rePost :: Road pricing in the Netherlands & using math to reduce traffic | A Smarter Planet Blog :: Quick notes

I constanly site this during conversations with friends about traffic.  Looks just about right.

1. Road pricing trial results in the Netherlands.
Consistent with the themes in this morning’s transportation forum, road pricing is a growing tool being used by cities and states around the world to change behaviors drivers and shift the balance of transportation from car-dependent to a more multi-modal form system. Six month ago, IBM and NXP Semiconductors began a pilot in Eindhoven to implement variable road pricing based on traffic demand, time of day and type of car (i.e., size + environmental impact of vehicle). Following are some insights from the pilot:

  • * Seventy percent of drivers improved their driving behavior by avoiding rush-hour traffic and using highways instead of local roads.
  • * On average, these drivers in the trial saw an improvement of more than 16 percent in average cost per kilometer.
  • * A clear system of incentives is critical to changing driving behavior.
  • * Instant feedback provided via an On-Board Unit display on the price of the road chosen and total charges for the trip is essential to maximizing the change in behavior.

via Quick notes: Road pricing in the Netherlands & using math to reduce traffic | A Smarter Planet Blog.

rePost:Coffee Heart Risk Gene???: Orszag Budgets for Caffeine Genetic Marker – ScienceInsider

Wish I’m negative for this gene. I consume about 1-3L of coffee a day, and I measure coffee by the table spoon not teaspoon so this would be ncie to know!!!!

The Office of Managament and Budget said that Orszag was traveling today and couldn’t provide additional details-including whether he’d learned anything about his genetic predisposition to other diseases. But ScienceInsider guesses that he was referring to a single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) called rs762551 that modulates a caffeine metabolizing enzyme in the liver. Those with a “slow” metabolizing version who drink a few cups of coffee a day are at a higher risk of heart attacks.
via The Latest Buzz: Orszag Budgets for Caffeine Genetic Marker – ScienceInsider.

Research:: Taxis and Taxes :: Stumbling and Mumbling

Read the part of the post not quoted here. This is interesting but I think that a major problem to this is that cabbies are like salesmen in a way their actions translate to easily measurable stuff, other professions on the other hand are not as easy to measure. Take for instance bankers. How do you isolate how hard they work versus the money they get. The structure of compensation really is counter to what we want to measure. This is I believe the most important factor : Most of what people do cannot be tracked to what they earn. I believe how easy it is to see our actions translated to income  the easier the more similar people become to the actions of the New York cabbies.

Taxis and Taxes
What’s the difference between high earners and New York cabbies? This question is central to the issue of whether the new 50% tax rate will actually raise revenue.
I ask it because of this new paper (early version here) by Orley Ashenfelter and colleagues.
They studied how New York cab drivers changed their labour supply in response to the higher incomes caused by fare rises. And they found a negative elasticity, of around minus 0.2. That means a 10% rise in cabbies’ revenue per mile caused them to work 2% less.
This means we have a backward-bending labour supply curve, because the income effect outweighs the substitution effect.
Now, if what’s true of cabbies is also true of bankers, this implies that higher taxes on the rich might indeed raise revenue. This is because the immediate effect of such taxes is to reduce peoples’ incomes, so if the income effect is powerful – as it is for New York cabbies – they will work harder to recoup the money.
Hence my question: in what ways do high earners differ from cabbies?
via Stumbling and Mumbling: Taxis and Taxes.

rePost::» Blog Archive » Beyond Passion: The Science of Loving What You Do » Study Hacks

Working Right
Research reveals that autonomy, competence, and relatedness are the key to loving what you do. So how do you get them? There are different answers to this question, but the strategy that I keep emphasizing on Study Hacks has two clear steps:
1. Master a skill that is rare and valuable.
2. Cash in the career capital this generates for the right rewards.
The world doesn’t owe you happiness. Your boss has no reason to let you choose your own projects, or spend one week out of every four writing a novel at your beach house. These rewards are valuable. To earn them, you must accumulate your own career capital by mastering a skill that’s equally rare and valuable.
It’s important, however, that you cash in this capital, once accumulated, for the right rewards. The word “right,” in this context, is defined by the traits of SDT. In other words, once you have something valuable to offer, use it to gain as much autonomy, competence, and relatedness as you can possibly cram into your life.
via Study Hacks » Blog Archive » Beyond Passion: The Science of Loving What You Do.

rePost:Advice to Various Presidential Candidates: The demand for quacks :Stumbling and Mumbling

Read the whole thing. Interesting thought, even if a product doesn’t work, advertising does. This is why we need to force the candidates that we like to advertise more. If your for Gibo, for Noy, for Gordon, for Villanueva, we can’t let the Villar (aka Arroyo 2) to win.
Btw1: except for the Ampatuan misstep Gibo’s brand of campaigning is really good, though not good enough. I especially like the way they highlighted the aviator credentials (Believe this is good for the girls). Gibo has the hottest wife they need to get her to do more shows/commercials. Although Gibo’s interview highlights his intelligence I believe as the GMA2’s popularity boost has shown its about virality, Last Song Syndrome etc.
Btw2: Noy’s advertisements are dull and kind of self centered. I fail to get “Di Ka Nag Iisa”. Campaigns should be about the candidate showing us he/she is worth voting. Di ka nag iisa was made as if you want us to convince you to run. Come on, fix your message/Public Relations team, they seem to be too full of themselves.
Bt3: I’ve written about this before but Gordon should be highlighting his nickname. We need a more fun campaign.
Bt4: I believe that Eddie should just point his followers to any of the three other candidates (Gibo/Gordon/Noy). Religion and Government should not mix.
Btw5: I think that in the next Presidential Forum the other candidates should gang up on GMA2(Just love that GMA2 is like 7ABS hehehe) in the passive aggressive way we Filipinos excel at. Everyone should keep saying. Hindi ako magnanakaw, di ko gagamitin ang pera ng gobyerno para sa pansarili kong kapakanan, etc etc. Though I fear only Bro Eddie can say this because he is a relatively new politician, and all politicians are liars (well not all but close enough).

The 10:23 campaign against homeopathy raises a question: given that homeopathy doesn’t work, why is there such strong demand for it? A new paper by Werner Troesken (ungated draft pdf) sheds some interesting light on this.
He studies not homeopathy but US patent medicines in the 19th century. Despite being practically useless, these enjoyed spectacular long-run growth – Professor Troesken estimates that spending on them grew 22 times faster than US GDP between 1810 and 1939. Why?
The answer, he says, is that demand for them was inelastic with respect to failure – people kept buying them even though they didn’t work. This was because the medicines offered enormous consumer surplus; the products were cheap, but the benefits they offered were huge; there’s an analogy here with Pascal’s wager. As a result, when a product failed to work, consumers downgraded the probability that patent medicines generally would work, but still saw a positive expected gain from buying them; the small chance of a big improvement in one’s health is worth paying for.
via Stumbling and Mumbling: The demand for quacks.

Research::The Dutch Disease Gets a Brazilian

I believe we can do the same study for the natural gas in malampaya (I think I’m not sure but the one that pays taxes to the Provincial Government of Batangas). I feel that the results would be similar. I hope they are not.

The Dutch Disease Gets a Brazilian
By Paul Kedrosky · Saturday, January 23, 2010 · ShareThis
The Dutch disease – the economic hollowing-out and corruption effects of domestic resource exploitation – has an interesting twist when it happens in Brazil:
Oil windfalls and living standards: New evidence from Brazil
Francesco Caselli, Guy Michaels, 20 January 2010
Does the “resource curse” exist? This column presents new evidence from Brazil. Municipalities that receive oil windfalls report significant increases in spending on infrastructure, education, health, and transfers to households. However, the windfalls do not trickle down and much of the money goes missing. Indeed, oil revenues increase the size of municipal workers’ houses but not the size of other residents’ houses. [Emphasis mine]
via The Dutch Disease Gets a Brazilian.

Research::Gratitude Enhanced by Focusing on End of Pleasurable Experience | PsyBlog

Six weeks isn’t long
In her study Dr Kurtz recruited participants who were about six weeks from finishing college and graduating. They were asked to write about their experiences at college in one of three conditions:
1. Encouraged to view 6 weeks as a long time.
2. Encouraged to view 6 weeks as not very long.
3. Just told to write about what they had done on a typical day (control group).
Then, over the next two weeks participants were asked to complete four surveys. Participants in the first two conditions were encouraged to think about what they were grateful for: things like friends, clubs and activities, but with their remaining time at college framed either as very short or relatively long. Participants in the final control condition continued describing their typical day.
As Dr Kurtz predicted it was those in the second group who were happier after the intervention; the other two groups showed no significant improvement. It seemed that just being encouraged to think grateful thoughts was not enough to increase happiness. What made the grateful thoughts beneficial was focusing on the imminent end of this pleasurable experience.
On top of being happier, students encouraged to think how little of college remained were more likely to take advantage of the time they had left. They displayed greater motivation by taking part in more college-related activities. Dr Kurtz suggests thinking about the end of their experience at college put them in a “now or never” frame of mind.
via Gratitude Enhanced by Focusing on End of Pleasurable Experience | PsyBlog.

We forget this often, we put death out of our minds and live as if we are going to forever. Its always about balance balance between the memories of the past, the wants of now and the preparations for tomorrow.  If you can honestly say to yourself  “Nothing”, When asked the Question”If you have one day to live and knew it, what would you change how you lived yesterday” most of the time,”Congratulations!!!!”

rePost::How America Lost the War on Drugs : Rolling Stone

frankly drugs scare me, it’s just that people on drugs cannot be reasoned with, they will probably kill you even if you do not have any plans on trying to fight back when being mugged, or the like. It’s like in poker, I actually don’t fear the rational players, it’s the irrational players who doesn’t have a lot of logic in their playing that is very hard to beat. This is because you get beaten by hands that you assume wouldn’t be possible because they would have folded already with such.
This is something concrete that can be asked to Presidential Aspirants. Do they even know of these almost 20 year recommendation? The Drug problem in the Philippines is worsening because poverty is worsening, producing a spiral of crime-poverty-addiction. We are a poor country and to not know what the most cost efficient way to combat the Drug Problem is a big question mark in any Presidential Candidates armor. We must be asking these questions.
PS: Legalize marijuana now!!!!
PSS: Notice that in a lot of our problems the Pareto Principle is at work 80-20 90-10;. For me at least someone worthy of leading our beautiful and somewhat seemingly damned country should know the those places where we could put the Pareto Principle to work.

“If you had asked me at the outset,” Everingham says, “my guess would have been that the best use of taxpayer money was in the source countries in South America” — that it would be possible to stop cocaine before it reached the U.S. But what the study found surprised her. Overseas military efforts were the least effective way to decrease drug use, and imprisoning addicts was prohibitively expensive. The only cost-effective way to put a dent in the market, it turned out, was drug treatment. “It’s not a magic bullet,” says Reuter, the RAND scholar who helped supervise the study, “but it works.” The study ultimately ushered RAND, this vaguely creepy Cold War relic, into a position as the permanent, pragmatic left wing of American drug policy, the most consistent force for innovating and reinventing our national conception of the War on Drugs.
When Everingham’s team looked more closely at drug treatment, they found that thirteen percent of hardcore cocaine users who receive help substantially reduced their use or kicked the habit completely. They also found that a larger and larger portion of illegal drugs in the U.S. were being used by a comparatively small group of hardcore addicts. There was, the study concluded, a fundamental imbalance: The crack epidemic was basically a domestic problem, but we had been fighting it more aggressively overseas. “What we began to realize,” says Jonathan Caulkins, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University who studied drug policy for RAND, “was that even if you only get a percentage of this small group of heavy drug users to abstain forever, it’s still a really great deal.”
Thirteen years later, the study remains the gold standard on drug policy. “It’s still the consensus recommendation supplied by the scholarship,” says Reuter. “Yet as well as it’s stood up, it’s never really been tried.”
To Brown, RAND’s conclusions seemed exactly right. “I saw how little we were doing to help addicts, and I thought, ‘This is crazy,'” he recalls. “‘This is how we should be breaking the cycle of addiction and crime, and we’re just doing nothing.'”
The federal budget that Brown’s office submitted in 1994 remains a kind of fetish object for certain liberals in the field, the moment when their own ideas came close to making it into law. The budget sought to cut overseas interdiction, beef up community policing, funnel low-level drug criminals into treatment programs instead of prison, and devote $355 million to treating hardcore addicts, the drug users responsible for much of the illegal-drug market and most of the crime associated with it. White House political handlers, wary of appearing soft on crime, were skeptical of even this limited commitment, but Brown persuaded the president to offer his support, and the plan stayed.
via How America Lost the War on Drugs : Rolling Stone.

rePost::Overcoming Bias : Telescope Effect

Would they rather spend $10 million to save 10,000 lives from a disease that caused 15,000 deaths a year, or save 20,000 lives from a disease that killed 290,000 people a year? Overwhelmingly, volunteers preferred to spend money saving the 10,000 lives rather than the 20,000 lives. …
Slovic once told volunteers about a 7-year-old girl in Mali who was starving and in need of help. They were given a certain amount of money and asked how much they were willing to spend to help her. On average, people gave half their money to help the girl. … One group of volunteers was asked whether they would give money to the little girl; another was asked whether they would donate money to the little boy. A third group of volunteers was told about both the boy and the girl and asked how much they were willing to give. People gave the same amount of money when told about either the boy or the girl. But when the children were presented together, the volunteers gave less.

More here. If you want to care more about distant victims, set aside your mental image of a large tragedy, focus your mind on one particular victim, and open your heart. If you want to care less, instead of thinking about any one victim, try to visualize a much larger group of similar victims. Now here’s the key question: do you want to care more or less? Not sure? See which image you put in your mind, long enough to act on it.
This puzzles me a bit re near-far analysis. It suggests we help distant victims more in near mode, even though far mode is where we more express abstract ideals we want others to see. Do we not actually want others to think we help distant victims?
via Overcoming Bias : Telescope Effect.

rePost::Believing You Can Get Smarter Makes You Smarter

Back in college they instituted a reform in the basic undergraduate curricula called RGEP. This allowed students to choose what general educations subjects to take with certain restrictions. This was met with celebration by a few friends from CAL(College of Arts and Letter), they were celebrating because for them this meant that they can fully skip taking even one math course, through my mildly probing questions (some would say interrogation) I was able to find out that they believed themselves NOT GOOD in math,  they seem to believe that they won’t get good in math. This saddened me.  (although one was dreaming of graduating with honors and didn’t want to risk a mediocre grade in math subjects). This afflicts most of us, we do a few things well and when faced with the initial problems when trying to get better at something we stop. I say push through, forge your skill from this frustration and anxiety.

Practical Application
Blackwell, Dweck, and Trzesniewski (2002) recently replicated and applied this research with seventh-grade students in New York City. During the first eight weeks of the spring term, these students learned about the malleability of intelligence by reading and discussing a science-based article that described how intelligence develops. A control group of seventh-grade students did not learn about intelligence’s changeability, and instead learned about memory and mnemonic strategies. As compared to the control group, students who learned about intelligence's malleability had higher academic motivation, better academic behavior, and better grades in mathematics. Indeed, students who were members of vulnerable groups (e.g., those who previously thought that intelligence cannot change, those who had low prior mathematics achievement, and female students) had higher mathematics grades following the intelligence-is-malleable intervention, while the grades of similar students in the control group declined. In fact, girls who received the intervention matched and even slightly exceeded the boys in math grades, whereas girls in the control group performed well below the boys.
These findings are especially important because the actual instruction time for the intervention totaled just three hours. Therefore, this is a very cost-effective method for improving students’ academic motivation and achievement.
via Believing You Can Get Smarter Makes You Smarter.