Nudges, webforms and cookies

May 17, 2012 Leave a comment

They can designed to be in your best interests (as in the libertarian paternalism espoused in Thaler’s and Sunstein’s book, Nudge) but also in someone else’s best interest.

One small way is the resetting of options of webforms. The next time you’re booking something, uncheck/check the boxes so as not to receive marketing mail, then make a mistake in e.g., your payment details before pressing submit. Watch what happens when the site loads the page again with a message saying to review that section – I bet all your details are still there, except the marketing options have reverted to the defaults of opting in.

I forget the company now (Eurostar, Opodo Booking.com, ?) that I was using a lot sometime ago, but there would always be a ‘mistake’ on the form – I think it was the CVV number – and the page would reload with that bit blank asking me to try again. I’d retype the number (the same number as before) but in the reload process the marketing options had reverted back and needed changing again.

Anyway, I noticed today on the Brussels Airlines website, that when the page reloads after making an incorrect entry they keep everything for you – except for the frequent flyer number you’ve entered, which will need retyping if you happen to notice. A nice way to marginally lower some of their future airmile liability.

One of my favourite sites is thedailymash.co.uk, which recently has started to charge readers when they view more than 7 articles a month (as far as I can tell, this is only when your IP address is outside of the UK). However, simply going via your browser’s internet options to see the list of cookies, and deleting the one from ppjol.com will reset your count back to zero, which made me wonder – is this theft?

Party A clearly wishes to charge Party B for their product, but Party B is preventing Party A from conducting the process that will lead to an invoice being issued and this is done in a way that Party A can’t detect.

Party A’s process involves planting a tracking device on Party B however. But then Party B probably also implicitly accepts such an activity (I haven’t read through the T&Cs on the site, but presume it’s standard to have a line about ‘we may use cookies when you use this service’). Ultimately though, when Party B is not on the site, what is wrong with choosing to remove data files from her computer so as to no longer be tracked, even if that does stop the payment process from being triggered on a later return?

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Healthcare expenditure -v- life expectancy

May 4, 2012 1 Comment

A smart way to reduce the risk of confusing correlation with causation, especially when comparing different countries, is to plot the two variables of interest over time.

Here’s a nice example, showing that it’s likely the US has a less efficient healthcare system than other rich countries, and that the low life expectancy is not due to other confounding variables (e.g., having a higher homicide rate – something which has actually decreased over the time period shown).

More here by Lane Kenworthy

Filed under economics, living well Tagged with ,

The Guardian -v- Addison Lee

May 3, 2012 3 Comments

I was wondering why the London-based taxi firm, Addison Lee, had so many bad reviews all of a sudden on its iPhone app and so did a little googling. This Guardian article explains part of the controversy*, which concerns a quote by the company’s chairman:

“There has, as we all know, been a tremendous upsurge in cycling … These cyclists are throwing themselves onto some of the most congested spaces in the world … the influx of beginner cyclists is going to lead to an overall increase in accidents involving cyclists.

“The rest of us occupying this road space have had to undergo extensive training.

“It is time for us to say to cyclists, ‘You want to join our gang, get trained….”

The Guardian felt differently however, using as evidence the fact that motorists are responsible for up to 75% of collisions involving cyclists. Their source was an earlier Guardian article which contained this:

The data, which was analysed by the Transport Research Laboratory (TRL) …found that police attributed responsibility for collisions to … the driver solely in about 60%-75% of all cases, [with] riders solely at fault 17%-25% of the time … CTC said the report showed that the government needed to focus more on driver behaviour …”We believe this report strongly supports our view that the biggest problem for cyclists is bad driving.”

I don’t agree that the data supports that the view that the government should concentrate on driers [though this may be true]. The statistics reported relate to the probability that party x caused an accident given that an accident occurred. It can often be useful to analyse something with extreme numbers, so let’s do that.

Imagine there are 1,000,000 motorists, just 4 cyclists, and 3 collisions. Two of the collisions are the fault of the driver, and one is down to the cyclist. So 66% of accidents are caused by motorists, but this ignores the fact that there are relatively more drivers than cyclists (ok, a lot more given the numbers we picked). The bigger picture is that in this version of London a mere 1 in 500,000 motorists cause accidents, as opposed to a massive 1 in 4 cyclists.**

A related stat I remember: you have the same chance of dying on a 200-mile motorbike ride in the UK as you do of getting killed whilst serving for a single day in the British army in Afghanistan (a year or so ago).

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* The actual source of bad reviews seems more likely to be by black cab drivers not taking kindly to their unique privilege of being able to use bus lanes being challenged – a challenge which I think has some merit.

**When I first heard about Monty and his 3 doors I didn’t guess to change door, so happy to receive a challenge on this way of looking at the stats…

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Bless you

April 23, 2012 Leave a comment

Or, why Mandarin won’t be the language of the future:

The learner needs to know at least 3,000-4,000 characters to make sense of written Chinese, and thousands more to have a real feel for it. Fewer and fewer native speakers learn to produce characters in traditional calligraphy. Instead, they write their language the same way we do—with a computer. And not only that, but they use the Roman alphabet to produce Chinese characters. If the user types in wo shi zhongguo ren, “I am Chinese”, the software detects the meaning and picks the right characters. With less need to recall the characters cold, the Chinese are forgetting them. David Moser asked three native Chinese graduate students at Peking University how to write ‘sneeze’:

“To my surprise, all three of them simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one could correctly produce the character. Now, Peking University is usually considered the “Harvard of China”. Can you imagine three phd students at Harvard forgetting how to write the English word ‘sneeze’? Yet this state of affairs is by no means uncommon in China.”

More here.

How many words do you know?

How many languages are there in the world?

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How times change

April 16, 2012 1 Comment

As late as 1971, women were banned from going into Wimpy Bars on their own, after midnight, on the grounds that the only women out on their own at that hour must be prostitutes.

More observations on 1970s life in the UK here.

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Earth to reach boiling point in 400 years

April 12, 2012 Leave a comment

As an ex-physicist who realises later in life that he’d probably rather have studied economics, I’d like to paraphrase from an interesting article by Tom Murphy. It uses fundamental physics to argue that economic growth cannot continue indefinitely, albeit under the assumption that increases in GDP require an increased use of energy*:

US energy consumption has increased by about 3% per year for several centuries.This is partly due to increases in population, but per-capita energy use itself has grown also — our energy lives today are far richer than those of our great-great-grandparents a century ago.

So even if population stabilizes, it’s fair to say we are accustomed to per-capita energy growth.

The Earth has only one mechanism for releasing heat to space, and that’s via infrared radiation. It’s well understood. If we use more energy (it must all end up as heat energy) then more must be radiated away, and the surface temperature of the planet will increase.

This graph, which presumes a constant 2.3% energy increase per year, plots the Earth’s surface temperature over time:

Graph of earth temperature over time at constant energy growth

The upshot is that at a 2.3% growth rate, the Earth would reach boiling temperature in about 400 years. This statement is independent of technology. Even if we don’t have a name for the energy source yet, as long as it obeys the laws of thermodynamics, we cook ourselves with perpetual energy increase. Thermodynamic limits impose a cap to energy growth due to the process of radiating the spent energy away.

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*Under a model in which GDP is fixed, with conditions of stable energy, stable population, and steady-state economy, then if we accumulate knowledge, improve the quality of life, and thus create an unambiguously more desirable world this is a form of economic growth, but one which more normally falls under the title of “development” rather than “growth”.

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Let there be light

April 8, 2012 2 Comments

I’ve come across this a few times over the years, and been meaning to post it the next time I saw the numbers somewhere. And today I have, here:

In 1800, a candle providing one hour’s light cost six hours’ work. In the 1880s, the same light from a kerosene lamp took 15 minutes’ work to pay for. In 1950, it was eight seconds. Today, it’s half a second. In these terms, we are 43,200 times better off than in 1800.

The 1800 number I think is too high (I reckon you can go and find some wood in less than 6 hrs, or buy some for an amount smaller than 6 hrs of labour). Order of magnitude correct though.

I also think it takes less than half a second, by the way, today, plugging in average salary and electricity kw/h numbers for the UK.

But the thrust of the point is clear, we are massively better off than generations before because we have gotten more efficient at producing things. Four of the basic human needs, food, clothing, fuel, and housing, are now far cheaper in terms of the average wage.

And given it’s Easter, remember, stars died so that you could live.

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How did you arrive?

April 4, 2012 Leave a comment

The blog passes 10,000 page views today, and I thought it might be entertaining to look at how people arrived at the site.

Most people reading the blog regularly do so using an rss feed, or via the automated emailing function, and don’t actually visit the site. Therefore page views are mostly down to people clicking a link, or following a Google search. WordPress collects the search string.

Sadly, a number of lost souls wondered: “why do people get more birthday posts than me on Facebook”. One more solution-orientated individual however, wanted to know “how to be more popular than your friend”.

Perhaps the two people curious about the “going postal % rate in workplace” are the same two interested in the “human melting temperature”. I don’t know what has led Google here for that! But I guess I’ve just gone and strengthened the weighting that Google will give to my site being the source of an answer…

By far the most frequently used search term was “marc gawley”, with my favourite variant being “powerstance marc gawley”. Yeah.

 

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Putting the clocks forward caused 1,000 heart attacks

March 30, 2012 Leave a comment

This article from Sweden (hat tip Åsa) describes some research by the Karolinska Institute analysing hospital records from which they calculate that over the two weeks from putting the clocks forward, there is typically an excess of 30 Swedes dying from heart attacks. Conversely, in the Autumn, there are 10 fewer heart attacks in the period following the clocks going back.

Scaling that up, this gives a rough back-of-the-envelope calculation for 1,000 excess fatal heart attacks across the EU27 each year as a direct result of the stresses caused by getting up an hour earlier.

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How the UK budget is put together

March 23, 2012 Leave a comment

Anyone can come up with an idea for the Budget: members of the public who write in; NGOs and Business groups; other government departments; officials in HMRC; Treasury staff, special advisers and ministers; and of course the Chancellor himself.

More here on how the UK budget is put together using an excel spreadsheet.

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