unlikely

4Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

Journalism

Why The G-7 Effort To End Tax Havens Is Unlikely To Succeed

Beverly Moran, Vanderbilt University Close your eyes and imagine a tax haven. Does a Caribbean island come to mind? Sand, surf and thousands of post office boxes housing shell corporations? Some tax havens, like the Cayman Islands or Bermuda, fit that description. Many others do not. The key to a tax haven is the taxes, not the tan. Any place that allows a taxpayer – whether an individual or a company – to get a lower tax bill overseas than at home is a tax haven. Thus, depending on the taxpayer’s jurisdiction and business, many places turn out to be tax havens, even the United States. A recent agreement by the Group of Seven wealthy nations seeks to eliminate corporate tax havens by imposing a global 15% minimum corporate tax rate. However, as a tax expert, I find the effort hard to t...

Unlikely To Work Anyway But Why Wall Street Investors’ Trading California Water Futures Is Nothing To Fear

15Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

LIFESTYLE

Unlikely To Work Anyway But Why Wall Street Investors’ Trading California Water Futures Is Nothing To Fear

Water is one of the world’s most vital resources. So is there reason to freak out now that profit-hungry hedge funds and other investors can trade it like a barrel of oil or shares of Apple? That’s exactly what CME Group recently did in California when it launched the world’s first futures market for water in December 2020. Put simply, a futures market lets people place bets on the future price of water. Some people worry Wall Street’s involvement in trading water will disenfranchise the water rights of rural communities and lead to more scarcity of an already dwindling resource, thus driving up the price everyone pays. As researchers who study commodity markets and the economics of water resources, we believe there are many benefits of a well-functioning water futures market, especial...

We Can Ease Up On The Disinfecting – Catching COVID From Surfaces Is Very Unlikely

24Feb

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

COVID-19

We Can Ease Up On The Disinfecting – Catching COVID From Surfaces Is Very Unlikely

A lot has happened over the past year, so you can be forgiven for not having a clear memory of what some of the major concerns were at the beginning of the pandemic. However, if you think back to the beginning of the pandemic, one of the major concerns was the role that surfaces played in the transmission of the virus. As an epidemiologist, I remember spending countless hours responding to media requests answering questions along the lines of whether we should be washing the outside of food cans or disinfecting our mail. I also remember seeing teams of people walking the streets at all hours wiping down poles and cleaning public benches. But what does the evidence actually say about surface transmission more than 12 months into this pandemic? Before addressing this, we need to define ...

Chess is taking over the online video game world – and both are changing from this unlikely pairing

4Sep

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

GAMING

Chess is taking over the online video game world – and both are changing from this unlikely pairing

As a global pandemic continues to determine a new normal, tens of thousands of viewers have been tuning in to watch people play chess on a livestreaming website called Twitch.tv. An American chess grandmaster, Hikaru Nakamura, along with a number of celebrities of the video game world, is leading a renaissance in the ancient game. While viewers eagerly await Nakamura’s streams to begin, they are treated to a slideshow of memes involving Nakamura’s face superimposed into scenes from pop culture. First a reference to a well-known Japanese animation, next a famous upside-down kiss with Spiderman and finally, Nakamura’s characteristic grin is edited onto the Mona Lisa herself. From Aug. 21 to Sept. 6, Twitch and Chess.com are hosting a tournament, called Pogchamps, where some of the most pop...

Challenge trials for a coronavirus vaccine are unethical – except for in one unlikely scenario

24Aug

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

COVID-19

Challenge trials for a coronavirus vaccine are unethical – except for in one unlikely scenario

The world urgently needs a vaccine for COVID-19. Only when a vaccine is approved and people are safe can countries fully end their lockdowns and resume normal life. The trouble is that such vaccines usually take years to develop and test for efficacy and safety. Recently, some bioethicists have proposed a way of speeding up this testing process by several months. Researchers would put volunteers in quarantine with access to the best medical care, give these volunteers one of the trial vaccines and then directly expose them to the coronavirus. This type of intentional exposure is called a challenge trial, and since researchers would not have to wait for subjects to encounter the virus in the normal course of their daily lives, it could result in a vaccine much faster than a normal trial. R...

A quantum computing future is unlikely, due to random hardware errors

3Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

TECHNOLOGY

A quantum computing future is unlikely, due to random hardware errors

Google announced this fall to much fanfare that it had demonstrated “quantum supremacy” – that is, it performed a specific quantum computation far faster than the best classical computers could achieve. IBM promptly critiqued the claim, saying that its own classical supercomputer could perform the computation at nearly the same speed with far greater fidelity and, therefore, the Google announcement should be taken “with a large dose of skepticism.” Artist’s rendition of the Google processor. Forest Stearns, Google AI Quantum Artist in Residence, CC BY-ND This wasn’t the first time someone cast doubt on quantu...

7Mar

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

Journalism

As An African American Woman, I’m Your Most Unlikely Homesteader

Slavery forced a wedge between Black people and the land. But now the garden feels more like church—a place for my spirit to be renewed. On a crisp March 2015 day, in a D.C. suburb, my family and I stood in a fenced-in community garden, nestled behind a church, looking at a grassy, weeded over, 10-foot-by-20-foot rectangular plot, daring us to tame it. The overcast sky hung over us, and our shoes grew damp from the dewy grass. “What are we supposed to do with this?” This was not what I imagined when I signed up at my friend’s suggestion to join a community garden. I envisioned rich dark soil, in neatly arranged rows, waiting for us to sow vegetable seeds and water them with cute silver watering cans. But we dug in, and that day marked not just the beginning of my healing,...