Archive for the ‘Miscellany’ Category

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The steady sun and clean wind … not!

February 28, 2011

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):

Posted in Energy markets, Miscellany | Comments Off

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How has my happiness varied over time?

February 21, 2011

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:

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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.

Posted in Miscellany | Tagged | Comments Off

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Nate Silver’s Valentine to Huffington Post bloggers…

February 14, 2011

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.”

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Better living through applied statistics: Cracking scratch-off lottery games

February 5, 2011

Michael Giberson

In WIRED, Jonah Lehrer reports on how Toronto geological statistician Mohan Srivastava discovered a flaw in a lottery scratch-off game.

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.

Posted in Economics, Miscellany | Tagged | 2 Comments »

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Paul Cézanne’s birthday

January 19, 2011

Lynne Kiesling

Today’s Google banner celebrates the 172nd birthday of Paul Cézanne, my favorite artist. I love how he unpacks the underlying layers of geometry in landscapes. When I first saw the painting above, Le lac d’Annecy, in the Courtauld Gallery in London when I was a college student, it literally took my breath away.

Last year when I read Jonah Lehrer’s Proust Was A Neuroscientist, I was riveted by his chapter “Paul Cézanne: The Process of Sight”, because he articulated so clearly (where I cannot!) why I respond so strongly to Cézanne’s art:

His paintings were about the subjectivity of sight, the illusion of surfaces. … But Cézanne believed that light was only the beginning of seeing. “The eye is not enough,” he declared. “One needs to think as well.” Cézanne’s epiphany was that our impressions require interpretation; to look is to create what you see.

We now know that Cézanne was right. Our vision begins with photons, but this is only the beginning. Whenever we open our eyes, the brain engages in an act of astonishing imagination, as it transforms the residues of light into a world of form and space that we can understand.” …

… Cézanne’s art exposes the process of seeing.

None of this, or its appeal to someone like me, should surprise any of you familiar with Hayek’s The Sensory Order. On a related note, see this post from Steve Horwitz on The Sensory Order and optical illusion.

Posted in Complexity, Miscellany | Tagged , , | Comments Off

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Technological developments useful in eventually producing the equivalent of Neal Stephenson’s “Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer”

January 14, 2011

Michael Giberson

As any reader of Neal Stephenson’s book The Diamond Age knows, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer would be quite handy to have. Unfortunately, technology hasn’t quite advanced to the point necessary to actually produce such a thing.

A recently published research report seems like one small step in the right direction. From a summary:

Researchers report that they can predict “with unprecedented accuracy” how well you will do on a complex task such as a strategic video game simply by analyzing activity in a specific region of your brain.

The findings, published in the online journal , offer detailed insights into the brain structures that facilitate learning, and may lead to the development of training strategies tailored to individual strengths and weaknesses.

The new approach used established brain imaging techniques in a new way. Instead of measuring how brain activity differs before and after subjects learn a complex task, the researchers analyzed background activity in the basal ganglia, a group of brain structures known to be important for procedural learning, coordinated movement and feelings of reward.

Using magnetic resonance imaging and a method known as multivoxel pattern analysis, the researchers found significant differences in patterns of a particular type of MRI signal, called T2*, in the basal ganglia of study subjects. These differences enabled researchers to predict between 55 and 68 percent of the variance (differences in performance) among the 34 people who later learned to play the game.

More from Chris Kohler at WIRED.

The article, “Predicting Individual’s Learning Success From Patterns of Pre-Learning MRI Activity,” will be published in the journal PLoS One (but I couldn’t find a link to the article there this morning).

HT to Mark Thoma.

Posted in Miscellany, Technology | Tagged | Comments Off

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In which the author explains the likely origin of the idea for a professional code of ethics among economists

January 11, 2011

Michael Giberson

For more economists caught in the act of navel gazing, check out The Economist‘s forum on the question of whether economists need a professional code of ethics.

If you want some background, the urge for a code of ethics came about something like this:

Since the end of 2008, economists have been professionally embarrassed by the financial crisis and associated recession, and didn’t people expect us to have answers, and by-the-way why didn’t we predict this in advance and prevent it from happening and stuff.  So now economists are having low esteem which is bad for us, and we know it is bad which makes us feel worse.  Anyway, us economists were all sitting around feeling sorry for our sorry state, and down in the dumps.

Suddenly one of us economists jumps up and says, “Hey, let’s put on a show!” And then another one jumps up and says, “Yeah, we’ve gotta have a great show, with a million laughs… and color… and a lot of lights to make it sparkle. And songs – wonderful songs. And after we get the people in that hall, we’ve gotta start em in laughing right away.”

And then all of us economists were getting excited and exuberant and feeling our animal spirits again until one guy calls out, “But what are we gonna call our show?” And for a moment we was stumped, but then  came the answer from the crowd, ringing  forth clear as the “The Opening BellSM” at the start of trading at the NYSE: “A professional code of ethics for economists.”

So there you have it. And you’ve got to admit, it is a title that will start em laughing right away.

(Among views expressed in the forum, I favor the Lant Pritchett and Giles Saint-Paul’s responses.)

Posted in Economics, Miscellany | Tagged | 2 Comments »

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Randomized testing for online fundraising appeals

January 10, 2011

Michael Giberson

Following up yesterday’s note on randomized testing in free legal aid, here is another kind of applied experimental work: The recently ended Wikipedia fundraising campaign made extensive use of randomized testing to explore just which appeals generated the most revenue. “If everyone reading this donated $5″ vs. “If everyone reading this donated $10″ (about the same). “Only 4 days left” vs. “4 days left” (“Only” seemed to increase donations slightly).  Many variations tried.  Links and some data here.

HT to Al Roth at Market Design.

Posted in Economics, Miscellany | Comments Off

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Speed blogging

December 8, 2010

Michael Giberson

Speed blogging = copying a Zetland trope so I can clear these items off my “to blog” list:

Robert Rapier on the Renewable Fuels Association‘s wild efforts to hold onto all possible subsidy and policy advantages that it can grab.  Elsewhere, the Wall Street Journal reports the emergence of a left-right coalition in Congress against extension of ethanol subsidies. (via Environmental Economics and Market Power)

Also don’t miss Rapier’s “Cellulosic Ethanol Reality Begins to Set In.”

Matthew Lewis explains Steven Levitt’s premium pricing puzzle.  A while back Levitt observed gasoline pricing data that showed the premium paid for premium (high octane) fuel became larger compared to the price of regular gasoline as the overall price of gasoline increased. Levitt was puzzled, his economics leading him to expect a fixed price difference. Lewis explains that the data Levitt observed (USA Today‘s “Weekend Gas Gauge”) was faulty. USA Today relies on AAA’s price data which accurately records regular gasoline prices and simply assumes a fixed percentage mark-up to estimate mid-grade and premium gasoline prices.

Robin Hanson at Overcoming Bias points to an intriguing bit of experimental social science. Researchers manipulated the perceived status of leaders in a public good contributions game, players tended to mimic the contributions of high-status leaders but not low-status leaders. When punishment was an option in the experiments, low-status leaders punished more and were punished by other players more. (See “Cooperation and Status in Organizations” by Catherine Eckel, Enrique Fatas, and Rick Wilson in the Journal of Public Economic Theory).

Al Roth at Market Design, “College football teams are hard to rank” commenting on the New York Times, “Who’s No. 1?” I wonder, “Hard to rank compared to what?” Doesn’t some version of Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem apply to BCS or any other system of ranking football teams? Maybe some other ranking system would work better, but my guess is that ranking ranking systems is also hard, so how are we going to pick a better ranking system?

I guess if I’m copying one of David Zetland’s tropes I ought to offer a HT in the general direction of Aguanomics. Here is his “Gasland – The Review.” It is an inflammatory film, and Zetland is fired up.

Posted in Economics, Energy markets, Miscellany, Sport and fitness | 4 Comments »

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Happy Thanksgiving!

November 25, 2010

Michael Giberson

Among the many things I am thankful for: this blog, and its readers and commenters.

So thank you.

Posted in Miscellany | 3 Comments »

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