Tyler Cowen's Blog, page 105

The collapse of parental bargaining power (sentences to ponder)

When I last visited Bombay, I explained to my then four-year-old about that we couldn’t buy too many things because of weight restrictions in the flight, etc. My relatives were genuinely wondering why I didn’t just stop at “no.”

That is quoted by Kottke, from a series by Joanna Goddard, the whole post is interesting on issues of child-rearing across the nations.

Comedy club average is over

 One Barcelona comedy club is experimenting with using facial recognition technology to charge patrons by the laugh.

The comedy club, Teatreneu, partnered with the advertising firm The Cyranos McCann to implement the new technology after the government hiked taxes on theater tickets, according to a BBC report. In 2012, the Spanish government raised taxes on theatrical shows from 8 to 21 percent.

Cyranos McCann installed tablets on the back of each seat that used facial recognition tech to measure how much a person enjoyed the show by tracking when each patron laughed or smiled.

Each giggle costs approximately 30 Euro cents ($0.38). However, if a patron hits the 24 Euros mark, which is about 80 laughs, the rest of their laughs are free of charge.

The full story is here, via Mark Steckbeck.

What I’ve been reading

1. David Sterling, Yucatán: Recipes from a Culinary Expedition.  This cookbook is “too good” to actually cook from, but as account of food from Yucatán, along with history, photos, and recipes, it has to count as one of the year’s most notable publications.

2. Sebastian Edwards, Toxic Aid: Economic Collapse and Recovery in Tanzania.  He gives foreign aid to Tanzania an “F” for the 1961-1981 period, a “B minus” for 1981-1994, and a B+ for the latter part of that period.  Edwards is a top international economist and this is one of the best thought out books on foreign aid.

3. Todd Kashdan and Robert Biswas-Diener, The Upside of Your Dark Side.  Only some people should read this book.

4. Virginia Woolf, Flush: A Biography.  This one doesn’t get huge amounts of play, but it’s actually an awesome book about…a dawg.  Recommended, beautifully written and easy to read, Straussian too though you can read it straight up for fun as well.

5. Rabih Alameddine, An Unnecessary Woman.  A charming tale for bibliophiles, centering around a Lebanese woman who translates one classic novel a year, but for herself only.

The Manhattan apartment with the furthest distance from the subway

I Quant NY reports:

…there on the map lies the farthest residential building from a subway entrance in Manhattan according to my analysis: 10 Gracie Square, located at the end of 84th street at the FDR Drive.  It is 0.7 miles from the subway station as the crow flies, or 0.8 miles using the grid.  My favorite part about the finding is that the Penthouse, which I guess is literally the farthest place you can live from the subway due to the longer ride down in the elevator, is currently on the market for $18.9 million, down from $23 million last year. That’s right, you can pay $18.9 million dollars to have the longest walk to the subway in all of Manhattan!  But fear not power walkers, there is also a two bedroom with a the same walk but a slightly shorter elevator ride… for $3.75 million.

For the pointer I thank Craig Richardson.

Assorted links

1. The last one-sentence book review.

2. Lead role in Kafka’s Metamorphosis given to a robot.

3. Lev Grossman reviews Kerry Howley.

4. Jesse Rothstein revisits the value of a great teacher (pdf).  Maybe it’s not so high.

5. 5700 video games for $164k.

6. Claims about carbon capture (speculative).

7. America fights Chinese plan for a rival to the World Bank.

8. Economic policy in Hong Kong isn’t as good as many people think.

The Thai Coasean anti-bribery campaign, moral hazard edition

From the headline it is easy to see what is going on here:

 Thailand’s traffic policemen will get money in return for refusing bribes, police said on Thursday, part of the junta’s efforts to combat what it has called an ingrained culture of corruption within the force.

…two policemen were recently awarded 10,000 baht ($310) for refusing a $3 bribe.

The full article is here, and the pointer is from James Crabtree.

Online Education for Pre-School

Online education continues to expand rapidly:

WASHINGTON—Saying the option is revolutionizing the way the nation’s 3- and 4-year-olds prepare for the grade school years ahead, a Department of Education report released Thursday confirmed that an increasing number of U.S. toddlers are now attending online preschool. “We found that a growing number of American toddlers are eschewing the traditional brick-and-mortar preschools in favor of sitting down in front of a computer screen for four hours a day and furthering their early psychosocial development in a virtual environment,” said the report’s author, Dr. Stephen Forrest, who said that the affordability and flexibility characteristic of online pre-primary education are what make the option most appealing, allowing young children to learn their shapes and colors on a schedule that works best for them. “With access to their Show-And-Tell message boards, recess timers, and live webcams of class turtle tanks, most toddlers are finding that they can receive the same experience of traditional preschooling from the comfort of their parents’ living room or home office. In addition, most cited the ability to listen to their teacher’s recordings of story time at their own pace as a significant benefit of choosing an online nursery school.” Forrest added that, despite their increasing popularity, many parents remain unconvinced that online preschools provide the same academic benefits as actually hearing an instructor name farm animals and imitate their noises in person.

From America’s Finest News Source but do consider this.

Aromafork (there is no great stagnation)

Christopher Snow reports:

What would you give to make all your veggies taste like chocolate? Would you give $60 to a Canadian molecular gastronomy company called Molecule-R? Because that’s how much it’s asking for the new “Aromafork.”

Molecular gastronomy is a subset of modern cuisine that borrows many of its innovations from the scientific community, but you don’t need to be a scientist to know the tongue is only responsible for a portion of overall taste. It’s your nose that fills in most of the subtleties of a given flavor, and that’s how the Aromafork works.

Each Aromafork—you get four of them—has a notch near the prongs to hold a small, circular diffusing paper. Onto the diffuser you’ll drop one of the 21 included aromas, like coffee, basil, peanut, ginger, smoke, and—yes—chocolate.

Of course the Aromafork isn’t intended solely to mask the flavor of yucky vegetables, but rather to extend the possibilities for creative food pairings. Molecule-R’s website suggests seared tuna with the aroma of truffle, or strawberries with a hint of mint, or eggs with a whiff of cilantro. The only limit is your creativity.

The company’s website is here, and for the pointer I thank Ray Llpez.

Rich countries download music, poor countries download movies

Peer-to-peer file sharing of movies, television shows, music, books and other files over the Internet has grown rapidly worldwide as an alternative approach for people to get the digital content they want — often illicitly. But, unlike the users of Amazon, Netflix and other commercial providers, little is known about users of peer-to-peer (P2P) systems because data is lacking.

Now, armed with an unprecedented amount of data on users of BitTorrent, a popular file-sharing system, a Northwestern University research team has discovered two interesting behavior patterns: most BitTorrent users are content specialists — sharing music but not movies, for example; and users in countries with similar economies tend to download similar types of content — those living in poorer countries such as Lithuania and Spain, for example, download primarily large files, such as movies.

“Looking into this world of Internet traffic, we see a close interaction between computing systems and our everyday lives,” said Luís A. Nunes Amaral, a senior author of the study. “People in a given country display preferences for certain content — content that might not be readily available because of an authoritarian government or inferior communication infrastructure. This study can provide a great deal of insight into how things are working in a country.”

Amaral, a professor of chemical and biological engineering in the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, and Fabián E. Bustamante, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, also at McCormick, co-led the interdisciplinary research team with colleagues from Universitat Rovira i Virgili in Spain.

Their study, published this week by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences…reports BitTorrent users in countries with a small gross domestic product (GDP) per capita were more likely to share large files, such as high-definition movies, than users in countries with a large GDP per capita, where small files such as music were shared.

Also, more than 50 percent of users’ downloaded content fell into their top two downloaded content types, putting them in the content specialist, not generalist, category.

The full article is here, the paper and data are here, and for the pointer I thank Charles Klingman.  Can you explain the rich-poor, music vs. movies difference using economic theory?

New York court to weigh legal rights of chimpanzees

A New York appeals court will consider this week whether chimpanzees are entitled to “legal personhood” in what experts say is the first case of its kind.

For Steven Wise, the lawyer behind the case involving a chimp named Tommy, it is the culmination of three decades of seeking to extend rights historically reserved for humans to other intelligent animals.

On Wednesday, a mid-level state appeals court in Albany will hear the case of the 26-year-old Tommy, who is owned by a human and lives alone in what Wise describes as a “dark, dank shed” in upstate New York.

Wise is seeking a ruling that Tommy has been unlawfully imprisoned and should be released to a chimp sanctuary in Florida.

A victory in the case could lead to a further expansion of rights for chimps and other higher-order animals, including elephants, dolphins, orcas and other non-human primates, Wise said.

“The next argument could be that Tommy … also has the right to bodily integrity, so he couldn’t be used in biomedical research,” the Boston attorney said.

The full article is here, via Charles Klingman.