Wednesday, January 2, 2013

IPCC Expert Meeting on Economic Analysis, Costing Methods, and Ethics - Meeting Report


For instance, many infrastructure investments will be made in the coming years in
developing countries, and the question is “how to do it” not “whether to do it.”

via IPCC Expert Meeting on Economic Analysis, Costing Methods, and Ethics - Meeting Report

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B1gFp6Ioo3akVkxibjhjenNWdzQ/edit

http://www.ipcc.ch/

Monday, October 8, 2012

Scholium. From hence it follows, that Polygamy is contrary to the Law of Nature and Justice, and to the Propagation of Human Race; for where Males and Females are in equal number, if one Man takes Twenty Wives, nineteen Men must live in Celibacy, which is repugnant to the Design of Nature; nor is it probable that Twenty Women will be so well impregnated by one Man as by Twenty.

Dr. John Arburhnott, An Argument for Divine Providence, taken from the constant Regulaity observ'd in the Births of Both Sexes (1710).

I'm currently dipping my toes into the mathematical history of statistics and the paper above is apparently the first which used probability to reject the null hypothesis, although Arburhnott structures it more like a traditional reductio ad absurdum. The scholium comes at the end, and its content was unexpected.

Monday, October 1, 2012

Hi-B Electrical Steel


The technology for manufacturing Hi-B electrical steel is closely held, and only six mills in the world produced it in 2007: AK Steel (United States), POSCO (Korea), Nippon and Kawasaki (Japan), TKES (Germany), and Cogent (United Kingdom). 51

via http://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/Large%20Power%20Transformer%20Study%20-%20June%202012_0.pdf