IngliS speling is ubserd

May 2, 2009 in Uncategorized | Tags: | by | 4 comments

Hau muC tym dew kids wayst lerning tew spel ingliS?  Sudent we 3ther standerdeys 0n a simplifeyd speling sistem or just ubandun speling cunvenCins oltewgether? And hau muC tym is lost lerning to r3d? I caym ucross the Spelling Society wiC advocayts speling r3form and 0lso Wyrdplay wiC arcayvs a number of simplifayd speling sistems raynjing frum the totul3 fonetic tew sistems wiC are intended tew bey incrementul steps toword r3form. This wun I am yewsing is just mayd up bayst 0n luking at a few uf them.

  1. Dont thinc that deveyces will mayk the pr0blem mewt.  Yes my iPhone pr3dicts wut I am reyting but onl3 b3cus I spel the furst few letters curectl3.
  2. The pr0blem with fonetic sistems is that BritiS and Umericun werds wud be speld diferently.
  3. I expect that informul speling cunvenCuns wil 3merj sewn withaut a t0p-daun iniSitiv.  Instunt mesujing is the furst big r3sun for kids to reyt tew 3C uther.  Til nau, kids talct to 3c uther but rot onl3 tew thayr t3Cers.  Thay develupt informul spocen layngwij ul0ngseyd the formul layngwij.  This is hapening nau with reyting. Just as informul spocen layngwij perm3ayts the formul, this wil hapen with the ritin langwij.  3ven morso b3cus uf the 3fiSens3 gayns.
  4. This wud b3 a thing uf the past.

(C0nversaySin with Wolfgang and Tomek acn0lijd.)

Traffic School

May 2, 2009 in Uncategorized | Tags: , | by | 2 comments

I got two speeding tickets in less than one year.  I worked off the first one by taking an online course.  For the second one, they make you go to an 8 hours (!) course over two nights.  The only course that fit my schedule was in Rolling Meadows.  Just like Old Orchard in Skokie, there may have been farmland there a while ago but there are no rolling meadows now.

It’s obvious that the punishment in terms of wasted time is harsh so that you do not speed again.  Your first thought is whether you can persuade the teacher to let you go early.  This desire was very strong on Thursday night when the Bulls were playing the Celtics in Game 6 of their best of seven series.  The class took place in the basement of a courthouse and it turns out the police monitor the teacher to make sure he does not let the class off early.  Of course the teacher would love to go home early too so the incentives for renegotiation are huge.  The police have to stay anyway so they enforce the rules.

So I was stuck in the class but I kind of enjoyed it because I got to meet people I do not meet everyday otherwise.  I also got lots of information that I would not gotten in my normal interactions.

The hippie woman:  “I got a ticket because I gave a ride to a Jamaican guy who turned to be a homeless  ex-convict.  I got a speeding ticket when I got scared driving him to his shelter.”

The hippie girl: “When I have fatigue, I do yoga to wake up before I drive”

The truck driver: “Go to White Castle before you drink.  The grease soaks up the beer.”

The Comcast guy:  “Ritalin is like cocaine if you don’t have ADD.  I’m taking Ritalin now so I can sit in this class without going crazy.”

Lucca, the waiter: “The strip clubs in Indiana are better than the strip clubs in Chicago.  The Indiana girls are nicer and they want dates.  Always go to a ranch style strip club.”

I’m not sure how the last comment was related to the class.

Friday Night Wine: Allegrini, Pallazo del Torre, 2003

May 2, 2009 in food and wine | Tags: | by | Leave a comment

This is a family favorite.  There’s blackberry but enough tannin to make it dry and not sweet.  Smoky barbecue. Acidic aftertaste.  Great value for $22.  It’s widely produced and distributed.  Get any vintage you can find.

Wishful Thinking Department

May 1, 2009 in Uncategorized | Tags: | by | 1 comment

Did you know that since 2001 heroin, cocaine, marijuana and all similar drugs were decriminalized for personal use in Portugal?  Decriminalization means that there are no criminal penalties, and instead citations for use result in the offer of counseling and voluntary rehabilitation.  This CATO study reports that since then use of these drugs has actually declined.

The study is interesting for the historical account and other context but the claim about usage rates is hard to believe.  The paper is missing details on how usage rates are calculated but a simple alternative explanation is this.  Without criminal penalties, law enforcement has reduced incentives to issue citations and thus users are undercounted.

The American Association of Wine Economists

May 1, 2009 in Uncategorized | Tags: , | by | 3 comments

I think I need to sign up.  The home page is here.  They host conferences.  Here is the program for the 2008 conference in Portland.  Notice the scholarly outings in shaded green.  The first issue of their society journal appeared in 2006 and features an article by Nobel Laureate Daniel McFadden.  McFadden is a small-time wine maker whom I once heard say “How do you become a millionaire in the wine business?  Start with 2 million.”  Orley Ashenfelter is the editor of the journal and here is a working paper entitled “Predicting the Quality and Price of Bordeaux Wines.”

They have a blog here and there is a sister organization called The Association of Food Economists. (Gatsby Gesture:  Marginal Revolution)

Small World Coffee, Princeton

May 1, 2009 in Uncategorized | Tags: | by | 6 comments

It is not hard to make a good espresso nor is it hard to steam milk to the right temperature and frothiness to make a cappuccino or latte.  But virtually all coffee houses fail both, especially the supposedly high-end ones.  The espresso should not run much beyond the point it turns dark brown/black to blonde.  The milk should be lukewarm, not hot, and it should be pourable.  If you see your barista spooning milk into a cappuccino, run away fast.  The milk is almost certainly scalded.

Most people think that coffee just tastes bitter and they grin and bear it.  Or they pour in a lot of sugar. But the bitterness comes from over-run espresso and burnt milk.  In fact, properly done, a latte is sweet and needs no sugar.  Milk is naturally sweet and gentle frothing accentuates the sweetness.  Coffee is nutty.  A good cappuccino can have flavors of hot chocolate or even peanut butter cookies.

Small World coffee in Princeton consistently makes a good cappuccino.  The right volume, the right temperature and sweet.  I have been in Princeton all week and had two cappuccinos per day from 10 different baristas and all but one was drinkable and a few were downright excellent.  I highly recommend this place.  A few details:

  1. the internet is free for one hour but somewhat flaky.
  2. stay away from the biscotti.  Grab a muffin from the bakery at Olives which is three doors away.
  3. the layout of the place is nice.  The mirrored columns have a funny effect on you when you try to find a place to sit.  If you are by yourself take a seat at the bar looking over the lower level.
  4. even a good barista makes a bad coffee from time to time.  today the barista dumped the first latte he made for me because he could see it was not perfect.
  5. as i said, it is easy to make a good coffee.  but it took me years of practice to do this:

photo

The Small World baristas are still working on it:

photo-2

Cheap Talk

May 1, 2009 in Uncategorized | Tags: , | by | 26 comments

A game-theorists’ term derived from the commonplace admonishment “Talk is Cheap.”  To say that “talk is cheap” is to suggest that words have no meaning because they don’t raise the stakes.  “Actions speak louder than words.”  Or, to quote the game theorist Yogi Berra “A verbal contract isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.”  Our casual understanding that the meaning of words derives solely from their ultimate consequences demonstrates that we have deep game-theoretic instincts.

But game theory is useful because with careful study we arrive at insights one or more steps beyond our instincts.  And indeed, upon further reflection, just because talk is cheap does not imply by itself that words have no meaning.  In fact “cheap talk” can and often does matter because it enables credible exchange of information provided such communication is consistent with self-interested motives.  Even though talk is cheap, when upon landing at O’Hare, I phone my taxi dispatcher and tell him I am ready to be picked up at the curbside, he believes me and sends a cab.

Moreover, cheap talk is credible even when there is substantial conflict of interest between the talker and the listener.  Despite my claims to the contrary, the dispatcher knows that I am actually calling from inside the airplane and I am not at the curbside yet and he delays the dispatch long enough so that the driver arrives at the curbside after me and not before.

Suprisingly, talk can be credible sometimes only because it is cheap.  If instead of me, it is an uninterested third-party who calls the dispatcher to send a cab, the dispatcher knows that she has no reason to say anything other than the truth, and the dispatcher sends the cab immediately.

A final digression on the genesis of the phrase “cheap talk” as a term of art in game theory.  It is tempting to suppose that the popularity of the phrase  derives from the irony that the logic of incentive-compatible communication turns the idea that “talk is cheap” on its head.  But the origin of the phrase is something of a mystery.  The first game theorists to demonstrate the role of communication in strategic interactions were Vince Crawford and Joel Sobel in their hugely important paper “Strategic Information Transmission”  Interestingly, a quick search through the text of that paper reveals that neither “cheap” nor “talk” appears anywhere in the paper.

(dinner conversation with Dilip, Tomek, Stephen and Sylvain acknowledged.)

Pointers

April 30, 2009 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , , | by | Leave a comment

  1. The music of H1N1
  2. Justice Souter retiring?
  3. Hobbits.
  4. DOJ investigating Google Books settlement.

Why Pork Bellies Futures?

April 30, 2009 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , | by | 2 comments

First of all, in case there is any misconception, trading in pork bellies really means trading in the bellies, and only the bellies, of pigs. Bacon (Sandeep’s vegetarian-exception) is cut from pork bellies. Pork bellies futures, like all futures contracts, are agreements on delivery, at some pre-specified date in the future, of freshly-butchered pork bellies.  They have been traded for decades on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.  Futures contracts are generally used to manage risk from volatile prices by securing in advance a price for future delivery at some premium.

Now, the question.  Why pork bellies futures?  Are pork bellies prices so volatile?  Surely they cannot be more volatile that than the rest of the pig’s parts since supply must move together.  More volatile than other meat products?  Since we can always just count the number of pigs alive today we can get a good forecast of the supply of butchered pigs in the future so any volatility must be explained by demand fluctuations.  But what is so volatile about the demand for bacon?  I can’t imagine it is any more volatile than the demand, say for sushi-grade tuna.  But there are no tuna futures as far as I can tell.  This is a genuine mystery.  Please share your pork belly knowledge in the comments section.

(dinner conversation with Dilip, Tomek, Stephen and Sylvain acknowledged.)

What is High-Fructose Corn Syrup?

April 29, 2009 in Uncategorized | Tags: | by | 3 comments

For a long time in the US, processed foods have featured high-fructose corn syrup as a sweetener rather than cane or beet sugar.  This is largely because of subsidies for domestically produced corn and tariffs on imported sugar.  There now seems to be a backlash developing against HFCS and in favor of “natural” sugar (HFCS is processed by converting the glucose in corn syrup into fructose.)  This Slate article takes a critical look at the case against HFCS and clarifies a few misconceptions.  For one, while fructose is probably worse for you than glucose, HCFS has no more fructose than, for example, table sugar. Also, there is mixed evidence whether there is any difference in taste.

In a street survey conducted by the Toronto Star, most passers-by preferred regular Coke to the Passover version; several folks described the latter as tasting like aspartame. A similar confusion beset the Snapple testers at Fast Company: One described the HFCS version as tasting “more natural” while another dismissed the all-natural version for its “chemical taste.

Here is the ad for Pepsi Throwback with “natural sugar.” What model of consumer behavior rationalizes introducing a limited-time product that raises questions about the main product line?

Arlen Specter Revisited

April 29, 2009 in Uncategorized | Tags: , | by | 1 comment

Jeff already wrote an interesting blog about Specter switching parties.  Specter seems to have switched because he stands a better chance winning in re-election as a Democrat than a Republican, Jeff’s point 4.  The Democrats seem ecstatic and I’m trying to deduce why this is the case.

If Specter had not been accepted into the Democratic fold, he would have lost in the Republican primary.  The Republican candidate, presumably someone very right wing, would then face a Democratic challenger.  This Democrat would be someone other than Specter as Specter would have tried to run as a Republican.  Maybe Specter would run as an Independent in this scenario – though I’m not sure if Pennsylvania allows this.  If the Democrats think that having Specter run as a Democrat means a higher probability of a Democratic win than this messy scenario, I can see some rationale for their happiness.

Their payoff is affected by the quality of Specter as a Democrat as well as his probability of winning.   Specter was pretty independent as a Republican and, for example, voted for the stimulus bill.   So, he is a net gain to the Democrats if he is more likely to vote Democrat than Republican with a “D” label attached to him rather than a “R”.  But he has just shown his lack of loyalty to party by switching sides and was always independent anyway.  His move is very much a rational move made by a calculating politician.  Hence, I believe he is only of use till he is re-elected (or not) in 2010.  Obama has promised to campaign with him and help him raise money.  This is useful till 2010.  After that, Specter will go his own way.    Obama has to get as much Specter-friendly legislation as possible passed in the next two years.  I’m not sure where Specter stands on healthcare reform.  He had cancer and is emotional about health issues.  Maybe this is a point of common value.

Incumbency Advantage and Disadvantage on the Food Network

April 29, 2009 in food and wine | Tags: , , | by | 15 comments

The chef Bobby Flay is ubiquitous on the Food Network.  I usually see him in two shows, Iron Chef America and Throwdown with Bobby Flay.  Both are competitive shows.  Flay usually loses on Throwdown and wins on Iron Chef.

On Throwdown, Bobby Flay makes one dish and competes with an expert .  For example, recently there was a show where he made a deep dish pizza against Chicago native Lou Malnati.  The two dishes are judged by two experts side by side with a partisan local audience watching.  Flay lost.

On Iron Chef America, the format is different.  There is a secret ingredient (though I bet both contestants have a fair idea of  what it will be!).  In this format, Flay and his fellow Iron Chefs are matched against a gourmet chef.  Last week the secret ingredient was butter.  The entrant was Koren Grieveson of avec in Chicago.  Koren picked Cat Cora to compete against.  And the competition was tied.   As I said, this is a rare event in Iron Chef because the incumbent usually wins.  Why?

I think it’s all in the judging.  On Iron Chef, the chefs get to present their dishes to the judges so there is no anonymity.  On Throwdown, they do not identify who cooked which dish.

I wish they would adopt the same format for Iron Chef.  The judges are biased towards the incumbent.  For example, while Cat Cora’s food looked good, she won more points in the category of “originality”.  One of her dishes was bread and butter, another was gnocchi in a butter sage sauce.  These are original only if one adopts an ironic definition of the word “original”.  But then everything is original and the category makes no sense!  Frankly, I went to avec last night and I just find it hard to believe Cat Cora’s food is better.  Maybe I am expressing the bias manifested on Throwdown: the bias of the local audience towards the local contestant.  This can also be fixed by making the judges judge in a different room.  Similarly, on Iron Chef, a  third party, say Alton Brown, could present the dishes.  If the judges have questions, the show can set up speakers in a separate room where the chef is standing nervously.  S/he can answer the questions into an earpiece worn by Alton Brown.  He can relay the answers to the judges.   This can be done in a theatrical way to add more drama and tension.

A basketball game where one team is vastly superior to the other is boring to watch.  By leveling the playing field, Food Network can add more uncertainty to the competition and get more viewers.

Why Exams Should be Open Book

April 29, 2009 in Uncategorized | Tags: , | by | 196 comments

Writing and studying for an exam is a game played between Professor and student.  In this game the Professor has to pick which questions to ask and the student has to pick which topics to study.  The game has the flavor of rock-scissors-paper in that the Professor would like to be unpredictable.  That way the students will have to devote studying time to all topics rather than focus on just one that they know the Professor will ask about.

But the Professor might not want the students to spend too much time memorizing concepts from the book.  Instead he may want them to spend their time thinking about how to apply those concepts to new problems.  How can the Professor be unpredictable and still deter the students from trying to memorize the book?  The solution is to use an open book exam.  This way the Professor is committing not to ask rote questions which would turn the exam into nothing more than a contest to see which students are the fastest to search through the book and find the topic.

With an open-book exam, the students can predict that the Professor will not ask such questions and they will not bother studying for them.  They bring their books to the exam and never have to open them.  And they still cannot predict which questions (apart from the mundane ones) the Professor will ask.

Keep in mind that this means students should dislike open-book exams.  Many students don’t understand this and are always asking for open-book.

Also, the worst possible format is the common practice of allowing students to write out crib notes on one sheet of paper.  This turns studying into pure rent-seeking.  All students will predict which are the essential concepts from the book and will write them down and, predicting this, the Professor will not ask questions about those topics.  In the end the outcome is just like open-book except the poor students lose valuable studying time while they squeeze the book onto a sheet of paper.

(To my PhD students and undergrads taking exams today:  aren’t you glad the exams are closed book?  Oh and good luck!)

Preserving the F-Word

April 28, 2009 in Uncategorized | Tags: , | by | Leave a comment

“Even when used as an expletive, the F-word’s power to insult and offend derives from its sexual meaning,” Scalia said.

No, it derives from the fact that they can’t say it on television.  Thank you Justice Scalia for preserving its power and reserving it for the little guy.

Arlen Specter

April 28, 2009 in Uncategorized | Tags: , | by | 4 comments

From a bargaining point of view, the move reveals that the majority values reaching 60 more than the minority values preventing it.  But this is a puzzle.  Why is it not zero sum?  A few reasons, some generic, some specific to this situation.

  1. In fact, other things equal, the minority should be able to muster more goodies because, due to the smaller numbers, each senator internalizes more of the cost of losing the fillibuster.  So there is even more of a puzzle.
  2. But the majority controls committee chairmanships which is a more efficient way to transfer value as opposed to bill-by-bill sweeteners.
  3. In the current climate the cost of losing the fillibuster is lower than usual because Republicans are lacking leadership and are generally adrift.  Their best chance to rise again is to give Democrats enough rope to hang themselves.
  4. As pointed out by Tyler Cowen, Specter already had some private motivation to switch.  He is among the most liberal of Republicans and his prospects for re-election are better as a Democrat than as a Republican given that he nearly lost the Republican Primary in 2004.

Twitter Cycles

April 28, 2009 in Uncategorized | Tags: | by | 3 comments

I previously speculated on what it means when you don’t like your friends’ friends. Now to take it one step further, what does it mean when you belong to a Twitter cycle?  Unlike facebook and other social-networking sites, Twitter is a directed graph:  you follow your friends but they don’t have to follow you.  A cycle is a chain of Twitters that loops back on itself:  i.e. 1 follows 2, 2 follows 3,…,n-1 follows n, n follows 1.

What does it say about you and your friends if you follow Jane, who doesn’t folow you but instead follows her friend Jack, who doesnt follow Jane but instead follows you?

Anyone belong to a Twitter cycle?  What is the largest Twitter cycle?

If we start with an arbitrary Twitter user and “move up” the graph from followers to leaders (follow-ees?) we must eventually either hit a cycle or a single user who sits on top of his domain.  Who are these people?

Emotional Cartography

April 28, 2009 in Uncategorized | Tags: | by | Leave a comment

What do you get when you combine GPS and GSR (Galvanic Skin Response:  a measure of emotional arousal) and an artist‘s inspiration?  You get emotional maps, that’s what.  Think of a topographical map where the vertical dimension at a location measures the emotional excitement of the people passing through there.  Here’s San Francisco.  Here’s more information. (via MindHacks)

The Irony of China-Taiwan Relations

April 28, 2009 in Uncategorized | Tags: , | by | 1 comment

Representatives of Taiwan’s semiofficial Straits Exchange Foundation and its Chinese counterpart, the Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits, or ARATS, reached the agreements on Sunday in the third round of formal negotiations since Ma Ying-jeou became Taiwan’s president in May 2008, elected on a pledge to improve the island’s flagging economy through better relations with China.

It is looking more and more likely that China and Taiwan will soon realize de facto (if not formal) re-unification.  And the irony is that the driving force stems from China’s markets softening Taiwan’s political opposition.  Wasn’t it supposed to be the other way around?  Read the article from the Wall Street Journal.

Choice and Rationalization

April 28, 2009 in Uncategorized | Tags: | by | Leave a comment

Psychologists, and especially magicians, know that a lot escapes our attention, even things happening right under our noses. The most impressive example I have seen of this comes out of an experiment in which unwitting subjects are asked for directions by a stranger.  In the middle of giving the directions, an obstruction briefly allows the stranger to swap places with another stranger.  When the new stranger comes back into view the subject doesn’t notice that he is talking to someone completely different.

Its not just that we don’t notice.  Instead, our minds often prefer to explain away the unexpected rather than investigate. A new series of experiments show just how far this can go and they raise deep questions about how we make decisions.  In these experiments, subjects were shown photos of two strangers and asked to pick the more attractive photo.  Then they were handed the photo they chose and asked to explain why they picked it.  But by a sleight-of-hand, the subjects were actually handed the other photo, the one they deemed less attractive.

Not noticing the switcheroo, these subjects went on to point to the photo and give detailed reasons why they prefer the one that they in fact did not prefer.

Here is an article from the New Scientist about this and related experiments. (thanks to Toomas Hinnosaar for the pointer.)

Here is a video of the swapped stranger experiment.

Strategy of Terror – Al Qaeda in Iraq

April 27, 2009 in Uncategorized | by | 1 comment

There has been a resurgence of suicide bombings in Iraq.  Why, when we’re going to leave?

This is the first shot in a potential civil war between Shiites and Sunnis.  Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia is Sunni and the suicide attacks, which are their hallmark, are aimed at Shiites. Al Qaeda is hoping to provoke a crackdown on the Sunnis by the Shiites.  This, they hope, radicalizes the Sunni population which then joins them in the civil war.

But there is a bigger picture.  Al Qaeda wants the US to stay in Iraq, not leave.  They hope to drag America in and get the population to see Americans as the common enemy.  War with America is a bigger aim than civil war in Iraq.  Unfortunately, if Al Qaeda in Iraq is powerful then it might be in best interests of the US to stay in.  A civil war in Iraq would draw in Iran and then who knows what happens in the region further along.

Plogging

April 26, 2009 in Uncategorized | Tags: | by | Leave a comment

I listen to Pandora most of the time I am in my office.  Pandora is a free internet radio that personalizes musical selections based on feedback you give it.  For example, you can specify a song by an artist and it will find other songs that have similar qualities.  I thought it would be fun to listen for a little bit and write down my thoughts about the music that Pandora suggests.

I recently discovered (on Pandora!) the music of Patrick Moraz and Bill Bruford, a drum and piano duo that plays something between jazz and prog-rock.  I decided to use them as my starting point.  Here is what I heard: (you can listen to the same “station” by using this link. the tune selection is not deterministic so you will hear different music than i did, but in my experience it won’t take long before there is duplication.)

Omjhonz by Satoko Fujii and Tatsuya Yoshida.

this is my kind of music.  improvising the form and not just within the form.  its hard to coordinate this with more than two musicians.  given my choice of two, i go for piano and drums.  it works here because the pianist leans toward classical rather than “free jazz” which in settings like this usually skates off into dissonance.  I am thinking Cecil Taylor here.

Bekei by Dewey Redman/Cecil Taylor/Elvin Jones

Speak of the devil! But this one was just a drum solo by Elvin Jones.  A nice one, typical Elvin Jones, but still just a drum solo.  Never knew these three played together.  Have to bookmark this album for later Pandora fun.

Windy Mountain by Charles Lloyd and Billy Higgins

Duet of sax and drums.  More grounded in Jazz than any of the previous.  Charles Lloyd is good at this.  His work with Zakir Hussain is very similar.  Here Billy Higgins is playing very standard jazz rhythms.  A bass would fit in here.

The Drum Also Waltzes.  Patrick Moraz and Bill Buford.

Another drum solo.  Short.  I like it better than the Elvin Jones.

Double Image. Joe Zawinul.

Whoa, how did this get here?  This is essentially Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew carried on through Zawinul, Wayne Shorter and Miroslav Vitous who also went on to form Weather Report.  I like this much better than Weather Report.  Wait, Herbie Hancock too?  And I love the Vitous bowing on this tune.  Cool, but hard to see how it fits with the theme here. Wondering about Pandora.

Ran Blake “Thursday”

Never heard of Ran Blake.  Looking at the above link I see I am probably not alone.  But this is nice.  Solo piano.  A little Monk, a little Chick Corea.  And although that sounds like a recipe for disaster, it works for me.

Bottom line:  no keepers on this round.  I like Ran Blake, but its generic enough that I don’t imagine ever having a real craving for it.  I was glad to learn that Zawinul had some outings between Miles Davis and Weather Report.  The Japanese duo were the most interesting.  I will check them out again.  (on Pandora!)

Worries are not Additive

April 26, 2009 in Uncategorized | Tags: | by | 5 comments

“As if there wasn’t enough to worry about already.”  It seems that every day there is something new to worry about.  And some big ones have come along in recent days.  When the really big new worries hit, its important to remember that to some extent at least, worries are substitutes.  Big worries imply that small worries matter less and so they offer the small consolation of dispensing with those.  And while the consolation is small,  we should take what we can get when the worries are big.

So think through all of the little worries that have been hanging around enjoy the feeling of letting them go.

Against Pharmaceutical Patents

April 25, 2009 in Uncategorized | by | 3 comments

More and more economists are disavowing the conventional view that patents are essential for providing incentives to innovate.  A radical proposal is to eliminate patents for pharmaceuticals and to promote research and development through government funding rather than the promise of monopoly.  This article by Dean Baker (via The Browser) discusses the variety of lobbying and rent-seeking strategies pharaceutical companies use to secure and maintain monopolies.  Economic theory suggests that all of the value that monopoly offers may be dissapated wastefully through rent-seeking, undermining much of the benefits of patents.  Baker argues that once we recognize that the patent system is just one of many potential second-best solutions, government funding of research and elimination of monopoly is not necessarily any less efficient.

Public funding obviously involves the government in the research process, but demand for medical care is already determined in large part through the political process. The vast majority of health care costs are paid by third parties, either insurance companies or the government; costs are not distributed according to individuals’ willingness to pay. If the government and insurance companies cannot be forced to pay for a drug, the industry will not develop it. Since politics inevitably decide which drugs are developed, government and insurance companies should determine whether they will pay for a drug before it is developed.

Places to Drink: Brewed Awakenings, Euclid Av., Berkeley

April 25, 2009 in food and wine | Tags: , | by | 2 comments

After my Cafe Milano post yesterday, I got some great comments that took me north of the Berkeley campus.  (First, I stopped at Peet’s on Telegraph so I had the requisite amount of caffeine to be able to walk from the south of campus to the north.)

One comment suggested Nefeli Caffe.  Comment 7/33 on yelp offered up the blandishment of seeing sexy Europeans sipping coffee after a hard night of posing.  I was not sure I would fit in but thought I would enjoy it anyway.  In typical European fashion, Nefeli was closed. Europeans don’t like getting up too early on a Saturday, or speaking for myself as a pseudo-European, any other day.  Brewed Awakenings, on the other hand, seems to be run by hard-working Middle Eastern immigrants and is open.  It has free wifi.  Quiet classical music in the background.  Very few people.  Good coffee and good almond croissant.  And a great place to hang out and BS.  Ideal for research I would say.  This is my first stop on future visits to Berkeley.  Ariel Rubinstein and Shachar Kariv have great taste.

Places to Drink: Cafe Milano, Berkeley

April 24, 2009 in Uncategorized | by | 4 comments

Surly staff, gives you that NYC feel.  Good cappuccino.  Slightly bitter aftertaste.  Decent croissant.  Classical radio in the background.  Free wifi.  Not too loud (at 8 am!) so it is possible to work/blog.

Fairly generic  but I would come back.

It’s on Bancroft and Telegraph.

Why She Does (and Why She Doesn’t)

April 24, 2009 in Uncategorized | Tags: , | by | 1 comment

Female orgasm eludes evolutionary explanation.  Most candidate explanations have a hard time reconciling the observation that a large fraction of women do not have orgasm during intercourse and among those that do it is not a consistent occurrence.  Here is a fun paper surveying a variety of just-so stories that “explain” female orgasm.  The authors dispense with

  1. Its a non-adaptive vestige of male orgasm.
  2. It encourages females to have more sex. (then why not always?)
  3. It encourages females to have sex with multiple partners (thus the asymmetry in “arrival times” between males and females.)
  4. It improves chances of fertilization. (empirically false)

and they leave us with an intriguing, relatively new one, the Evaluation Hypothesis.

When Barash was a graduate student  more  than  ten  years  earlier,  he  observed  that  when  subordinate  male  grizzly  bears  copulate,  their heads  are  constantly  swiveling  about  on  the  lookout  for  a  dominant  male,  who,  should  he  encounter  a  couple  in  flagrante,  will  likely dislodge  his  lesser  rival  and  take  its  place.  Not  surprisingly,  subordinate  males  ejaculate very quickly, whereas dominants take their time. If female grizzly bears  were to experience orgasm, with which partner would you expect it to be more  likely? And is it surprising that premature ejaculation is a common problem of  young, inexperienced men lacking in status and self-confidence? Moreover, is it  surprising that women paired with such men are unlikely to be orgasmic?

So it doesn’t encourage more sex uniformly, it encourages more sex with the right mate.  And it is inconsistent and slow to arrive, not by accident, as in the vestigal hypothesis, but by design.  And the sorting of men according to, let’s call it patience, seems to be a stable equilibrium as it requires either an exogenous characteristic correlated with “good genes” as in the case of dominant grizzlies, or perhaps in its social incarnation where it requires

sufficient  access  to  resources  to  orchestrate  interactions  that  are  private,  safe,  and gratifying—in a word, romantic—and thus appealing to women’s evolved evaluation  mechanisms.

From the book How Women Got Their Curves and Other Just-So Stories:  Evolutionary Enigmas by David Barash and Judith Lipton. (Cloche Click:  Bookslut.)

San Francisco is a State of Mind

April 24, 2009 in Uncategorized | by | 1 comment

In that state of mind, San Francisco is an easy, friendly city to live in.  There’s no traffic and you get over the Bay Bridge very quickly on your way to Berkeley.   There’s no ten car crash you drive past on your way from the airport.  Your cab driver does not listen to his Ipod while driving and concentrates on the road.  And you switch on the T.V. in your hotel just in time to see the Chicago Bulls beat the Celtics.

Unfortunately, that is all a state of mind.

Unraveling

April 23, 2009 in Uncategorized | Tags: , | by | Leave a comment

The NBA will not draft players who are under 19 or who are not at least one year past high school graduation.  Most players opt for at least one year of NCAA basketball where they are unpaid and (at least nominally) full-time students.  The first step toward the unraveling of this system has occurred as Jeremy Tyler has left San Diego High School and will skip his senior year to play professional basketball in Europe.  After two years he will be eligible for the NBA draft at which point he is a likely number 1 pick.

“It’s significant because it shows the curiosity for the American player just refusing to accept what he’s told he has to do,” Vaccaro said. “We’re getting closer to the European reality of a professional at a young age. Basically, Jeremy Tyler is saying, ‘Why do I have to go to high school?’ ”

Lessons for Embezzlers

April 23, 2009 in Uncategorized | Tags: , | by | Leave a comment

William J. Fell, the parking meter repairman in Alexandria VA, skimmed $170,000 worth of coins from parking meters over the course of one year.

The 61-year-old city employee did it, police say, by going to work at 3 a.m., well before his shift started. He would jump in his city truck and, under the cover of darkness, empty into bags the contents of coin canisters from parking meters all over Old Town, according to court documents.

Done carefully, taking a constant percentage, this would be hard to detect based purely on tracking total revenue.  However, at some point the city raised the parking rate to $1 per hour.  How do you adjust your skimming rate to avoid detection?

Last year, the city took in just over $1 million in revenue from its 1,040 parking meters, officials said. But they realized something was amiss. They had raised the rates to $1 an hour but weren’t getting as much money as they expected.

Oops.  If Mr. Fell thinks that the city knows the correct elasticity of demand, then he should keep the same skim rate as before.  That way the city sees exactly the percentage change in revenue they were expecting.  Apparently Mr. Fell thought that the city had overestimated demand elasticity and therefore was expecting a smaller increase in revenue than they were actually getting so he raised his skim rate to compensate.

Of course, alternative explanation is that Mr. Fell is not motivated by standard economic incentives:

That much money in quarters, dimes and nickels would weigh at least four tons. If it was all in nickels, it would weigh nearly 19 tons.

Police were perplexed after they subpoenaed Fell’s bank accounts but did not see any of the money there. That was when they decided that it might be in his home and executed a search warrant April 15 — tax day.

Police say Fell, who lives alone, did not appear to use the money for anything specific and mostly just kept it in his home.

Interpreting Data

April 23, 2009 in Uncategorized | Tags: | by | 5 comments

According to a recent study, those who illegally download music are also significantly more likely to purchase music online legally via services such as iTunes.  It follows that the record labels should fight even harder to stop pirated music.  Explain.