Month: August 2015

Saturday assorted links

1. Princeton math oral exams.  This link is for only a few of you.

2. Personal injury lawyer birthday party for two-year olds.  This link is for a somewhat greater number of you.

3. Peter Brook returns to the Mahabarata.  See the remark at #1.

4. “…more than half of the participants who receive their check straight away instead of waiting two weeks for a reasonably larger amount, subsequently take more than two weeks to cash it…”  This link is for all of you.

5. Americans are a disproportionately large share of trophy hunters.

Buy Charity Now, While It’s Still Cheap

Prior to 1800 or so there were no large differences in per-capita GDP between nations, differences were perhaps on the order of 2-3 at most. As modern economic growth took hold in some nations and not in others, between-country inequality increased dramatically with differences in per-capita GDP between nations of up to a factor of 100. As more and more nations enter a modern economic growth phase–which now includes a very rapid catch-up phase–between-country inequality has started to decline. In the future we may return to much smaller differences in per-capita GDP between countries.

As MacAskill points out in Doing Good Better (review here see also here) this means that we live today in an unusual time when charity is very cheap. Today, for example, it’s possible to save a life for as little as $4000. As other nations become rich that will no longer be true. More generally, the average person in a developed country can do a lot of good today by giving up relatively little. As MacAskill writes:

Imagine a happy hour where you could either buy yourself a beer for five dollars or buy someone else a beer for five cents. If that were the case, we’d probably be pretty generous–next round’s on me! But that’s effectively the situation we’re in all the time. It’s like a 99-percent-off sale, or getting 10,000 percent extra free. It might be the most amazing deal you’ll see in you life.

From the comments

Tyler,

Isn’t it funny how so many people hold these two opinions in their heads at the same time:

1) Wall Street is just focused on the next quarter and they push corporations to have short term motives.

2) There was a stock market bubble 15 years ago built around bidding up prices to unprecedented levels for an entire basket of firms which had never been profitable and had no near-term plans for being profitable.

That is from Kevin Erdmann, Kevin’s blog is here.

The highest-ranking rooster has priority to announce the break of dawn

Tsuyoshi Shimmura, Shosei Ohashi, and Takashi Yoshimura have a new paper:

The “cock-a-doodle-doo” crowing of roosters, which symbolizes the break of dawn in many cultures, is controlled by the circadian clock. When one rooster announces the break of dawn, others in the vicinity immediately follow. Chickens are highly social animals, and they develop a linear and fixed hierarchy in small groups. We found that when chickens were housed in small groups, the top-ranking rooster determined the timing of predawn crowing. Specifically, the top-ranking rooster always started to crow first, followed by its subordinates, in descending order of social rank. When the top-ranking rooster was physically removed from a group, the second-ranking rooster initiated crowing. The presence of a dominant rooster significantly reduced the number of predawn crows in subordinates. However, the number of crows induced by external stimuli was independent of social rank, confirming that subordinates have the ability to crow. Although the timing of subordinates’ predawn crowing was strongly dependent on that of the top-ranking rooster, free-running periods of body temperature rhythms differed among individuals, and crowing rhythm did not entrain to a crowing sound stimulus. These results indicate that in a group situation, the top-ranking rooster has priority to announce the break of dawn, and that subordinate roosters are patient enough to wait for the top-ranking rooster’s first crow every morning and thus compromise their circadian clock for social reasons.

In case you had any doubts.  The pointer is from Michelle Dawson.