your apartment building has a schedule for when each apartment’s occupants can use the laundry machines.
Archive for November, 2007
You know you’re in Switzerland if…
Wednesday, November 28th, 2007More Eyes for Student Work!
Saturday, November 17th, 2007Most papers written by university students are seen by two people: the student and her TA. I think this should change radically: the default should be that all student work is published to the web. This would give students output to point their friends and family to; it would encourage students to take more pride in their written work; and it would promote discourse about class subjects among students who could read each other’s work.
The technology is there. The students are more than talented and diligent enough that we should have faith in them and their writing. How could universal web publication be made to happen?
Crazy Calculations
Thursday, November 15th, 2007The FDIC insures all our checking and savings accounts, but they apparently don’t understand interest. The Truth-in-Lending law they administer has been interpreted so that uniformly-reported “annual percentage rates” do not compound within each year. The key portion of the regulations specifies instead that periodic rates should be multiplied by the number of periods in a year to get the APR.
For most types of consumer credit, including credit cards, this makes little or no difference or other regulations fix the problem. One realm, however, where it leads to allowance of very misleading advertising, is the case of payday loans. The typical payday loan carries a finance charge of 18% for a two-week loan. The FDIC’s guidelines imply that this loan has an APR of 26*18% = 468%.
The more relevant calculation, which yields the true cost of this form of liquidity to consumers and is the right number for comparisons with most alternatives, is (1.18) to the 26th power minus 1, which yields a whopping 7295%.
Tell them they can prosper…
Monday, November 12th, 2007and, to an astonishingly large extent, they will. I can’t wait to see the whole paper.
Data for Personal Decision-Making
Sunday, November 11th, 2007We all make thousands of small decisions each day–whether to snooze a few extra minutes in the morning, how long a workout to have, whether to snack on carrots or cookies, whether to have decaf or regular coffee–that may affect our immediate and future well-being. We get some immediate feedback on some of those decisions (geez, those carrots were tasty), but detailed quantitative feedback on immediate and delayed effects is challenging.
Many such decisions have immediate, identifiable, bioelectrical and biochemical signatures. Imagine a device that automatically tracked and uploaded this information, standard metrics of body function (e.g., pulse, breathing rate, temperature, bp), and manually-inputted subjective measures of well-being (e.g., headache, euphoria, anxiety, zone) and productivity. Imagine using all this information and a decent stats package to make inferences about the effects–specific to oneself–of many of life’s small decisions. Many of the inferences would be obvious and well-known: sleeping very little makes you sluggish; eating carrots makes you feel virtuous; talking with dear old friends makes you elegiac, reflective, and happy.
For a device that would track lots of bio-indicators automatically and make it easy to track food intake, exercise info, and subjective variables on the fly, I doubt I’d blink about paying $10,000. Such a device would give me far better tools for enhancing my own productivity and well-being. Maybe my dear old friends also profoundly believe in me, motivating me to do more good; those carrots can give me spates of indigestion, making them less virtuous; and blogging occasionally loosens the chains and accelerates my other writing. I’d like to run the stats, controlling for daylight hours, age, the weather, the number of seminars I’ve been attending, and my overall workload, see the results, and adjust accordingly. Explicit experimentation could come soon after. Just a 1% increase in productivity would make the gadget pay well within my lifetime.
Intergenerational Inequality Transmission
Thursday, November 1st, 2007Certain groups have short shrift. In part this may be because they face hostile social circumstances; in part it may be because they continue to suffer the consequences of hostile historical circumstances.
Hostile historical circumstances are likely to affect some groups more than others. Specifically, groups that match and reproduce internally (for whatever reason) are likely to experience more persistence than groups that mix. This innocuous observation has an important implication: because (in the West, at least) the sex ratio is close to 1, inequality between men and women can be wiped out in a single generation. If, at some remarkable point in time, everyone in the population switches from believing in gender discrimination to believing in gender non-discrimination, the next generation to be born will be composed of sons and daughters whose parents choose to treat them equally.
This implication contrasts with the observation’s implications for racial inequality, for example. Reproductive matching within racial groups perpetuates disparity.