Thursday, May 10, 2007

Congestion pricing: how to mitigate its impact on the poor?


Remember the congestion pricing proposal in New York City? Robert Frank finds an interesting similarity between the current debate on congestion pricing and another such episode in the 1970s, and proposes some practical changes to make the congestion pricing program more viable. So, what happened in the 1970s?

In a reform effort, ... the agency that regulates New York’s public utilities took aim at the now quaint-seeming practice of providing directory assistance free. The commission argued that a 10-cent charge for directory assistance calls would give consumers an incentive to look up telephone numbers on their own whenever convenient, which would free up operators and equipment for more valuable tasks.

Although the commission’s proposal promised net benefits for the average telephone subscriber, it was greeted by a firestorm of protest. And when social scientists testified gravely, albeit absurdly, that it threatened to disrupt vital networks of communication in the community, its defeat appeared certain.

Commission officials then introduced a simple amendment that saved it. In addition to charging 10 cents for each directory assistance call, they proposed a 30-cent credit on each consumer’s monthly phone bill, a reduction made possible by the additional revenue from the charge and the savings from reduced volumes of directory assistance calls. Because this amendment promised to reduce the monthly bill of customers willing to use their phone books, political opposition vanished overnight.

Thanks to Mark Thoma for the pointer.

Harvard Crimson makes a strong pitch for 'Open Access'


Their editorial is very good:

... Leading academics in fields as diverse as biology, computer science, and law have spoken out and taken action for “open access” which includes novel publishing models that do not set up barriers to access, models where neither Wiley nor Elsevier nor even the American Chemical Society restricts the dissemination of academic research.

In 2003, Donald Knuth, a laureate of computer science’s highest honor, the Turing Award, wrote a long letter to his colleagues on the editorial board of Elsevier’s Journal of Algorithms in protest of climbing prices and restrictions on access. After consultation, they followed a dozen other journals’ editors before them by resigning en masse and forming a new open-access journal with a friendlier publisher. Similarly, the Open Access Law Program has 34 law journals (and counting), pledged to making the legal scholarship they publish freely available.

Other researchers, in fields from philosophy to biology, have gone further still, setting up new peer-reviewed journals founded on open access. Among these are top journals in some fields, including the Journal of Machine Learning Research founded at MIT and flagship journals PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine of the Public Library of Science led by Nobel laureate and former National Institute of Health director Harold Varmus. A handful (like the PLoS journals) are funded from their authors’ research grants; the rest operate on minimal university or foundation subsidies or even on no budget at all—after all, at any journal the real work is done by unpaid authors, editors, and reviewers.

Constructive visualization: Try a third-person perspective ...


Interesting stuff:

One hundred and forty-six undergrad participants, all of whom had registered to vote, were asked to imagine themselves going to the polling booth to vote the next day, in what were then the upcoming 2002 presidential elections. Just under half were instructed to do this from a first-person perspective, the remainder were told to do it from a third-person perspective.

Next they answered questions about their attitudes to voting: how important it is to vote, and the lengths they would go to make their vote. Already differences appeared – those students who had visualised themselves voting from a third-person perspective displayed a stronger pro-voting mindset.

But most vitally, 95 of the participants were followed up a few weeks later (an equal proportion from each of the visualisation conditions), and 90 per cent of the participants who'd imagined themselves voting from a third-person perspective reported that they had indeed gone on to vote, compared with just 72 per cent of the first-person perspective participants – a statistically significant difference.

Department of 'Who knew?'


This one is about Pythagoras:

... I can with confidence say to readers of this essay: most of what you believe, or think you know, about Pythagoras is fiction, much of it deliberately contrived. Did he discover the geometrical theorem that bears his name? No. Did he ponder the harmony of the spheres? Certainly not: celestial spheres were first excogitated decades or more after Pythagoras’ death. Does he even deserve credit for his most famous accomplishment, analysing the mathematical ratios that structure musical concordances? Possibly, but there is little reason to believe the stories about his being the first to discover them, and compelling reason not to believe the oft-told story about how he did it. Allegedly, as he was passing a smithy, he heard that the sounds made by the hammers exemplified the intervals of fourth, fifth and octave, so he measured their weights and found their ratios to be respectively 4:3, 3:2, 2:1. Unfortunately for this anecdote, recently rehashed in the article on Pythagoras in Grove Music Online, the sounds made by a blow do not vary proportionately with the weight of the instrument used.

Freaky note from a student


This is what the recipient of the note had to say:

... [T]his student finished the course fully five months ago. The assignment was due seven months ago. She didn’t take an extension or explain why it wasn’t done; she didn’t question the grade in December. I had forgotten she ever existed.

I am… I don’t know what I am. Baffled? Horrified? Insulted?

So, what did the student say in that note?

Link via Kieran Healy, who calls it a 'hall of fame note'.

Wednesday, May 09, 2007

Intellectual property


James Surowiecky has an excellent article on how the US uses its trade treaties with other countries to force stronger IP laws down their throats. Among other things, he argues for a search for the right balance in IP rules (implying that the American rules are flawed):

Intellectual-property rules are clearly necessary to spur innovation: if every invention could be stolen, or every new drug immediately copied, few people would invest in innovation. But too much protection can strangle competition and can limit what economists call “incremental innovation”— innovations that build, in some way, on others. It also encourages companies to use patents as tools to keep competitors from entering new markets. Finally, it limits consumers’ access to valuable new products: without patents, we wouldn’t have many new drugs, but patents also drive prices of new drugs too high for many people in developing countries. The trick is to find the right balance, insuring that entrepreneurs and inventors get sufficient rewards while also maximizing the well-being of consumers.

History suggests that after a certain point tougher I.P. rules yield diminishing returns. Josh Lerner, a professor at Harvard Business School, looked at a hundred and fifty years of patenting, and found that strengthening patent laws had little effect on the number of innovations within a country. And, in the U.S., stronger patent protections for things like software have had little or no effect on the amount of innovation in the field. The benefits of stronger I.P. protection are even less convincing when it comes to copyright: there’s little evidence that writers and artists are made more productive or creative by the prospect of earning profits for seventy years after they die, and the historical record suggests only a tenuous connection between stronger I.P. laws and creative output.

Phrase of the day: "Attentional Blink"


... [Let's say] pictures of a St. Bernard and a Scottish terrier are flashed before one’s eyes half a second apart, embedded in a series of 20 pictures of cats. In that sequence, most people fail to see the second dog. Their brains have “blinked.”

Scientists explain this blindness as a misallocation of attention. Things are happening too fast for the brain to detect the second stimulus. Consciousness is somehow suppressed.

But the blink is not an inevitable bottleneck, Dr. Davidson said. Most people can identify the second target some of the time. Thus it may be possible to exert some control, which need not be voluntary, over the allocation of attention.

Read Sandra Blakeslee's article describing recent research which shows that meditation "can help train attention".

Congestion pricing


This New Yorker article is quite good at explaining the concept; this Wikipedia entry is good, too. Now that I know what it is, it's clear to me that the city of Bangalore would benefit greatly from it. There is a pre-requisite, though: existence of a functional and quite extensive public transport network.

Law and Other Things


Have you checked out the excellent group blog Law and Other Things? It has some contributors whose interests and ideological persuasions are, um ..., refreshingly different.

Their posts on contentious issues such as OBC reservation end up having very interesting discussions among the contributors. It's all polite and appropriately lawyerly, but it's also clear that there are deep differences of opinion about how much of the current law on OBC reservation (in centrally funded universities) is within our Constitution. For example, can the clause about the exclusion of creamy layer (which is mandated for employment) be dispensed with when it comes to higher education?

The blog is not just about the quota issue, however. For example, V. Venkatesan has a post examining critically the tenure of President Dr. Abdul Kalam, and has some interesting things to say about the constitutional propriety of his seeking a second term.

The writing there gets a little too lawyerly sometimes [for example, "how creamy layer criterion for the purpose of 16-4 could be different from that of 15(5)"]. It would be helpful if the contributors provide links (or short explanatory phrases) for such technical terms as Article 15(5).

Monday, May 07, 2007

Biology of aging


NYTimes's Sara Davidson has a fascinating interview with Lenny Guarente of MIT and Robert Butler of the National Institute of Aging. They cover a lot of things: biological basis of aging, calorie-restricted diet, Alzheimer's disease, philosophical issues, etc. And, oh, they discuss marriage too:

What about the institution of marriage? If you’re going to live to 100 and get married at 22 or 25. ...

BUTLER: Oh, you are evil.

Are you still going to vow “till death do us part”?

BUTLER: There’s a demographer, Peter Uhlenberg, who said that divorce is a substitute for death, because in the old days there was enough death, unfortunately, particularly of women in childbirth, that the men would remarry. Someone even calculated that marriage now lasts about as long as it did then, but it was ended then by death rather than by divorce. So maybe you’re onto something.

Clash of economists over trade policy


In all the excitement over the JEE last week, I missed the really exciting discussion that went on (and is still going on) among economist bloggers over trade policy. Harvard economist Dani Rodrik started things off with a post on trade and procedural fairness:

Economists fail to appreciate sufficiently that globalization often runs into a procedural fairness roadblock.

Imagine some change in the economy leaves Tom $3 richer and Jerry $2 poorer, and I ask you whether you approve of this change. Few economists, regardless of their political and philosophical orientation, would be able to give a straight answer without asking for more information. Is Tom richer or poorer than Jerry to begin with, and by how much? What are their respective needs and capabilities? And what exactly is the nature of the shock that created this redistribution of income? It would be one thing if Tom got richer (and made Jerry poorer) through actions that we would consider unethical or immoral; it would be another if this was the result of Tom’s hard work and Jerry’s laziness. In other words, most of us would care about the manner in which the distributional change occurred--i.e., about procedural fairness. The fact that the shock created a net gain of $1 is not enough to conclude that it is a change for the better.

The discussion thread has been picked up by several others (including top bloggers such as Greg Mankiw, Tyler Cowen and Dan Drezner), and Rodrik has been busy responding to them in his rather young blog (which is less than a month old). Start with the above link, and work your way up. There's quite a bit of interesting stuff there (but it does get a little too technical at times). In a later post, he says something that is worth keeping in mind when we read our pink papers' unqualified support for this or that policy:

The point is that unconditional supporters of free trade take a whole lot for granted. Our professional training prepares us to be analysts who can make contingent statements. Policy A is good if conditions X, Y, and Z are in place. Rule-of-thumb economists sweep all the caveats under the rug, and in the end, are not true to their training.

Clash of cultures: An American at the helm of a leading Korean institution


The American is physics Nobel winner Robert B. Laughlin. The institution is Korea Advanced Institute for Science and Technology (KAIST).

When the two were together for three years, the result was one heck of a disaster.

In an interesting, meta-cultural way, they even disagree on whether cultural clash was an issue:

Ryu Keun-chan, a member of Korea's national assembly who was involved in Kaist's oversight, cited cultural issues as a problem. Dr. Laughlin, he says, "could not communicate his ideas to students and professors."

Dr. Laughlin doesn't think that cultural issues played much of a role during his tenure. "I find that when Koreans bring up those subjects they're mostly trying to deflect the conversation away from the issues they really care about -- money and job security -- because talking about them in public is taboo."

The link to the WSJ article comes via Doug Natelson who adds an interesting perspective:

To be fair to Bob, the leaders of KAIST were crazy to hire him - all issues of personality clashes aside, he'd never managed a group of more than a handful of people, let alone an enormous research institution with a complex bureaucracy, large staff, and huge budget. Surprise: a Nobel prize in physics doesn't automatically imply success in extremely sophisticated management problems. It's also entirely possible that his assigned task was essentially impossible by design. An interesting read, anyway.

The ugly face of AIIMS


Caste discrimination.

A committee formed by the Central Government documents the terrible acts of discrimination endured by students belonging to Dalit and tribal communities. The perpetrators include both faculty and fellow students.

The HIndu also carried a report yesterday about the Committee's findings, but didn't try to do any reporting on its own. Today, it reported on conflicting reactions from AIIMS faculty. Predictably, one group -- the AIIMS Faculty Association --- has called some of the findings (its representative calls them 'allegations') "absurd and baseless". More ominously, this group has chosen to question the credibility of the committee members by calling them "known associates" of the Union Health and Family Welfare Minister!

I'm willing to concede that the committee may have overstated its findings due to a possible bias in its choice of people it interviewed. However, even if the situation in AIIMS is just 10 percent as bad as the committee says it is, you can't escape the conclusion that it's still horribly ugly.

But, thankfully, the Telegraph goes further. It complements the Committee's findings with its own reports, and claims two things:

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had personally intervened to set up the three-member committee, headed by University Grants Commission chairman Sukhdeo Thorat, after this newspaper reported the campus discrimination.

and

Daily life at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences resembles that in the country’s feudal outbacks and Apartheid-era South Africa, a government committee has discovered, confirming findings reported by The Telegraph. [emphasis added]

I am not able to locate Telegraph's original report, which it says the committee's findings have 'confirmed'. Does anyone know when it was published?

* * *

Thanks to reader Yogesh for the e-mail alert.

Sunday, May 06, 2007

Words of the day: osculum, basium, savium


Mr. Ahmadinejad’s was a classic osculum. Mr. Gere’s was probably an osculum playfully masquerading as a basium that, unfortunately for Mr. Gere, may have looked a little too much like a savium on TV.

From this story by Paul Vitello about the many cultural meanings of a kiss -- particularly one done (implemented? carried out? executed? planted?) in public. Among other things, we learn that:

The earliest written record of humans’ kissing appears in Vedic Sanskrit texts — in India — from around 1500 B.C., where certain passages refer to lovers “setting mouth to mouth,” according to Mr. Bryant.

Lungi ...


Been poking around Kamat's Potpourri, and discovered The Lungi Page. Here's a snippet from a poem from that page:

Ready for Cricket when I fold you in half,
Ready as rope when I twist you in pleats
ready as bed when I'm struck at fairs
you become a shawl when I forget to be modest.

The trousers are no good!

While on lungis, check out this undated (and timeless?!) dance video on Gawker's blog. And back on Kamat's site, there is a special page dedicated to Ancient Brassieres, and another one on Indian Loin Cloth.