1 China service sector growth at six-month low (The
Guardian) Growth in China's services sector slipped to a six-month low in July
as new orders rose at their weakest rate in at least a year, data indicated,
taking some of the shine off an industry that has been a bright spot in the
Chinese economy this year.
The slight retreat in the services sector came at a
time when China's factories have started to recover, having earlier this year
been one of the drags on growth in the world's second largest economy due to
faltering demand at home and abroad.
The official Purchasing Managers' Index (PMI) for
the non-manufacturing sector slowed to 54.2 in July from June's 55. That is the
weakest reading since January. A reading above 50 indicates an expansion in
activity while one below the threshold points to a contraction.
China's once-heated housing market has slowed this
year as sales and prices turned south in their biggest pull-back in two years,
driven in part by a cooling economy, and after the government tried for almost
five years to calm the market. But the extent and breadth of the downturn have
surprised analysts, with many worrying that it is the biggest threat to the
health of China's economy this year.
2 How Google search trends can predict the next
market crash (Eryk Bagshaw in Sydney Morning Herald) The next financial crisis
could be preceded by a spike in people searching for politics or business
topics on Google, a new study has revealed. The study by Warwick Business
School suggests that an increase in search volume for these topics tends to
precede stock market falls.
"By mining these datasets, we were able to
identify a historic link between rises in searches for terms for both business
and politics and a subsequent fall in stock market prices," said Professor
Suzy Moat from the school, which is part of Warwick University. It’s the latest
development in Google’s evolution from search engine to crystal ball, which now
predicts everything from the success of an album or film - to the rate of flu infections
in the coming winter.
The research found that searches linked to business
or politics correlated to an increased concern about the state of the economy. “This
may lead to decreased confidence in the value of stocks, resulting in
transactions at lower prices.” There are precedents for the real-world effects
of Google searches. The popularity of a film or album has been preceded by a
spike in Google searches before its release. In 2013, Google claimed that it
could predict with 94 per cent accuracy, whether a film would be a box office
success before it hit a single movie screen.
Google has also turned its hand to health
predictions. Google flu trends aims to correlate instances of searching for flu
symptoms with a rise in flu infections. Once hailed as the poster boy of big
data - it’s come under attack recently from researchers at Harvard and North
Eastern University for wildly overestimating the rate of flu infection in the
United States. They called it the “big hubris of big data”. The co-inventor of
Google Flu Trends, Matt Hobebbi agreed with the researchers criticism.
3 Discarded tyres turn sandals (Ken Wysocky on BBC) It
may seem incongruous to think of discarded rubber car tires as the source of
fetching but functional footwear or fashion-forward furniture. But from Kenya
to India to Detroit to Sweden, clever and eco-minded niche entrepreneurs are
turning one of industrialized society’s most ubiquitous and
difficult-to-dispose-of waste products (an estimated 1.5 billion tires are
discarded each year worldwide) into weirdly appealing – and super-tough – items
with a little bit of, um, soul.
Enterprising locals in Kenya have made a cottage
industry out of hand-crafting so-called akala sandals from the “pelts” of old
car tires. They sell on the streets of Nairobi for anywhere from $2 to $5 a
pair – considerably less than retail footwear sold nearby, and boasting 10
times the longevity.
In Mumbai, India, ground-floor entrepreneur Anu
Tandon Vieira established The Retyrement Plan, where workers morph old tires
and other recycled waste materials into weatherproof outdoor furniture that
will inflate the ambience of any patio or three-season room.
On a whole other plane, a Swedish company, Apokalyps
Labotek, is making durable and stylish flooring out of the 4m tires discarded
nationally there each year. The company grinds the tires into a powder and
through some sort of modern alchemy, mixes it with recycled plastic and –
voilà! – creates parquet flooring as tough as a thousand-miler sandal. Tread
lightly? No way.
Rest easy – there’s no need to rush out and stock up
on akalas. It’s estimated that billions of old car tires remain stockpiled
around the world, so this is one recyclable resource that’s not disappearing
any time soon.
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