Category: Web/Tech

*Total Recall*

by  Tyler Cowen in

[since 2001] Microsoft researcher Gordon Bell…has been compulsively scanning, capturing, and logging each and every bit of personal data he generates in his daily life.

This trove includes Web sites he's visited (221,173), photos taken (56,282), emails sent and received (156,041), docs written and read (18,883), phone conversations had (2,000), photos snapped by the SenseCam hanging around his neck (66,000), songs listened to (7,139), and videos taken by him (2,164). To collect all this information, he uses a staggering assortment of hardware: desktop scanner, digicam, heart rate monitor, voice recorder, GPS logger, pedometer, smartphone, e-reader.

Here is more and that is all from the interesting new book Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything, by Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell.  You may recall that I mention Bell in Create Your Own Economy.  I don't personally have the ability to operate all that technology.  So if I could measure only five things from my daily life, what should they be?  What would yours be and why? 

Lately I've developed a new theory as to when I sleep especially well (in general I sleep well so the variance is not so large).  I believe that I sleep especially well when I end up going to bed at exactly the same time I expect to be going to bed.  On the unusual occasions when I don't sleep well, it is because I have been winding down my body and mind before I actually have the opportunity to fall asleep.  Somehow when the later chance to sleep comes, it is too late for that sleep to be deep.  Or so it seems to my mental econometrics; it would be interesting to measure it.

Two Million Books Printable on Demand

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Awesome:

Two million out-of-copyright books that have been scanned by Google could come back into limited printed form after the search giant signed a deal with On Demand Books, the company that makes the Espresso Book Machine – a custom book printer able to produce a bound one-off 300-page paperback, with a full-colour cover, in about five minutes.

Assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen in

1. Profile of Robert Shiller.

2. Markets in everything: road kill toys.

3. Dynamic pricing for hockey games; why doesn't everyone do this?

4. Five questions for Doug Irwin.

5. The historical roots of the financial crisis, by Arnold Kling.

6. What if yesterday's books were retitled today?  Two of my favorites were:

Then: Declaration of Independence
Now: The Pursuit of Happiness: How to get control of your continent and have fun doing it!

And this:

Then: Quotations from Chairman Mao (or "the Little Red Book")
Now: You're Telling Me Comrade! Hilarious but helpful sayings from China's Best Selling Author

Assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen in

1. Critical Review blog; CausesoftheCrisis.  Vernon Smith and David Colander have posts up.

2. Boston Globe article on Hyman Minsky.

3. Arnold Kling: "One could argue that this country is on the verge of a crisis of legitimacy. The progressive elite is starting to dismiss rural white America as illegitimate, and vice-versa. I see the chances of both sides losing as much greater than the chance of either force winning."

4. 1990-2007: In which countries were health care costs rising the fastest?

5. Women with masculine names have better shots at judgeships.

First debug the child, then the computer

by  Alex Tabarrok in

The idea of computers as liberators appealed to Silicon Valley philanthropists and Nicholas Negroponte could certainly tell a compelling story but, as Timothy Ogden explains, today the one laptop per child project seems to be in technical and financial trouble, the evidence that computers increase learning either in the classroom or at home is weak and the demand for the computers (as opposed to say cell phones (pdf)) in the developing world is low.  Meanwhile, simpler, cheaper approaches with proven evidence are not being fully exploited.  Here's Ogden.

The simplest and least costly of these programs is deworming. Nearly 2 billion people around the world are affected by parasitic worm infections, with children disproportionately affected. While each variety of parasitic worm affects a person differently, they all take a substantial toll on growth, energy and attention, with entirely predictable impacts on school attendance and learning. Harvard economist Michael Kremer has studied the impact of mass deworming in Kenya and India. Delivering deworming medication costs 50 cents per child per year in Kenya but yielded a 25 percent increase in school attendance; a similar program in India cost $4 per student per year and yielded a 20 percent attendance gain. "This is a simple, cost-effective and yet tragically not-done program. It's a scandal that [deworming] hasn't been addressed," Kremer says. There are spillover effects as well. "The most surprising thing about the study in Kenya was the widespread impact," Kremer says. The program drove down infection rates for several kilometers around the schools, he says, and there were significant improvements in attendance for untreated students, in the treatment schools as well as in nearby schools not in the program.

Read the whole thing.  Help to deworm the world.

Hat tip to Alanna Shaikh via Chris Blattman and also to Dan in the comments.