Google reveals plans for new health database

Yesterday, Google laid out plans for one of its most anticipated new services, a digital health records system meant to give users more control over their personal healthcare.

Read story in the FT here.

Obamonomics

We've had Reagonomics and Bushonomics - based on profligacy to a large extent. I don't think many people use the phrase Clintonomics, but this was essentially a bout of recticude in between the aforementioned governments.

Now Dan Ariely thinks Barack Obama may be the presidential candidate to appreciate behavioural economics. Apparently he has already used it on his campaign trail. You can hear Dan describe this on YouTube on this link.

Stickk.com

"When two tubby graduate economics students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology decided to lose some weight, they employed the profit motive to help them succeed. Dean Karlan promised to pay John Romalis $10,000 if he did not lose 38lb (17kg) by an agreed date".

An article in The Economist describes how Prof. Karlan (now slim and at Yale University) launched stickK.com, a company based on using behavioural economics to let one's good self triumph over one's bad self.

How To Beat Insomnia

"Forget counting sheep or popping pills, a team of Dutch researchers have reported the profound sleep-inducing effect of a warming body-suit".

Article from BPS Research Digest

Reading Group

In the last reading group we went through

Suicide and the Economy:

(i) the Ecological Fallacy is something that needs to be guarded against in explaining regional rates. See the work below by Gary King

http://gking.harvard.edu/projects/ecinf.shtml

(ii) the role of psychological services and policy reforms in generating suicide rates was discussed

Welfare and Well-Being

(i) We talked about child consumption and well-being. Time inconsistency is one reason why children's consumption may not be a valid marker of well-being. We discussed issues with constructing measures of child well-being. We also discussed the determinants of child well-being including the extent to which child well-being is determined by factors outside of the market.

(ii) I mentioned the work of Partha Dasgupta who writes on the limitations of traditional economic welfare analysis

http://www.econ.cam.ac.uk/faculty/dasgupta/

(iii) Amartya Sen's critique of welfare economics was also discussed.

(iv) The idea of multiple identities over time is discussed in the philosophical work of Derek Parfit. The article "reasons and persons" is worth reading if you are interested in these types of argument

http://users.ox.ac.uk/~ball2568/parfit/bibliography.htm

Life Expectancy and Wealth

(i) David Cutler's paper on the role of medical advances in improving life expectancy is below

http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/cutler/files/cutler_miller_cities.pdf

(ii) Some other papers of Cutlers and of David Canning well worth reading in this vein include

"The Determinants of Mortality", Journal of Economic Perspectives, 20(3), Summer 2006, 97-120 (with Angus Deaton and Adriana Lleras-Muney).

David Canning, 2007. "Valuing Lives Equally and Welfare Economics," PGDA Working Papers 2707, Program on the Global Demography of Aging, revised

(iii) it would be incredibly interesting to examine the long run determinants of mortality in Ireland (say from 1860 to 2005). One project i am work on here does this for infant mortality but doing it more generally for life expectancy would also be fascinating.

RWJF Launches Commission to Look Beyond Medical Care System to Improve the Health of All Americans

(from the rwjf alerts)



New Report Finds That Poor, Minority and Middle-Class Americans With Less Education Live Sicker and Die Younger

Coinciding with the release of a new report describing the current health profile of Americans—looking specifically at how education, income, race and ethnicity play a role in Americans' health—the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has announced the formation of a new commission to identify and promote workable, evidence-based solutions to address the many non-medical influences on health and improve opportunities for all Americans to make healthier choices.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Commission to Build a Healthier America will investigate how factors beyond the medical care system affect personal behavioral choices. Mark McClellan, M.D., Ph.D., former FDA commissioner and administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, and Alice Rivlin, Ph.D., former director of the Office of Management and Budget, will co-chair the commission.

"The evidence tells us that whether or not a person gets sick in the first place often has little to do with their health care," said RWJF President and CEO Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, M.D., M.B.A. "A far greater determinant of a person's health is the relationship between how we live our lives and the surrounding economic, social and physical environment. This commission will take a fresh look at factors such as these to identify innovative ways to make ours a healthier nation."

Learn more.
Read the Overcoming Obstacles to Health report.



You have received this e-mail alert because you have elected to receive information from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation on one or more of the following program areas: Addiction Prevention & Treatment, Building Human Capital, Childhood Obesity, Disparities, Health Insurance Coverage, Nursing, Long-Term Care, Pioneer, Public Health, Quality Health Care, Tobacco Use & Exposure, Vulnerable Populations.

taxonomy of behavioural interventions

this recent paper is a useful taxonomy of behavioural interventions used for behavioural change

here

American Time Use Survey Threatened

As part of his Fiscal Year 2009 budget submission, President Bush has proposed eliminating the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) to help cover the rising costs of the Current Population Survey.

If you visit www.SAVEATUS.org, you will see a letter posted by Daniel Hamermesh, Alan Krueger and others - that individual researchers may sign in support of maintaining the ATUS.

According to the website: "In the view of many social scientists, (the ATUS) is the most important new data initiative begun by the U.S. government in at least 35 years". If you are interested in this issue, I encourage you to view the letter and sign.

Time Use and Well-Being

"National Time Accounting is a way of measuring society's well-being, based on time use. Its explicit form is the U-index, for “unpleasant” or “undesirable”, which measures the proportion of time an individual spends in an unpleasant state".

This is according to a new IZA paper by Blanchflower. The paper reviews cross-country evidence on happiness and life satisfaction and considers whether these data will be replaced by the U-index.

Saturation in Social Networking?

According to the Harvard Complexity and Social Networks Blog (see our new list of "Other Blogs of Interest"), today's online version of The Economist includes an interesting story about membership growth of social networking sites. It appears that growth rates for Facebook have peaked. Bebo and MySpace hit their user peaks in mid-2007.

Day Reconstruction

Visit www.rte.ie/graphicdesign/ to see a day reconstruction of sorts. Unfortunately there are no url directories, so click on "work" then "recent work" then "not enough hours".

Mind, Brain, Behaviour

The Mind/Brain/Behavior Interfaculty Initiative (MBB) at Harvard is an interdisciplinary community of investigators whose research aims to "elucidate the structure, function, evolution, development, and pathology of the nervous system in relation to human behavior and mental life".

http://mbb.harvard.edu/

The Google Health Map

Google.org, the management arm of Google's philanthropic foundation, are sponsoring a $450,000 multi-year grant to conduct in-depth research into the use of online data sources for disease surveillance. This is the project website, worth a look.

behaviour seminar series rest of the term

In reverse order, below is the more or less final version of the rest of the years behaviour seminar series. Some really great work.


Tuesday 29th April 2008: Sandra Cavaco (Paris II & Aarhus Business School): "Identifying Causal Paths Between Health and Socio-economic Status: Evidence from European Older Workforce surveys"

Tuesday 15th April 2008: Alois Stutzer (University of Basel). "Blood Donations and Incentives: Evidence from a Field Experiment"

Tuesday 8th April 2008: Pierre Dubois (Toulouse) “"TBA."”

Tuesday 1st April 2008: Gabriella Conti (Essex) "The Dynamics of Cognitive Development"

Tuesday 25th March 2008: Anne Carlos (UCD) ""A knavish people..:London Jewry and the Stockmarket during the South SeaBubble.""

Tuesday 18th March 2008: Vani Booroah (QUB). "Comparing Levels of Job Satisfaction in the Countries of Western and Eastern Europe"

Tuesday 11th March 2008: Marcel Zeelenberg (Tilburg University). "TBA"

Monday 10th March 2008, 4pm: Christopher Ruhm (UNCG): "Age, Socioeconomic Status and Obesity Growth"

Tuesday, 26th February 2008: Rowena Pecchenino (NUI Maynooth). "Becoming All You Can Be: Behavioral Change, Socially-Referenced Preferences, and Spiritual Growth"

Being Poor Can Kill You

In an article in yesterday's Irish Times, Vincent Browne states that more than 5,000 people die in Ireland every year because of inequality and deprivation.

This is "14 times the number of people killed on the roads, about 2,000 more per year than were killed in the entire 25 years of the conflict in Northern Ireland; nearly 75 times the number of murders".

The director of the Health Research Board, Ruth Barrington, has made the calculation that about 5,400-plus premature deaths occur every year.

Launch of All-Ireland Health Data Inventory

The All-Ireland Health Data Inventory was developed by Ireland and Northern Ireland’s Population Health Observatory and launched in November 2007. There are over 150 data sources from both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland listed here.

DETERMINE

DETERMINE is a 3 year project co-ordinated by EuroHealthNet which brings together 26 European countries to analyse the socioeconomic determinants (SED) of health inequalities and introduce innovative pilot projects. Further information is available at:

www.health-inequalities.eu

Behavioural Economics Reading Group

We had the first behavioural econ reading group the other day and it is now scheduled for Wednesdays at 6pm so feel free to come to the odd one. To be clear, this is different to the seminar series and journal club and designed to help out three of the MA Students and to talk about some ideas

We went through a good few things the other day:

(i) The first main topic was on determinants of suicide. The papers below are worth reading including the Ruhm paper on recessions which is a good methodology for this type of work.

Brainerd, E. "Economic Reform and Mortality in the Former Soviet Union: A Study of the Suicide Epidemic in the 1990s." European Economic Review, 2001, 45, pp. 1007-19.

Hamermesh, D. and Soss, N. "An Economic Theory of Suicide." The Journal of Political Economy, 1974, 82(1), pp. 83-98.

Hamermesh, D. S. "The Economics of Black Suicide." Southern Economic Journal, 1974, 41(2), pp. 188-99.

Minoiu, C. and Andres, A. R. "The Effect of Public Spending on Suicide: Evidence from U.S. State Data." The Journal of Socio-Economics, 2007, Article in press.

Ruhm, C. J. "Are Recessions Good for Your Health?" The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2000, 115(2), pp. 617-50.

(ii) We also talked about the determinants of well-being

On the data side, looking at the websites for the European Social Survey and SHARE would be useful.

See below for some information on the DRM including links to existing papers

here

(iii) In terms of useful tasks to talk about for testing some of the theories of decision making we discussed, it would be wortwhile spending some time looking at the Iowa Gambling Task, the Monty Hall problem and the Wason Selection task.

(iv) Some literature on neuroeconomics and discounting is provided below. Also, we talked about Contingent Valuation Methodology as a useful way of examining theories of decision making albeit in a hypothetical context. A nice overview of CVM is linked below

http://geary.ucd.ie/neuroeconomics/

http://www.ecu.edu/econ/wp/00/ecu0008.pdf

Beggs disputes "borrowing boom" theory

According to John Beggs, chief economist at AIB Global Treasury, the growth of retail spending in the past few years has been well exceeded by the growth in people's earnings.

He says this disproves the widely held view that spending has been funded by borrowing.

Read the story here.

New Paper: 'The Economics and Psychology of Personality Traits'

Lex Borghans, Angela Lee Duckworth, James J. Heckman and Bas ter Weel are forthcoming in the Journal of Human Resources, 2008, 43 (4) with the paper that Heckman presented in Geary on the 2nd November last year: “Economics and Psychology of Personality”.

'The Economics and Psychology of Personality Traits' is now available as an IZA working paper; the abstract is below:

Abstract:

This paper explores the interface between personality psychology and economics. We examine the predictive power of personality and the stability of personality traits over the life cycle. We develop simple analytical frameworks for interpreting the evidence in personality psychology and suggest promising avenues for future research.

optimal control of urges

Emre Ozdenoren, Stephen Salant, Dan Silverman
NBER Working Paper No. 12278Issued in June 2006NBER Program(s): HC PE
The NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health provides summaries of publications like this. You can sign up to receive the NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health by email.
---- Abstract -----
Common intuition and experimental psychology suggest that the ability to self-regulate, willpower, is a depletable resource. We investigate the behavior of an agent who optimally consumes a cake (or paycheck or workload) over time and who recognizes that restraining his consumption too much would exhaust his willpower and leave him unable to manage his consumption. Unlike prior models of self-control, a model with willpower depletion can explain the increasing consumption sequences observable in high frequency data (and corresponding laboratory findings), the apparent links between unrelated self-control behaviors, and the altered economic behavior following imposition of cognitive loads. At the same time, willpower depletion provides an alternative explanation for a taste for commitment, intertemporal preference reversals, and procrastination. Accounting for willpower depletion thus provides a more unified theory of time preference. It also provides an explanation for anomalous intratemporal behaviors such as low correlations between health-related activities.
This paper is available as PDF 4.0+ (472 K

Health Insurance - What Is It Good For?

Conor Pope writes in today's Irish Times:

"Many of the 1.5 million people who pay an average of around €700 each year in health insurance premiums hope that... they will be protected ... The reality is that ... once you enter the system through an A&E unit - which is how around 70 per cent of people are admitted - you are placed in whatever type of bed is available, if there is a bed available".

The story is here on the Times website.

NESC Publications

a lot of useful historical information has come online about the irish economy recently. for example, JSSISI volumes going back to the 1800s are now downloadable as pdfs in trinity

http://www.tara.tcd.ie/handle/2262/1080

also, the nesc has links to publications going back to the 1970s. Some of these are really interesting from the point of view of seeing what economic analysts were thinking at, what in retrospect, were incredibly turbulent times for the country

http://www.nesc.ie/publications.asp

Science 15 February 2008

Steven Levitt and John List discuss the emergence of behavioural economics in the current issue of Science, and make some arguments for why "field" research may be more appropiate for testing theories, compared to efforts in the "lab".

Trading The Future at Intrade.Com

On the excellent Complexity and Social Networks Blog at Harvard, David Lazer describes how intrade.com anticipates electoral outcomes a few hours before they are publicly known. See his post here.

Google Trends and Quantcast Web User Demographics

Google Trends (http://www.google.com/trends) is a useful resource. Courtesy of Google Labs (http://www.google.com/labs/), it can be used to look at data on search volume and news reference volume. Spikes in search volume are linked to major news stories making this a very interesting time series observatory.

This chart showing search volume for Osama Bin Laden reveals that web user's propensity to search for information about Bin Laden is highly correlated with major news stories about the Taliban leader.

Another interesting data source is Quantcast - a new media measurement service that lets advertisers view audience reports on millions of websites. Website profiles include information on gender, age, household income, ethnicity, head of household education and the presence of children in the household.

See the profile of Google.com here for an example. More detailed demographic breakdowns are available here.

Another blow for the academic publishing industry?

Gary King describes on the IQSS blog how the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University have created an open access policy in relation to any research produced by faculty members.

See link here.

Stop using Orwellian language in education

an interesting debate triggered at a recent teaching conference in the uk is linked below. it does frustrate me also that we've internalised so much non-sense language when talking about research and teaching though, on the flip side, nothing is more frustrating than seeing people badly manage scarce resources allocated to teaching and research so there is a balancing act with respect to use of management concepts applied to research and teaching. most management books even would advise that you shouldnt lose sight of what you actually set up the management structure for in the first place.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/7247160.stm

Nber working paper on maternal care

Michael Baker, Kevin Milligan
NBER Working Paper No. 13826Issued in February 2008NBER Program(s): CH LS
---- Abstract -----
We study the impact of maternal care on early child development using an expansion in Canadian maternity leave entitlements. Following the leave expansion, mothers who took leave spent between 48 and 58 percent more time not working in the first year of their children's lives. We find that this extra maternal care primarily crowded out home-based care by unlicensed non-relatives, and replaced mostly full-time work. However, the estimates suggest a weak impact of the increase in maternal care on indicators of child development. Measures of family environment and motor-social development showed changes very close to zero. Some improvements in temperament were observed but occurred both for treated and untreated children.
This paper is available as PDF 4.0+ (291 K) or via email.
Machine-readable bibliographic record - MARC, RIS, BibTeX

Revealed Preferences and Risk Perception

In 1969 (see Science reference below), Chauncey Starr used a revealed preference approach to find out what risks are considered acceptable by society. He assumed that society had reached equilibrium in its judgment of risks, so whatever risk levels actually existed in society were acceptable. His major finding was that people will accept risks 1,000 greater if they are voluntary (e.g. driving a car) than if they are involuntary (e.g. a nuclear disaster).

"Social Benefits versus Technological Risks" in Science Vol. 165, No. 3899. (Sep. 19, 1969), pp. 1232-1238

Who's Afraid of A Big Bad Debt?

Irish people have the fewest number of credit cards in Europe, new figures show.

The average Irish adult carries 1.2 payment cards in their wallet and just 0.7 credit cards, figures compiled by market analysts Datamonitor found.

This compares to Britain where adults carry an average of 2.8 payment cards which include debit cards - more than any other country in Europe.

More here.

neuroeconomics

A couple of people were asking me for some useful papers on neuroeconomics

Below is the website we have been maintaining for the neuroeconomics project. it contains lots of reading lists in key areas of neuroecon.

http://geary.ucd.ie/neuroeconomics/

Behavioural Economics in Song

We've covered behavioural economics in policy settings and time now for finding it in song. i was thinking of this and my favourite behavioural economics riddle is the chorus of neil young's "Tell me Why" - a meditation on commitment devices and life cycle development of preferences; a true classic

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUHyKC4x-q0

genetics and economics

there is currently a large amount of interest in the interaction between economics and genetics, particularly epigenetics. I thought id give a brief whistle stop tour starting with a Science review (a little out of date)

http://www.sciencemag.org/feature/plus/sfg/resources/res_epigenetics.dtl

the equivalent Nature review is available here

http://www.nature.com/nrg/focus/epigenetics/index.html

One of the most interesting papers in the literature is below which addresses most of the major issues for economists such as timing, reversability etc,.

http://njc.rockefeller.edu/pdf2/topic%202meaney-epigenetic.pdf

An example of a paper in economics that seeks to use genes as health instruments are below.

http://ideas.repec.org/p/qed/wpaper/1045.html

Another example below

http://web.econ.uic.edu/health/health.11072007.pdf

A recent contribution (from that book on biosurveys that i was talking about is below)

Benjamin, Daniel J., Christopher F. Chabris, Edward L. Glaeser, Vilmundur Gudnason, Tamara B. Harris, David I. Laibson, Lenore Launer, and Shaun Purcell (2007) "Genoeconomics." in eds. Maxine Weinstein, James W. Vaupel, and Kenneth W. Wachter, Biosocial Surveys, National Research Council of the National Academies

we have spoken a lot about James Heckman's work (not technically genetics but related to this issue a lot)

James J. Heckman, 2007. "The Economics, Technology and Neuroscience of Human Capability Formation," NBER Working Papers 13195, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
James J. Heckman & Dimitriy V. Masterov, 2007. "The Productivity Argument for Investing in Young Children," NBER Working Papers 13016, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc
Eric I. Knudsen & James J. Heckman & Judy L. Cameron & Jack P. Shonkoff, 2006. "Economic, Neurobiological and Behavioral Perspectives on Building America's Future Workforce," NBER Working Papers 12298, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)Other versions

Students to get grants based on own income

A major shake-up in third-level maintenance grant rules will allow students qualify for State financial support to pay their way through college on the basis of their own, rather than their parents', income.

However, proof will be required to establish that a student is financially independent and not claiming a grant while, for instance, their parents pay the rent.

This measure is part of the new Student Support Bill, which will finally bring some efficiency into the Irish higher education grants system, and which also outlines penalties of imprisonment and heavy fines for students who claim grants dishonestly.

Read more about the financial independence rules here.

Revealed Preferences for Websites

UCD is the most popular university website in the Republic of Ireland, and the 71st most popular website in the country, according to Alexa.com, the web information company. UCD's position in the Irish website rankings can be viewed here.

More statistics about the UCD website can be found here. Ucd.ie has a traffic rank of: 29,142. The alexa scale goes from 1 to 1,000,000, where 1 is the biggest website in the world (yahoo.com) and 1,000,000 is very very small. Google.ie is currently at 726 - the most popular website in Ireland. I thought that Google would also have been the most popular website in the world.

"Rank" is a measure derived by combining page views and numbers of users, called "reach". An interesting source of data provided by Alexa.com is the traffic history of websites - which is essentially a time series of revealed preferences. The traffic history of any site can be charted just like one would chart series in a data provider such as Datastream. It is possible to chart the measures of rank, views and reach for multiple websites, over various temporal intervals.

It is also possible to examine the statistic of "other sites that link to the site (in question)", which might go someway to explaining traffic history if one could compile a large amount of this data.

The traffic history of the UCD website can be viewed here; below is shown traffic history for the site, measured by "reach" (number of users) over the last three years. There seems to be a dip in volume in late December/early January each year, when the university sector is on holidays. If one examines page views, there is a very substantial spike in the first half of 2005 - I wonder if this was a time when the UCD website was re-developed?




The Alexa Blog can be accessed here: http://awis.blogspot.com/

New strategy document for third-level sector under way...

... to be prepared by the Department of Education and the Higher Education Authority. Preliminary work on the paper - A National Strategy for Higher Education - has begun and submissions will be invited from education partners, business, employers and other interested parties.

The Department of Education wants to focus on the immediate challenges facing the sector, particularly the huge projected increase in student numbers over the next decade.

Read more here.

Why The Size of Peer Effects in College Should Vary by Field of Study

Residential Peer Effects in Higher Education: Does the Field of Study Matter?

(IZA WP, 2008-01)

Brunello, Giorgio (University of Padova)
De Paola, Maria (University of Calabria)
Scoppa, Vincenzo (University of Calabria)

Exploiting the random assignment of first year students to college accommodation, they find evidence that peer effects are positive and statistically significant for students enrolled in the fields of Engineering, Maths and Natural Sciences – which are expected to generate higher earnings after college – and not different from zero for students enrolled in the Humanities, Social and Life Sciences, which give access to lower payoffs.

More Behavioural Economics of Fundraising

Matching and Challenge Gifts to Charity: Evidence from Laboratory and Natural Field Experiments

(IZA WP, 2008-01)

Rondeau, Daniel (University of Victoria), List, John A. (University of Maryland)

This study examines the effectiveness of "matching gifts" and "challenge gifts", two popular strategies used to secure a portion of the $200 billion annually given to charities (n the USA). The aiuthors find evidence that challenge gifts positively influence contributions in the field, but matching gifts do not.

Crossing the thin line.. The Global Coherence Project- Genius or Madness?!?

"the GCMS will be measuring the "brain waves and heart rhythm" of the planet in real time. It will explore whether the earth’s magnetic field is influenced by collective human emotional resonance resulting from heart-directed intention, or in response to major events, and whether the emotional energy generated by the collective intuition about major future events is measurable in this field."

The researchers believe they have evidence which shows that collective human intuition was picked up by electronic devices in the hours preceding 9/11 presumably due to changes in magnetic brain and heart waves. This was followed by a seemingly unprecedented change in the detected signals in the hours after 9/11. If this explanation of the findings is true (very big if as it's probably picking up telecommunications activity or some other confounding factor) then this may be a very sensitive terror alert system and an objective way to measure the collective knowledge of all humans!

GCMS project

bio-social surveys

just reading a book here on Biosocial surveys that should be on the bedside of people working in the interaction between social science and biology

http://books.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=11939

the authors make a strong case for the integration of bio-markers in to social surveys and there are some excellent chapters on the various issues involved

Some highlights worth checking out

- discussion of bio-markers in the Longitudinal Study of Ageing Danish Twins
- the Danish 1905 study
- a chapter on the Whitehall II and ELSA studies
- a chapter on the Taiwan bio-marker study
- a chapter on bio-markers in the hrs

there are some nice discussions of ethical and practical issues in collecting bio-markers. there are also dedicated chapters on nutrigenomics and epigenomics and specific discussions of how genetic data can be used in IV formats in econometrics. there is also a really useful discussion of the main candidate genes that are useful to screen for in social surveys. there are also extremely useful discussions of the main uses of blood bio-markers in social surveys. it gives some very condensed and useful descriptions of why specific markers such as Interleukin 6 levels are interesting and what they are used for.

in short, this covers most of the things that people working in this area would be interested in. it should be read in conjunction with a previous volume called Cells and Surveys.

Given where i am (and the fact that i havent left my hotel room yet as i am piling through STATA do-files to get ready for the week) i thought i would take a moment to remind people of the classic result on the focusing illusion

Schkade, D., & Kahneman, D. (1998). Does living in California make people happy? A focusing illusion in judgments of life satisfaction.

"Abstract—Large samples of students in the Midwest and in Southern
California rated satisfaction with life overall as well as with various
aspects of life, for either themselves or someone similar to themselves
in one of the two regions. Self-reported overall life satisfaction was the
same in both regions, but participants who rated a similar other
expected Californians to be more satisfied than Midwesterners.
Climate-related aspects were rated as more important for someone
living in another region than for someone in one’s own region. Mediation
analyses showed that satisfaction with climate and with cultural
opportunities accounted for the higher overall life satisfaction predicted
for Californians. Judgments of life satisfaction in a different
location are susceptible to a focusing illusion: Easily observed and
distinctive differences between locations are given more weight in
such judgments than they will have in reality."

my heart swells with patriotic pride

One unlovely facet of Irish life is how obsessed we can be with how other nations perceive us. However there's an upside to this and I guess we can all be proud of how our plastic bag levy is, as I type, the most emailed story on the New York Times website

A different view of commuting

This map includes hot spots where you can reach the London city centre in a
quicker than expected time.

http://www.mysociety.org/2007/more-travel-maps/

An addition to the concept is to compare different variables. For instance, time taken to travel via different transport options. This map shows areas where public transport is quicker than travel by car.

http://www.mysociety.org/2007/more-travel-maps/EH12QL_driving_800.png

Using a bike seems to be the optimum choice if you live within reasonable distance to the city centre:

http://www.mysociety.org/2007/more-travel-maps/SW1P4DR_20km_cycling_800.png


Starting to conceptualise space in terms of travel time, emotion, and pollution variables using graphing and weather systems type visualisations is something that is being pushed forward by a small group of programmers and artists resulting in alternative city maps..

One useful function is that they have modeled house prices and commuting time in a visualisation programme meaning you can see the optimum areas in terms of these two variables..

http://www.mysociety.org/2007/more-travel-maps/

Interactive map

http://www.tom-carden.co.uk/p5/tube_map_travel_times/applet/

Emotional Geographies

"Bringing together well-established interdisciplinary scholars, this volume presents a range of studies of fundamentally important questions of emotion. It contains three interlinked sections which elaborate key intersections between emotions and spatial concepts, on which each chapter offers a particular take informed by substantive research."

The book

The intro...

Innovative methodology: Taking field potentials into the field (with pigeons)

The Journal of Neurophysiology runs an innovative methodology section which does exactly what it says on the tin, my favourite article so far: Miniature Neurologgers for Flying Pigeons: Multichannel EEG and Action and Field Potentials in Combination With GPS Recording

Making this methodology work with humans is the focus of much Intel supported neuro research in Trinity and UCD at the moment...

The Behavioural Economics of Fundraising

Uri Gneezy, John A List (2006)
Putting Behavioral Economics to Work: Testing for Gift Exchange in Labor Markets Using Field Experiments
Econometrica 74 (5), 1365–1384.

"Our field evidence suggests that worker effort in the first few hours on the job is considerably higher in the "gift" treatment than in the "nongift" treatment. After the initial few hours, however, no difference in outcomes is observed, and overall the gift treatment yielded inferior aggregate outcomes for the employer... With the same budget we would have ... raised more money ... using the market-clearing wage rather than by trying to induce greater effort with a gift of higher wages".

Domain Specific Risk Preferences

Preference Heterogeneity and Insurance Markets: Explaining a Puzzle of Insurance

David M. Cutler, Amy Finkelstein, Kathleen McGarry (2008)

http://papers.nber.org/papers/W13746

We present empirical evidence in five difference insurance markets in the United States ... we show that individuals who engage in risky behavior or who do not engage in risk reducing behavior are systematically less likely to hold (a range of insurance products). (However), we show that the sign of this preference effect differs across markets, tending to induce lower risk individuals to purchase insurance in some of these markets, but higher risk individuals to purchase insurance in others.

A Course in Behavioural Economics

Joe Pomykala, Ph.D.
Department of Economics
Towson University

Course under construction