Tag: forecasts

Whether It Will Rain Tomorrow Or Not Is A Solved Question

… although it does still depend on which part of the world you live in. But such minor niggles aside, weather forecasting is now very, very good. Or so says the latest Our World in Data article:

https://ourworldindata.org/weather-forecasts

Weather forecasting has been a hard won (and hard fought!) battle. Did you know, for example, that the HMS Beagle was famous for more than just the one obvious thing?

Vice-Admiral Robert FitzRoy FRS (5 July 1805 – 30 April 1865) was an English officer of the Royal Navy and a scientist. He achieved lasting fame as the captain of HMS Beagle during Charles Darwin’s famous voyage, FitzRoy’s second expedition to Tierra del Fuego and the Southern Cone.

FitzRoy was a pioneering meteorologist who made accurate daily weather predictions, which he called by a new name of his own invention: “forecasts”. In 1854 he established what would later be called the Met Office, and created systems to get weather information to sailors and fishermen for their safety

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_FitzRoy

But over time, forecasts the world over have become better and better, and today we can count upon real time forecasts being made available literally by the second:

Faster speeds are crucial: the Met Office now chunks the world into grids of smaller and smaller squares. While they once modeled the world in 90-kilometer-wide squares, they are now down to a grid of 1.5-kilometer squares. That means many more calculations need to be run to get this high-resolution map. The methods to turn the observations into model outputs have also improved. We’ve gone from very simple visions of the world to methods that can capture the complexity of these systems in detail.

The final crucial factor is how these forecasts are communicated. Not long ago, you could only get daily updates in the daily newspaper. With the rise of radio and TV, you could get a few notices per day. Now, we can get minute-by-minute updates online or on our smartphones.

https://ourworldindata.org/weather-forecasts

Well, most of us can, but all of us can’t:

And that, as it turns out, is a problem, because you are much more likely to work in agriculture in a low income country, and are therefore that much more dependent on accurate and timely weather forecasts. Alas, you are unlikely to get these forecasts, precisely because you are a poor agricultural worker.

So what can help? Take a wild guess:

A recent paper published in Nature documented a new artificial intelligence (AI) system — Pangu-Weather — that can perform forecasts as accurately (or better) than leading meteorological agencies up to 10,000 times faster.6 It was trained on 39 years of historical data. The speed of these forecasts would make them much cheaper to run and could provide much better results for countries with limited budgets.

https://ourworldindata.org/weather-forecasts

Links for 13th May, 2019

  1. “There should be limits, too, on the rights investors can sign away. In recent years, some companies — such as Smartsheet and Twilio — have done dual-class issues in which the extra voting rights expire after a certain number of years. These sunset provisions preserve the potential benefits of leaving initial control in the hands of founders, while avoiding the risk of creating a dynastic birthright. That’s a sensible compromise. The Securities and Exchange Commission, or the exchanges it oversees, should make such provisions mandatory.”
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    A very useful article to help understand how to think about IPO’s, Uber, Lyft valuations, mandatory disclosures from firms and how they try to get around the issue – and the excerpt above is yet another example of a favorite adage of mine: the truth always lies in the middle.
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  2. “We find that between 1300 and 1400 a 10 percentage point higher Black Death mortality rate was associated with a 8.7 percentage point fall in city population, but between 100 and 200 years later, the impact of mortality was close to zero. When we examine the spillover and general equilibrium effects of the Black Death on city populations, we similarly find negative effects in the short run, and no effects in the long run. Cities and urban systems, on average, had recovered to their pre-Plague population levels by the 16th century.”
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    A worrying article, especially towards the end, but two major takeaways for me: cities matter, and trade matters. But my major takeaway is there is (yet more) cause for worry.
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  3. “Unfortunately, the world’s most prominent specialists are rarely held accountable for their predictions, so we continue to rely on them even when their track records make clear that we should not. One study compiled a decade of annual dollar-to-euro exchange-rate predictions made by 22 international banks: Barclays, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, and others. Each year, every bank predicted the end-of-year exchange rate. The banks missed every single change of direction in the exchange rate. In six of the 10 years, the true exchange rate fell outside the entire range of all 22 bank forecasts.”
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    Forecasts are useless. I cannot be more serious when I say this. Forecasts are useless. But foxes are better at the impossible then the hedgehogs – this article helps you understand these terms, and their usefulness. This blog is about becoming a better fox!
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  4. “Again, one can argue that the amount of redistribution should be larger. But it would be untrue to argue that a significant amount of redistribution–like doubling the after-taxes-and-transfers share of the lowest quintile–doesn’t already happen. ”
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    The always informative Timothy Taylor on taxes, their composition, their effectiveness and the resulting redistribution in the United States of America. Also, read the book that is reviewed in this article – the entire book is worth your time, but the chapter on income tax is what I was reminded of.
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  5. “When Paul Romer expresses an opinion, it is always worthwhile to listen because it is always well-considered. In an opinion piece in the New York Times, he puts forward a proposal to restore what he terms is the “public commons” of the provision of information in support of democracy. He actually puts forward two linked proposals: one for a target on targeted ads by digital platform companies and a proposal that the tax is progressive (which may be a check on dominance). The latter is interesting but I will just focus on the former here.”
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    I do not recollect if I linked to the Paul Romer piece that is linked to in the excerpt above – in case I did not, please go ahead and read it. The rest of the current article speaks about why Romer’s proposal is a good idea, but not necessarily implementable right away.