March 2018
Welcome, Analytica friends, we’re restarting our Analytica Newsletter, with the latest about Analytica and Lumina. We welcome your ideas and contributions.
Jaya Hoy, Customer Support Manager, Lumina
The Effect of Trump’s Steel & Aluminum Tariffs
President Trump’s new tariffs on imported steel and aluminum have caused a predictable furor. What’s harder to predict is the effect on the US economy. Trump and his supporters claim these tariffs will significantly reduce the trade deficit. Others, including most economists, think ‘not so much’. Lumina’s fearless analysts, Kim Mullins and Lonnie Chrisman, wondered whether they could add some illumination with a very simple model. It looks at how the new tariffs would affect domestic prices of these metals, ripple out to the cost of other products that use them, and so affect other imports and exports. They find that reduced imports of steel and aluminum may be almost completely counterbalanced by reduced exports of products that use these metals, with a mean total reduction in trade deficit of only $50M. And that’s before any relatiatory tariffs. Naturally, they represent the inevitable uncertainties with probability distributions.
More at Tariffs blog. You can explore the Tariff model in ACP and test your own assumptions.
Enthusiasm for Analytica 5.0!
We continue to get enthusiastic feedback on Analytica 5.0 since its release in November. Users tell us that they really like the new look and interactions with influence diagrams, faster calculation with multithreading, and the new Find dialog. If you haven’t yet tried it, see the Video tour of Analytica 5.0 by CTO, Lonnie Chrisman and What’s new in Analytica 5.0. Learn how to use key features from the nine Analytica 5.0 video shorts(each under 5 minutes). If haven’t yet tried it, you can upgrade free until your support expires. If not, call us for a discounted price.
Lumina ranked in "50 Best" by The Silicon Review
The Silicon Review, a business and technology magazine for tech decision makers and enterprise IT, ranked Lumina in “2017 50 Best Companies to Watch” in their August 2017 issue.
Silicon Review recognized Lumina’s achievements in promoting innovative tools for collaborative decisions, and its work to assist organizations in finding effective paths to a more sustainable world.
Lumina Welcomes Kim Mullins
The Lumina team welcomes Kimberley Mullins, PhD, as the latest addition to our consulting team. Kim has extensive experience in risk and lifecycle analysis of energy and agricultural systems. Most recently, she was a postdoc at the University of Minnesota, where she worked on DER (distributed energy resources) for rural and municipal electric utilities, and lifecycle impacts of corn ethanol and other vehicle fuels. Kim has a PhD from Carnegie Mellon, Departments of Engineering & Public Policy, and Civil & Environmental Engineering. After growing up in Toronto and living in Minneapolis – and hearing about this year’s winter storms – she is enjoying the winter (spring?) weather in the Bay Area!
