Arvind's Newsletter -Weekend edition

1.Indian news brands haven’t escaped a global downturn in advertising revenues. Flagships such as Hindustan Times, New Delhi Television (NDTV), and Zee have had quarterly profits squeezed even as persistently high inflation and aggressive interest rate hikes have compelled them to rein in costs.

NDTV, for instance, recorded a 97.6% plunge in quarterly profit due to weak advertising demand. HT Media posted $2.65 million in losses in the December quarter due to lower ad spends and high newsprint prices; it had recorded profits a year ago.Reliance Industries-owned Network18 Media is feeling the heat, too.BSE’s Nifty Media index, which reflects the performance of India’s media and entertainment sector, has slipped nearly 14% this year so far.

With consumers moving to digital media channels, less funds are being earmarked for TV—in 2022, it grew by mere 2% as opposed to 30% in digital advertising.

“Subscription revenue continued to fall for the third year in a row, experiencing a 4% de-growth due to a reduction of five million pay-TV homes and stagnant consumer-end revenue,” according to FICCI-EY report on Media & Entertainment sector.

2.US investor interest in China cools as political tensions grow reports the Financial Times, while New York Times reports that Foreign firms are on edge in China. Does this explain the FII flows into the Indian stock markets after outflows earlier in the year?

“This was supposed to be a season of renewed investor confidence in China, now that strict pandemic restrictions are gone. But a string of government security measures have spooked foreign firms, and some are questioning whether their China operations are at risk

Chinese security officers have in recent weeks made unannounced visits to the Chinese offices of several foreign businesses, and seem particularly focused on U.S. consulting firms, like Bain & Company.

Separately, Chinese lawmakers have expanded counterespionage laws, which the U.S. ambassador said could make illegal the “mundane” research that companies regularly do before an investment deal.

News of China’s impending reopening from coronavirus pandemic restrictions late last year prompted a brief burst of enthusiasm for Chinese stock markets after years of underperformance on hopes of an uptick in economic growth. But trading activity has fallen back this year, according to fund managers and trading data.

3Chip and Wars : Microsoft is said to be working with Advanced Micro Devices on the chipmaker’s expansion into artificial intelligence processors, part of a multipronged strategy to secure more of the highly coveted components. The companies are teaming up to offer an alternative to Nvidia Corp., which dominates the market for AI-capable chips called graphics processing units.

Creating an alternative to Nvidia’s lineup will be a challenging task. That company offers a package of software and hardware that works together — including chips, a programming language, networking equipment and servers — letting customers rapidly upgrade their capabilities.

That’s one of the reasons Nvidia has become so dominant. But Microsoft isn’t alone in trying to develop in-house AI processors. Cloud rival Amazon acquired Annapurna Labs in 2016 and has developed two different AI processors. Alphabet Inc.’s Google also has a training chip of its own.

In a separate news item, Microsoft also opens its ChatGPT-based Bing search engine for public use; It drops waiting list and opens The ChatGPT-enhanced search engine and makes it available to anyone with a Microsoft account.

4Nagomi: The Japanese philosophy of finding balance in a turbulent life
It can be difficult to find a sense of balance in the turbulence of modern life. Kenichiro “Ken” Mogi believes the Japanese philosophy of nagomi can help people cultivate a greater sense of harmony.
Nagomi is about blending seemingly disparate elements until they form a unified, harmonious whole.

5.The Crisis of antibiotic resistance: Western firms are becoming interested in a Soviet medicine: “Phage therapy” aims to use viruses to cure bacterial infections reports the Economist. Excerpts from this article:

“It was on the golf course that Barry Rud first noticed something was seriously wrong. A trim 60-year-old who played hockey as a young man, he found himself unable to take more than a few steps without gasping for breath. His doctors said he had caught a strain of Pseudomonas aeruginosa, one of the growing number of “superbugs” that have evolved resistance to many common antibiotics."

Mr Rud’s experience illustrates a growing problem—and one possible solution to it. Antibiotics are among medicine’s most spectacular achievements. A class of “silver bullet” drugs that destroy disease-causing bacteria while sparing the patient’s own cells, they have defanged all sorts of once-feared illnesses, from cholera to syphilis. They have drastically reduced the risks of surgery (patients often died from infections caught on the surgeon’s table) and chemotherapy, which destroys the patient’s immune system.

But their magic is waning. Repeated exposure to a lethal threat has led bacteria to evolve resistance to many existing antibiotics, blunting their efficacy. At the same time, much of the pharmaceutical industry has lost interest in finding new ones. It has been almost 40 years since a new class of antibiotics has been made available to patients. Some infections, including gonorrhoea and tuberculosis, are once again becoming difficult to treat. One estimate, published in the Lancet in 2022, reckons antibiotic resistance directly caused 1.2m deaths in 2019, and was indirectly implicated in 3.8m more.

With antibiotics unable to cure his illness, Mr Rud took a chance. He travelled to the Eliava Institute in Tbilisi, Georgia, one of a handful of institutions specialising in the study of bacteriophages. These are viruses that infect and kill bacteria. The Eliava Institute uses them as living antibiotics, hoping to cure a human’s disease by causing one in the bacteria making him sick.

“Phages” are little known outside the former countries of the Soviet Union, which did the most to develop the idea. In Georgia they have been part of the local pharmacopoeia for decades. (Indeed, 2023 marks the Eliava’s centenary.) Little vials containing stale-tasting liquid full of anti-bacterial viruses can be bought at pharmacies across Tbilisi. Now, as worries about antibiotic resistance build, Western firms are taking a second look.

Despite their name, bacteriophages infect, rather than eat, their prey. Owing to the profusion of bacterial life, phages are the most abundant biological entities on the planet. Most resemble a cross between a Moon lander and spider. An icosahedral head (think of a 20-sided die) holds their genome, and is attached to a tail of proteins that culminates in a spray of fibres. When the fibres encounter a suitable receptor on a bacterial cell wall, they bind the phage to its victim, driving its tail through the cell’s membrane and allowing its genome to enter its new host.

One of two possible fates awaits the unfortunate bacterium. “Lysogenic” phages weave their own genomes into that of their host, leaving it alive with its new cargo of viral dna. If the phage is “lytic”, though, it hijacks its host’s cellular machinery to assemble copies of itself. These proliferate until they burst out, killing the bacterium in the process. It is the latter sort of phage that is of interest to doctors.

As living antibiotics, phages have several advantages, at least on paper. Since they can make more of themselves, initial dosages can be relatively small. Unlike chemical antibiotics, they can evolve as readily as their prey, potentially blunting a bacterium’s ability to develop resistance. And the myriad differences between human cells and bacterial ones means they are unlikely to do any damage to the patient.”

How well phages actually do at curing infections, though, is another question. Although encouraging anecdotal evidence has been trickling in for decades, regulators need big, formal clinical trials. A report published last year by the Antibacterial Resistance Leadership Group, a gathering of experts, concluded that the lack of data meant phages were not ready for clinical use.

That uncertainty has not stopped a wave of medical tourism to the Eliava Foundation’s Phage Therapy Centre. It treats more than 500 foreign patients a year.

More clinical trials of phage therapy have begun around the world in the past three years than in the preceding two decades

One problem facing would-be phage therapists is that, as natural entities, phages cannot be patented. One solution is to tinker with a phage’s genome, since edited genomes are eligible for protection.

There are plenty of questions left to answer. Some are big and conceptual. Since phages are foreign bodies, for instance, they are likely to spur a patient’s immune system to produce antibodies to neutralise them. That could be a problem, especially with repeat prescriptions, as a body primed to repel a phage is one in which its effectiveness will be limited. Whether phages can be tweaked to overcome such defences remains to be seen. Others are humdrum but essential: doctors will need to work out ideal doses, the best administration mechanisms, and which sorts of patients might be best suited to the treatment.

Not even the most dedicated advocates of phages think they will replace antibiotics. But they hope they might serve as a treatment for infections for which nothing else works, or as a supplement to conventional antibiotics in order to strengthen their effects. For that to happen, though, will require building the infrastructure to explore the idea properly. For now, the facilities to do that simply do not exist. “We can receive a thousand patients,” says Dr Sturua, back at the Eliava Institute. “But we can’t receive a million.”