3 Noticias economicas ingles

California Governor Gavin Newsom has asked residents and businesses statewide to cut their water usage by 15% this summer, as low precipitation and low snowpack threaten reservoir levels and raise the specter of another deadly wildfire season.

While some California counties have already instituted mandatory water restrictions, Newsom’s request to reduce usage is voluntary.

“We’re hopeful that people will take that mindset they brought into the last drought and extend that forward,” he said at a Thursday press conference, according to the Los Angeles Times.

“We’re not trying to be oppressive,” he added. “Again, these are voluntary standards.”

California previously experienced emergency drought conditions just two years ago. Now, as the state prepares for a hot, dry summer, its 1,500 reservoirs are 50% below their typical levels. Some, like Lopez Lake, are at just 35% capacity. Lake Mendocino is at risk of emptying before the end of the year.

Though Newsom has so far declined to institute a statewide drought emergency, on Thursday he paved the way for the State Water Resources Control Board to institute localized water restrictions by declaring a drought state of emergency in specific counties. So far, 50 of California’s 58 counties, or 42% of its population, are subject to that designation.

Water usage in California is already 16% below 2013 levels, according to the governor’s office. A further 15% reduction would save enough water to supply 1.7 million households.

An additional after-tax contribution to your 401(k)—now allowed in the plans of many large employers— can grow tax free if it’s moved to a Roth account.

US Treasuries rally as investors’ worries over inflation ease

Highly enthusiastic Covid-19 vaccine stock investors aren’t leaving themselves much wiggle room if booster-shot demand is lighter than expected.

Minutes of June’s meeting show some policymakers want to reduce stimulus

A new plan for “premier access” in Disneyland Paris will allow guests who pay extra to skip ride lines, and some see a potential preview of policy in the U.S.

The social networking site is a place to make pithy jokes, improve writing skills and connect with people

Impulse buying and overspending defeat all of us on occasion. But no longer! The good people of the psychology department at Germany’s Julius-Maximilians-Universität have found a solution: It all comes down to understanding your type.

• Pleasure seekers crave enjoyment, and are frequently driven by spontaneity or curiosity, such as wanting to treat themselves to a truffle they’ve never tried before, or add a great pair of jeans to their wardrobe. They are reaching for pleasure. So curbing those expenditures is a matter of curbing the spontaneity by forcing a pause between the urge and the purchase. The solutions here are low tech, such as keeping a note on your wallet that says “STOP,” or limiting immediate access to money (by locking cash or credit cards in a desk drawer or car, for instance). The goal is to halt the impulse.
• Security seekers are slower to buy. They’ll stand in front of an object and think, Will this taste as good as it looks? or spend 10 minutes hovering over the “buy” button online. For them, the key is to simply not give themselves the time to consider: They need to walk away, or stand up and take a break from their computer.

These findings are based on two research studies—recently published in PLoS One—carried out on 250 participants. Interestingly, security seekers were just as likely to impulse buy, and just as likely to want to treat themselves. But the motivational state of the would-be consumer also plays a large role. For example, the researchers found that someone who has just studied their dwindling bank balances is less likely to buy, while a pleasure seeker who just got a promotion may well celebrate further via consumerism. You can manipulate your own mood before shopping accordingly.

Summertime is in full swing but during the COVID-19 era, fall is of chief concern as the virus’s delta variant rises and Americans remember the case surges of last autumn. As we fight on and into this next season, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is reminding us that of all things the pandemic can take, learning shouldn’t be one of them.

For kids, that means getting the best education possible—which is most likely to happen in-person. When K-12 schools reopen this fall, the CDC and federal officials are urging that all students, vaccinated or unvaccinated, be welcomed back into their hallways and classrooms. The agency has released its newest guidance for COVID-19 safety in grade schools, and the report recommends typical precautions including testing, ventilation, social distancing, and contact tracing, but also mentions “the importance of offering in-person learning, regardless of whether all of the prevention strategies can be implemented at the school.”

Here are some key takeaways:

• The CDC recommends that people who are not fully vaccinated wear face masks indoors. However, it suggests that people who are fully vaccinated do not need to wear masks, which is in line with its nationwide guidance.
• Masks are generally not necessary outdoors.
• The CDC also recommends maintaining at least three feet of distance between students within classrooms wherever possible. Schools without enough space to place every student’s desk this far apart should focus on other strategies such as indoor masking.
• COVID-19 screening should be done regularly.
• Students, teachers, and staff should stay home if they show any symptoms of infectious illness.
• Vaccines, it stresses, are the leading public health initiative for a safe return to schools, extracurricular activities, and sports. Currently, children and teens aged 12 and over are eligible.
• As children under 12 years of age are still not eligible for the vaccine, schools should layer other precautions.
• Localities should monitor community outbreaks and make calls on strengthening the level of prevention as needed.
• The guidance, it reminds, is secondary to any federal, state, local, territorial, or tribal health and safety laws, with which schools must comply.

Approval is fillip for insurance brokers whose combination is facing a US investigation

Did a colleague blow you off? Or ignore you in a meeting? Or say something cutting? That rudeness will affect your work for hours, and not for the better.

Researchers from a quintet of organizations (Carnegie Mellon University, University of Florida, University of Maryland, Envision Physician Services, Thomas Jefferson University Hospital) collaborated on a quartet of studies tracking the impact of mild slights on both workers and coworkers who observe the rudeness, such as witnessing a doctor yell at an instructor for missing a meeting. They found that in tasks afterward, all are much more likely to “anchor,” which is a psychological phenomenon of fixating on one piece of information (rather than considering all available information). Such fixations can sway decision-making.

“While small insults and other forms of rude behavior might seem relatively harmless compared to more serious forms of aggression, our findings suggest that they can have serious consequences,” says coauthor Binyamin Cooper, a post-doctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business. “Our work demonstrates how dangerous these seemingly minor behaviors can be, whether they are experienced directly or even if people just observer incidental rudeness.”

The narrowing of perspective that comes along with anchoring can have deadly consequences in healthcare, where the study shows that physicians exposed to rudeness may incorrectly diagnose patients, and then treat them for ailments that they don’t have. The impact could also be particularly large in tasks like negotiation, legal sentencing, financial forecasting, and pricing.

The researchers call for managers to reduce rudeness among employees, especially in high-stakes situations where judgment is essential. Two strategies can help avoid anchoring in real-time: information elaboration, where you pause to think what information you need to help someone make a decision, and perspective taking, where you imagine yourself viewing the problem from another person’s point of view.

More research is needed on rudeness and other well-known cognitive biases.

Futures were mixed while U.S.-listed Chinese technology shares regained ground after a multi-day tumble

The bank took fresh steps to tackle its risk management in the wake of the $5.5 billion loss from Archegos Capital, with the creation of a new role that will police the effect of market moves on clients’ trading positions.

Ecommerce company hopes to list on Indonesia Stock Exchange in August

Ecommerce company hopes to list on Indonesia Stock Exchange in August

Exchanges operator plans to list in New York through a deal with a blank cheque company

The few Swiss watch brands that haven’t been troubled by the pandemic are the hardest to invest in.

Plastic is the most common type of debris floating in the world’s oceans. Waves and sunlight break much of it down into smaller particles called microplastics—fragments less than 5 millimeters across, roughly the size of a sesame seed.

To understand how microplastic pollution is affecting the ocean, scientists need to know how much is there and where it is accumulating. Most data on microplastic concentrations comes from commercial and research ships that tow plankton nets—long, cone-shaped nets with very fine mesh designed for collecting marine microorganisms.

But net trawling can sample only small areas and may be underestimating true plastic concentrations. Except in the North Atlantic and North Pacific gyres—large zones where ocean currents rotate, collecting floating debris—scientists have done very little sampling for microplastics. And there is scant information about how these particles’ concentrations vary over time.

Looking for smooth zones

To address these questions, University of Michigan research assistant Madeline Evans and I developed a new way to detect microplastic concentrations from space using NASA’s Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System. CYGNSS is a network of eight microsatellites that was launched in 2016 to help scientists predict hurricanes by analyzing tropical wind speeds. They measure how wind roughens the ocean’s surface—an indicator that we realized could also be used to detect and track large quantities of microplastics.

Annual global production of plastic has increased every year since the 1950s, reaching 359 million metric tons in 2018. Much of it ends up in open, uncontrolled landfills, where it can wash into river drainage zones and ultimately into the world’s oceans.

Researchers first documented plastic debris in the oceans in the 1970s. Today, it accounts for an estimated 80% to 85% of marine litter.

The radars on CYGNSS satellites are designed to measure winds over the ocean indirectly by measuring how they roughen the water’s surface. We knew that when there is a lot of material floating in the water, winds don’t roughen it as much. So we tried computing how much smoother measurements indicated the surface was than it should have been if winds of the same speed were blowing across clear water.

This anomaly—the “missing roughness”—turns out to be highly correlated with the concentration of microplastics near the ocean surface. Put another way, areas where surface waters appear to be unusually smooth frequently contain high concentrations of microplastics. The smoothness could be caused by the microplastics themselves, or possibly by something else that’s associated with them.

By combining all the measurements made by CYGNSS satellites as they orbit around the world, we can create global time-lapse images of ocean microplastic concentrations. Our images readily identify the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and secondary regions of high microplastic concentration in the North Atlantic and the southern oceans.

Tracking microplastic flows over time

Since CYGNSS tracks wind speeds constantly, it lets us see how microplastic concentrations change over time. By animating a year’s worth of images, we revealed seasonal variations that were not previously known.

This animation shows how satellite data can be used to track where microplastics enter the water, how they move and where they tend to collect.

We found that global microplastic concentrations tend to peak in the North Atlantic and Pacific during the Northern Hemisphere’s summer months. June and July, for example, are the peak months for the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

Concentrations in the Southern Hemisphere peak during its summer months of January and February. Lower concentrations during the winter in both hemispheres are likely due to a combination of stronger currents that break up microplastic plumes and increased vertical mixing—the exchange between surface and deeper water—that transports some of the microplastic down below the surface.

This approach can also target smaller regions over shorter periods of time. For example, we examined episodic outflow events from the mouths of the China’s Yangtze and Qiantang rivers where they empty into the East China Sea. These events may have been associated with increases in industrial production activity, or with increases in the rate at which managers allowed the rivers to flow through dams.

Better targeting for cleanups

Our research has several potential uses. Private organizations, such as The Ocean Cleanup, a nonprofit in the Netherlands, and Clewat, a Finnish company specializing in clean technology, use specially outfitted ships to collect, recycle and dispose of marine litter and debris. We have begun conversations with both groups and hope eventually to help them deploy their fleets more effectively.

Our spaceborne imagery may also be used to validate and improve numerical prediction models that attempt to track how microplastics move through the oceans using ocean circulation patterns. Scholars are developing several such models.

One possibility is surfactants on the ocean surface. These liquid chemical compounds, which are widely used in detergents and other products, move through the oceans in ways similar to microplastics, and they also have a damping effect on wind-driven ocean roughening.While the ocean roughness anomalies that we observed correlate strongly with microplastic concentrations, our estimates of concentration are based on the correlations that we observed, not on a known physical relationship between floating microplastics and ocean roughness. It could be that the roughness anomalies are caused by something else that is also correlated with the presence of microplastics.

Further study is needed to identify how the smooth areas that we identified occur, and if they are caused indirectly by surfactants, to better understand exactly how their transport mechanisms are related to those of microplastics. But I hope this research can be part of a fundamental change in tracking and managing microplastic pollution.

Christopher Ruf is a professor of Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering at the University of Michigan

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Didi debacle signals end of steady stream of New York listings for Chinese companies

The ECB joins the fight against climate change, but there are problems posed by mixing environmental mandates with financial regulation enforced by unaccountable institutions.