Smart highways

I feel like I might have posted about these things before, but given my past blog posts on the topic, I figured it was worth sharing either way. Via Barry Ritholtz comes a quick summary of these so-called "smart" highways, which are scheduled to debut in the Netherlands later this year. Pretty cool stuff.

From their own fact sheet (with some funky translations):

Smart Highway are interactive and sustainable roads of today. Designer Daan Roosegaarde and Heijmans Infrastructure are developing new designs and technologies for this Route 66 of the future. 

New designs include the ‘Glow-in-the-Dark Road’, ‘Dynamic Paint’, ‘Interactive Light’, ‘Induction Priority Lane’ and ‘Wind Light’. The goal is to make roads which are more sustainable and interactive by using light, energy and road signs that automatically adapt to the traffic situation. 

Awarded with a Best Future Concept by the Dutch Design Awards 2012 the first meters Smart Highway will be realized mid 2013 in the Netherlands. 

The "Dynamic Paint" design, for example, puts designs on the road that will change based on temperature and general road conditions, to better inform drivers of what to expect. And the "Induction Priority Lane" has induction coils underneath the surface, which can allow electric cars to recharge their batteries as they drive on them.

Here's a short video showing what these guys are doing, and what's possible.


Futuristic highways glow in the dark by Daan Roosegaarde and Heijmans from Daan Roosegaarde on Vimeo.

While this still seems like pretty crude and early-stage technology, I think it's a good step toward being more creative with how we think about our roads and their functions. The days of having a piezoelectric national highway system that powers the cars that drive on it may not be so far away, after all.

More nerd humor

I'm working on a few posts for later today (and later this week), but until I've got those ready to roll, I thought I'd share some more excellent nerd humor that I've come across lately. First, from the always brilliant nerds over at XKCD:

And second, from imgur, courtesy of my man Killagroove:

Yup, it's a big Wednesday around here. More coming your way later today... I think.

Weather trends

Last week, Barry Ritholtz's Big Picture blog published a guest post from Climate Central's Andrew Freedman, which shared some fairly astonishing data about the year in weather. I'll post Freedman's eye-popping charts here along with some of his analysis, which mostly speaks for itself. Take it for what it's worth...

"The 1°F difference from 1998 is an unusually large margin, considering that annual temperature records are typically broken by just tenths of a degree Fahrenheit. In fact, the entire range between the coldest year on record, which occurred in 1917, and the previous record warm year of 1998 was just 4.2°F."...

"During the summer, nearly 100 million people experienced 10 or more days with temperatures greater than 100°F, which is about one-third of the nation’s population, NOAA reported.

With 34,008 daily high temperature records set or tied the year compared to just 6,664 daily record lows — a ratio of about five high temperature records for every one low temperature record — 2012 was no ordinary weather year in the U.S. It wasn’t just the high temperatures that set records, though. Overnight low temperatures were also extremely warm, and in a few cases the overnight low was so warm that it set a high temperature record, a rare feat."...

"According to data from NOAA's National Climatic Data Center, there were 356 all-time high temperature records set or tied across the entire U.S. in 2012, compared to four all-time low temperature records. All of the all-time record lows occurred in Hawaii."

So, yeah. Climate change, no climate change, who really knows, right? But if you're interested in seeing more about this topic, this video gives some more context.

[Climate Central]
(h/t Big Picture)

The problem with "most likely" outcomes (an NFL playoffs discussion)

On the final Sunday of the NFL regular season (yesterday, for those who weren't paying attention), there's always a number of moving parts as we try to figure out who is going to make the playoffs and who isn't (and also, who is going to be seeded where). Figuring it out is often a challenge, which is why it's nice to have a handy guide at your disposal to help you through the morass.

Luckily, our friends over at Deadspin were nice enough to provide just that, which was an immeasurable help to me as I sat around and rooted for the Patriots and made myself fatter (thanks to Sam Adams and some homemade lasagna). A Patriots win and a Texans loss meant that my Patriots earned themselves the #2 seed and a first-round bye, which was interestingly contrary to what Deadspin had told me to expect. To wit:

The most likely scenario [in the AFC] is that every team which has something at stake wins—they're almost invariably playing teams that don't—and thus the playoff order is exactly what you see above [Texans, Broncos, Patriots].

That line, when I first read it at 2pm or so, stuck with me as I watched the afternoon's games. What does "most likely scenario" really mean? It turns out that the way that we define our terms has an important impact on the way that we understand and respond to the world before us. That's what I'm about to explain.

Yes, it's true, in each individual game, it's "most likely" that the favorite will win—that's what being a favorite means. Therefore, when you start stringing together potential scenarios, the "most likely combination of outcomes" is, indeed, the combination in which all of the favorites win their games. But that doesn't necessarily make it the "most likely scenario"—there's a subtle but very important difference. Bear with me for a second here, because I'm about to get nerdy.

Let's start from the top here, considering a three-game sample. Let's say that each of the three top seeds coming into yesterday (Texans, Broncos, Patriots) had a 60% chance of winning their game (in the grand scheme of things in the NFL, that's a pretty high probability). To determine the likelihood of ALL THREE of them winning their games, which Deadspin said was the "most likely scenario", we just need to multiply the probabilities. In this case, 60% x 60% x 60% = 21.6% , so the likelihood of all the favorites winning was a little less than 1 in 4 odds.

There are 8 possible groupings of winners in this scenario (Texans/Broncos/Patriots would be one, Colts/Broncos/Patriots would be another, Texans/Chiefs/Dolphins a third, etc, etc, etc), and of those 8 possible groupings, the one where the favorites all win is indeed, as we said, the "most likely combination of outcomes". Here's a super-nerdy chart that shows that point, using the 60% probabilities that I used above.

When you look at it this way, you start to see that the "most likely scenario" isn't that all three teams will win, but that one of the other seven scenarios will occur (in fact, the "at least one upset" scenario is more than three times as likely here, with probability 78.4%).

Sure, any one of those individual outcomes is less likely than the individual outcome of "no upsets", but the reality of the matter is quite different. When we start to group the possible outcomes, we see things with a little bit more clarity. I think that a more realistic way of presenting the available data is the following:

Probability of exactly one upset:                       43.2% 

Probability of exactly two upsets:                     28.8%  

Probability of zero upsets:                            21.6% 

Probability of three upsets:                                6.4%

When you group the scenarios this way, you can see that all three teams doing what they're "supposed" to do is, in fact, far from the "most likely scenario" (NOTE: in order for it to become the "most likely scenario" the way I define it, the probability of each favorite winning would have to be more than 75%, as opposed to the 60% that I am using; I find 75% to be way too high for any NFL game). The statistics say that we should probably expect at least one upset, and that "exactly one upset" is the most likely scenario—which, unsurprisingly, is exactly what we ended up with.

Of course, in advance, we can't possibly know which game was likely to produce the upset, but it's almost beside the point. What we can know is that the more times we flip a coin, no matter how lopsided toward "heads" the coin may be, the more likely it becomes that it will eventually come up "tails".

Ultimately, the more independent variables (games) you start linking together, the more likely it is that your "most likely outcome" involves an upset (or a couple of upsets) somewhere along the way. In a sense, this is a similar statistical problem to the birthday problem, which I discussed here once before.

So, why does all of this matter? I'll make this part quick. Let's say you're the Broncos. You're sitting at home this week as the #1 seed, on your bye, trying to decide which team to prepare for (remember, the NFL re-seeds after the first round) while the Wild Card Weekend games are being played. With two games being played—Texans hosting Bengals, Ravens hosting Colts—there are four possible scenarios: (1) Texans and Ravens win, (2) Texans and Colts win, (3) Bengals and Ravens win, (4) Bengals and Colts win.

Assuming once again that the favorite has a 60% chance of winning, we get the following probabilities:

Texans/Ravens (Broncos play Ravens):                 36% 

Texans/Colts (Broncos play Colts):                       24% 

Bengals/Ravens (Broncos play Bengals):               24% 

Bengals/Colts (Broncos play Bengals):                  16%

So, using the same logic we used before, the most likely individual scenario is that both favorites (the Texans and Ravens) win their games, and so the Broncos should be preparing to play the Ravens next week... right?

But no, look again. Even though the "Bengals/Ravens" and "Bengals/Colts" scenarios are individually less likely than the "no upsets" scenario, they combine to be more likely. Because we've given the Bengals a 40% chance of winning their game, and because the Broncos will play the Bengals no matter what if they do indeed win, the Bengals are in fact the Broncos' most likely opponent. Sure, it's only by a small amount, but it's still relevant from a preparation standpoint—Denver should spend at least as much time watching Bengals film as Ravens film, if not more.

Any time we use statistics, we need to be careful with what we're really saying when we communicate our findings or beliefs. In the case of the Deadspin piece, the analysis in question wasn't wrong, it was simply imprecise (and possibly incomplete). When we as readers read that something is the "most likely" scenario, we're almost certainly hoping for something better than a 21.6% probability. Personally, I greatly prefer the much higher 43.2% probability that I ascribed to the "exactly one upset" scenario—I especially prefer it as a Patriots fan, whose team benefited greatly from the way things turned out on the field yesterday.

Good statistics (and good math, and good science, and good writing) requires that we be precise with our methods and our communication of our methods. If we're imprecise, we end up saying things that we don't really mean or that just aren't true.

[Deadspin]

On the other hand...

... maybe we DON'T want our population to keep growing. Reuters reports from Maine:

Researchers studying Maine's lobster population, booming in recent years amid warming waters and disappearing predators, have detected something never before seen in the wild: lobster cannibalism. 

It has long been known that lobsters will attack and eat each other if confined together in a small space — hence the banding of claws on lobsters in supermarket tanks. 

That aggressive behavior had not been thought to occur in the wild, but with the increasing density of the crustaceans in the Gulf of Maine it seems big lobsters are feasting on little lobsters once the sun goes down. 

"We've got the lobsters feeding back on themselves just because they're so abundant," said Richard Wahle, a marine sciences professor at the University of Maine, who is supervising the research. "It's never been observed just out in the open like this," he said.

Apparently overfishing of other species like cod and halibut have created a dearth of natural predators for the lobsters (no, I didn't know that cod and halibut could kill and eat lobsters, but now I do), which has helped to cause this strange behavior.

All I know is, if this is what happens when a species becomes overpopulated, then I think I can handle a little bit of economic stagnation over the alternative. So, please don't eat me, people. Eat lobsters instead, they're delicious and apparently plentiful. 

[Reuters]

Quote of the Week (Fertility Edition)

I definitely had at least half a mind to give this week's Quote of the Week to Chiefs quarterback Brady Quinn, who did an admirable job of distilling a horrific incident down to a useful message (without preaching or being trite or condescending, like some people). It's rare that you see an athlete being so frank and dropping their guard like Quinn did (it happened around five minutes into the press conference, which started out pretty slowly), and I salute him for it.

As he mused, "when you ask someone how they're doing, do you really mean it... and when you answer someone back, are you really telling them the truth?" I think Quinn is right to decry the shallowness of many (or most) interpersonal relationships in our social media-driven era, and his words can definitely give us all some food for thought.

But I came across another excerpt yesterday that was even more academically intriguing, if somewhat less poignant and powerful. Courtesy of Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowen, and echoing some of the comments I made in this blog post last week, I give you the New York Times' Ross Douthat, who discusses the reasons for and potential impact of America's plummeting fertility rate:

This week's QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"There’s been a broader cultural shift away from a child-centric understanding of romance and marriage. In 1990, 65 percent of Americans told Pew that children were “very important” to a successful marriage; in 2007, just before the current baby bust, only 41 percent agreed... The retreat from child rearing is, at some level, a symptom of late-modern exhaustion — a decadence that first arose in the West but now haunts rich societies around the globe. It’s a spirit that privileges the present over the future, chooses stagnation over innovation, prefers what already exists over what might be. It embraces the comforts and pleasures of modernity, while shrugging off the basic sacrifices that built our civilization in the first place."
                                            - Ross Douthat, New York Times

I think there's a lot of merit to Douthat's take on the matter. The decision to eschew having children is, in a sense, the pinnacle of short-term thinking (a dynamic which has clearly taken on a life of its own in recent generations). If we all made the decision to have no children, our society would (theoretically, anyway) disappear in a matter of decades. None of us would be here but for someone else's decision to procreate, and yet there is often no recognition of that fact when it comes time for us to make a similar decision.

The decision is, in fact, the ultimate indulgence of a rich and stagnant society, one that is made all the more possible and plausible by the emergence and standardization of birth control, the access to which the UN has bizarrely ruled a universal human right.

To be fair, for many people in my generation, the decision not to have children has been a direct by-product of the explosion of debt (student loans and other types) in recent decades, and in that respect it's a perfectly rational—yet still sub-optimal—decision. If you can't afford to have kids (or don't feel like you can), then you clearly shouldn't, lest those children be deprived or resented by their own parents.

Nevertheless, it's an interesting thought experiment to wonder what would happen if only the underprivileged people in the world (those who couldn't afford birth control, and therefore couldn't afford to decide not to have children) were procreating. What would the next generation look like? What would be the prospects for global economic growth? And what kinds of decisions would such a scenario lead governments and voters to make, if the rich and powerful had no direct connection to the next generation of humans?

I don't know the answers to all of these questions (especially since many of them are purely academic in nature), but I do know that those who have the weakest connection to the future are the least likely to make good decisions with respect to said future. And if we continue to make decisions that sacrifice the future to benefit today, then I'm pretty sure we're not going to like the future very much once we do get there.

[New York Times]
(h/t Marginal Revolution)

Finally, some real innovation

You see, guys, what have I always been telling you? If we really want to get some real innovation in this country to get us out of our economic doldrums, we just have to start taking our cues from Russia. Wait, that can't be right...

In October, design practice Y/N studio caused a stir by designing a blueprint for a swimming lane along Regent's canal in London, so that people could swim to work. Now, the Estonian architecture studio Salto has built an equally inventive solution to the boredom of the morning commute – a 51m (170ft) -long trampoline, so that you can bounce to your destination. 

 

The trampoline, called Fast Track, has been built and installed at arts festival Archstoyanie, and has been a hit since it was opened at the end of November in the Nikola-Lenivets forest, in south-west Russia. Made of black rubber, it is, according to Salto "an attempt to create [an] intelligent infrastructure that is emotional and corresponds to the local context, giving the user a different experience of moving and perceiving the environment".

Hey, that's a fantastic idea! It's green, it gets us off our butts and exercising a little bit, it encourages our long-lost love of nature... what could possibly go wrong? Oh... right.

3-D printing meets Skyfall

Yeah, I know, shut up about the 3-D printing already... but this is seriously cool, and it's becoming clear that 3-D printing is being used in more and more applications all the time these days.

If you thought producers spent millions on James Bond’s Aston Martin DB5, which was put through a series of huge explosions and stunts during the filming of Skyfall, including one scene where the priceless vehicle exploded in flames – think again. 

Three replicas of the classic car were created using a large scale 3D printer for the filming of the latest installment from the spy series. 

The models double for the now priceless original vehicle from the 1960s in the film’s action scenes. 

The models were made by British firm Propshop Modelmakers Ltd, which specialise in the production of film props, and used Voxeljet to print the cars, the Daily mail reported. 

“Propshop commissioned us to build three plastic models of the Aston Martin DB5,” voxeljet CEO Dr. Ingo Ederer, said. 

“We could have easily printed the legendary sports car in one piece at a scale of 1:3 using our high-end VX4000 printer, which can build moulds and models in dimensions of up to eight cubic metres,” Ederer said. 

But the British model builders were pursuing a different approach. 

“To ensure that the Aston Martin was as true to detail as possible, and for the purpose of integrating numerous functions into the film models, they decided on an assembly consisting of a total of 18 individual components,” Ederer said. 

“The entire body is based on a steel frame, almost identical to how vehicles were assembled in the past. In addition to the automotive industry, foundries, designers and artists, the film industry represents an entirely new customer base for voxeljet. 

“3D printing is on the cusp of a great future in the film industry. The technology offers fantastic opportunities, since it is usually much faster, more precise and more economical than classic model construction,” Ederer added.

Awesome. That's a perfect example of what this stuff is so great for, and I'm glad to see the creativity and innovation being put to good use. I can't wait to see what comes up next.

[Zee News]

Jail the Venetian meteorologists!

Since the Italian justice system decided it was necessary to imprison the seismologists who failed to predict 2009's deadly L'Aquila earthquake, I think it's only fair that meteorologists also be forced to pay for their sins in the wake of the worst flooding in Venice in two decades. After all, Mother Nature is much easier to predict than Crazy Uncle Earthquake over there, right?

Why can't everyone be more like Nate Silver, huh?

[Guardian]

More on 3-D printing (Japan edition)

Since I'm always talking about 3-D printing, this little news item seemed like it had to be passed along here.

3D printers – it’s a word that offers glimpses into the future that seems so far, and yet is so close. The technology, which allows you to replicate 3D objects the same way you make a photo copy, has been around for a couple years now, but, for the most part, has been far too expensive and inaccessible to the public. 

But now, what’s being called the world’s first 3D printing photo booth is set to open for a limited time at the exhibition space EYE OF GYRE in Harajuku. From November 24 to January 14, 2013, people with reservations can go and have their portraits taken. Except, instead of a photograph, you’ll receive miniature replicas of yourselves. 

Reservations are taken only through the website. You can pick from 3 sizes, S (10cm), M (15cm) and L (20cm) for 21,000 yen, 32,000 yen and 42,000 yen, respectively. But there are group discounts! This would be really fun to do with your kids, who seem to grow up just way too fast.

For those wondering about the conversions, the sizes are roughly 4 inches, 6 inches, and 8 inches, for $264, $403, or $529. Obviously not cheap, but still sort of awesome if you happen to be passing through Tokyo in the next few months (and who isn't, right?). Check out the pics:

I assume the thing is capable of capturing some sweet action poses as well, even though our Japanese models seem to have been angling for the "coffin" pose for some reason. For anyone who ever grew up wishing they could have their own action figure, this is about as close as you're gonna get. Well, unless you feel like enlisting...

[Spoon & Tamago]
(h/t Marginal Revolution)

Punishing bad predictions

I've been a little silent on here this week, in large part because I'm really trying hard to avoid talking about the election. That's not because I'm upset with the outcome or thrilled with the outcome or anything of the sort, but more because if nothing else, this election showed me just how deeply divided our nation has become. Our President was re-elected, yes, but re-elected with only 39% of the white vote nationally—Latinos and African-Americans carried the day for President Obama. As much as we may like to pretend that we inhabit a "post-racial America", that statistic would strongly suggest otherwise.

The fact is that there are entire segments of our population—gays, womens, blacks, Latinos—who largely felt that they had little choice in this election but to vote for the incumbent. Whether their feelings were correct or not is largely an immaterial matter—the feelings alone are indicative of just how ill our current political environment has become. Because of this bitter division, I feel that it's best not to weigh in with my personal opinions about the election, expecting that they would simply inflame some readers while being redundant to others. If you've read enough of my blog, you know my political leanings already, and I therefore feel no need to reiterate them at a time when nerves are a bit frayed. I'll revisit them in the not-too-distant future, to be sure. Now just doesn't seem to be the right time.

But what I would like to talk about is predictions, a topic I actually love discussing. As you may remember, I think that the incentive structure surrounding predictions and projections is badly out of whack, which leads us to be inundated with all manner of terrible prognostications. Italy, for one, decided that they'd finally had enough:

Six Italian scientists and an ex-government official have been sentenced to six years in prison over the 2009 deadly earthquake in L'Aquila. 

A regional court found them guilty of multiple manslaughter. 

Prosecutors said the defendants gave a falsely reassuring statement before the quake, while the defence maintained there was no way to predict major quakes. 

The 6.3 magnitude quake devastated the city and killed 309 people. 

Many smaller tremors had rattled the area in the months before the quake that destroyed much of the historic centre... 

The seven - all members of the National Commission for the Forecast and Prevention of Major Risks - were accused of having provided "inaccurate, incomplete and contradictory" information about the danger of the tremors felt ahead of 6 April 2009 quake, Italian media report. 

In addition to their sentences, all have been barred from ever holding public office again, La Repubblica reports. 

In the closing statement, the prosecution quoted one of its witnesses, whose father died in the earthquake. 

It described how Guido Fioravanti had called his mother at about 11:00 on the night of the earthquake - straight after the first tremor. 

"I remember the fear in her voice. On other occasions they would have fled but that night, with my father, they repeated to themselves what the risk commission had said. And they stayed."

Well, that's certainly one way to change the incentive structure surrounding predictions. Since I've often complained that pundits never face any real consequences when their predictions turn out to be wrong, this certainly provides a pretty strong counter-example. Whether or not it's a good thing is a different matter entirely.

Ultimately, if this sort of thing gained traction throughout the world, all that it would really do is give people an incentive to never make predictions of any kind, under any circumstances. That may or may not be a good thing, and it probably takes things too far in the opposite direction.

Ultimately what we all need to do is to take responsibility for our own decisions, rather than outsourcing them to "experts" and taking their predictions at face value. The more we ignore the expertise of the punditry and rely on our own research and intuition, the better off we all will be. We'll be a better-informed, better-prepared, and generally more capable populace, and that's inarguably a good thing. But the more we try to blame others for the bad outcomes that befall us, the further we're going down the wrong path.

Personal responsibility is paramount in the world, and while this ruling may help shift around the incentive structure surrounding predictions, it does absolutely nothing to promote personal responsibility. Therefore, I can't bring myself to support the move, no matter how much I might like certain elements of it. Although, maybe if we used this logic on Ben Bernanke.... nahhhhhhh.

[BBC]

Quote of the Week

A few months ago, I wrote a post about the Black-Scholes pricing model, its role in the financial crisis, and how economists continue to do themselves a terrible disservice by insisting that their discipline is a physical science like physics or biology, rather than the inexact social science that it is. I wrote:

We all use models in our daily lives, because they help us to make sense of what are often very complex problems. Models simplify, organize, and categorize the variables in an uncertain world so that we can better understand the impacts of our decisions. But they DO NOT, ever, have the power to tell us what to do. You don't even need to know a thing about Black-Scholes (and trust me, a lot of people who should know a lot about it... don't) in order to accept that assertion as fact. 

The intelligent person knows to use a model only as a guide to confirm (or refute) what our intuition tells us. Very often, our painfully simple heuristic models (which you can learn or hear more about from Gerd Gigerenzer's speech, if you're a nerd like me) actually outperform very elegant statistical models. How can this be? The answer lies in this brilliant polemic from economist Robert Wenzel (which is almost as great as a similar recent rant from Jim Grant).

In the science of physics, we know that water freezes at 32 degrees. We can predict with immense accuracy exactly how far a rocket ship will travel filled with 500 gallons of fuel. There is preciseness because there are constants, which do not change and upon which equations can be constructed. 

There are no such constants in the field of economics since the science of economics deals with human action, which can change at any time. If potato prices remain the same for 10 weeks, it does not mean they will be the same the following day. I defy anyone in this room to provide me with a constant in the field of economics that has the same unchanging constancy that exists in the fields of physics or chemistry.  

And yet, in paper after paper here at the Federal Reserve, I see equations built as though constants do exist.

Wenzel is dead on. We all know that models are useful, but they do not remove responsibility for rational risk management—only people have the power to do that. When callous risk managers at huge investment banks take another man's model on faith, and make huge bets with billions of dollars on the line without sanity-checking the model, that's nobody's fault but theirs.

While my points were correct, I took a little while to get the point across. For a more pithy take on things, we'll turn to Barry Ritholtz, for this week's Quote of the Week.

This week's QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"Economists are neither Engineers nor Scientists, as each of these fields has a significant degree of precision in what they do, and test their hypotheses in a lab. The better choice for Economists are 'Historian' or 'Sociologists.' The sooner the profession loses its 'physics penis-envy', the better off we all will be."
                                                  - Blogger Barry Ritholtz

I'll just let that "physics penis-envy" line stand on its own, because I think it's the single greatest takedown of modern economics that I've ever seen.

As our economy becomes more and more dependent on the fantasy-land models put together on Ben Bernanke's laptop, I sincerely hope that the damage done by these grand experiments isn't so grave that we all end up suffering for decades. But if we allow ourselves to entrust ever more of our lives to these "scientists", we're certainly running that risk.

The future of automotive transportation

While I spend a lot of time on this blog decrying the current state of our economy (and political environment), I try my best to balance that cynicism with a fair amount of optimism about our future, especially where new technologies are concerned. If we can be courageous enough to allow for the breaking down of old paradigms (and for the failure of outdated and obsolete business models), the future for our nation is indeed incredibly bright.

In that vein, a pair of articles that I read over the weekend have me particularly excited. First up, from US News & World Report:

Last week, California became the third and by far the most important state to legalize driverless cars, joining Nevada and Florida. Google has been getting most of the attention here for its work developing driverless vehicles. But it is hardly alone. Major automakers have their own projects under development. 

Google may want to leapfrog existing technology to point the way toward a driverless future. Existing auto companies will seek incremental changes that protect their franchises while moving toward an automated future. It's not clear what the pace of commercialization will be for driverless cars. 

After all, many of the improvements promised at the 1939 World's Fair in New York still have not come to pass. And there will be no shortage of open-road lovers and skeptics reluctant to cede control of their cars to a bunch of computers—shades of Skynet and The Terminator. 

But as Google, Apple, and other new-tech giants have demonstrated, the pace of change is likely to be much faster when it comes to automated vehicles. Using increasingly sophisticated sensors and software, driverless cars hold out the promise of saving lives, fuel, and time. They react more quickly to accident threats. They don't panic. They can tie into traffic grids and do a much better job of balancing traffic flows. They can optimize fuel consumption. 

We already trust a lot to technology when we drive. We generally believe traffic signals and respond to GPS guidance and traffic congestion reports. We expect speed and fuel flows to respond properly when we use cruise controls. We use digitized cameras and back-up sensors. Newer cars monitor weather conditions and automatically trigger any number of safety responses. Increasingly, we even pay for auto insurance using on-board computers to record where and how we are driving. And many of these functions are voice-activated on newer vehicles.

For more on the Google Car project, check out this video on Bloomberg—you have to admit, it looks pretty awesome. But in case driverless cars don't get you all excited, I've got another car-related article that is equally awesome. From Yahoo Finance:

Tesla Motors today unveiled its highly anticipated Supercharger network. Constructed in secret, Tesla revealed the locations of the first six Supercharger stations, which will allow the Model S to travel long distances with ultra fast charging throughout California, parts of Nevada and Arizona.  

The technology at the heart of the Supercharger was developed internally and leverages the economies of scale of existing charging technology already used by the Model S, enabling Tesla to create the Supercharger device at minimal cost. The electricity used by the Supercharger comes from a solar carport system provided by SolarCity, which results in almost zero marginal energy cost after installation. Combining these two factors, Tesla is able to provide Model S owners1 free long distance travel indefinitely. 

Each solar power system is designed to generate more energy from the sun over the course of a year than is consumed by Tesla vehicles using the Supercharger. This results in a slight net positive transfer of sunlight generated power back to the electricity grid. In addition to lowering the cost of electricity, this addresses a commonly held misunderstanding that charging an electric car simply pushes carbon emissions to the power plant. The Supercharger system will always generate more power from sunlight than Model S customers use for driving. By adding even a small solar system at their home, electric car owners can extend this same principle to local city driving too. 

The six California locations unveiled today are just the beginning. By next year, we plan to install Superchargers in high traffic corridors across the continental United States, enabling fast, purely electric travel from Vancouver to San Diego, Miami to Montreal and Los Angeles to New York. Tesla will also begin installing Superchargers in Europe and Asia in the second half of 2013. 

The Supercharger is substantially more powerful than any charging technology to date, providing almost 100 kilowatts of power to the Model S, with the potential to go as high as 120 kilowatts in the future. This can replenish three hours of driving at 60 mph in about half an hour, which is the convenience inflection point for travelers at a highway rest stop. Most people who begin a road trip at 9:00 a.m. would normally stop by noon to have lunch, refresh and pick up a coffee or soda for the road, all of which takes about 30 minutes. 

"Tesla's Supercharger network is a game changer for electric vehicles, providing long distance travel that has a level of convenience equivalent to gasoline cars for all practical purposes. However, by making electric long distance travel at no cost, an impossibility for gasoline cars, Tesla is demonstrating just how fundamentally better electric transport can be," said Elon Musk, Tesla Motors co-founder and CEO. "We are giving Model S the ability to drive almost anywhere for free on pure sunlight."

Make it through that whole thing? Good. To date, I haven't been particularly excited about electric cars, in large part because previous models have mostly relied upon existing sources of electric energy, the majority of which is generated from the burning of fossil fuels (largely oil and coal). In other words, there's no real fundamental change, just a shifting of where the fuel is burned—in a power plant instead of in your car.

But if we can make a shift to solar, then that's a legitimate game-changer in the automobile world. Of course, as I've mentioned on here once before, what would be even cooler is if we could figure out a way to turn all of our highways into piezo-electric energy generators, with the cars effectively powering themselves, at least in part. Spray some transparent solar film on the outside of all the car's windows, and we could take this whole thing even another step further.

Yes, I know that some of this probably sounds insane, but I also think it's completely possible and plausible. The technology all exists, it's just a matter of harnessing it in a way (and scaling it up to a point) that makes it broadly useful and usable.

Do I think that a future of self-driving cars which use virtually no energy is possible? Absolutely. Do I think that we as humans have the courage to embrace that future, if it means destroying entire companies and industries in the process? That jury's still out. But I certainly hope so.

[US News]
[Yahoo Finance]

Our food supply issues grow

I hadn't blogged about our food supply here in a long time, but then I came across two articles in one day that gently reminded me that I was overdue for an update. I've previously blogged here (and here) about the dangerous (and creepy) nature of genetically modified (GMO) foods, and the evidence continues to pile up in favor of my argument.

From Yves Smith of the Naked Capitalism blog, citing a study from the Committee for Research & Independent Information on Genetic Engineering (CRIIGEN):

For the first time, the health impact of a GMO and a widely used pesticide have been comprehensively assessed in a long term animal feeding trial of greater duration and with more detailed analyses than any previous studies, by environmental and food agencies, governments, industries or researchers institutes. 

The two tested products are in very common use : (i) a transgenic maize made tolerant to Roundup, the characteristic shared by over 80% of food and animal feed GMOs, and (ii) Roundup itself, the most widely used herbicide on the planet. The regulatory approval process requires these products to be tested on rats as a surrogate for humans. 

The new research took the form of a two year feeding trial on 200 rats, monitored for outcomes against more than 100 parameters. The doses were consistent with typical dietary/ environmental exposure... 

The results... included increased and more rapid mortality, coupled with hormonal non linear and sex related effects. Females developed significant and numerous mammary tumours, pituitary and kidney problems. Males died mostly from severe hepatorenal chronic deficiencies...

The implications are extremely serious. They demonstrate the toxicity, both of a GMO with the most widely spread transgenic character and of the most widely used herbicide, even when ingested at extremely low levels, (corresponding to those found in surface or tap water). In addition, these results call into question the adequacy of the current regulatory process, used throughout the world by agencies involved in the assessment of health, food and chemicals, and industries seeking commercialisation of products.

As Yves and the study's authors point out, what sets this research apart from previous studies is the duration of the testing. While regulatory analyses of these products last only 3 months, this particular study lasted two years, a significant portion of the rats' lives. This study therefore sheds more light on the long-term effects of these products, which is frankly significantly more relevant from a public health standpoint.

At issue here is Monsanto's GMO corn, an herbicide-resistant product (Monsanto also sells the herbicide in question, Roundup) that is in a distressing number of the products that we buy regularly—one estimate pegs the percentage at 70%, largely because GMO corn is the primary ingredient in high-fructose corn syrup, which is in basically everything in the supermarket these days. Think you're doing your best to avoid GMO corn in the supermarket? So did I, until I read this blog post, which scared the crap out of me.

Finally, since I promised that I'd read two articles that made me want to revisit this topic, here's the second.

If it were a novel, people would criticize the plot for being too far-fetched – thriving colonies disappear overnight without leaving a trace, the bodies of the victims are never found. Only in this case, it’s not fiction: It’s what’s happening to fully a third of commercial beehives, over a million colonies every year. Seemingly healthy communities fly off never to return. The queen bee and mother of the hive is abandoned to starve and die. 

Thousands of scientific sleuths have been on this case for the last 15 years trying to determine why our honey bees are disappearing in such alarming numbers. “This is the biggest general threat to our food supply,” according to Kevin Hackett, the national program leader for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s bee and pollination program. 

Until recently, the evidence was inconclusive on the cause of the mysterious “colony collapse disorder” (CCD) that threatens the future of beekeeping worldwide. But three new studies point an accusing finger at a culprit that many have suspected all along, a class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids. 

In the U.S. alone, these pesticides, produced primarily by the German chemical giant Bayer and known as “neonics” for short, coat a massive 142 million acres of corn, wheat, soy and cotton seeds. They are also a common ingredient in home gardening products. 

Research published last month in the prestigious journal Science shows that neonics are absorbed by the plants’ vascular system and contaminate the pollen and nectar that bees encounter on their rounds. They are a nerve poison that disorient their insect victims and appear to damage the homing ability of bees, which may help to account for their mysterious failure to make it back to the hive.

Perfect. Am I the only one creeped out by the fact that we regularly eat chemicals that disorient and kill bees? If it's toxic to bees, then it's toxic to us as well, even if it doesn't immediately kill us or send us wandering aimlessly off the grid in search of our homes. No, we just die decades later from mysterious cancers that we can't seem to cure, never knowing what the hell happened to us or why.

Just because there isn't a short-term problem doesn't mean there it isn't a long-term problem (hey, sounds a lot like our debt situation, doesn't it?), and I'm increasingly convinced that's what's going on with our nation's food supply.

Yes, in the short term it seems like these foods are just the same as the foods that we grew 20 years ago—they look the same, nobody's dropping dead from them, we don't show any visible ill effects in the first few years, so we all assume that everything is hunky-dory. But is that really the case? Increasingly, science is answering "no" to that question, and I think we all need to stand up and take notice. Our food supply is inexorably deteriorating in quality, and it may already be too late to reverse the damage.

[Naked Capitalism]
[Reuters]

Clip of the Week

Time for this week's Clip of the Week, brought to you once again by NASA.

Yes, that means I'm passing up on some good football highlights from NFL Week 1, notably from Robert Griffin III and David Akers. I'm also passing on a delightfully deceptive defensive play from the Baltimore Orioles' Manny Machado, yet another head-scratching play in the Orioles' bizarre sleight-of-hand season.

I'm also passing up on some seriously excellent animal-related videos, including this one about how birds' communication patterns mimic those of humans (and how Beethoven used birds as his muse), this one that features a daredevil family of ducks, and this cat just chillin'.

Other random stuff includes this amazing "Obama campaign video" from the Daily Show and Larry David (it's the second video on that page, but the first one is excellent too), this cool underwater wonderworld, and The Roots' ?uestlove killing it on the pots and pans.

But NASA has been churning out some eye-opening stuff lately, and I'd be remiss if I didn't pass this one along. According to NOAA, this year through August has seen the most extreme climate (coldest winter months, hottest summer months, longest droughts, most soaking rains) of any year in U.S. history. That's terrifying, even if you're a right-wing whacko who thinks that global warming is a hoax cooked up by scientists in a basement for God knows what reason.

Alright, good talk. Enjoy your Clip of the Week. It's... something.

Statistical significance vs. significance

Alright, it's time to start plowing through some of my unfinished drafts here, in no particular order. I've been sitting on this one for a while, and it follows in the theme of this post and this post, both of which discussed the questionable validity of study results. From the Freakonomics blog... 

A new paper by psychologists E.J. Masicampo and David Lalande finds that an uncanny number of psychology findings just barely qualify as statistically significant.  From the abstract:

We examined a large subset of papers from three highly regarded journals. Distributions of p were found to be similar across the different journals. Moreover, p values were much more common immediately below .05 than would be expected based on the number of p values occurring in other ranges. This prevalence of p values just below the arbitrary criterion for significance was observed in all three journals.

Alright, yeah, I know that's a little stat-wonky/jargony, but the basic point is that a large number of clinical trials that report "significant" results are in fact barely scraping by on the statistical validity scale.

In any statistical study, the "goal" is to show a result that is too extreme to have occurred simply by random chance. A "p-value" of .05 means that there is only a 5% chance that the study result could have occurred simply by chance—low, but not impossible. What we're seeing here is that a large number of "statistically significant" studies are scraping by in this little margin-of-error window just on the "right" side of that 5%. Hence, there's a pretty decent chance that at least some of those studies are reporting something as significant that is actually dumb luck or chance—indeed, probably about one out of every twenty is reporting a significant result when none in fact exists.

Now, I don't really want to go too far down a road talking about bell curves and standard deviations on normal distributions, so I won't. But the point of the matter is, the incentives to report a "statistically significant" result are typically pretty strong, and so we should take a lot of the study results that we read (you know, stuff like "Coffee causes cancer! Also, it prevents cancer and cures cancer, but only when taken in specific doses at pre-determined times over several decades! So drink coffee, and also, don't drink coffee!) with an enormous grain of salt.

A lot of the time, the stuff we're reading is just a reporting of statistical noise and random chance, with a catchy headline attached. So please, people, don't fall prey to the people who want to confuse us with numbers—they're seriously everywhere these days, especially in an election year. Know the statistical background, and you'll be better able to determine for yourself whether a study result is actually significant, or just statistically significant.

[Freakonomics]

Clip of the Week (NASA edition)

With all my posting this week, I still can't seem to make a dent in my backlog of unfinished drafts. So be it, some day I'll catch up. For now, it's Clip of the Week time.

In light of today's financial news, this realistic depiction of Ben Bernanke and Mario Draghi's policy proposals (h/t Red Cowboy) seems particularly appropriate. I also love it because animals make me smile.

I've also already mentioned that it's election season, which probably means that you can get ready to see a whole lot of Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart clips around here in the coming weeks (I highly recommend the awesomeness of that Stewart clip, by the way... great satire, with a terrific Glengarry Glen Ross reference to boot).

In the sports world, outfielders continue to make great catches, as do wide receivers (just like last year). Also, for all you golfers out there, Charl Schwartzel's four-putt is just painful to watch. Enjoy.

But this is going to be a week for science and for recognizing NASA. I came across a couple of videos that showed some of the awesome stuff they're doing down there, even if their funding is coming under fire as we apparently shut down all government functions in order to save Social Security and Medicare. Crap, I'm ranting again, huh?

Anyway, this time-lapse image of all the ocean's currents was pretty awesome, but not nearly as awesome as this depiction of the Mars rover's journey, which is your Clip of the Week. Keep up the good work, NASA. Don't let the bastards get you down.

As for the rest of you, blow this up full screen and enjoy. Remember, America is still a pretty awesome place if we'll let it be, just not on Wall Street...

More on 3-D printing

Amid all my rants and raves and complaints around here, there's one thing that I've consistently touted as being seriously awesome, and that's 3-D printing. I think the potential for this technology is simply mind-blowing, and that it could completely revolutionize the way we think about manufacturing and manufactured products and shipping and basically anything you associate with our "modern" economy.

Like any technology, it's taken a little while for 3-D printing to emerge from its infancy and work out the kinks, but I think (hope?) we're rapidly approaching the point where this could be a viable consumer technology.

Early desktop printers were horrible. For the price of thousands of dollars one got lo-res dot matrix printouts on paper that had tractor-feed holes punched into the margins. It wasn’t pretty, but those early models paved the way for high-resolution, low-cost laser printing.

Today’s hobby grade 3-D printers are similarly crude. They all use Fused Filament Fabrication (FFF) technology and are essentially robotic hot glue guns. Fortunately, a new generation of higher-resolution, faster, and more reliable machines are starting to come to market.

This new type of hobbyist printer use Stereolithography (SLA) technology, utilizing light instead of heat to make models. How? A high powered light source hardens a cross section of light-sensitive liquid plastic. The machine then raises the build platform a smidge and the process is repeated. It’s very dramatic — models look like they are being pulled from a puddle of goo.

For those interested in seeing what this looks like in real time (okay, time-lapse), check out this video:



Are there potential issues with this technology? Yes, most definitely, and I certainly hope that the government doesn't fall all over itself to pre-emptively restrict the usage of 3-D printers. But I think that may in fact end up happening, if only because of this:

An American gunsmith has become the first person to construct and shoot a pistol partly made out of plastic, 3D-printed parts. The creator, user HaveBlue from the AR-15 forum, has reportedly fired 200 rounds with his part-plastic pistol without any sign of wear and tear. 

HaveBlue’s custom creation is a .22-caliber pistol, formed from a 3D-printed AR-15 (M16) lower receiver, and a normal, commercial upper. In other words, the main body of the gun is plastic, while the chamber — where the bullets are actually struck — is solid metal.

So, yeah, I can see where the government might step in and try to heavily regulate the usage of these printers. A world in which an individual can print himself a gun (or a grenade, or whatever else) on a whim might make it pretty difficult to regulate the things that government likes to regulate.

But that, in my opinion, would be a significant shame. I believe that this technology has significantly more upside than downside, and I think that there are reasonable ways to limit the potential negative impacts that government might fear. We'll see, but this is one of the few recent innovations that truly gets me excited for the future of our country and the world. If we have to break some eggs to make an omelette, so be it. This stuff is just way too cool.

[Wired]
[Extreme Tech]

Where we spend our booze money (and why)

There's an interesting set of charts over at NPR's Planet Money that shows the changes in Americans' spending habits on alcohol over the last 30 years. We don't generally spend more money on booze now than we did then (it accounts for roughly 1% of income, same now as in 1982), but we've certainly changed where we're spending it.

Here are the two primary charts:

As the author (Lam Thuy Vo) points out, it's clear that we've spent a much bigger portion of our booze money at bars and restaurants, but it's not because we've been going out more often--it's just that the prices of alcohol-at-home and alcohol-at-the-bar have gone in wildly different directions.

The author suggests a productivity argument to explain the disparity ("Over time, you expect productivity gains and falling prices in manufactured goods. But a bartender today can't make drinks any faster than a bartender 30 years ago. In other words, there haven't been major productivity gains at bars. When a sector lags in productivity growth, it tends to have increasing prices."), but I'm not buying that dynamic as a sufficient explanation.

I think that if it was a brutal lack of bartender productivity that was to blame here (to the tune of a 79% overall increase in cost of providing the service, despite a plunge in the primary input cost), then bars and restaurants would have figured out a way by now to bypass the bartender entirely--pre-mixed drinks, auto-pouring wine dispensers, self-serve beer taps, something, anything to get that pesky bartender out of the way and bring liquor prices back down. So instead, it seems like booze prices at restaurants are headed higher as a matter of business choice, not necessity.

What I think is most likely is simply that there has been a fundamental change in the restaurant/bar business model. Instead of enticing customers with super-cheap drink specials--selling the booze at a loss in hopes of making up the difference on profitable sales of food--restaurants have mostly gone in the other direction, selling their food at cost or at a loss in hopes that their customers will buy super-marked-up drinks to wash it all down. That business model would frankly make a lot of sense, and I know from anecdotal evidence that it can also be incredibly lucrative.

I spent some time over at the Bureau of Labor Statistics website trying to track down some more granular data to support my theory, but my eyes glazed over in a hurry and I quickly gave up the chase. Nevertheless, I think that given the data presented, it's highly illogical to presume that booze prices at restaurants are skyrocketing simply because of lagging bartender productivity. More likely, those prices are increasing (or, at least increasing more rapidly than they otherwise would be) in tandem with decreasing prices elsewhere, probably on another part of the menu.

There are also other potential factors that might drive a business choice in this direction--for example, it's possible that restaurants are deliberately setting their prices high so as to discourage binge drinking and the negative consequences that can result from that behavior (fights at the bar that create property damage, DUIs that result in lawsuits, etc). Whatever the explanation, I think it's fairly clear that the upward pressure on in-restaurant alcohol prices has been a conscious choice on the part of businesses, rather than an unfortunate accident.

Of course, if my theory is correct, then the best move for us as consumers would be to order take-out food from restaurants, then eat that deliciously cheap food at home with booze that we bought for ourselves at the store. That's a move that I've already pulled quite frequently myself, and might just do tonight as a matter of principle.

[NPR]