Michael Giberson
The KP Texas office is alive and functional, I am relieved to discover, just recently emerged from the end of semester rush and not yet enveloped in the holiday rush. So I’ll try to rediscover my internet legs, re-raise the Jolly Blogger flag, and set sail in search of curious, erroneous, surprising or provoking energy policy and/or economics stories.
Yo-ho-ho and happy holidays to all!
Michael Giberson
We talk a bit about the economics of electric power transmission and wind power here, but there is more to understanding the world than economics. Previously we have noted Virginia Postrel writing on the techno-glamour of, among other things, wind turbines. Now we take note of the Pylon Design Competition and its recently announced winning design, a transmission tower design intended to “be both grounded in reality and be beautiful” as per the competition guidelines, the Bystrup T-Pylon (I liked short-listed entry 3 as well).
And if you like integrating artistic insights into your thinking about power transmission and wind turbines, you just might want to support a planned performance art piece intending to promote exactly that kind of integration. The piece will be based on recordings in the wind energy oral history project housed in Texas Tech University’s Southwest Collection.
Lynne Kiesling
Here’s some outstanding geek attire! Monsters of Grok is a line of t-shirts that use rock band t-shirt logo designs, but the names are instead famous scientists and intellectuals such as Ada Lovelace (done as a Ladytron logo), Isaac Newton (as Iron Maiden), and Benjamin Franklin (as Black Flag). I fell over laughing when I first saw these, literally hyperventilating and weeping. Guess that makes me a geek rocker …
Today, to make myself feel better for having such a nasty ear infection (with gratitude to those of you who have sent get well wishes!), I finally broke down and purchased two of them. The first one’s easy to guess if you’re a regular KP reader, the second one is a little more tricky as there were several contenders. If you guess them both you get a gold star!
Michael Giberson
Is this an unpriced external effect of shooting off fireworks on July 4?
July 5 tends to have an unusual number of animal-related traffic problems, as pets, spooked by the fireworks on the previous day, have a greater propensity to wander onto freeways.
From Eric Morris at the Freakonomicsblog, “Road Blocks: The Strange Things That Cause Traffic.”
Other non-traffic contributors to traffic congestion mentioned in the article: oil spills, antifreeze, oranges, lemons, livestock, wild animals, abandoned pets, suicides, homicides, discarded Christmas trees, and furniture and appliances including couches, chairs, refrigerators, and stoves.
Michael Giberson
A fool and his money are soon parted. -Thomas Tusser.
Potassium iodide supplies in the United States have run low and the price shoots up. What sold for $10 or $20 dollars a week ago is now priced from $30 to $75 and more. Some cry “price gouging!”
Regulation magazine has just published an article of mine on price gouging policies. Since the Regulation article was finished in January, I didn’t anticipate potassium iodide price gouging in March. My reactions:
Is “price gouging” on potassium iodide in the United States a good thing?
High prices will have the beneficial effect of dissuading some Americans from acquiring and hoarding supplies of a resource that will be better used elsewhere. High prices will have the beneficial effect of prompting some additional production. High prices will have the unfortunate effect of attracting more supplies to the United States when those resources would be better sent elsewhere (i.e. to some of the 3- to 4-billion people living closer than most Americans to the damaged reactors in Japan). Note that Japanese officials are promoting a 12-mile evacuation range around the damaged reactors and the United States is thousands of miles outside the evacuation range.
Of course the appropriate question is “a good thing compared to what”? What is the alternative to allowing suppliers and consumers work out prices in the market? Two alternatives to price gouging are (1) anti-price gouging moralizing and (2) anti-price gouging laws.
Anti-price gouging moralizing discourages useful economic activity because businesses will take steps to avoid being branded a price gouger even when those steps actually make consumers worse off. (I.e. failing to resupply at higher prices and simply running out of stock instead.) Anti-price gouging moralizing also encourages political responses that we’d be better off without, which leads me to the next point:
Would an “anti price gouging law” enforced by federal or state authorities be a good thing?
No. All such a law would have done was minimize the amount of money parted from the fast-acting fools, slower-moving fools would lament their ineptness, less dim-witted fools would not be prompted have second thoughts about hoarding something they didn’t need and no price signal would encourage suppliers to respond.
Note that state laws on price gouging do not apply in this situation, since they typically require an official declaration of emergency, or if not an official declaration, at least some kind of threat of harm to consumers associated with the higher-priced good. There is no related emergency anywhere in the United States.
NOTES: Check out prices on eBay; see related news: Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Bridgeport, CT News-Times, NBC Bay Area, and many more.
I’ll post more about the Regulation article here in a day or two. Regular readers will have seen much of the raw material for the article discussed earlier onKnowledge Problem (link searches the KP archives for “price gouging”), but there is new material, too.
Michael Giberson
At Knowing and Making, Leigh Caldwell writes about “a charming pop song by the delightful young artist Jessie J” about “the important and neglected issue of pricing.” Initially he is pleased with the song, but ultimately “his faith in humanity is shaken. Shattered, in fact.”
A great deal of drama for a short post.
Michael Giberson
When an essay about ups and downs in the natural gas industry ends suggesting we need energy sources “as steady as the rays of the sun and as clean as the wind on plains” …. Well let’s just say the weather over the last 24 hours in this part of the plains doesn’t offer reasons to be a believer in steady sun and clean wind. Wind speeds averaged about 26 mph for much of yesterday was blowing significant quantities of dust (speeds ranged from about 10 mph to gusts near 50 mph), and the constant dust reduced significantly the amount of solar energy reaching the surface. This morning we have a 7 mph breeze and clear skies.
Wind gusts yesterday as high as 69 mph are helping to spread at least three large wildfires in the Texas panhandle and southern plains.
(I realize that a dust storm doesn’t actually undermine the point the author was trying to make, but the essay itself seemed to mistake one company’s shift of focus from increasingly cheap natural gas to not-so-cheap crude oil as somehow indicating that consumers shouldn’t believe in natural gas for the long term. That is to say, it seems so obviously off track that I don’t feel a need to get too serious about it.)
NOTE: The image below reports Lubbock, Texas windspeeds in the second panel and solar energy in the fifth panel (but the image will update, so this particular bit of evidence will be gone by the end of today):
Michael Giberson
Since December 30 I’ve been responding to twice-a-day prompts to report how I feel and what I am doing. Loosely speaking I am taking part in the Mappiness research project, but Mappiness is primarily focused on mapping “subjective well being” over time and place within the U.K. No guarantee that my data is doing anything other than sitting in storage somewhere. But the system provides some feedback to me, see below, which I find mildly interesting.
Project creator George MacKerron explained the project and described some early research results at the recent TEDx Brighton event.
(The TEDx Brighton page has the video as well along with additional information about MacKerron and the project.)
Recently I hit 101 responses and so took some screenshots of the feedback for this post:
So contrary to my self-image as a quiet loner more comfortable in a stack of books, my self-reported subjective well-being data suggests I’m happier out in crowds at sporting events (#1, but note just one report) and talking/chatting/socialising (#2). On the other end of the spectrum, I’m least happy doing “Admin/finances/organising” (#22), “Shopping/Errands” (#23), “Sports/running/exercise” (#24), and “Something else” (#25, something not on their list, and perhaps fortunately I can’t remember what I was up to at the time). As in most of the U.K. data the MacKennon talks about, I report being happier on weekends.
Not that I think you should be that interested in my data, but it gives you a glimpse of the kind of information that Mappiness is collecting. The interesting part is in the broader Mappiness project.
Michael Giberson
Nate Silver runs some numbers on public Huffington Post information to get an idea on how much the posts of unpaid bloggers on the site are worth to the company in gross advertising revenue: “Do the multiplication, and you find … the median blog post, with several hundred views, was worth only $3 or $4.”
RELATED: New York Times, “At Media Companies, a Nation of Serfs.”
Michael Giberson
As a trained statistician with degrees from MIT and Stanford University, Srivastava was intrigued by the technical problem posed by the lottery ticket. In fact, it reminded him a lot of his day job, which involves consulting for mining and oil companies. A typical assignment for Srivastava goes like this: A mining company has multiple samples from a potential gold mine. Each sample gives a different estimate of the amount of mineral underground. “My job is to make sense of those results,” he says. “The numbers might seem random, as if the gold has just been scattered, but they’re actually not random at all. There are fundamental geologic forces that created those numbers. If I know the forces, I can decipher the samples. I can figure out how much gold is underground.”
Srivastava realized that the same logic could be applied to the lottery. The apparent randomness of the scratch ticket was just a facade, a mathematical lie. And this meant that the lottery system might actually be solvable, just like those mining samples. “At the time, I had no intention of cracking the tickets,” he says. He was just curious about the algorithm…
Andrew Gelman comments at his Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science blog:
“Ticket designers fill the cards with near-misses…”: This doesn’t sound like they’re just slapping down random numbers. Instead, the system seems to be rigged in the fashion of old-time carnival games in order to manipulate one’s intuition that the probability of near-misses should be informative about the underlying probability of hits. …
In this sense, the story is slightly more interesting than “Lottery designers made a mistake.” The mistake they made is directly connected to the manipulations they make in order to sucker people into spend more money.
If Gelman’s view is right, it suggests that scratch-off games companies will continue to produce and sell games that can be cracked. Quasi-randomized games can be made more interesting than a truly randomized game, so more tickets will be sold, so more money made by the lottery, so they will keep doing it. Presumably now, however, they watch their payout rates a little more closely and shut down their quasi-randomized games when it appears that someone has figured it out.
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