intel healthcare

worth having a look at some of the things on this site. interesting applications

http://www.intel.com/healthcare/index.htm?iid=homepage+tech_health

Strange Maps

The strange maps blog - - is one of the most addictive sites I've come across in a while. Of particular interest to bloggers and blog readers might be :


US States renamed for countries with similar GDPs

and the follow up (or rather follow-ups)

and the Subway Map of Web Trends

Anger as gaping gulf in wealth revealed

The front page of today's Irish Independent is running with the story: "Anger as gaping gulf in wealth revealed".

The story says there is "a new report from the Bank of Ireland (which) outlined how we (Ireland) now boast the second highest rate of millionaires in the world. Around 33,000 people are worth more than €1m - even when the value of their home is excluded. That is a jump of 10pc in the space of just one year".

The BOI report that the story refers to is "The Wealth of the Nation 2006", which has been reviewed in Geary by the financial decision-making team. David McWilliams mentioned this report in one of his articles last week: "Rich man, poor man divide merely breeds seething society of discontent". This is were the attention on the figures may be stemming from.

The figures are quite stark, as reported in another of today's articles in the Irish Independent: "The top one per cent of the population own 20pc of the wealth. The next four per cent have another 20pc. That leaves 60pc for the remaining 95pc".

With such massive wealth inequality, it may not come as a much of a surprise that, last week, the Irish Independent reported that most Irish people are living beyond their means. See story here. These findings come from the preliminary results for the long awaited Household Budget Survey 2004-05. The Irish Independent says that: "70pc of all households cannot cover their weekly expenditure from their regular income, with only the richest families bucking the trend".

But anyone feeling the pinch should rest assured, as the highest paid banker in the country says that he is "feeling your pain".

What Parts of Microeconomics Are Actually Relevant to Human Behaviour?

Dave mentioned in his last post that when preferences are revealed in the private market (under certain conditions) they provide ample information about willingness to pay, and that when this ocurs, a willingness to pay survey isn't really required.

My first thought was that the willingness to pay survey about car-parking spaces was probably a waste of money. But I'm also quite interested in the conditions for when revealed preferences are deemed to be satisfactorily derived from consumer choice.

Consumer choice is something I was reading about over the weekend, and it strikes me as the element of microeconomic theory that I will get most value out of studying over the next few years. All of the applications that I am being exposed to at the moment revolve around Industrial Organisation, and I must admit that the pricing strategies of commercial enterprises is something that won't continue to engage my intellectual interest to a large extent.

I actually fear that the study of graduate microeconomics currently features a growing emphasis on the field of industrial organisation. Even after the theory of the firm is done, most parts of game theory and information economics are about firm-level behaviour. Certainly, game theory can be said to be at it most realistic when applied to firm behaviour, but it must be remembered that some of us don't want to be specialists in firm-level behaviour.

Consumer choice (or "individual choice" as I am currently preferring to call it) and household behaviour are elements that I hope will be emphasised (or at least equally represented) when I take micro studies at PhD level. I really feel strongly that there is minimal benefit from studying firm theory at the highest level, when one is researching individual and household behaviour. Indeed, one might suggest that in years to come there might be a fragmentation of micro at PhD level, firstly into mezzo (or firm level) micro for graduate students researching Ind Org and Int Trade. And secondly into micro-micro (or individual level micro) for graduate students researching human behaviour, aswell as risk and welfare.

One might suggest that graduate students need to know all the theory before they choose a topic, but surely its reasonable to suggest that by the time a grad student starts year 2 of their studies, they should have an inkling of whether they'll look at firm-level or individual-level behaviour? A bit far-reaching I know, but I think its an important debate.

People predict payment for parking better than payment for pandas

A Willingness To Pay survey for parking spaces (see a post by Martin July 25th) would be expected to perform reasonably well since respondents are likely to be familiar with parking spots; their benefits, which accrue mainly to the consumer; and, since there is already a private market for parking spots, to hold an informed reference price as a guideline. But when these conditions hold a willingness to pay survey isn't really required - preferences revealed in the private market provide ample information to infer the market price for parking spots.

The unique contribution that Willingness to Pay surveys (and other stated preference techniques such as Willingness to Accept and Choice Experiments) make is in putting a money figure on passive-use values, such as the value I receive from the knowledge that there are 1600 pandas in the wild. The fact that the World Wildlife Federation receives significant donations to protect these 1600 bears, which most of us will never get a chance to see, reveals that existence values are manifest as real and important economic preferences. One indication of how great existence values for pandas are is the elaborate nature of the resources that are deployed to attract donations: http://www.chase.com/ccp/index.jsp?pg_name=ccpmapp/card_acquisitions/unsolicited/page/PFSCreditCardDetails&sourcecode=6W72&mkid=6W5L) Policy makers cannot afford to ignore passive-use values.

The trouble is that there is no means of validating the findings of stated preference valuations. We know that the existence values of pandas are at least the amount that has been donated to preserve them, but there are certainly free-riders who derive a benefit from pandas but have never paid to preserve them. Likewise, there are certainly those who use stated preference questionnaires as an opportunity to show their support for pandas by exaggerating the benefit they derive e.g. stating WTP as infinite; or $1,000,000; or possibly $100 - we just don't know.

Because, by definition, existence values are not related to use, they cannot have a direct material impact on the way people live their lives. Pandas becoming extinct would only change my world by making me feel bad. It should come as no surprise then that Stated Preference techniques are predominantly employed in domains where emotions play a very strong role e.g. health, cultural, and environmental economics. Kahneman, Ritov and Schkade (1999) http://www.springerlink.com/content/u232267854514u6m/
argue thoroughly convincingly that dollar responses to questions of existence value are simply attitude expressions applied to some arbitrary money scale. The result they infer from this is that responses are extremely fragile and should not be inferred as a meaningful reflection of the benefit respondents receive.

grand challenges in global health

well worth a read for those of you interested in development
http://www.gcgh.org/default.htm

ps am i becoming more blind or does this thing require you to enter the word verification at least twice before letting you in?!

bio-behavioural links

some more good bio-behavioural links (thanks Ken for some suggestions)


http://biomed.bsd.uchicago.edu/common/faculty/lingen.html

http://www.spc.uchicago.edu/coa/index.php

http://biomarkers.uchicago.edu/index.htm

http://www.cshl.edu/ (have a look at Zachary Meinen's work)

http://www.dnalc.org/home.html (nice learning site)

http://www.fnih.org/Biomarkers%20Consortium/Biomarkers_home.shtml

biomarkers at northwestern

this looks good. we've missed this years one but one of us should go next year. Michael, keep an eye out for deadline

http://www.northwestern.edu/ipr/c2s/events/biomarkers.html

Is Obesity Socially Contagious?

A recent story in the Irish Independent says that "if you want to stay thin, don't choose fat friends".

Apparently researchers have found that obesity is socially contagious - it spreads from person to person within the same social group.

A study of 12,000 people whose height and weight were measured repeatedly over 32 years has revealed that when one person gained weight those around them tended to gain weight, too.

Nicholas Christakis, professor of healthcare policy at Harvard Medical School and co-author of the study, said: "What appears to be happening is that a person becoming obese most likely causes a change of norms about what counts as an appropriate body size. "People come to think that it is OK to be bigger since those around them are bigger, and this sensibility spreads."

This is an angle on the issue of obesity that might interest those in the qualitative lab at Geary, and I think Michael will be interested in this research too.

Unexpectedly, the greatest quantifiable effect on the likelihood of individual obesity did not come members of the same family (who shared the same genes) or household, but from friends.

This seems to be provide evidence for a mechanism where peer effects influence health behaviour, without the nuance about how family backround can affect peer choice, as mentioned at the end of the previous post.

IPPR Links Breakdown of Social Capital in Britain with Negative Peer Effects on Youth Behaviour

British teenagers are the worst behaved in Europe, a report by the Institute for Public Poicy Research has revealed. See here.

British teenagers are more likely to binge-drink, take drugs, have sex at a young age and start fights according to the report. The "think-tank closely linked to Labour" says the collapse of family life is at least partly to blame.

It is suggested that "youngsters follow the example set by their friends rather than guidance from their parents". This is an interesting reference point for some of the developing work on youth health risk behaviour in Geary, which tentatively suggests that young people choose their peers based on family background factors, and that this might be the underlying mechanism behind how peer effects influence youth health risk behaviour.

EUA President calls for universities to focus on the labour market outcomes of their graduates

The current edition of the EUA newsletter tells how earlier this month, Professor Georg Winckler, President of EUA, was asked to give a presentation to the UK Parliament’s Education and Skills Committee on the key international perspectives for higher education.

The Committee was meeting just days after new Prime Minister Gordon Brown had announced a major shake up of the education arena in the UK. One of his first moves in office was the creation of a new Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills that would look to make Britain one of the best places in the world for science, research and innovation.

In his presentation, Professor Winckler described how the creation of a knowledge society would put pressure on higher education institutions across Europe, particularly through increased participation rates and more lifelong learning. In this context, he underlined that universities would need to care more about the employability of their graduates.

Student Preferences and Drop-Out From UK Degree Courses

A story in a local London paper (page 3 of today's London Lite) says that a report by the UK Parliament's watchdog, the National Audit Office, reveals that UK professors are changing tutorial times to the afternoon in a bid to stop UK students quitting UK degree courses. The reports says that 28,000 full-time students drop-out in the UK each year, costing the taxpayer £300 million.

Is this the correct way to tackle the fundamental reasons behind drop-out? Or are other issues such as financial support being overlooked in the debate (see a previous post on the reform of UK student loans).

More abstractly, is students do have a preference for a lie-in, should institutions pander to student preferences in order to tackle drop-out?

Reforms to Student Loans in the UK

A story on page 2 of Monday's Finacial Times says that wealthier families will benefit from the UK government's reforms to student loans, but that the poorest households will gain nothing. The changes will give more financial support to students from families with incomes above $17,500 - but not to those below that level. However, the poorest students still get the highest support. A report out on Monday from IFS was cited, authored by Haroon Chowdry and Emla Fitzsimons. "It would probably be better to spend (the) money trying to improve school results" said Chowdry. Dr. Fitzsimons gave a seminar in Geary earlier this year.

Willingness to Pay for Parking Spaces

A story on page 4 of yesterday's Financial Times says that on average, Britons are prepared to pay £4,800 to secure a parking space with their residence. Seven out of ten would pay some amount. One per cent claim they would be willing to pay up to £30,000 for the parking space.

I wonder if the survey question differentiated between survey respondents' abstract willingness to pay and survey respondents' willingness to pay given that they had the ability to pay. This is something that Dave and Liam have probably looked at a fair bit.

Computing Emotion

In a market place where efficient cognition and critical thinking skills are prized values across the gamut of professions one may wonder why governments and economists are concerned about the well-being of the population for anything more than humanitarian reasons. The main reason, from a psychological perspective, is that cognition is deeply affected by emotion: from attention, to evaluatation and preference, to decision-making, goal generation, planning, motivation and learning. There have been several theories of emotion from William James who pointed to the role of bodily changes in the production of emotion to other approaches focusing on the role of appraisal in the creation of emotion. As usual the closest approximation to the truth seems to be an intermediate point where both the body and the brain together create the experience of emotion. The structure of the nervous systems into it's parasympathetic and sympathetic aspects would support this contention and a main point of actual synergy and of analysis is the heart. So it turns out that the millions of crooning love songs were right and the heart can tell us quite a lot about emotion, as can other measures of physiology such as skin conductance, temperature and also body movements. So the question arises as to if it is possible that a computer can analyse your physiological response to a stimulus and tell you what you're feeling. Why would we want to do this? Well then an intelligent computer that understood a users emotional state could, in combination with other data, learn user preferences, and respond accordingly. Imagined uses could be the perception of driver fatigue and advising a driver accordingly, or to manipulate the drivers mood through adjustment of the music in the car (if angry then classical music- or would this make you worse!?). In the work place, similarly frustation could be monitored and adequate times for 'time-outs' could be advised. On the positive side, biofeedback could help workers achieve so-called 'flow' states. Nasoz et al. take the first step towards such 'futuristic' devices in calculating alrogithms based on physiological data (heart rate, galvanic skin response, body temperature) to predict six emotional states (sadness, anger, surprise, fear, frustration, amusement) with an accuracy of 60-70%. Considering that people are often quite limited in their own capacity to identify what emotion they are experiencing (emotion differentiation) this is quite an encouraging result though it is achieved in a tight experimental paradigm. It also opens up the question as to who knows better what you're feeling, you or the computer!

read more...

procrastination

An old book but nonetheless worth reading for people looking at student decision making and related areas ; "Procrastination and Task Avoidance: Theory, Research and Treatment" edited by Ferrari, Johnson and McCowan. Sarah got it from the UCD library. It is particularly strong on procrastination in academic settings and potential interventions including discussions of measures and ethics of intervention. Worth comparing this with the later economics literature

Ken Says Twenty-Somethings Aren't Spendthrifts

Kenneth McKenzie, a psychologist with UCD's Geary Institute, says that Irish twenty-somethings are less "overboard" with money than people think. This comes in the wake of survey research by Bank of Ireland that Irish 20-somethings are financially savvy, self-reliant and well versed in the habit of saving.

Read about the survey here in today's Irish Times.

The Disutility of U-Turns

On Friday afternoon, Martin and I were leaving his office with every intention of leaving the building. A relatively straightforward task, you might think. It was complicated by the fact that I had to pick up my lunchbox from the fridge in the common room. He turned right, I turned left. An embarrassed silence fell on the corridor. Though I knew his way to be the shorter route, I was loath to use it on the grounds that it involves passing our final destination (the building’s exit) on the way to fetch my lunchbox. On principle, I find making a U-turn abhorant. Anecdotal evidence suggests I’m not alone in this. I can’t find any academic evidence to support it though. Travel costs would give a very straightforward measure of people’s willingness to pay to avoid the cognitive dissonance experienced in making a physical u-turn. How would everyone feel about being strapped up to a pedometer for a few months?

Socioxensor- putting your lab in the participant's pocket

Measuring user behaviour and experience in context and analyzing the networks of relationships and actions between people and places over time is likely to be a very fertile area of research for the future especially in regard to well-being research. The Xensor group have been developing a system for the collection of such data:

Abstract
Mobile phones tend to go wherever people go. SocioXensor is an extensible toolkit that exploits this, in combination with the capabilities of current smartphones. It can capture objective data about human behavior and the context in which this takes place (e.g., location, proximity and activities such as communication), objective data about application usage and subjective data about user experience (e.g., needs, frustrations, and satisfaction). SocioXensor is a research instrument that allows social scientists to gain a detailed and dynamic insight into social phenomena and their relations. In turn, these outcomes can inform the design of mobile context-sensitive collaborative system.

What's your lab doing in my pocket

The Xensor group

In The Days of Bulls, Bears and Tigers, Do The Elephants Know Best?

Previous discussions on this blog have addressed the issue of whether the economy is being talked down, and this is something that has been getting a lot of media attention lately. Obviously, the most desirable course of action is for commentators to simply "tell it like it is", rather than talking the economy down, or up, for that matter. Another concern is that homo psychologus should not over-react to news, be it good or bad. Writing this weekend about the Irish property market, Lisney economist John McCartney says that "despite all the changes of the last century, one weakness of the human condition - our tendency to overreact to both good and bad news - remains intact". ('Gloom merchants endanger property market'). One thing that worries me, though doesn't bear cause for outright panic is the news that the average cost of mortgage repayments has doubled since this time last year (Department of Environment). I am however quite cautious, and if my macroeconomics is worth any salt, its a case of considering whether there's more interest rate hikes on the way, rather than wondering if there'll be any reprieve. Today's generation of first-time buyers should be grateful for the current weakness of the US dollar.

An article by David McWilliams in the current edition of the Sunday Business Post is titled "A Country in Denial". McWilliams suggests "if it is possible to talk the economy down, it must be equally possible to talk it up. But who was talking it up, panicking thousands of young workers to buy commuter homes for 14 times their salaries? Who terrified thousands to get into life-long debts with their 100 per cent mortgages over 35 years? The people responsible for this are those who ''talked up'' the economy precisely when it was overheating three or four years ago".

McWilliams finishes the article by using the theories of psychiatrists to give a new twist to the behavioural economics of the property market. He describes the five stages of dealing with death in the observations of bereavement discusssed by Elizabeth Kubler Ross in her 1967 book 'On Death and Dying'. The five stages are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. McWilliams suggests that "the five stages also provide an interesting framework to analyse how societies react when they experience a significant fall in house prices and the consequent loss of wealth". He contends that we are in the denial phase, and I suspect he is right given some quite worrying news-stories that also feature in the current edition of the Sunday Business Post.

Kathleen Barrington, in the same edition as McWilliams, says that "Most analysts have agreed that the intensifying of competition (in the mortgage market) has driven down the price of mortgages, and resulted in margin attrition for banks selling mortgages. That should be great news for consumers. The problem, however, is that the cheaper and more available mortgages become, the greater the supply of money in the market. And the greater the supply of money being made available to buy houses, the higher that house prices go". ('How Competition in the Mortgage Market Pushed Up House Prices'). Also: "The fact that first-time buyers were seizing on 100 per cent mortgages in large numbers goes some way towards explaining the anomaly that house prices rose by 9 per cent last year, even though many observers had expected house prices would fall as interest rates rose. Commenting on the figures, housing minister Batt O'Keeffe made the very good point that 'mortgage lending is essential to the housing market, but recent experience shows how lending can add to market cycles'. The pity is that his warning has come too late for many of the country's young borrowers". And: "The scale of the contribution made by lenders to the housing bubble can be gleaned from a revealing analysis by Goodbody Stockbrokers, published last month. Economist Dermot O'Leary hinted that financial innovation was responsible for some of the sharp rise in house prices over the last ten years. He found that house prices rose by 21 per cent a year in the period from 1997 to 2007, a mounting to a total increase of 211.3 per cent over the decade.
A significant part of the increase - 3.5 per cent a year, or 35 per cent over the decade - could be attributed to the extension of the average mortgage term from 25 to 35 years".

An interesting debate might emerge as to whether the 35 per cent increase in house prices attributed to financial innovation is what the market needs to lose in order to return to equilibrium. Some folks would make the reasonable argument that innovation is to be welcomed, but some innovations are quite dangerous, say the atom bomb, or bio-chemical weapons. It could very well be the case that the government has allowed the financial institutions to provide too much access to the punchbowl. The ECB sets our interest rates, but IFSRA still has a strong influence over various aspects of liquidity in the Irish housing market. If the government believes so strongly about the wanton attention-seeking of the 'down-talkers', why don't they put money into schemes that would demonstrate their convictions? For example, what about a government-sponsored scheme that would compensate any first-time buyer for any fall in the value of a mortgage-financed house purchase? The Department of Finance should bear the risk if Bertie wants to rebuke the doomsayers.

I wonder what the Department will make of the news this weekend that the 10,000 first-time buyers who bought homes over the past year are now experiencing negative equity. ('Negative Equity Affects 10,000'). This is certainly bad news and it does ehance my proclivities to consider that there might be panic at the disco. "Fears that the house price index has yet to reflect the full extent of house price falls were exacerbated recently when one of the country's top mortgage lenders, Permanent TSB, said it would lend 20 per cent less to new borrowers this year than last... AIB chief economist John Beggs said recently that house prices were likely to fall further over the remainder of this year". (Barrington, SBP). What worries me most is that a financial institution is now looking less favourably on the use of a house as collateral for a long-term mortgage. So surely there is at least a risk that property faces a substantial drop in value? The days of the 100 per cent mortgage might be numbered, but the damage may already be done if the effect of financial innovation has been to create artificial market liquidity - the sorcerer's artifice, perhaps?

In terms of trying to tell this situation like it is, I think that some insight might come from observing what behaviour ia actually taking place, and subsequently attempting a sensible interpretation. In the days of bulls, bears and tigers, it might be the elephants who know best. While the market doesn't always get it right, I'm very conscious of developments in the ISEQ over the last week. "Last week saw the Iseq take a fresh hit as heavyweight institutional investors, most of them based overseas, decided once again it was time to offload holdings in Irish banks and construction companies with most to lose from the incipient property slowdown". ('ISEQ In The Firing Line'). The market for stocks is much more liquid than the market for properties and no-one can ignore the fact that all of the major Irish stocks in the financial sector lost between 3 and 4 per cent last week.

Furthermore, DIY and building materials group Grafton fell 5 per cent, despite an upbeat trading statement that had good news on the six months to June. "But the most significant damage was done to those closest to the Irish housing market, where investors offloaded as they continued to worry about future sentiment towards property. Cavan building materials group Kingspan was punished for its exposure to housing through its insulated panels and timber-framed homes. Its share price tumbled 10 per cent on the week at one point. The market had equally bad news for house builder McInerney, whose share price continued a dismal run by falling 10 per cent since the start of last week". Nor was last week just a blip. All of the companies mentioned above are, on average, down 20 per cent in terms of stock market value, since last February. McInerney is 39 per cent lower than its level of five months ago and the combined fall in the value of Grafton and Kingspan alone has been in the region of €1.5 billion.

It used to be a case of working the 'nine-to-five', but in the words of McWilliams, many will now work the "100pc, 35-year mortgage dilemma. This scandal condemns an entire generation to debt. These 30-year-olds are the backbone of our society, they are the engine of the economy and yet, this State has lumbered them with a bill which only enriches our banks and our landowners... The crux of the issue is that the banks are now out of control - in many cases due to forces beyond the control of any one bank in particular. Someone has to come in and discipline them... Everyone needs discipline. Sometimes, even in this era of high-faluting finance, the old rules are still the best ones" ('Having Us In Their Debt'). Well, this disco might certainly be more enjoyable if they would now take the punchbowl away. Or maybe... its come to the stage where nobody wants the punchbowl anymore - are the newest kids on the block causing all that noise in the rental market?

The Potterian Economy

"In this paper, we analyze the economic structure of the world of wizards as depicted in the Harry Potter books, which we term Potterian economy, and offer an economist’s perspective on it. We look at the economic structure of the life of Harry Potter and his co-actors as an economic model that governs the social organization of their economic activities. Our goal is to study and understand the internal consistency of the Potterian economic model and explore the relationships between its assumptions and the situation in the real world, as reflected in the Potterian model. To accomplish this, we focus on a textbook version of Solow’s economic growth model, which economists often use for studying the process of nations’ income determination and which serves as a standard benchmark for comparative economic growth studies. The analysis of the Potterian economy reveals that the Potterian model fits quite well the predictions of the economic growth model. We discuss potential implications of this finding, and explore the link between Potterian economic structure and performance in a broader context by discussing the link between economic institutions and economic outcomes".

Here.

mit reality mining

another very interesting site from the mit centre - a potential journal club

http://reality.media.mit.edu/

E-Rationality Lab MIT

would be worth talking about some of the work going on here at some stage

http://erationality.media.mit.edu/

Debate on Economics in the New York Times

In yesterday's edition (the Wednesday July 11, 2007) of the New York Times there is an article on 'In Economics Departments, A Growing Will to Debate Fundamental
Assumptions'.

"...in recent months, economists have engaged in an impassioned debate over the way their specialty is taught in universities around the country, and practiced in Washington, questioning the profession’s most cherished ideas about not interfering in the economy.

“There is much too much ideology,” said Alan S. Blinder, a professor at Princeton and a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Economics, he added, is “often a triumph of theory over fact.” Mr. Blinder helped kindle the discussion by publicly warning in speeches and articles this year that as many as 30 million to 40 million Americans could lose their jobs to lower-paid workers abroad. Just by raising doubts about the unmitigated benefits of free trade, he made headlines and had colleagues rubbing their eyes in astonishment...

...others point out that the increasing popularity in the mainstream of behavioral economics, which looks at people’s complex psychological reactions to events, has offered a fuller picture of how consumers operate in the marketplace".

Here's the New York Times article.

New Figures on Pensions Released

The annual report from the Irish Pensions Board shows that 55% of workers have a pension and that figure rises to 61% for the age group 30 to 65.

http://www.rte.ie/news/2007/0711/pensions.html?rss

the global market for skilled workers

Becker and Posner's current post relates to the global market for skilled workers. A nice synopsis of where we are

"The fundamental cause of the great emphasis being placed on talent is that production in modern economies is much more knowledge-intensive than production was in the past. This is because modern technologies and capital require abundant supplies of skilled workers to be effective. The competition for talent has raised earnings of skilled workers relative to other workers, and has led to an international search for the best and brightest."

http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/

Shades of the DRM

"We humans suffer from an advanced case of self-delusion, according to Alex Pentland. We like to see ourselves as free-willed, conscious beings, self-governing and set apart from other animals by our capacity for reasoning. Yet watch people closely, says Pentland, and you find that we are more instinctual and a lot more like other creatures than we care to think.

At the Media Lab of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Pentland and his colleagues are doing just that. By fitting custom-made electronic "black boxes" to students, researchers and visiting executives at MIT, they can monitor people going about their day - working, meeting, eating, going out and sleeping. The devices record where the wearers go and how fast, their tone of voice, and subtle details about their body language. What they have revealed is that a good 90 per cent of what most people do in any day follows routines so complete that their behaviour can be predicted with just a few mathematical equations.

These findings are part of a quiet explosion of psychological work that is casting human behaviour in a weirdly mechanical light. "It's difficult for people to accept," says psychologist John Bargh of Yale University, "but most of a person's everyday life is determined not by their conscious intentions and deliberate choices, but by mental processes put into motion by the environment."

In other words, most of the time we are simply reacting instinctively to the world around us. This may sound disheartening if you see yourself as rational master of your destiny, but breaking down this illusion could be the key to bringing the science of human behaviour back in line with other studies of animal behaviour.

Over the past decade, one key insight that has emerged in psychology is that seemingly irrelevant details within a person's environment can strongly influence their behaviour".

Article in the New Scientist

Tories Push Social Capital Agenda in Britain

I don't normally turn on Sky News when I am eating my toast, but this morning I did and was gripped by the lauch of a new report by former Conservative Leader and current Tory MP Iain Duncan Smith, which was called "Breakdown Britain". No other media seem to be picking up on this except Sky News, and Rupert Murdoch's station certainly had the story blown up.

The Breakdown Britain report includes nearly 200 recommendations aimed at tackling the root causes of debt, addiction or third dependency, and dysfunctional family life. Mr Smith pinpointed alcohol as a road to hard drugs and family breakdown. As a result he called for higher taxes on alcohol to pay for strict new drug treatments. Other suggested policies include offering disaffected youths concert tickets as a reward for doing community work.

Economists will be interested in the report's claim that social breakdown costs the British taxpayer £102bn a year. See more here.

What surprised me most was the nature of the coverage given to this report this morning - it looked and felt like it was the launch of a Governmnet report. It could be the case that the Tories have stolen the thunder from under Gordon Brown's feet.
The phrase "Bingo Alone" springs to mind.

Anti-Smoking Pill May Help Curb Drinking

CEMMAP MICROECONOMETRICS COURSES

These are really worth checking out for the economists in the group

http://cemmap.ifs.org.uk/courses.php

Mindless Eating

There are numerous studies addressing the question of how aware people are of the food-related decisions they make and how the environment influences these decisions. This study is nice in its simplicity and the magnitude of the effect found. Wansink & Sobal (2007) show that people underestimated the number of food-related decisions they made—by an average of more than 221 decisions! Participants overate 31% more food as a result of having been given an exaggerated environmental cue (such as a large bowl). Of those studied, 21% denied having eaten more, 75% attributed it to other reasons (such as hunger), and only 4% attributed it to the cue. The authors suggest that we are aware of only a fraction of the food decisions we make and that we are either unaware of how our environment influences these decisions or we are unwilling to acknowledge it.

Self-Belief, Reference-Dependent Expectations and Labour Market Outcomes

A recent IZA paper, "Subjective Beliefs and Schooling Decisions", by Belzil (May 2007), examines sequential schooling decisions made by agents who are endowed with subjective beliefs about their own ability. I find Belzil's approach very interesting; it seems that there is a literature developing on this issue - people my remember that I mentioned Oxoby (2007), on the blog before. In his paper, “Skill Uncertainty and Social Inference” (IZA WP-2567), he suggests that individuals without familiar reference points for academic achievement may under-invest in their human capital due to uncertain expectations about their academic ability. And I suggested that evidence for this topic could possibly pave the way for behavioural interventions to raise expectations about academic ability. There is a further potential link between the literature on this topic and the work that Heckman is doing on personality metrics, such as his enquiries into how self-esteem affects labour market outcomes.

The Economics of Workaholism

A workaholic is a compulsive worker, someone who is prone to believing in a destructive illusion that s/he can conquer the challenges of life simply by putting in more time and effort at work. Working hard could be likened to other addictions like gambling in that there is a substance (adrenalin from work) and a process (the actual practice of working). It's estimated that about 30% of people could be classified as workaholics and unsurprisingly those who spend more hours on the job or earn more money are more likely to be workaholics. You might think- so what's the problem? Well the drawback is that people may be literally killing themselves through overwork. In Japan they even have a term for death from overwork- karoshi! Five percent of deaths from cardiovascular disease and cerebrovascular disease amongst those of the typical working age range have been attributed to workaholism. There are also several other problems such as the effect of parental overworking on children and overworking has been shown to be related to poorer perceptions of ones spouse and marriage though cause and effect could be an issue here!

The authors argue that for workaholics current work increases the desire (marginal utility) for future work (known as “reinforcement”), lowers the utility from a given amount of working (“tolerance”), and imposes future costs in terms of health, and other, problems. If workaholics either fail to recognize these effects, or do recognize them but have time-inconsistent preferences and imperfect self-control, then government intervention arguably can increase their utility as measured consistently.

This is definitely an interesting and understudied area, though when you come across a paper on workaholism at eleven on a Sunday night you have to wonder is someone trying to tell you something!

WE SHOULD NOT HAVE WORKED ON THIS PAPER

Materialism and Satisfaction with Over-All Quality Of Life

Previous research has shown that materialism relates negatively to satisfaction with many life domains. This study shows that overall materialism and its happiness dimension were consistently negatively related to all eight measures of QOL in a diverse sample of US respondents.

read more...

The Scarecrow and the Tinman: The Viscissitudes of Human Sympathy and Caring

There have been several mismatches of late between donations and the conditions and needs of different crises across the globe. The prime example of this being the 9/11 tragedy (Spence, 2006). The authors of this integrative and interesting paper propose a theoretical framework to answer the question- "Why do some victims elicit outpourings of sympathy whilst others do not?" in relation to individual decision-making and public policy.

Loewenstein & Small (2007)

Seminars for Week Beginning 9th July

Two Seminars Next Week.

Dr. Orla Doyle of the Geary Institute will give an overview of a new intervention programme for early childhood. Dr. Hannah Hale also of Geary will talk about the development of masculine identities in the British military.


July 12th, 12pm. Seminar Room Geary Institute
Speaker: Dr. Orla Doyle
Title: “Designing and Evaluating Social Experiments: An early childhood intervention”

Speaker Biography:

Dr. Orla Doyle is a senior researcher at the Centre for Human Development and Public Policy in the UCD Geary Institute. She received her Ph.D. from Trinity College Dublin in 2005 and holds a B.A. in economics and political science (TCD). Her research interests include applied microeconometrics, empirical labour economics, family economics, voting behaviour and evaluation methods.

July 13th, UCD Geary Institute Seminar Room, 2pm.
Speaker: Dr Hannah Hale
Title: 'Interviewing soldiers: The development of military masculinities through symbolic resources'

Speaker Biography:
Hannah Hale is a Social Psychologist with a specialist interest in Cultural Psychology. Her most recent research focuses on the social representations of military masculinities while her overall research interests include self, culture and identity, masculinities, transitions, health and qualitative research methods. She has a B.A. in Psychology and an MSc in Psychology and Culture from Luton University, and has finished a PhD in Social Psychology from the University of Cambridge.

The evolution of foresight: What is mental time travel and is it unique to humans?

In a dynamic world, mechanisms allowing prediction of future situations can provide a selective advantage. The authors argue that the emergence of mental time travel in evolution was a crucial step towards our current success.

read more...

David Grissmer's 1994 report on "Student Achievement and the Changing American Family."

"Grissmer used an unusually creative combination of NELS, NLSY, and NAEP data to disaggregate the influence of demographic from other factors in changes in student achievement. It is remarkable that there has been little interest in following-up on this research, to attempt further to isolate the demographic factors and to specifically identify the residuals which might have included school as well as social policy changes. One suspects that the reason there has been so little interest in follow-up is that researchers are mostly, unlike Grissmer, unwilling to focus on "big ideas" and instead are focused on localizable and short-term policy interventions".

Comes from here.

Temporal Discounting Predicts Risk Sensitivity in Rhesus Macaques

Summary

Humans and animals tend both to avoid uncertainty and to prefer immediate over future rewards. The comorbidity of psychiatric disorders such as impulsivity, problem gambling, and addiction suggests that a common mechanism may underlie risk sensitivity and temporal discounting. Nonetheless, the precise relationship between these two traits remains largely unknown. To examine whether risk sensitivity and temporal discounting reflect a common process, we recorded choices made by two rhesus macaques in a visual gambling task while we varied the delay between trials. We found that preference for the risky option declined with increasing delay between sequential choices in the task, even when all other task parameters were held constant. These results were quantitatively predicted by a model that assumed that the subjective expected utility of the risky option is evaluated based on the expected time of the larger payoff. The importance of the larger payoff in this model suggests that the salience of larger payoffs played a critical role in determining the value of risky options. These data suggest that risk sensitivity may be a product of other cognitive processes, and specifically that myopia for the future and the salience of jackpots control the propensity to take a gamble.

read more...

commentry on Hayden and Platt (2007): Don't risk a delay: risk-preference as a function of patience and self-control?

An Instrument for PhD Outcomes?

Abstract: "Each year, graduate students entering the academic job market worry that they will suffer due to uncontrollable macroeconomic risk. Given the importance of general human capital and the relative ease of publicly observing productivity in academia, one might expect unlucky graduating cohorts' long-term labor market outcomes to resemble those who graduate in favorable climates. In this paper, I analyze the relationship between macroeconomic conditions at graduation, initial job placement, and long-term outcomes for PhD economists from seven programs. Using macro conditions as an instrument for initial placement, I show a causal effect of quality and type of initial job on long-term job characteristics. I also show that better initial placement increases research productivity, which helps to limit the set of economic models that can explain the effect of initial placement on long-term jobs".

Here's a link to the 2006 NBER paper by Paul Oyer: http://papers.nber.org/papers/W12157

The R Book

The high-level language of R is recognized as one of the most powerful and flexible statistical software environments, and is rapidly becoming the standard setting for quantitative analysis, statistics and graphics. R provides free access to unrivalled coverage and cutting-edge applications, enabling the user to apply numerous statistical methods ranging from simple regression to time series or multivariate analysis.

Building on the success of the author’s bestselling Statistics: An Introduction using R, The R Book is packed with worked examples, providing an all inclusive guide to R, ideal for novice and more accomplished users alike. The book assumes no background in statistics or computing and introduces the advantages of the R environment, detailing its applications in a wide range of disciplines.

Read more about this book, and follow links to excerpts, here.

Shock Tactics to Encourage Safe Driving Behaviour

Festival goers taking their cars to Oxegen this weekend will be greeted by a somewhat shocking scene when they arrive.

Kildare Fire Brigade are planning to place two crashed cars in the main car park of the event in an attempt to encourage safe driving to and from the site.

The display will also feature pictures of casualties and slogans aimed at discouraging drink and drug driving.

More here.

Public unaware what constitutes binge drinking

The alcohol industry says a survey it commissioned has found that many Irish people are unaware of what constitutes binge drinking.

The official definition is five alcoholic units for women and seven for men.

This equates to two-and-a-half pints of beer for women and three-and-a-half for men.

However, the survey for the Drinks Industry Group of Ireland found that 27% of Irish adults assume it means consuming more than 10 alcoholic drinks in one session.

Another 27% think it means consuming between seven and nine drinks, while 24% think it means five or six drinks.

Here.

Unified by Evolution?: The beliefs, preferences, and constraints (BPC) model

The main article in this years Behavioural and Brain Sciences by Herbert Gintis proposes that "if decision theory and game theory are broadened to encompass other-regarding preferences, they become capable of modeling all aspects of decision making, including those normally considered “psychological,” “sociological,” or “anthropological.” The mind as a decision-making organ will then become the organizing principle of psychology."

"Summing up a quarter century of psychological research in 1995, Paul Slovic asserted, accurately I believe, that “it is now generally recognized among psychologists that utility maximization provides only limited insight into the processes by which decisions are made” (Slovic 1995, p. 365). “People are not logical,” psychologists are fond of saying, “they are psychological.” In this paper I argue precisely the opposite position: people are generally rational, though subject to performance errors. Psychology could be the centerpiece of the human behavioral sciences by providing a general model of decision making for the other behavioral disciplines to use and elaborate for their various purposes. The field fails to hold this position because its core theories do not take the fitness-enhancing character of the human brain, its capacity to make effective decisions in complex environments, as central."

A framework for the unification of the behavioural sciences

Defying the Laws of Physics

An Irish company will today reveal controversial technology that allegedly defies basic laws of physics to produce free power.

Steorn, which is based in Dublin, claims to have discovered a method of creating clean, constant energy, which it claims could end the global fuel crisis.

Called Orbo technology, it is based on the interaction of magnetic fields and has yet to be conclusively proven.

Last year, Steorn placed an advertisement in the Economist magazine and challenged the world's scientists to test its claims.

See more here.

Free Fees For Part-Time Students

The Government has announced a new initiative to alleviate fees for part-time students in Third Level public institutions who have not previously pursued a Third Level qualification.

This initiative is "part of the Government's strategy to improve the skills of the workface and boost competitiveness". It will be interesting to see if the number of part-time students at third level increases in coming years.

Maybe some school-leavers will now decide to attend third-level courses on a part-time basis instead of enrolling in full-time courses (and working in paid employment on a part-time basis)?

The Government has also commissioned research into the impact on the economy of employment agencies.

The Psychological Consequences of Money

"I will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, walk with you, and so following; but I will not eat with you, drink with you, nor pray with you." - Shylock- The Merchant of Venice.

This is a comforting vein of research for those of us of relatively limited finances! Vohs et al. show that merely thinking about money can push people into a narrowly individualistic frame of mind. I'm sure it doesn't apply to economists though!

Abstract:
Money has been said to change people’s motivation (mainly for the better) and their behavior toward others (mainly for the worse). The results of nine experiments suggest that money brings about a self-sufficient orientation in which people prefer to be free of dependency and dependents. Reminders of money, relative to nonmoney reminders, led to reduced requests for help and reduced helpfulness toward others. Relative to participants primed with neutral concepts, participants primed with money preferred to play alone, work alone, and put more physical distance between themselves and a new acquaintance.

Burgoyne and Lea discuss the findings and quote as an example, the figure that across 15 different cultures, “financial success” as a goal was in direct opposition to goals concerning “community” (although less so for poorer cultures). They finish by reflecting on the relationship between materialism and well-being: "being overly preoccupied with money, especially for the “wrong” reasons is characteristic of those who score highly on a measure of materialism, and such people tend to be less happy than others. Given the centrality of money in modern societies, gaining a more comprehensive understanding of the causes and effects of behavior toward money is clearly not just a scientific project; it also has a contribution to make toward understanding, and perhaps enhancing, human happiness and well-being."

Third of Americans Have Alcohol Problems at Some Point

"At some time in a person's life, 30 percent of the population in the United States will develop alcohol dependence or alcohol abuse," said lead researcher Bridget F. Grant, chief of the Laboratory of Epidemiology and Biometry at the U.S. National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.

Here.

Class divide apparent in professional jobs

A study commissioned by the Higher Education Authority has reportedly highlighted how a class divide in education is permeating into the professions.

Reports this morning say the research has found that jobs in law, medicine, architecture, dentistry and pharmacy are more likely to be filled by people from the higher social classes.

It has also found that just over 15% of students from skilled and unskilled working families achieved five or more honours in the Leaving Cert, compared to well over 40% of students from professional backgrounds.

I looked around the HEA website and saw nothing about this study, but a news-story about it can be read here.

Increase in Grant Levels and Grant Eligibility

"A total of over 56,000 students who receive a maintenance grant to attend higher and further education will see this grant increase by 10%, or twice the rate of inflation, from September next... the annual income thresholds to qualify for student grants will also be increased with effect from the coming September. The annual income thresholds for the ordinary rate of maintenance grant are being increased by 3.5%".

See here.

These are positive developments but one can't help wonder if the increases are arbitrary. It can be argued that the increase in the grant (by 10%) is twice the rate of inflation and that this is very positive. However, the actual level of the grant is only €3,420, and this to me seems to be set quite arbitrarily.

There is research that estimates what students’ monthly expenditure actually amounts to; it averages at €698 per month according to Darmody et al (Eurostudent 2005). This approximates to €8,000 euro every year, or €32,000 over the course of a four-year degree. Expenditure is highest on accommodation, so considerable savings could be made if the higher education participant stays in the family household. However, the biggest indirect cost of participating in higher education is incurred by every student; this is the “opportunity cost” of earnings that must be sacrificed from engaging in full-time employment.

With all this in mind, annual maintenance support of €3,420 seems very low, and falls very far below half of the amount (€8,000) that students are estimated to need for their annual expenditure. If policy in this arena was to be informed by research and to avoid accusations of arbitrariness, surely the annual maintenance level should be set at €8,000? Admittedly, this is the average level of annual expenditure, but it might prove too unwieldy to discriminate between students who have expenditure on accomodation and those who don't.

In relation to the annual income thresholds for grant eligibility, the same survey research by Darmody et al (Eurostudent 2005) estimates that 35 per cent of higher education students receive a grant from the Irish state; and they say this is in line with national figures from the Department of Education and Science for the year they examined. They also estimate that over 40 per cent of students do not receive any direct (or indirect) financial support from their families (Darmody et al, 2005). This suggests that five per cent of higher education students receive no financial support from their families, and that the same students also fail to qualify for financial support maintenance.

From the findings in the paragraph above, there is no clear implication for criticism on the increase in the annual income thresholds by 3.5%. Though one implication for what might be done (given the findings in the paragraph above) would be to estimate the average family income from Eurostudent 2005 for the "60 percent" of students who do receive financial support from their families. And use this as a sensible income threshold when determining grant eligibility?

EpiData FreeWare

I just found a link to EpiData Software, available for free from www.epidata.dk

Its potentially quite useful - there are two downloads available: EpiData Entry and EpiData Analysis

From what I've read so far its essentially and alternative to STATA for those who might not be able to afford it. But if anyone else knows anything about it I'd be interested to hear. There's a brief outline below.

EpiData Entry is used for simple or programmed data entry and data documentation. Entry handles simple forms or related systems Optimised documentation and error detection features. E.g. double entry verification, list of ID numbers in several files, codebook overview of data, date added to backup and encryption procedures.

EpiData Analysis performs basic statistical analysis, graphs, and comprehensive data management. E.g. descriptive statistics, SPC Charts, Recoding data, label values and variables. Defining missing values.

Psychological momentum and sports "analogy?" research

I was watching Laois- Wexford in Croker yesterday and after a poor first half performance we (Laois) were trailing and needed a push to get back in the drivers seat. It was then that Joe Higgins blocked down an incoming forward catching the ball (pic is from the Longford match) in the process and passed it off to a huge roar from the crowd who were tethering on boredom up to that point. From then on it was happy days for Laois and we cruised to victory (no offence to any Wexford fans reading this!).

I started wondering was it possible that beliefs about the momentum of a team would influence how they play. It turns out there's been a bit of research realted to this, in sports and non-sports contexts and that people do perceive psychological momentum as an "extrapersonal force with which one is imbued until something causes one to lose it". Sports viewers would agree that when this momentum is lost it's difficult to get it back and that it's associated with feelings of frustration (again no offence to Wexford fans). Intrinsic to the idea of psychological momentum is the sensation of being on a roll or that the driving force of our mind is akin to the movement of a physical object. So ideas arise like that giving something more 'mass' will mean greater performance.

Keith Markman and colleagues found that akin to availability heuristics that participants conferred the team who had won their last match with greater psychological momentum and that local derby matches gave both teams more psychological momentum with a larger percieved 'mass'. Similarly, when participants were told a researcher was on a roll writing a research paper (I guess stick to what you know!) an interruption was thought of as more disruptive to her overall chances of completion than if she was working at a steady pace.

When we move forward towards a goal (or the goal) we feel a sense of exhilaration and when we are involved in the flow of an intrinsically rewarding task we feel frustration when our momentum is interrupted and this can be demotivating. When we feel we have momentum we can move easily to another task as there is a perception that this force carries over. Also research has shown that when we are confronted with uncertainty we are more likely to rely on perceptions of momentum to form our beliefs about what will happen.

So if we think about the typical situation of being on a roll in a gambling context then such naive beliefs may have detrimental effects in terms of letting a current state of psychological momentum impair your judgement in throwing good money after bad in a hand of poker or similarly trying to regain psychological momentum by playing irrationally (the momentum of the slippery slope perhaps!).

I was interested to read recently of a U-shaped curve in terms of time preferences of those living in Durban where those in very good or very bad health had high subjective discount rates. It may be pushing it to say that these people have a greater sense of psychological momentum or are chasing momentum respectively rather than the steady state individuals of middling health, but who knows. All I know is we'll need a hell of a lot of psychological momentum behind us to get over Dublin in 2 weeks time!