Numlock News: February 1, 2024 • Swift, Flip, Wiggles
By Walt Hickey
Tabletop
For the second year in a row, the amount of money pledged to successful tabletop Kickstarters — the primary way that such ventures achieve initial start-up funding — has gone down, falling to $226.2 million, off a high of $270 million in 2021. All is not terrible, as the spike in 2020 and 2021 is likely a pandemic-related anomaly, and funding is far higher than the $176.3 million invested in 2019. The good news is that while the overall funding may have gone down, the overall number of successful tabletop Kickstarters hit 4,920 in 2023, up significantly from the 4,042 in 2022 and the 2,337 five years before.
Music Industry
As their vast and sprawling empire of sound expands ever outward and their business becomes more intricate, sophisticated and high stakes, with over 30 million albums and DVDs sold since 1991 and 8 million books sold over the same period, the industrial might of The Wiggles has demanded the organization — which entertains children with silly songs — hire a CEO for the first time. The Wiggles are a large live events business combined with a music publishing business, and a new customer is born every day. They’re interested in diversification, and expanding into real estate and hospitality.
Flip
The magnetic poles of the sun are about to reverse, an event that takes place once every 11 years. This tends to mean an increase in sunspots on the star in the lead-up, followed by massive solar flares and a whole lot of ejected radiation from the star. The coronal mass ejections that come out have become a bit of an issue. They take about three days to arrive at Earth, and while most of them are deflected by the Earth’s own magnetic field and can lead to auroras, particularly strong ones can disrupt satellites and GPS instruments in space.
Swift
The popularity of the NFL among women remained steady for several years, but has increased swiftly over the course of the past several months. From July to December of 2023, the percentage of Gen Z and millennial women who had a favorable opinion of the NFL increased from 53 percent to 64 percent, an increase of 11 percentage points over a very short time. One reason for that is the relationship that developed between Taylor Swift and Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, which began in July 2023 and has continued through to today.
Cartels
A new analysis of mathematics papers claims to have discovered a number of “citation cartels,” which are groups of mathematicians who consistently and unnecessarily cite one another’s work with the express goal of exploiting algorithms that determine the relative importance of scientific research. These groups, by citing one another, are able to not only increase one another’s prestige, but also the prestige of their institution. From 2008 to 2010, before the practice entered into play, universities at Princeton and UCLA produced the highest number of papers in the top 1 percent of citations, with 27 and 28 papers respectively. From 2021 to 2023, institutions like the China Medical University in Taiwan and King AbdulAziz University in Saudi Arabia have had 95 and 66 highly cited papers, which is weird, because they had none a decade ago and people there have pumped out hundreds of papers citing their own colleagues.
WFH
A survey of workers found that 43 percent said that working from home made them more productive, 14 percent said that it made them less productive, and 43 percent said that it didn’t make a difference either way. This runs up against perceptions among bosses, which in general tend to think that flexible working relationships somehow have a negative impact on productivity. One paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco found that there is no measurable relationship between working from home and productivity across an analysis of 43 industries.
Matthew Boyle and Alexandre Tanzi, Bloomberg
Coolant
The chips that empower AI models are typically graphics processor chips rather than the CPUs that are the brain of your average computer, and the main thing to know is that these things tend to run hot. As more and more of them are needed, they consume more and more power, and that makes more and more heat. Dealing with that heat is a crucial element of building out these kinds of server banks, and a number of companies have dived into the liquid cooling tech niche in order to make a buck off the AI boom, including component maker Lite-On Technology Corp in Taiwan, which has become a supplier to Apple, HP and Dell. AI servers are projected to rise from 12.4 percent of the total server industry to 20.9 percent by 2027, and the chips are only going to get hotter: A Nvidia A100 chip takes 400 watts of power, an H100 chip needs 700 watts, but the next generation B100 will need 1,000 watts.
Lauly Li and Cheng Ting-Fang, Nikkei Asia
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The cooling thing was really an issue, but I’m wondering how much it still is. With modern chips and graphics, the need has really changed. I’m looking at a new MBP for my wife’s birthday (*shh*Don’t tell her...), and am absolutely amazed by the specs when it comes to battery life and performance.