Something else to consider, though, is that if everyone on the road was riding a bike, the total energy of traffic would be less.
Also, I've found it to much safer to be a bicyclist on the road in an area that has a lot of other bicyclists on it --- drivers of cars tend to be much more aware. Also, once the bicyclists get a critical mass, then there's a larger constituency for, and it makes more sense to invest in, bike lanes and bike paths. When I lived in Palo Alto, I rode my bike to work every day --- people with longer commutes could take their bikes on Caltrain.
The number one cause of bicycle-car collisions is the failure of drivers taking left hand turns to yield the right of way. It's going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts the car, so it pays to be very aware of potential turns by unaware drivers.
My indispensable piece of bike safety advice: wear a helmet. Smacking your unprotected head on the pavement hurts way more than you can possibly imagine.
chocolate bunnie research
on
Easter Humor
·
· Score: 1
For interspecies comparison with peeps, check out this research project on Lindt Gold Bunnies.
So if you are playing a guy and hitting on women.... you are really.... hitting on....
There's a great short story by Maureen McHughtitled "A Coney Island of the Mind" (the title was taken from Lawrence Ferlinghetti's poem) that riffs on this idea -- it's set in a virtual Coney Island. Can't seem to find the anthology it appeared in...
I cannot believe I am posting this link on/. of all places, but as a long time advocate of the "let's send short vegetarian women into space and leave those beefy air force pilots on the ground" position I feel compelled to address the issue:
I really enjoyed The Double Helix the first I read it, shortly after high school. The second time I read it, just after grad school, I was appalled. Watson & Crick's (& conspirator Wilkins') deliberate theft of Rosalind Franklin's work violated any reasonable standard of academic or professional conduct, as well as being highly unethical. The fact that Watson went on to trash her in his book only adds insult to tremendous injury.
If you are interested in learning about the abusive mistreatment of women researchers look no further than The Double Helix.
From the acknowledgements section of their letter to Nature:
We have also been stimulated by a knowledge of the general nature of the unpublished experimental results and ideas of Dr. M. H. F. Wilkins, Dr. R. E. Franklin and their co-workers at King's College, London.
Not included in their acknowledgements section: the fact the "general information" about Dr. R. E. Franklin's work was in fact a very specific look at her crystallography data which was removed from her lab without her knowledge or consent by Dr. M. H. F. Wilkins.
Here's a brief NPR review of a recent biography of Rosalind Franklin and a more extensive review in Scientific American which details the theft of data by Watson/Crick/Wilkins.
Being accountable to yourself is a lot harder but much more effective.
I agree with you about self-motivation being the key element of change. However many, if not most, people struggle with achieving their goals in some area of their life. Addiction is the most extreme situation. I don't think that third party accountability can do it alone either, but once a person has made a decision that they would like to change having support from another person who's been there and who will remind them of their commitment seems to be a tremendous help.
The technique I mentioned from The Diamond Cutter relies exclusively on self-accountability --- the author recommends a Tibetan tracking system called tundruk or "six times a day" which involves taking stock of and making notes on how you are doing with regards to your goals every two hours. He includes a long description of the specific technique but two points he emphasizes are being specific in your comments and spreading the comments out over the day. It's not about judgement or feeling guilty --- the process of keeping track leads you to change your behavior.
Actually, this is just an online variant of a critical element of 12 step programs --- having a 'sponsor' who checks in with you every day to help you stay on track. I don't have any (first-hand) experience with addiction myself, but the idea that someone else is watching does seem to have a powerful effect on behavior.
I found this out when I was teaching intermediate macroeconomics at Vanderbilt University. Being an expensive private university, the adminstration has made a real fetish out of teaching evaluations. Several times I noticed in the "anonymous" but handwritten evaluations that students who had poor attendance indicated that my lectures were disgorganized. (Yeah, I see the causality problem, but I really didn't think the lectures were disorganized, but they do build on each other.) So I decided to take attendance at every class, by passing around a sign up sheet. Attendance did not count towards the students' grades, but just the fact that I kept a record increased attendance. I asked a few students about this, and without prompting from me, they said that just knowing that it was written down somewhere that they hadn't been to class made them more likely to come.
& it did seem to improve my evaluations as well. I know that college students are supposed to be adults, and shouldn't need this kind of psychological trick, blah-blah-blah, but it worked, and in academia the moral high ground is occupied exclusively by tenured professors.
Interestingly enough, years later I read a great book on business management written a Buddhist monk who worked in the diamond industry (The Diamond Cutter by Geshe Michael Roach) that suggests simply keeping track of errors, with no actual or implied punishments, will reduce the number of errors dramatically. The book is very interesting --- I reccommend it highly.
A tremendous amount of energy goes into transporting food to your table --- try consuming locally grown produce and shopping at the farmer's market, if your town has has one.
I agree with the poster who talked aout telecommuting --- shortening your commute to work by living closer to your workplace, telecommuting, or taking public transportation also reduces energy consumption day by day.
Looks like you'll be passing some of america's finest roadside attractions as well, like the Mitchell Corn Palace, Bedrock City, and the statue of Crazy Horse under construction in South Dakota. After that it's straight into Jackalope territory...
One of the recent trends in science journalism is focusing the narrative on the individuals involved --- after all, "character drives fiction" so why not apply to same maxim to non-fiction. This usually means portraying scientists as lone inspired geniuses working in isolation to develop their ideas, with the rest of the scientific community coming off as slightly doltish and resistant to new ideas.
I noticed this in several books I read about complexity some years back --- they all featured the same cast of characters, with the same spin on how they labored alone in obscurity to develop their ideas. After a while, I felt like I was reading the work of a Hollywood PR consultant who specializes in branding the "scientific persona". In contrast, economist W. Brian Arthur's own account of his research focused on how he got inspiration for his ideas from working with Russian mathematicians.
I do think it's possible to weave a compelling narrative out of scientific ideas, it's just harder.
My first inductee into the science journalism "Hall of Shame" would have to be The Double Helix by James Watson, which I enjoyed immensely the first time I read it (shortly after high school) and horrified me the second time I read it (shortly after grad school). Not only is The Double Helix an abominable exercise is self-aggrandizement, Watson proudly recounts their underhanded attempts to gain access to another researcher's work without her knowledge or consent, and of course, without giving her credit later, even though it involved an outright lie in a letter to Nature.
The Quadra I bought in grad school in 1994 is still in use as part of a home recording studio, basically as a front end for some DigiDesign hardware. I paid $2183 for the machine, and $1138 for 24 MB of added memory, to bring it up to a whopping total of 32 MB. We've added more memory since then but it still screaming along at 33 Mhz.
The answer to Chicken Little economists
on
World of Ends
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Great article --- I tried to make some of the same arguments (and didn't do as good of a job) several years ago in response to proposals being put forward academic economists to "improve" the allocation of bandwidth with complicated pricing schemes and "smart markets". The efficiency fetish common amongst economists blinded them to the real strengths of the protocol --- stupidity, flexibility and reliability. (Alas, the NSF didn't bite on the funding, and I moved on to other unrelated projects.)
We had a great working title for the project though:
Exactly, if I need a basic idea of what a book is about or even whether a book is in print, I look at Amazon. Then I buy it from half.com, or check it out of the library. (Now that Amazon lists the price of used books right next to the new ones, I sometimes get it used through Amazon.) Amazon has publisher's descriptions and excerpts/links to standard reviews in addition to customer reviews, so it will be hard to compete with such an extensive already-existing database. The "iblist" might get some leverage by linking to as many existing reviews on individual websites as possible, they have a long long way to go if they are starting from scratch.
I still haven't gotten over the tactile appeal of dead trees for browsing --- I sometimes go to large bookstores with coffeeshops, browse a while, have a cup of coffee, and write down the name of the books that look interesting --- much as I appreciate the vastly increased selection of books available online, I still really enjoy picking new books up, looking at them, scanning through. I'm not sure if this is just a throw-back that will go away in time (like writing papers out in longhand before typing them into the wordprocessor) or whether the experience of having a book in my hand is just fundamentally more satisfying. (BTW, I started this "writing down the title instead of buying the book" regimen before books were available online, as a way of curbing my bookbuying.)
You winnow the list to the 10 qualified applicants, and then discover that 4 of them want 30% less money. Which do you hire?
Historically, the jobs that women were able to apply for were restricted (teaching, nursing, retail, low level office work). Employers could offer women less because they had fewer employment alternatives, and the wage that a rational person is willing to accept is a function of their (beliefs about) their next best job they can get. "Women's work" and "low pay" were synonyms. So it's not just what one firm does that matters in wage setting, the wage conditions at other firms are a critical part of the equation. It sounds circular, but it's true --- the fact that women are paid less overall means that a particular firm can pay individual women less. The competiveness of the larger labor market most certainly has an impact on the micro-economic level.
In practice, the wage gap between men and women arose mainly from restricting women's access to certain kinds of jobs, not by paying individual women less for doing the same job as men. As the restrictions break down, the wage gap narrows, but because of the imperfectly competitive nature of the labor, it will take a very long time and concerted effort to get out from under the weight of history. Interestingly, the only exception to the rising inequality of the last three decades in the US is inequality between men and women, which has declined.
I believe we have a statistics gap.
There are many many issues in which the statistical evidence provided by economists is uncertain or contradictory. This is not one of them. The statement "women are paid less then men" is as close to a fact as you get in economics.
In general, if I can make money charging 20% when my competitor charges 25%, I will to gain market share.
You may gain market share, but you won't necessarilly increase profits -- the whole point of the article is that many of these generalizations are simply not true in today's economic environment.
Kent Monroe, a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is one of the deans of pricing. He's been teaching the subject for nearly 37 years, and he knows that
sloppy thinking about pricing is widespread across the U.S. economy.... Businesspeople assume that if they are in a competitive situation, and prices drop, they have to match. Wrong. "The natural tendency to match is foolish," he says. Executives who are devoted to using "data" in all kinds of other arenas think it's perfectly acceptable to set prices based on "history" or "experience" or "instinct." Wrong again. (emphasis added)
This reminds of the myth about women being paid around 70% of what men are. If true, there must be someone out there hiring only women and killing their competitors with wildly lower labor costs.
This is rehash of an old, flawed argument:
1) Assume that the labor market is perfectly competitive. 2) Assume that competitive markets will eliminate wage disparities between equally qualified men and women. 3) Observe that wage disparity exists between men and women. 4) Conclude that "unobserved differences" between men and women explain the wage disparity.
What justification is there for assumptions 1 & 2?
One point of the article is that businesses can make themselves better off by segmenting the market and selling products to different people for different prices. If businesses can do this when it comes to selling products, why can't they do the same for buy products, like say, labor?
The argument that markets will eliminate wage differentials based on gender or race assumes perfectly competitive markets composed of identical goods with many anonymous buyers and many anonymous sellers with full information available about the quality of the products and all prices. Every single one of these conditions is absent in the labor market.
Ha! When I taught intermediate macroeconomics and we got to monetary theory I used to poll students as to what commodity, other than gold, they think we would use if we went back to commodity money (as opposed to useless paper fiat currency). For example, there's a famous article about a WWII prisoner of war camp that used cigarettes as currency, and vodka and cigarettes (as well as US $) were used for a while after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Numerous students answered drugs, and one made a good argument for prescription drugs (in our aging society), but no one ever answered pr0n that I recall. Or porn for that matter.
So is there a going rate for this stuff in the barter economy? I remember some econ professors predicting that the internet would drive to price of pr0n to zero when I was in grad school in the early 90s. They also predicted that emmigration from Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin wall would drive the price of brains in the US to zero. . .
*hums a few bars of the Internationale for effect*
And is immediately arrested as a subversive by the Chinese government.
Heads up --- the Internationale has long been considered a protest song in Stalinist & Maoist regimes, and was the "theme song" for the Tiananmen Square protesters.
Agreed --- I found the original email fascinating. It really highlights the disconnect between how issues are marketed by PR professionals in the national media and how they are discussed behind closed doors. Frank coverage like this should be (and isn't) available in any public forum, only in private correspondence.
And won't be available in the future, because there's no way that reporter is being invited back to WEF in the future.
All the fabulous word-of-mouth in the world is no good to him if nobody actually buys it.
Unless you believe that people get utility out of being famous as well as from being wealthy --- in which case he had already succeeded.
What criteria should we use in deciding whether or not it's "no good to him"? Economists use the concept of "revealed preference," that you should judge what people value by their actions, by how many resources they are willing to devote to achieving a goal or acquiring a good. There are two possible explanations for his behavior:
1. His goal is maxmizing the amount of money he makes, whether from this novel or his future writing, and the efforts he's put into distributing it for free are a tactic that may or may not achieve this goal.
2. His goal is to maximize his name recognition and/or the number of people who actually read his book.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, I've found it to much safer to be a bicyclist on the road in an area that has a lot of other bicyclists on it --- drivers of cars tend to be much more aware. Also, once the bicyclists get a critical mass, then there's a larger constituency for, and it makes more sense to invest in, bike lanes and bike paths. When I lived in Palo Alto, I rode my bike to work every day --- people with longer commutes could take their bikes on Caltrain.
The number one cause of bicycle-car collisions is the failure of drivers taking left hand turns to yield the right of way. It's going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts the car, so it pays to be very aware of potential turns by unaware drivers.
My indispensable piece of bike safety advice: wear a helmet. Smacking your unprotected head on the pavement hurts way more than you can possibly imagine.
For interspecies comparison with peeps, check out this research project on Lindt Gold Bunnies.
the subject line for that post should read "grunt grunt grunt" rather than "whine whine whine".
There's a great short story by Maureen McHughtitled "A Coney Island of the Mind" (the title was taken from Lawrence Ferlinghetti's poem) that riffs on this idea -- it's set in a virtual Coney Island. Can't seem to find the anthology it appeared in...
the keeper
Haven't tried it myself but I have friends who swear by it.
If you are interested in learning about the abusive mistreatment of women researchers look no further than The Double Helix.
Here's a brief NPR review of a recent biography of Rosalind Franklin and a more extensive review in Scientific American which details the theft of data by Watson/Crick/Wilkins.
I agree with you about self-motivation being the key element of change. However many, if not most, people struggle with achieving their goals in some area of their life. Addiction is the most extreme situation. I don't think that third party accountability can do it alone either, but once a person has made a decision that they would like to change having support from another person who's been there and who will remind them of their commitment seems to be a tremendous help.
The technique I mentioned from The Diamond Cutter relies exclusively on self-accountability --- the author recommends a Tibetan tracking system called tundruk or "six times a day" which involves taking stock of and making notes on how you are doing with regards to your goals every two hours. He includes a long description of the specific technique but two points he emphasizes are being specific in your comments and spreading the comments out over the day. It's not about judgement or feeling guilty --- the process of keeping track leads you to change your behavior.
I found this out when I was teaching intermediate macroeconomics at Vanderbilt University. Being an expensive private university, the adminstration has made a real fetish out of teaching evaluations. Several times I noticed in the "anonymous" but handwritten evaluations that students who had poor attendance indicated that my lectures were disgorganized. (Yeah, I see the causality problem, but I really didn't think the lectures were disorganized, but they do build on each other.) So I decided to take attendance at every class, by passing around a sign up sheet. Attendance did not count towards the students' grades, but just the fact that I kept a record increased attendance. I asked a few students about this, and without prompting from me, they said that just knowing that it was written down somewhere that they hadn't been to class made them more likely to come.
& it did seem to improve my evaluations as well. I know that college students are supposed to be adults, and shouldn't need this kind of psychological trick, blah-blah-blah, but it worked, and in academia the moral high ground is occupied exclusively by tenured professors.
Interestingly enough, years later I read a great book on business management written a Buddhist monk who worked in the diamond industry (The Diamond Cutter by Geshe Michael Roach) that suggests simply keeping track of errors, with no actual or implied punishments, will reduce the number of errors dramatically. The book is very interesting --- I reccommend it highly.
But I-80 has the barbed wire buffalo in Gothenburg, Nebraska (& the sod house museum & pony express station)....
I agree with the poster who talked aout telecommuting --- shortening your commute to work by living closer to your workplace, telecommuting, or taking public transportation also reduces energy consumption day by day.
More fun, less stuff!
I noticed this in several books I read about complexity some years back --- they all featured the same cast of characters, with the same spin on how they labored alone in obscurity to develop their ideas. After a while, I felt like I was reading the work of a Hollywood PR consultant who specializes in branding the "scientific persona". In contrast, economist W. Brian Arthur's own account of his research focused on how he got inspiration for his ideas from working with Russian mathematicians.
I do think it's possible to weave a compelling narrative out of scientific ideas, it's just harder.
My first inductee into the science journalism "Hall of Shame" would have to be The Double Helix by James Watson, which I enjoyed immensely the first time I read it (shortly after high school) and horrified me the second time I read it (shortly after grad school). Not only is The Double Helix an abominable exercise is self-aggrandizement, Watson proudly recounts their underhanded attempts to gain access to another researcher's work without her knowledge or consent, and of course, without giving her credit later, even though it involved an outright lie in a letter to Nature.
Here's a review of a biography Rosalind Franklin, THe Dark Lady of DNA by Brenda Maddox in Scientific American.
The Quadra I bought in grad school in 1994 is still in use as part of a home recording studio, basically as a front end for some DigiDesign hardware. I paid $2183 for the machine, and $1138 for 24 MB of added memory, to bring it up to a whopping total of 32 MB. We've added more memory since then but it still screaming along at 33 Mhz.
We had a great working title for the project though:
The Internet: Triumph of the Commons.
I still haven't gotten over the tactile appeal of dead trees for browsing --- I sometimes go to large bookstores with coffeeshops, browse a while, have a cup of coffee, and write down the name of the books that look interesting --- much as I appreciate the vastly increased selection of books available online, I still really enjoy picking new books up, looking at them, scanning through. I'm not sure if this is just a throw-back that will go away in time (like writing papers out in longhand before typing them into the wordprocessor) or whether the experience of having a book in my hand is just fundamentally more satisfying. (BTW, I started this "writing down the title instead of buying the book" regimen before books were available online, as a way of curbing my bookbuying.)
Historically, the jobs that women were able to apply for were restricted (teaching, nursing, retail, low level office work). Employers could offer women less because they had fewer employment alternatives, and the wage that a rational person is willing to accept is a function of their (beliefs about) their next best job they can get. "Women's work" and "low pay" were synonyms. So it's not just what one firm does that matters in wage setting, the wage conditions at other firms are a critical part of the equation. It sounds circular, but it's true --- the fact that women are paid less overall means that a particular firm can pay individual women less. The competiveness of the larger labor market most certainly has an impact on the micro-economic level.
In practice, the wage gap between men and women arose mainly from restricting women's access to certain kinds of jobs, not by paying individual women less for doing the same job as men. As the restrictions break down, the wage gap narrows, but because of the imperfectly competitive nature of the labor, it will take a very long time and concerted effort to get out from under the weight of history. Interestingly, the only exception to the rising inequality of the last three decades in the US is inequality between men and women, which has declined.
I believe we have a statistics gap.
There are many many issues in which the statistical evidence provided by economists is uncertain or contradictory. This is not one of them. The statement "women are paid less then men" is as close to a fact as you get in economics.
You may gain market share, but you won't necessarilly increase profits -- the whole point of the article is that many of these generalizations are simply not true in today's economic environment.
This is rehash of an old, flawed argument:
1) Assume that the labor market is perfectly competitive.
2) Assume that competitive markets will eliminate wage disparities between equally qualified men and women.
3) Observe that wage disparity exists between men and women.
4) Conclude that "unobserved differences" between men and women explain the wage disparity.
What justification is there for assumptions 1 & 2?
One point of the article is that businesses can make themselves better off by segmenting the market and selling products to different people for different prices. If businesses can do this when it comes to selling products, why can't they do the same for buy products, like say, labor?
The argument that markets will eliminate wage differentials based on gender or race assumes perfectly competitive markets composed of identical goods with many anonymous buyers and many anonymous sellers with full information available about the quality of the products and all prices. Every single one of these conditions is absent in the labor market.
So is there a going rate for this stuff in the barter economy? I remember some econ professors predicting that the internet would drive to price of pr0n to zero when I was in grad school in the early 90s. They also predicted that emmigration from Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin wall would drive the price of brains in the US to zero. . .
And is immediately arrested as a subversive by the Chinese government.
Heads up --- the Internationale has long been considered a protest song in Stalinist & Maoist regimes, and was the "theme song" for the Tiananmen Square protesters.
. . .
Earth First!
We can stripmine the other planets later.
Agreed --- I found the original email fascinating. It really highlights the disconnect between how issues are marketed by PR professionals in the national media and how they are discussed behind closed doors. Frank coverage like this should be (and isn't) available in any public forum, only in private correspondence.
And won't be available in the future, because there's no way that reporter is being invited back to WEF in the future.
Unless you believe that people get utility out of being famous as well as from being wealthy --- in which case he had already succeeded.
What criteria should we use in deciding whether or not it's "no good to him"? Economists use the concept of "revealed preference," that you should judge what people value by their actions, by how many resources they are willing to devote to achieving a goal or acquiring a good. There are two possible explanations for his behavior:
1. His goal is maxmizing the amount of money he makes, whether from this novel or his future writing, and the efforts he's put into distributing it for free are a tactic that may or may not achieve this goal.
2. His goal is to maximize his name recognition and/or the number of people who actually read his book.
Revealed preference + Occam's razor = 2.