Results for “bees” 60 found
The Birds and the Bees
Ocean City, NJ hires falconers to keep the seagulls off the boardwalk–in fact, they are looking for more trainees. West Coast Falconry explains more generally:
Falconry based bird abatement is quiet, discrete, organic, eco-friendly, and very sustainable. The objective is not killing the nuisance birds, but scaring them off the premises.
West Coast Falconry conducts pest bird abatement by contract. We have professionals on staff that can help rid your establishment of a number of pest bird species including pigeons, starlings, and seagulls. Regular flyovers are key to this environmentally-friendly service.
I am reminded of the extensive markets in bees.
Hat tip: Luke Froeb.
The new Fable of the Bees
This Leah Sottile WaPo piece is excellent in many ways. Here are a few bits:
Bees are still dying at unacceptable rates…Ohio State University’s Honey Bee Update noted that losses among the state’s beekeepers over the past winter were as high as 80 percent.
…Researchers say innovative beekeepers will be critical to helping bees bounce back.
“People ask me, ‘The bees are going to be extinct soon?’ ” said Ramesh Sagili, principal investigator at the Oregon State University Honey Bee Lab. “I’m not worried about bees being extinct here. I’m worried about beekeepers being extinct.”
Commercial beekeepers are leaving the sector and innovative bee hobbyists are taking on a much larger role:
“I feel a social responsibility to provide good bees,” Prescott said. “It makes me happy to look at the part that I’m playing.”
…Obsessing over bee health was unheard of 50 years ago, said Marla Spivak, a University of Minnesota professor of entomology. “In the past, it was very easy to keep bees. Throw them in a box, and they make honey and survive. Now, it takes lots of management.”
The story has some excellent examples:
Henry Storch, 32, does it because he felt a calling to beekeeping. A farrier by trade, Storch said he could make more money shoeing horses. But five years ago, he became obsessed with the notion that he could build a better bee…He barely flinched as a bee stung him on the upper lip.
…Storch’s mountain-bred “survivor” bees are like open-range cows: tough, hardened and less in need of close management than the bees he trucks to the California almond fields. Storch compares the effort to growing organic, non-GMO food.
The good news is this:
Amid the die-off, beekeepers have been going to extraordinary lengths to save both their bees and their livelihoods.
That effort may finally be paying off. New data from the Agriculture Department show the number of managed honeybee colonies is on the rise, climbing to 2.7 million nationally in 2014, the highest in 20 years.
Recommended. To trace the longer story, here are previous MR posts on bees.
Square Dancing Bees and Quadratic Voting
It’s well known that bees dance to convey where useful resources are located but how do bees convey the quality of the resource and what makes this information credible? Rory Sutherland and Glen Weyl argue that the bees have hit upon a key idea, quadratic dancing or as I like to put it, square dancing.
Seeley’s research shows that the time they spend on dances grows not linearly but quadratically in proportion to the attractiveness of the site they encountered. Twice as good a site leads to four times as much wiggling, three times as good a site leads to nine times as lengthy a dance, and so forth.
Quadratic dancing has some useful properties which can be duplicated in humans with quadratic voting.
Under Quadratic Voting (QV), by contrast, individuals have a vote budget that they can spread around different issues that matter to them in proportion to the value those issues hold for them. And just as with Seeley’s bees, it becomes increasingly costly proportionately to acquire the next unit of influence on one issue. This approach highlights not only frequency of preferences but also intensity of preferences, by forcing individuals to decide how they will divide their influence across issues, while penalising the single-issue fanatic’s fussiness of putting all one’s weight on a single issue. It encourages individuals to distribute their points in precise proportion to how much each issue matters to them.
They offer a useful application
Consider a firm that wants to learn whether customers care about particular product attributes: colour, quality, price, and so on. Rather than simply ask people what they care about — which leads to notoriously inaccurate results, often where people affect strong views just to maximise their individual influence — a business, or a public service, could supply customers with budgets of credits which they then used to vote, in quadratic fashion, for the attributes they want. This forces the group of respondents, like the swarm of bees, to allocate more resources to the options they care most about.
Weyl’s paper with Eric Posner is a good introduction to quadratic voting and here are previous MR posts on quadratic voting.
The new Fable of the Bees literature
From the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, there is a new paper by Randal R. Rucker, Walter N. Thurman, and Michael Burgett (Dept. of Entomology), here is the abstract:
The world’s most extensive markets for pollination services are those for honey bee pollination in the United States. These markets play important roles in coordinating the behavior of migratory beekeepers, who both produce honey and provide substitutes for ecosystem pollination services. We analyze the economic forces that drive migratory beekeeping and theoretically and empirically analyze the determinants of pollination fees in a larger and richer data set than has been studied before. Our empirical results expand our understanding of pollination markets and market-supporting institutions that internalize external effects.
This is a deep and thoughtful analysis which extends the tradition of Steven Cheung. There is an earlier ungated version here. Here is a related paper from UC Davis, and here is a related paper on the economics of honeybee pollination in Georgia. Here is a very good summary of the main piece.
For the pointer I thank Michelle Dawson.
“Agitated honeybees exhibit pessimistic cognitive bias”
Via Michelle Dawson, here is a new paper by Melissa Bateson, et.al.:
Whether animals experience human-like emotions is controversial and of immense societal concern [1,2,3]. Because animals cannot provide subjective reports of how they feel, emotional state can only be inferred using physiological, cognitive, and behavioral measures [4,5,6,7,8]. In humans, negative feelings are reliably correlated with pessimistic cognitive biases, defined as the increased expectation of bad outcomes [9,10,11]. Recently, mammals [12,13,14,15,16] and birds [17,18,19,20] with poor welfare have also been found to display pessimistic-like decision making, but cognitive biases have not thus far been explored in invertebrates. Here, we ask whether honeybees display a pessimistic cognitive bias when they are subjected to an anxiety-like state induced by vigorous shaking designed to simulate a predatory attack. We show for the first time that agitated bees are more likely to classify ambiguous stimuli as predicting punishment. Shaken bees also have lower levels of hemolymph dopamine, octopamine, and serotonin. In demonstrating state-dependent modulation of categorization in bees, and thereby a cognitive component of emotion, we show that the bees’ response to a negatively valenced event has more in common with that of vertebrates than previously thought. This finding reinforces the use of cognitive bias as a measure of negative emotional states across species and suggests that honeybees could be regarded as exhibiting emotions.
Are bees more Bayesian?
It appears, therefore, that a swarm's scout bees do something sharply different from what humans do to reach a full agreement in a debate. Both bees and humans need a group's members to avoid stubbornly supporting their first view, but whereas we humans will usually (and sensibly) ive up on a position only after we have learned of a better one, the bees will stop supporting a position automatically. As is shown…after a shorter or longer time, each scout bee becomes silent and leaves the rest of the debate to a new set of bees. Figure 6.7 shows how this regular turnover in which scouts are dancing can help a swarm's scouts quickly reach an agreement…
In other words, the bee algorithms allow attrition (a time-honored process of improving the scientific community) to operate at an especially rapid pace.
That is from the fascinating book Honeybee Democracy, by Thomas D. Seeley. Here is the book's home page. Here is a good review of the book:
In the final chapter, Seeley suggests five lessons we could learn from bees.
†¢ Compose a decision-making group of individuals with shared interests. Here bees have a higher stake than us: all members of a colony are related (sisters) and nobody can survive without the group.
†¢ Minimise the leader's influence on the group. Here we humans have much to learn.
†¢ Seek diverse solutions to the problem. Humans realised only recently that diversity is good for a group.
†¢ Update the group's knowledge through debate. Here again, bees are superior to us, as each scout's "dances" become less effective with time, no matter how good a new site is, while stubbornness can lead humans to argue forever.
†¢ Use quorums to gain cohesion, accuracy and speed. Impressively, bees came up with this concept long before the Greeks.
As a departmental chair at Cornell University, Seeley says, he applies these principles at faculty meetings with great success.
Definitely recommended.
How Germans use bees
Airports in Germany have come up with an unusual approach to monitoring air quality. The Düsseldorf International Airport and seven other airports are using bees as “biodetectives,” their honey regularly tested for toxins.
…Beekeepers from the local neighborhood club keep the bees. The honey, “Düsseldorf Natural,” is bottled and given away as gifts.
The article is here and I thank David Wessel for the pointer.
Sunday assorted links
Saturday assorted links
1. Flowers are evolving (rapidly) to have less sex (NYT).
2. Europe’s political stupor, excellent essay by Leopold Aschenbrenner.
4. Horse cloning transforms polo in Argentina. “Using embryo transfers, a single horse can now give birth to as many as 10 foals per year, instead of one…”
5. Model this (NYT): “Maine at Augusta spent $15,225 last year for the right to market U.S. News “badges” — handsome seals with U.S. News’s logo — commemorating three honors: the 61st-ranked online bachelor’s program for veterans, the 79th-ranked online bachelor’s in business and the 104th-ranked online bachelor’s.”
6. Mexican drone attack kills 30 in Guerrero (in Spanish).
The SEC Burned LBRY to the Ground
LBRY was YouTube on the blockchain, a public good protocol for delivering video content. Unfortunately, after years of protracted and extremely expensive legal wrangling with the SEC, LBRY has been driven into bankruptcy and forced to shut down as an organization (although the code lives on). I was a long-time LBRY advisor.
It makes me angry that with all the scams in the crypto world, the SEC chose to go after a working product with real customers and users. No one, not the customers, the content creators or the investors has benefitted or been protected by the SEC. But you don’t have to take my word for it. Here is SEC commissioner Hester Peirce’s compelling Statement of Dissent:
The Commission has brought many troubling crypto enforcement actions, but the LBRY, Inc. (“LBRY”) case has especially unsettled me. A statement on the case is overdue. I did not support bringing the case, but have been unable to speak publicly about my concerns while the case has been in litigation. Last week, after losing in federal district court on the question of whether the sale of LBRY tokens was an unregistered securities offering, LBRY announced that it will not move forward with an appeal of the decision.[1] Instead, the company will shut down and its assets will be placed in receivership and used to satisfy its debts, including the civil money penalty owed to the Commission.[2] Are investors and the market really better off now after the Commission’s litigation contributed to the demise of a company that had built a functioning blockchain with a real-world application running on top of it? This case illustrates the arbitrariness and real-life consequences of the Commission’s misguided enforcement-driven approach to crypto.
One does not have to dig deep to find fraudulent crypto projects that sold tokens with promises that they did nothing to fulfill. This sad reality makes the Commission’s decision to bring a case against LBRY especially puzzling. LBRY’s approach was more conservative than the approach many other projects took.[3]Here, the blockchain was up and running at the time most tokens were sold, and the Commission’s complaint did not allege, and the court did not find, evidence of fraud. LBRY built a blockchain to facilitate data sharing, afford greater control to content creators, and make censorship more difficult. LBRY created a popular platform on the blockchain for sharing videos and other media.[4] The open-source LBRY blockchain was available for anyone else to use.[5] Why go after a company that sold a token for a functioning blockchain with an established use when we could have pursued plenty of other projects that were outright frauds and did not attempt to comply with the securities laws? To make matters worse, the Commission took an extremely hardline approach in this case. For example, after winning on summary judgment, the Commission sought monetary remedies of $44 million and asserted that LBRY’s offer to burn all tokens in its possession was not sufficient assurance that LBRY would not violate the registration provisions in the future.[6] The Commission’s requested remedies were entirely out of proportion to any harm. Indeed, the court stated during the remedies hearing that “the absence of fraud allegations, [and] the fact that there was some measure of uncertainty” regarding the application of the securities laws when LBRY commenced its offering were facts that “should be taken into account when considering a penalty.”[7] After the remedies hearing, the Commission pared its penalty request back to a significantly lower $111,614, which the court approved.[8]
The application of the securities laws to token projects is not clear, despite the Commission’s continuous protestations to the contrary. There is no path for a company like LBRY to come in and register its functional token offering.[9] Even if a company did manage to register its token offering, it would not be a particularly useful effort. Compliance with the securities laws is important because we want to ensure that people buying securities receive accurate and reliable information so they can assess the risks and rewards of an investment. Here, LBRY made significant disclosures outside of the registration process—disclosures that the Commission did not allege were fraudulent or misleading—and there is little to indicate that LBRY’s disclosures did not provide token purchasers with information adequate to assess whether the tokens were a good fit for them.[10] The time and resources we expended on this case could have been devoted to building a workable regulatory framework that companies like LBRY could have followed. Then the market could have decided LBRY’s fate.
Even if, as the judge ruled here, the offering of tokens should have been registered, our scorched earth approach in remedying the violation was completely out of proportion to any investor harm. How does the result in this case protect LBRY investors, who likely would have preferred that the company continue to exist to support the blockchain, which is still in its infancy? The judge did not rule on whether the token itself was a security or on the status of secondary sales of LBRY tokens,[11] which means that the LBRY blockchain may live on, but its path forward is difficult. The Commission’s action forced a group of entrepreneurs to abandon what they built. Our disproportionate reaction in this case will dissuade people from experimenting with blockchain technology, which LBRY aptly describes as “technology that enables dissent.”[12] A government of a free people should welcome dissent and the technologies that enable it.
Earlier this year, LBRY tweeted: “It’s the year 2028, hundreds of thousands of Americans have been jailed for using illegally cryptocurrency instead of CBDCs, and Hester Pierce [sic] is still just writing dissenting memos.”[13] Although I will be tending bees, not writing dissents, in 2028, I think often about the crux of that criticism and ask myself: “What could I do to help prevent another group of people with a big idea for changing the world from going through what LBRY has over the past several years?” I have not come up with an answer to that question; however, I urge people who have suggestions about how the Commission can right its course on crypto and innovation more broadly, to send them my way.[14]
Google searches for inequality (from my email)
From Jared Sleeper:
I was surprised to see this magnitude of effect. Google searches for “inequality” are twice as high during the academic year as they are during the summer. They double in September vs. August and then collapse by 50% in June vs. May.
Food in Kenya, and yes you should go
In Nairobi the best meals are to be had at the upscale Indian restaurants, and it seems all or most of them are quite good — choose what fits your location and traffic constraints. The basic style usually is derived from Punjabi dishes.
The “British colonial” food is not bad, but I don’t think I would consume it repeatedly if I lived in Kenya.
Chapati and hummus are regularly interspersed amongst regular “Kenyan” food.
Ugali, a kind of corn meal that comes in many different forms, is the Kenyan national dish. It is good, albeit predictable, and often you have to ask for it to get it. I also like the dish with the sliced tomatoes and the chiles.
Blueberries are the fruit to try, and they are both sweeter and more tart than the U.S. product.
The food at the safari camp was very good, though it paid off to be asking all the time for more Kenyan dishes.
By the way, I can recommend the Naboisho Camp highly. Very friendly staff, excellent guides, and the supposed “tents” are more like high-quality hotel rooms. As comfortable as any place you could hope to stay at, the general weather usually is perfect, and you can sit and eat breakfast and watch the birds fly and the animals stroll by (at some distance). At night the hyenas start chattering and sometimes there are lions too. They do not allow you to walk to your room at night unless you are accompanied by a Masai man with a spear, but that only adds to the fun. The guides typically consider the ill-tempered buffalo to, in practical terms, be the most dangerous animal around for the humans. You won’t see rhinos there (Nairobi National Park suffices for that), but even cheetahs and leopards you are likely to come across, not to mention the certainty of numerous elephants, lions, hippos, giraffes, hyenas, wildebeest, warthogs, and much more. Recommended!
Kenya Airways is about to start daily direct flights from New York to Nairobi, and I found flying with them (from London) to be perfectly fine, albeit not close to an Emirates standard.
Safari surprises
I learned just how accustomed I am to North American wildlife patterns. In much of North America, you see wildlife only sporadically, as for instance in Yellowstone Park you can easily drive for an hour and not see a bear.
In this part of Masai Mara, it is unusual to drive for more than thirty seconds without seeing something interesting. And very commonly you can see a tableau of multiple animals, such as buffalo, Thomson’s gazelle, warthogs, and zebras, all together at once.
On those 4-5 hour drives around the plains, usuually I am thinking about “solving for the equilibrium.” When you see a group of dik-diks, the immediate thought is “how do they escape the cheetahs?” You wonder what is the optimal number of a buffalo grouping to repel a lion attack, without crowding or overgrazing on a particular patch of land.
How close can your open vehicle come to the lions without arousing excessive interest? (Closer than you might think.)
When should a pride of lions split into two groups, balancing strength of collective attack against food scarcity?
Why do cheetahs go about it solo? And how is that fact related to their propensity to win chases on the basis of extreme bursts of speed?
Can you model why the zebras and wildebeest seem to get along so well together?
What is the deadweight loss from the fact that wildebeest use property allocation — over which the males fight — to attract females?
I have noticed that the guides are implicitly Lamarckian in their theorizing.
As dusk arrives, many of the larger cats become more active. And so the potential prey wake up and move to more open territory, where they can see predators arriving. They group and spread themselves out (optimally?), to maximize their own collective field of vision and aural acuity, in case a predator should approach. Those patterns are gone by the late morning.
There is definitely a set of land value gradients here, noting that waterholes are both a) super-valuable, and b) the place where you are most vulnerable to predators. Few potential prey wish to settle there, though they will visit and make haste to leave.
I enjoy watching the prey trigger equilibrium of “My durability in running speed exceeds yours, so I can hang around and expect you won’t charge me, at least not if I keep a safe enough distance. Furthermore, if I don’t run away I can keep you in plain view, which is preferable in any case.”
So my biggest surprise is how visible the notion of equilibrium is here.
At what rate should we tax AI workers?
I find this (somewhat) tractable problem one good way to start thinking about alignment issues. Here is one bit from my Bloomberg column:
More to the point, there are now autonomous AI agents, which can in turn create autonomous AI agents of their own. So it won’t be possible to assign all AI income to their human or corporate owners, as in many cases there won’t be any.
And to continue the analysis:
One option is to let AI bots work tax-free, like honeybees do. At first that might make life simple for the IRS, but a problem of tax arbitrage will arise. Tax-free AI labor would have a pronounced competitive advantage over its taxed human counterpart. Furthermore, too many AIs will be released into the commons. Why own an AI and pay taxes when you can program it to do your bidding, renounce ownership, and enjoy its services tax-free? It seems easy enough to disclaim ownership of autonomous bots, especially if they are producing autonomous bots of their own. If nothing else, you could sell them to shell corporations.
The obvious alternative is to tax AI labor. Laboring AIs would have to file tax returns, which they may be capable of doing in the very near future. (Can they claim deductions for their baby AIs? What about their investments?)
Since AIs do not enjoy leisure as humans do, arguably their labor should be taxed at a higher rate than that of humans. Still, AIs shouldn’t be taxed too much. At prohibitively high rates of taxation, AIs will have lower stocks of wealth to invest in improving themselves, which in turn would lower long-run tax revenue from AI labor. Yes, they’re AIs, but incentives still matter.
Some people might fear that super-patient, super-smart AIs will accumulate too much wealth, though either investments or labor, and thereby hold too much social influence. That would create a case for a wealth tax on AIs, in addition to an income tax. But if AIs are such good investors, humans will also want the social benefits that accrue from such wisdom, and that again implies rates of taxation well below the confiscatory level.
And here is one of the deep problems with AI taxation:
The fundamental problem here is that AIs might be very good at providing in-kind services — improving organizational software, responding to emails, and so on. It is already a problem for the tax system when neighbors barter services, but the AIs will take this kind of relationship to a much larger scale.
Forget about hiring AIs, actually: What if you invest in them, tell them to do your bidding, repudiate your ownership, and then let them run much of your business and life? You could write off your investment in the AI as a business expense, and subsequently receive tax-free in-kind services, in what would amount to a de facto act of exchange.
Here is one general issue:
A major topic in AI circles is “alignment,” namely whether humans can count on AI agents to do our bidding, rather than mounting destructive cyberattacks or destroying us. These investments in alignment are necessary and important. But the more successful humans become at alignment, the larger the problem with tax arbitrage.
Not easy!
Thursday assorted links
1. Why Vienna is so livable, the theory may help explain Ljubljana as well.
2. Devon Zuegel and Russ Roberts on hyperinflation in Argentina.
3. Woman releases bees during eviction.
4. NFTs and the economics of royalties.
5. Brian Chau on me on the New Right, etc.
6. Out of the Blue Liz Truss about to be cancelled markets in everything?