Category: Science

Infrastructure: Roads and The Smart Grid

by  Alex Tabarrok in

The first thing people think about when someone says "infrastructure" is roads and bridges.  That’s unfortunate because we already spend over $100 billion a year on transportation infrastructure and the truth is we don’t need that much more.  Peter Orzag, President-Elect Obama’s choice for OMB estimated – when Director of the CBO – that an additional $20 billion in spending, mostly to maintain current transportation infrastructure, would achieve 83% of the net benefits to be had from more transportation infrastructure spending.  Moreover, in many cases, congestion pricing would be both greener and more efficient than greater spending.  A better program would be to follow Germany and several innovative state programs to get congestion pricing using GPS technology up and running, especially for trucks.

Even more valuable than transportation infrastructure would be greater investment in  electricity infrastructure, a smart grid.  Consider that in 2003 a massive, widespread, power outage threw 50 million people in the Northeastern states and Ontario, Canada out of power – disrupting lives and the economy.  Why did this happen?  Because of a failure to "trim trees" in Eastlake, Ohio – now that’s a dumb grid.  And remember that only a few years earlier, the most innovative, high-tech industries in the world were shut down by blackouts caused by our primitive electricity grid.  Overall, blackouts cost the U.S. on the order of $100 billion a year.

The smart gird is a not one idea but many technologies such as real-time pricing (smart meters), superconductive smart cable, and plug-n-play architecture that combine to produce a grid that is decentralized, self-healing, robust, and smart for both producers and consumers.  Decentralized power, for example, makes it easier to isolate problems, "route" power to different areas, and maintain robustness in the face of falling trees and other problems.  Plug and play architecture means that new technologies such as electric cars can be automatically used as both consumers and producers (via storage) of electricity, as needed, on the fly.  Plug-n-play, the open-source of electricity infrastructure, will also open the field of electricity generation and storage to far greater innovation than is possible now.

Useful references include the Department of Energy’s somewhat breathless introduction for the layperson, The Smart Grid, The National Energy Technology Laboratory’s The Modern Grid Strategy, the Smart Grid newsletter and papers by Kiesling and also Dismukes in Electric Choices (a book I had a hand in).

The smart grid did not receive prominent attention in Obama’s infrastructure speech but the campaign called for matching grants to investment in smart grid technology and support for smart meters and real-time pricing.  An investment tax credit for smart grid technologies and more foresighted regulation (price regulation has limited investment in needed infrastructure) could encourage the construction of much-needed electricity infrastructure while maintaining private investment incentives and promoting innovation.

Reasons not to own a pet

by  Tyler Cowen in

Yes I do find that a legitimate research topic but I was underwhelmed by this abstract:

There is inadequate understanding about why people might not own pets. This qualitative study asked eight elderly women and men to discuss why they do not have a pet, whether pets were deemed beneficial to health, and whether they had plans for future pet ownership. Reasons for not owning a pet were Emotional or Pragmatic; Pragmatic reasons were categorized as relating to Convenience, Negative aspects of companion animals and Competing demands on time or energy. Participants expressed mixed feelings in their plans for future pet ownership. Clinical and research implications of these findings are discussed.

I guess they save all the good results for the paper.

The Superorganism

by  Tyler Cowen in

The subtitle is The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies and that is the new book by Bert Hölldobler and Edmund O. Wilson. 

This is another plausible candidate for best non-fiction book of the year.  I liked this paragraph:

Ants and other social insects are good at what they do, and they get better by means of cooperative labor.  Their behavior fulfills principles of ergonomic efficiency embodied in the Barlow-Proschan theorems.  When individual competence is low, the first theorem says, the reliability of a system of individuals acting together is lower than the summed competence of the individuals acting singly; but when individual competence is high, above a certain threshold level, the reliability of the system based on cooperation is greater.  According to the second theorem, one redundant system, whose parts that can be switched back and forth (as in colony members), is more reliable than two identical systems with no such backup parts.

Here is another good bit:

Whenever two kinds or organisms live in close mutualistic symbiosis, as is the case in leaf-cutting ants and their fungus, we should expect communication between the two mutualists.  The fungus may signal to its host ants its preference for particular vegetable substrates or the need for a change in diet to maintain nutritional diversity or even the presence of a harmful substrate.

Here is a New York Times review of the book.  The photos are wonderful too.  Here is a short paper on the work of Barlow and Proschan and the general topic of "reliability"; it has implications for the financial crisis as well.

Wind Farming

by  Alex Tabarrok in

President-elect Obama has called for the creation of more "wind farms."  Before jumping on that bandwagon, however, we ought to take a look at West Texas where wind farmers are farming subsidies almost as well as their agricultural cousins and, as a result, they are paying distributors to take their power.  Mike Giberson has the story:

In the first half of 2008, [electricity] prices were below zero nearly 20 percent
of the time…During these negative price periods, suppliers are paying ERCOT to take their power….the negative prices appear to be the result of the large installed capacity of wind generation.
Wind generators face very small costs of shutting down and starting
back up, but they do face another cost when shutting down: loss of the
Production Tax Credit and state Renewable Energy Credit revenue which
depend upon generator output. It is economically rational for wind
power producers to operate as long as the subsidy exceeds their
operating costs plus the negative price they have to pay the market. Even
if the market value of the power is zero or negative, the subsidies
encourage wind power producers to keep churning the megawatts out….You could, as a correspondent put it to me, build a giant toaster in West Texas and be paid by generators to operate it.

If President-Obama is serious about green energy it’s not wind he needs to look at but nuclear.  Nuclear is clean and green and we can build power stations where we need power, instead of having to invest in costly and inefficient transport networks.

Now is the Time for the Buffalo Commons

by  Alex Tabarrok in

The Federal Government owns more than half of Oregon, Utah, Nevada, Idaho and Alaska and it owns nearly half of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Wyoming.  See the map for more.  It is time for a sale.  Selling even some western land could raise hundreds of billions of dollars – perhaps trillions of dollars – for the Federal government at a time when the funds are badly needed and no one want to raise taxes.  At the same time, a sale of western land would improve the efficiency of land allocation.

Mapowns_the_west

Does a sale of western lands mean reducing national parkland?  No, first much of the land isn’t parkland.  Second, I propose a deal.  The government should sell some of its most valuable land in the west and use some of the proceeds to buy low-price land in the Great Plains. 

The western Great Plains are emptying of people.  Some 322 of the 443 Plains counties have lost population since 1930 and a majority have lost population since 1990. 

Now is the time for the Federal government to sell high-priced land in the West, use some of the proceeds to deal with current problems and use some of the proceeds to buy low-priced land in the Plains creating the world’s largest nature park, The Buffalo Commons.

Hat tip to Carl Close for the pointer to the map.

Botox makes us happy

by  Alex Tabarrok in

It’s long been known that simply smiling makes people feel better and making an angry face can make people feel more angry.  Thus some cosmetic surgeons speculated:

People with Botox may be less vulnerable to the angry emotions of other people
because they themselves can’t make angry or unhappy faces as easily. And because
people with Botox can’t spread bad feelings to others via their expressions,
people without Botox may be happier too.

Amazingly, a recent experiment in the journal Cerebral Cortex supports this theory, although the abstract is a mouthful.  You can read a summary here.

We show that, during imitation of angry facial expressions, reduced
feedback due to BTX treatment attenuates activation of the left
amygdala and its functional coupling with brain stem regions
implicated in autonomic manifestations of emotional states. These
findings demonstrate that facial feedback modulates neural activity
within central circuitries of emotion during intentional imitation of
facial expressions. Given that people tend to mimic the emotional
expressions of others, this could provide a potential physiological
basis for the social transfer of emotion. 

How to get people to vote

by  Tyler Cowen in

KAHNEMAN: …there are
those effects that are small at the margin that can change election
results.

You call and ask people ahead of time, "Will you vote?". That’s all.
"Do you intend to vote?". That increases voting participation
substantially, and you can measure it. It’s a completely trivial
manipulation, but saying ‘Yes’ to a stranger, "I will vote" …

MYHRVOLD: But to Elon’s point, suppose you had the choice of calling up
and saying, "Are you going to vote?", so you prime them to vote, versus
exhorting them to vote.

KAHNEMAN: The prime could very well work better than the exhortation
because exhortation is going to induce resistance, whereas the prime‚ the mild embarrassment causes you to make what feels like a
commitment, and the commitment, if it’s sufficiently precise, is going
to have an effect on behavior.

THALER: If you ask them when they’re going to vote, and how they’re going to get there, that increases voting.

KAHNEMAN: And where.         

Here is the whole dialogue, on the importance of the environment and priming effects for human psychology; it is very interesting throughout.  I thank Stephen Morrow for the pointer.

So how do you get some people not to vote?

What do you do to stay sane?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here’s a project asking people to list five things they do to stay sane.  I’m going to arbitrage and ask only for one thing you do to stay sane.  Please leave your answer in the comments.

I try to listen to beautiful music at least once a day, I don’t check my portfolio even in the best of times, I hug a loved one at least one more time than was expected (with adaptive expectations this is hard to sustain over time but I have my tricks), and also I avoid television advertisements as much as possible.  That’s four, you need only offer one.

Facts about publication bias

by  Tyler Cowen in

In 1995, only 1 percent of all articles published in alternative medicine journals gave a negative result.  The most recent figure is 5 percent negative.

That is from Ben Goldacre’s excellent Bad Science, right now available only in the UK.  This is one of the best books I have read on how to think like a scientist and how to critically evaluate evidence and also on why we don’t have a better press corps when it comes to science.

I thank Michelle Dawson for the pointer to the book.

Fruitless Fall

by  Tyler Cowen in

The subtitle is The Collapse of the Honeybee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis and the author is Rowan Jacobsen.  Many books on biodiversity have bad economics but this book has very good economics:

Sometimes the fraud is chemical, as when rice syrup is doctored to resemble honey, and sometimes it’s ontological.  For instance, what is honey?  If you answered something like "a syrup made entirely out of nectar by bees," then consider yourself hopelessly out-of-date.  Let me introduce you to "Packer’s Blend," the latest offering from China.  It appeared on the market in 2006, shortly after the bond-posting loophole was closed by Congress.  Chinese honey may be subject to tariffs, but if a product is less than 50 percent honey, it isn’t covered by the law.  This "funny honey," as beekeeprs call it, is between 40 and 49 percent honey.  The rest is syrup; corn syrup, but also rice syrup, lactose syrup — whatever’s on hand and cheap.  The importers who bring in these blends may sell them to manufacturers as blends or as pure honey, adding some nice American or Canadian clover honey to give the blend a semblance of the real thing and get it past the manufacturers.

This book also offers a thoughtful analysis of the dangers facing biodiversity, a fascinating look at what Gordon Tullock called "the economics of insect societies," and a revision of Steven Cheung’s "Fable of the Bees" (the story now involves almond growers in a major role).  It is one of the best popular science books I have read in the last few years.

Do researchers suffer from winner’s curse?

by  Tyler Cowen in

OH NY GOD…READ THIS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

From The Economist:

In economic theory the winner’s curse refers to the idea that
someone who places the winning bid in an auction may have paid too
much…The same thing may be happening in scientific publishing, according
to a new analysis. With so many scientific papers chasing so few pages
in the most prestigious journals, the winners could be the ones most
likely to oversell themselves–to trumpet dramatic or important results
that later turn out to be false. This would produce a distorted picture
of scientific knowledge, with less dramatic (but more accurate) results
either relegated to obscure journals or left unpublished.

My colleague Omar Al-Ubaydli was part of this work.  Fortunately, it is mentioned on the very cover of the magazine.  Nonetheless I believe it is true and it is most true for "hot" fields.  The original paper is here.