Category: Science
Scientist facts of the day
Chris Mooney reports:
Only 18 percent of us know a scientist personally, according to a 2005 survey (subscription required), and when asked in 2007 to name scientific "role models," the results were dismal.
Forty-four percent of Americans couldn't come up with a name at all,
and among those few who did, their top answers were either not
scientists or not alive: Bill Gates, Al Gore, Albert Einstein.
Tabarrok at TED
I will be speaking on The Future of Economic Growth at this year's legendary TED Conference, TED 2009, which takes place in Long Beach, Feb 3-7. Other speakers include Tim Berners-Lee, Oliver Sacks, Daniel Lebeskind, Herbie Hancock and Bill Gates. In my session, I am paired with Nate Silver, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, and Dan Ariely. Yeah, I'm a little nervous. Fortunately, TED provides a masseuse for speakers before they hit the stage! I kid you not.
Chris Blattman on randomized control trials
As usual, he is wise:
Yes, the randomized evaluation remains the "gold standard" for
important (albeit narrow) questions. Social science, however, has a
much bigger toolbox for a much broader (and often more interesting)
realm of inquiry. If you want to know the effects of small binary
treatments, you are in business. If you find any other question in the
world interesting, you have some more work to do. Dani Rodrik has made
a similar point here.Don’t
get me wrong: a large number of my projects are randomized control
trials. They are eminently worth pursuing. But to be honest, uncovering
the causes of effects excites me more than measuring the effects of
causes. An evaluation masters the second, but only hints at the first.
The hardest and most rewarding work is the theoretical and
investigative work that comes with uncovering the underlying rhythms
and rules of human behavior.…If your goal is to improve the delivery of aid, and truly advance
development, many more skills and knowledge are involved than the
randomized evaluation. See here for
more. But in short: a well-identified causal impact that arrives two
years after the program does not performance management make.
Chris also points us toward a new and excellent blog, Obama in Kenya.
The Smart Grid and the Fiscal Stimulus
Earlier I pointed out that a) regulatory problems have prevented investment in the smart grid and b) subsidies to wind power in some states have driven prices to negative levels (yes, people are being paid to consume power). These two problems are closely related.
The states control whether transmission lines get built but states with a lot of wind energy don’t have an incentive to build transmission lines to move the power out. In effect, states with a lot of wind energy are preventing exports which lowers their own internal price of electricity but raises everyone else’s price and reduces the use of wind power.
A new article in Technology Review makes the point.
One effect of these regulatory moves was that companies had less incentive to invest in the grid than in new power plants, and no one had a clear responsibility for expanding the transmission infrastructure. At the same time, the more open market meant that producers began trying to sell power to regions farther away, placing new burdens on existing connections between networks. The result has been a national transmission shortage….
[Many states have a lot of wind potential]…But the existing transmission system doesn’t have the capacity to get that much electricity to the parts of the country that need it. In many of the states in the [wind] region, there’s no particular urgency to move things along, since each has all the power it needs. So most of the applications for grid connections are simply waiting in line, some stymied by the lack of infrastructure and others by bureaucratic and regulatory delays.
Hat tip to Andrew Samwick who writes:
The federal government is the entity that can resolve that failure, by taking the lead and making those expansions itself. It can recoup its costs by levying a fee on subsequent power consumed through the grid. I hope the fact that we need this investment isn’t a reason for it to be excluded from plans for fiscal stimulus.
Do we compete more against fewer competitors?
This caught my eye:
If you’ve ever had to take a test in a room with a lot of people, you may be able to relate to this study: The more people you’re competing against, it turns out, the less motivated and competitive you are. Psychologists observed this pattern across several different situations. Students taking standardized tests in more crowded venues got lower scores. Students asked to complete a short general-knowledge test as fast as possible to win a prize if they were in the fastest 20 percent completed it faster if they were told that they were competing against 10 people rather than 100. Students asked how fast they would run in a race for a $1,000 prize if they finished in the top 10 percent said they would run faster in a race against 50 people rather than 500. Similarly, students contemplating a job interview or Facebook-friending contest said they would be less competitive if they expected more competitors – even if "winning" only required finishing in the top 20 percent. The authors conclude that competitiveness was curtailed because the larger the group, the more difficult it is to compare oneself directly to others.
The original paper is here, but note that context effects may well give you varying results in other settings. The initial article, from the Boston Globe, discusses several other social science mechanisms of interest, although I was not surprised to learn that your dog relaxes you.
Addendum: Here is my earlier article on invisible competition.
What’s this?
Really, I want to know. Chris Blattman doesn’t know either. Please tell me in the comments.
Intelligent agent modeling
I am more optimistic about intelligent agent modeling than is Tyler. For one we already have an important, convincing, and Nobel-bestowed variant of intelligent agent modeling, namely experimental economics. Experimental economics uses one particular type of intelligent agent, the type based on…genetic algorithms. True, the intelligent agents used in I-A models are typically not as sophisticated as the agents used in experimental economics but they are rapidly improving. (Moreover, such agents are already important economic actors in their own right in limited areas, e.g. portfolio insurance, and they will continue to become more important as time continues.)
I see bringing experimental economics and I-A modeling closer as an important goal with potentially very large payoffs. Here, for example, is my model for a ground-breaking paper.
1) Experiment
2) I-A replication of experiment (parameterization)
3) I-A simulation under new conditions
4) Experiment under the same conditions as 3 demonstrating accuracy of simulation
5) I-A simulation under conditions that cannot be tested using experiments.
Now that would be a great paper. I-A agent modeling is already very useful for modeling contagion, peer effects, and highly non-linear environments. It will become even more useful when combined with experimental economics in a way that demonstrates the equivalence of the two types of intelligent agents.
Markets in everything
Wearable air bags for the elderly (click on "Start Reading" to get through).
Can you guess in which country?
If you keep on clicking on that link, you’ll go through the NYT’s Year in Ideas 2008, always worth reading. I found at least half of them worthwhile (a very good way to spend your Friday night) but sadly they do not have a separate link for each bit. Under "B" you will find an interesting discussion of the Bus-Wait Problem, namely when you should stop waiting for that bus and start walking. The advice is that usually you should wait.
Here is separate information on "the glass cliff," a fascinating phenomenon.
Rich brains vs. poor brains in childhood
You may have heard about the recent study by Mark Kishiyama et.al. described by USA Today as follows:
A new study finds that certain brain functions of some low-income 9-
and 10-year-olds pale in comparison with those of wealthy children and
that the difference is almost equivalent to the damage from a stroke.
Here is more detail:
…[they] rigged up the noggins of 26 kids — with an average age of 9.5 years —
with probes that sense the ebb and flow of electrical current in
different regions of the brain. Then, they put them through a battery
of neuropsychological tests. Half of the kids came from families with
annual incomes that averaged just over $27,000 and generally had low
levels of parental education; the other half came from families where a
primary caregiver had completed at least four years of college and in
which annual household income averaged a little more than $97,000.
The paper is here. Who better to ask about this than Michelle Dawson? Michelle wrote to me:
I read the poor vs rich
kids brains study (Kishiyama et al.). It’s a very small study (13 in
each group) and the groups aren’t matched on ethnicity. In the major
task (the one which got media attention), where the authors looked at
ERPs [TC: here is a link on ERP], the performance of the two groups was the same. The performance
of the two groups on a Stroop task, a classic test of what the poor
kids are said to be incapable of, was also the same. The major
performance difference between groups was on vocabulary (the WISC-III
vocabulary test), but only a few tests were used. There was no attempt
to match the groups on IQ.
Just to repeat two key points: a) the observed difference in electrical current patterns may depend on IQ differences, not poverty, and b) on the actual major task the poor kids did just as well. There are tasks where the poor children do less well but this is hardly news.
Popular science reporting on neuro issues is very often not to be trusted.
Addendum: There is more from Michelle Dawson in the comments.
Infrastructure: Roads and The Smart Grid
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
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.
What makes you happy?
Sentences to ponder:
Dr. Kahneman said unless the findings were replicated, he could not
accept that a spouse’s happiness had less impact than a next-door
neighbor. Dr. Christakis believes that indicates that people take
emotional cues from their own gender.
Read the whole fascinating article. You’ll find a link to the paper here.
The Superorganism
The subtitle is The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies and that is the new book by Bert Hรถlldobler and Edmund O. Wilson.
This is another plausible candidate for best non-fiction book of the year. I liked this paragraph:
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
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
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.
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.