No Arabic abstract
Ambient temperatures are rising globally, with the greatest increases recorded at night. Concurrently, the prevalence of insufficient sleep is increasing in many populations, with substantial costs to human health and well-being. Even though nearly a third of the human lifespan is spent asleep, it remains unknown whether temperature and weather impact objective measures of sleep in real-world settings, globally. Here we link billions of sleep measurements from wearable devices comprising over 7 million nighttime sleep records across 68 countries to local daily meteorological data from 2015 to 2017. Rising nighttime temperatures shorten within-person sleep duration primarily through delayed onset, increasing the probability of insufficient sleep. The effect of temperature on sleep loss is substantially larger for residents from lower income countries and older adults, and females are affected more than are males. Nighttime temperature increases inflict the greatest sleep loss during summer and fall months, and we do not find evidence of short-term acclimatization. Coupling historical behavioral measurements with output from climate models, we project that climate change will further erode human sleep, producing substantial geographic inequalities. Our findings have significant implications for adaptation planning and illuminate a pathway through which rising temperatures may globally impact public health.
Blockchain in supply chain management is expected to boom over the next five years. It is estimated that the global blockchain supply chain market would grow at a compound annual growth rate of 87% and increase from $45 million in 2018 to $3,314.6 million by 2023. Blockchain will improve business for all global supply chain stakeholders by providing enhanced traceability, facilitating digitisation, and securing chain-of-custody. This paper provides a synthesis of the existing challenges in global supply chain and trade operations, as well as the relevant capabilities and potential of blockchain. We further present leading pilot initiatives on applying blockchains to supply chains and the logistics industry to fulfill a range of needs. Finally, we discuss the implications of blockchain on customs and governmental agencies, summarize challenges in enabling the wide scale deployment of blockchain in global supply chain management, and identify future research directions.
Approximately half of the global population does not have access to the internet, even though digital connectivity can reduce poverty by revolutionizing economic development opportunities. Due to a lack of data, Mobile Network Operators and governments struggle to effectively determine if infrastructure investments are viable, especially in greenfield areas where demand is unknown. This leads to a lack of investment in network infrastructure, resulting in a phenomenon commonly referred to as the `digital divide`. In this paper we present a machine learning method that uses publicly available satellite imagery to predict telecoms demand metrics, including cell phone adoption and spending on mobile services, and apply the method to Malawi and Ethiopia. Our predictive machine learning approach consistently outperforms baseline models which use population density or nightlight luminosity, with an improvement in data variance prediction of at least 40%. The method is a starting point for developing more sophisticated predictive models of infrastructure demand using machine learning and publicly available satellite imagery. The evidence produced can help to better inform infrastructure investment and policy decisions.
Across a growing number of domains, human experts are expected to learn from and adapt to AI with superior decision making abilities. But how can we quantify such human adaptation to AI? We develop a simple measure of human adaptation to AI and test its usefulness in two case studies. In Study 1, we analyze 1.3 million move decisions made by professional Go players and find that a positive form of adaptation to AI (learning) occurred after the players could observe the reasoning processes of AI, rather than mere actions of AI. These findings based on our measure highlight the importance of explainability for human learning from AI. In Study 2, we test whether our measure is sufficiently sensitive to capture a negative form of adaptation to AI (cheating aided by AI), which occurred in a match between professional Go players. We discuss our measures applications in domains other than Go, especially in domains in which AIs decision making ability will likely surpass that of human experts.
This paper investigates whether security markets price the effect of social distancing on firms operations. We document that firms that are more resilient to social distancing significantly outperformed those with lower resilience during the COVID-19 outbreak, even after controlling for the standard risk factors. Similar cross-sectional return differentials already emerged before the COVID-19 crisis: the 2014-19 cumulative return differential between more and less resilient firms is of similar size as during the outbreak, suggesting growing awareness of pandemic risk well in advance of its materialization. Finally, we use stock option prices to infer the markets return expectations after the onset of the pandemic: even at a two-year horizon, stocks of more pandemic-resilient firms are expected to yield significantly lower returns than less resilient ones, reflecting their lower exposure to disaster risk. Hence, going forward, markets appear to price exposure to a new risk factor, namely, pandemic risk.
This morphological study identifies and measures recent nationwide trends in American street network design. Historically, orthogonal street grids provided the interconnectivity and density that researchers identify as important factors for reducing vehicular travel and emissions and increasing road safety and physical activity. During the 20th century, griddedness declined in planning practice alongside declines in urban form compactness, density, and connectivity as urbanization sprawled around automobile dependence. But less is known about comprehensive empirical trends across US neighborhoods, especially in recent years. This study uses public and open data to examine tract-level street networks across the entire US. It develops theoretical and measurement frameworks for a quality of street networks defined here as griddedness. It measures how griddedness, orientation order, straightness, 4-way intersections, and intersection density declined from 1940 through the 1990s while dead-ends and block lengths increased. However, since 2000, these trends have rebounded, shifting back toward historical design patterns. Yet, despite this rebound, when controlling for topography and built environment factors all decades post-1939 are associated with lower griddedness than pre-1940. Higher griddedness is associated with less car ownership - which itself has a well-established relationship with vehicle kilometers traveled and greenhouse gas emissions - while controlling for density, home and household size, income, jobs proximity, street network grain, and local topography. Interconnected grid-like street networks offer practitioners an important tool for curbing car dependence and emissions. Once established, street patterns determine urban spatial structure for centuries, so proactive planning is essential.