Another important point is that modern telephone polls have response rates in the neighborhood of 30%. In the same way that those with cell phones are different than those without, people who are (a) at home when the poll takes place and (b) agree to participate are different than those who are not or do not.
In surveys done for academic research, this kind of selection bias is taken very seriously. Political pollsters either need to model the selection process, or they need to be more honest about the accuracy of their surveys. The +/- 3% rule only applies if the sample was drawn independently, an assumption that is violated in the presence of selective non-response.
Workplace stress costs the nation more than $300 billion each year in health care, missed work and the stress-reduction industry that has grown up to soothe workers and keep production high, according to estimates by the American Institute of Stress in New York
Seems kind of useless to know that stress costs $300 billion per year without knowing the benefits of that stress. Surely some of this stress results in increased productivity. (I know I never get work done unless I have a deadline.)
Also, how much of this stress is preventable? Surely every culture has some degree of stress. How much would it cost to treat this baseline level of stress in the current American medical system? Without knowing that, it's impossible to tell to what extent this means Americans are really stressed out, or whether this is just another indication that we're relatively well-off and consume lots of expensive health care.
Workers who report that they are stressed, said Steven L. Sauter, chief of the Organizational Science and Human Factors Branch of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, incur health care costs that are 46 percent higher, or an average of $600 more per person, than other employees
Similarly, this could just reflect that those who have stressful jobs also have excellent health plans and thus consume more health care.
The amount of money it costs to take a piece of plastic, paper, glass or whatever and recycle it into another one is more than the cost to create that item from unrecycled material.
The problem is not this simple. Suppose that the monetary cost of producing a good from unrecycled material is less than the monetary cost of producing the same good from recycled material. Even so, it may be the case that it's better to produce the good using recycled inputs if the environmental damage is sufficiently smaller. (Of course, government subsidies are necessary to encourage the right out outcome in such situations.)
While this is great in theory, I don't think the environmental ramifications of using recycled versus unrecycled inputs are typically very well understood. This is a problem that I run into constantly as an environmentalist, it that often I find that the information I need to make even a simple problem (e.g., paper vs. plastic) is simply unavailable...
Anyone who claims that all recycling is bad (or good) has an agenda.
This article is simply an application of Coase's Law*: when the actions of an agent impose a negative externality on another agent one can rely on private bargining to produce an optimal outcome. However, this "law" only applies when a variety of assumptions hold.
In this case, it seems to me the most important issue is imperfect information. In order for a consumer to bargain to an optimal level of privacy, IT MUST BE POSSIBLE FOR THAT CONSUMER TO MONITOR THE DEGREE TO WHICH COMPANIES COMPLY WITH THE RESULTING CONTRACT. What good does it do to enter a privacy contract with the owner of a web-site if you have no ability to determine whether or not the company fulfills it's side of the bargin??
Another issue involves the distributed nature of the problem, an issue alluded to in the article. Even if a technical solution can be found to the information issue mentioned above, EACH CONSUMER WOULD NEED TO NEGOTIATE A PRIVACY CONTRACT WITH MANY COMPANIES. As a result, there will be substantial transaction costs (ie, the time necessary to form all these contracts). Such transaction costs can result in inefficiently low levels of contracting.
* See Ronald Coase's "The Problem of Social Cost" in the Journal of Law and Economics, October 1960.
The interesting thing about this conversation is that, NO GAME IS INNATELY ZERO SUM OR NON-ZERO SUM. Whether or not a game is zero sum has as much to do with the utility functions of the players as it does with the structure of the game.
The formal definition of a zero-sum game is that it must have the property that the aggregate utility received by all participants remains constant, regardless of the outcome of the game (although the allocation of this utility may, of course, vary.)
So, take the game of Charades, suggested by the original poster. If the participants derive enjoyment from the activity rather than from the outcome, then of course the game is non-zero sum. However, if the people playing the game only care about performing better than the other team then the game may be zero sum (IFF the utility team A gets from winning plus the disutility team B gets from loosing is equal to the utility team B gets from winning plus the disutility team B gets from loosing).
So this argument could go on all day, as any game (even Chess and Monopoly) can be legitimately viewed as zero-sum or non-zero sum, depending on the poster's assesment of the typical player's preferences.
Perhaps a better phrase for this conversation would be mutualistic, which is used by sociologists to mean "non-competitive"...
I'm no neuroscientist, but isn't possible that the causation actually went the other way? In other words, could it be that Einstein's intelligence caused his brain to develop differently?
Slashdot Mirror
Another important point is that modern telephone polls have response rates in the neighborhood of 30%. In the same way that those with cell phones are different than those without, people who are (a) at home when the poll takes place and (b) agree to participate are different than those who are not or do not.
In surveys done for academic research, this kind of selection bias is taken very seriously. Political pollsters either need to model the selection process, or they need to be more honest about the accuracy of their surveys. The +/- 3% rule only applies if the sample was drawn independently, an assumption that is violated in the presence of selective non-response.
Workplace stress costs the nation more than $300 billion each year in health care, missed work and the stress-reduction industry that has grown up to soothe workers and keep production high, according to estimates by the American Institute of Stress in New York
Seems kind of useless to know that stress costs $300 billion per year without knowing the benefits of that stress. Surely some of this stress results in increased productivity. (I know I never get work done unless I have a deadline.)
Also, how much of this stress is preventable? Surely every culture has some degree of stress. How much would it cost to treat this baseline level of stress in the current American medical system? Without knowing that, it's impossible to tell to what extent this means Americans are really stressed out, or whether this is just another indication that we're relatively well-off and consume lots of expensive health care.
Workers who report that they are stressed, said Steven L. Sauter, chief of the Organizational Science and Human Factors Branch of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, incur health care costs that are 46 percent higher, or an average of $600 more per person, than other employees
Similarly, this could just reflect that those who have stressful jobs also have excellent health plans and thus consume more health care.
I've run into this problem as well. May I suggest one of these:
http://empgen.tripod.com/#English
-christopher
The problem is not this simple. Suppose that the monetary cost of producing a good from unrecycled material is less than the monetary cost of producing the same good from recycled material. Even so, it may be the case that it's better to produce the good using recycled inputs if the environmental damage is sufficiently smaller. (Of course, government subsidies are necessary to encourage the right out outcome in such situations.)
While this is great in theory, I don't think the environmental ramifications of using recycled versus unrecycled inputs are typically very well understood. This is a problem that I run into constantly as an environmentalist, it that often I find that the information I need to make even a simple problem (e.g., paper vs. plastic) is simply unavailable...
Anyone who claims that all recycling is bad (or good) has an agenda.
This article is simply an application of Coase's Law*: when the actions of an agent impose a negative externality on another agent one can rely on private bargining to produce an optimal outcome. However, this "law" only applies when a variety of assumptions hold.
In this case, it seems to me the most important issue is imperfect information. In order for a consumer to bargain to an optimal level of privacy, IT MUST BE POSSIBLE FOR THAT CONSUMER TO MONITOR THE DEGREE TO WHICH COMPANIES COMPLY WITH THE RESULTING CONTRACT. What good does it do to enter a privacy contract with the owner of a web-site if you have no ability to determine whether or not the company fulfills it's side of the bargin??
Another issue involves the distributed nature of the problem, an issue alluded to in the article. Even if a technical solution can be found to the information issue mentioned above, EACH CONSUMER WOULD NEED TO NEGOTIATE A PRIVACY CONTRACT WITH MANY COMPANIES. As a result, there will be substantial transaction costs (ie, the time necessary to form all these contracts). Such transaction costs can result in inefficiently low levels of contracting.
* See Ronald Coase's "The Problem of Social Cost" in the Journal of Law and Economics, October 1960.
The interesting thing about this conversation is that, NO GAME IS INNATELY ZERO SUM OR NON-ZERO SUM. Whether or not a game is zero sum has as much to do with the utility functions of the players as it does with the structure of the game.
The formal definition of a zero-sum game is that it must have the property that the aggregate utility received by all participants remains constant, regardless of the outcome of the game (although the allocation of this utility may, of course, vary.)
So, take the game of Charades, suggested by the original poster. If the participants derive enjoyment from the activity rather than from the outcome, then of course the game is non-zero sum. However, if the people playing the game only care about performing better than the other team then the game may be zero sum (IFF the utility team A gets from winning plus the disutility team B gets from loosing is equal to the utility team B gets from winning plus the disutility team B gets from loosing).
So this argument could go on all day, as any game (even Chess and Monopoly) can be legitimately viewed as zero-sum or non-zero sum, depending on the poster's assesment of the typical player's preferences.
Perhaps a better phrase for this conversation would be mutualistic, which is used by sociologists to mean "non-competitive"...
-topher
I'm no neuroscientist, but isn't possible that the causation actually went the other way? In other words, could it be that Einstein's intelligence caused his brain to develop differently?