May will be an exciting month for me. I’ll be increasing the amount of work I post as more projects come to maturity. New and expanded topics include the mathematics of complexity and systems theory, markets as complex adaptive systems, policy work on Missouri’s earning tax, policy work on civil asset forfeiture, policy work on payday lending, policy work on comparative legal systems, sabremetrics and soccer.
One of the items not mentioned above because I wanted to mention it specifically is wine. Wine is a serious hobby of mine and this summer I hope to take the Certified Sommelier examination of the Court of Master Sommeliers. Hopefully that’ll mean a trip to someplace interesting and fun. There is also fun and very interesting work on the economics of wine that has been working its way my pile of drafts that I think will be worthwhile.
And finally, Daniel Maconald over at Imagining History has graciously invited me to begin writing in collaboration with him on economics; his initial thought was to use ‘Anti-Mankiw‘ as a starting point and see where that takes us.
Earthworms form herds and make “group decisions”, scientists have discovered.
The earthworms use touch to communicate and influence each other’s behaviour, according to research published in the journal Ethology.
By doing so the worms collectively decide to travel in the same direction as part of a single herd.
The striking behaviour, found in the earthworm Eisenia fetida, is the first time that any type of worm, or annelid, has been shown to form active herds.
“Our results modify the current view that earthworms are animals lacking in social behaviour,” says Ms Lara Zirbes, a PhD student at the University of Liege in Gembloux in Belgium.
“We can consider the earthworm behaviour as the equivalent of a herd or swarm.”
How competitive is the payday loan market? This is a question that as far as I know is unanswered. You would think that competition would stimulate innovation in the sense that as more payday lenders enter the market you would see firms starting to bundle financial products and offering lower fees or interest rates. Is this the case in Missouri or any other state? I don’t know, but it seems to me that these are all questions worth answering.
Found this while looking for phase-space diagrams:
Ice-nine (ice IX) is the low-temperature equilibrium, slightly denser, structure of ice-three (Space group P 41 21 2, cell dimensions 6.692 Å (a) and 6.715 Å (c) at 165 K and 280 MPa [385]). It is metastable in the ice-two phase space and converts to ice-two, rather than back to ice-three, on warming. The change from proton disordered is a partial process starting within ice-three that is only completed at lower temperatures, but with a first order transition near 126 K[1087]. The hydrogen bonding is mostly proton-ordered as ice-three undergoes a proton disorder-order transition to ice-nine when rapidly cooled in liquid nitrogen (77 K, so avoiding ice-two formation, see Phase Diagram); ice-three and ice-nine having identical structures apart from the proton ordering [389].
The ice-nine, described by Kurt Vonnegut in ‘Cat’s Cradle’ [83], with a freezing point well above ambient under normal atmospheric pressure is fortunately a completely fictitious material, reportedly invented by the Nobel prize winner Irving Langmuir to entertain H. G. Wells.
One of the most intellectually rewarding and challenging parts of my life has been my participation, in high school and college policy debate, first as a competitor and then a coach. Unfortunately this is an activity that is poorly understood by non-debaters because it is a hyperspecialized, academically rigorous activity. The popular impression is that people argue in some sophisticated, rhetorically eloquent format. While this is true, it is an inadequate characterization of policy debate, especially college policy debate on the NDT/CEDA circuit.
It is true that the best debaters argue in sophisticated, elegant ways. But policy debate has also evolved in some ways that make even sophisticated, eloquent argumentation inaccessible to the general population. College policy debate specifically is an activity that promotes hyper-specialization in the technical aspects of debate. Most noticeably, the existence of a stable judging pool has allowed debaters over the last 3 decades to increase their rate of delivery so as to maximize the argumentative potential of the round. Coterminously, college debate has also developed incredible intellectual diversity and any varsity level debater of merit has the ability to fluently argue a staggering amount of topics with very little in-round preparation.
What this functionally means to you is that college policy debate is an activity where competitors speak at speeds of up to 250-300 words a minute. Very few non-debaters can comprehend, let alone understand, speech at that speed. But this is only a matter of familiarity; I am told that the human brain can theoretically comprehend speech input that is twice as fast. Here is an example. This is the second speech given by a negative team (in this case, from the University of Iowa) during a debate round against an affirmative team from Harvard.
If you watched that speech without being able to distinguish more than a couple scattered words, play the video again and focus. Don’t worry about understanding initially; let your ear get attuned to the rhythm and cadence of the speaker and you’ll start being able to form a coherent impression of what he says. His speech is a finely structured, efficiently presented set of arguments that are impressively developed with both cited evidence and intricately developed analytical arguments. This is the part of debate that is most like pure science, with its hyper-specialized nomenclature and development.
Yet in a grander sense debaters who are able to perform at this level are also very multidisciplinary thinkers. To be a good policy debater one must be able to incorporate an understanding of the technical aspects of argumentative structure with an understanding of a very broad set of positions and the ability to adapt to accelerated communicative norms. And let us not forget the intensive research load; by the time a debater has spent 2 or 3 years competing seriously in college policy debate, they have done work equivalent to a masters in international relations or domestic policy.
Ducks and Economics 