Sully Syed

How much money makes a long commute worth it?

My personal commute horror story: The worst I’ve ever had it was my four years of study at Ryerson, where I commuted two to two-and-a-half hours – in either direction – from my parents’ place in Mississauga’s west end. For six months immediately after graduation I narrowed that down to one-and-a-half hours from Mississauga to my office on Bay Street.

I learned my lesson and moved downtown. My commute is a leisurely twenty minute walk west on King and south on Bay. Believe me, it makes a difference.

ScienceBlogs – Commuting: The Frontal Cortex

…

A few years ago, the Swiss economists Bruno Frey and Alois Stutzer announced the discovery of a new human foible, which they called “the commuters paradox”. They found that, when people are choosing where to live, they consistently underestimate the pain of a long commute. This leads people to mistakenly believe that the big house in the exurbs will make them happier, even though it might force them to drive an additional hour to work.

Of course, as Brooks notes, that time in traffic is torture, and the big house isn’t worth it. According to the calculations of Frey and Stutzer, a person with a one-hour commute has to earn 40 percent more money to be as satisfied with life as someone who walks to the office. Another study, led by Daniel Kahneman and the economist Alan Krueger, surveyed nine hundred working women in Texas and found that commuting was, by far, the least pleasurable part of their day.

…

Consider two housing options: a three bedroom apartment that is located in the middle of a city, with a ten minute commute time, or a five bedroom McMansion on the urban outskirts, with a forty-five minute commute. “People will think about this trade-off for a long time,” Dijksterhuis says. “And most them will eventually choose the large house. After all, a third bathroom or extra bedroom is very important for when grandma and grandpa come over for Christmas, whereas driving two hours each day is really not that bad.”

What’s interesting, Dijksterhuis says, is that the more time people spend deliberating, the more important that extra space becomes. They’ll imagine all sorts of scenarios (a big birthday party, Thanksgiving dinner, another child) that will turn the suburban house into an absolute necessity. The pain of a lengthy commute, meanwhile, will seem less and less significant, at least when compared to the allure of an extra bathroom.

But, as Dijksterhuis points out, that reasoning process is exactly backwards: “The additional bathroom is a completely superfluous asset for at least 362 or 363 days each year, whereas a long commute does become a burden after a while.”

Sully Syed

The trouble with capitalism

The trouble with socialism is socialism. The trouble with capitalism is capitalists.

— National Review Online: Willi Schlamm, Apr. 20, 2005

Sully Syed

How losing your job affects your long-term earning potential

Via Ezra Klein comes a graph from an International Monetary Fund discussion paper illustrating the effect of long-term unemployment on the average male’s overall earning potential:

International Monetary Fund – The Challenges of Growth, Employment and Social Cohesion

Loss of earnings: There is empirical evidence that layoffs are associated with substantial loss of earnings both over the short and long run. That is, even when workers are re-employed shortly after displacement, they suffer a decline in wages compared to the pre-displacement job and compared to similar workers that were not displaced.

The decline in earnings is on average observed for job losers in any period, but is most pronounced for job losers during a recession (see Farber, 2005). Studies for the US show that these earnings losses persist even in the long run: 15-20 years after a job loss in a recession, the earnings loss amounts on average to 20% (see e.g. Jacobson et al., 1993; von Wachter et al., 2009).

Sully Syed

The moves that make men attractive to women

The Economist has an article on what particular dance moves are the most attractive to females – and it looks like being left-handed is a (hopefully slight) disadvantage!

The Economist – Dancing and sexual selection: Lord of the dance

…

The motion-capture data were used to animate a humanoid avatar that was featureless and gender-neutral. Heterosexual women were then asked to judge the quality of the dancing. The results, published in Biology Letters, were intriguing: the most attractive movements were those that had “variability and amplitude” in the head, neck and trunk.

Dr Neave explains that humans move in three planes. You can nod your head backwards and forwards, side to side or twist your neck to look over a shoulder. The women rated big movements in these three planes for both the head and the trunk as the most attractive. However, there was an additional factor, says Dr Neave.

Headbanging (sorry, Motörhead fans) was simply not attractive: although it would show a large amplitude of movement in one plane it would not show the variability of movement that seems to appeal to women. Choreographers have told Dr Neave that movements in these three planes comes from strength and suppleness, so they would help to indicate a genetically fit male.

One curiosity was that, statistically, the speed of movement of the right knee also appeared to be important in signalling dance quality. Dr Neave, however, believes this may simply result from 80% of men being right footed, and so tending to place more weight on their left foot in order to demonstrate leg-waggling prowess with the right one.

Sully Syed

Best duffel bag ever

“It’s one of our top sellers because there are so many people that have some kind of connection with aviation in Canada, or the Air Force, that it appeals to. It’s rugged, the webbing goes all the way around, you can put a ton in it. That’s why we don’t put a shoulder strap on it, it would be too heavy. Recently a customer was using the bag and sent us a note. He said, “I’ve got Louis Vuitton and I’ve got Gucci bags, and yet I’ve never had so many people comment on my bag as with this one.'”

— Red Canoe via Retail Therapy

Sully Syed

What if the U.S. Senate was elected in proportion to voter income? Or by age?

An interesting thought exercise. Organizing the upper house of the U.S. (or here in Canada, if it ever becomes elected) by territory is really as arbitrary as by any other means.

The Washington Post – What if senators represented people by income or race, not by state?

…

What if the 100-member Senate were designed to mirror the overall U.S. population — and were based on statistics rather than state lines?

Imagine a chamber in which senators were elected by different income brackets — with two senators representing the poorest 2 percent of the electorate, two senators representing the richest 2 percent and so on.

Based on Census Bureau data, five senators would represent Americans earning between $100,000 and $1 million individually per year, with a single senator working on behalf of the millionaires (technically, it would be two-tenths of a senator).

Eight senators would represent Americans with no income. Sixteen would represent Americans who make less than $10,000 a year, an amount well below the federal poverty line for families.

The bulk of the senators would work on behalf of the middle class, with 34 representing Americans making $30,000 to $80,000 per year.

Imagine trying to convince someone — Michael Bloomberg, perhaps? — to be the lonely senator representing the richest percentile. And what if the senators were apportioned according to jobs figures? This year, the unemployed would have gained two seats. Think of the deals that would be made to attract that bloc!

…

What about a Senate in which voters cast ballots for candidates campaigning to win over a certain age group? Thirteen senators would vie for 18-to-24-year-olds, who strongly support measures such as the cap-and-trade climate bill and marriage rights for gays. Nearly all of these senators would be Democrats.

Americans over 65 would control 16 seats — and would be mostly Republicans interested in protecting Medicare and the broader status quo. The baby boomer bubble would be largely in the eldest category, though its stragglers would round out the segment of voters, probably split between the parties, that is edging up on retirement.

Thirty-six senators would serve 25-to-44-year-olds, and 35 senators 45-to-64-year-olds — and would be likely to push the very issues now on the table, including health care, entitlement viability and tax breaks for the middle class.

Sully Syed

Play Adobe Flash videos in fullscreen while you work on your second monitor

While watching 2K Games’s live broadcast at PAX I finally got fed up with Adobe Flash’s habit of closing the full screen viewer whenever you click elsewhere and make it lose focus.

I eventually found Axel Gembe’s IgnoFlash Patch, which Flash Netscape and ActiveX plugins to keep them in fullscreen until you specifically terminate that viewing mode (by double-clicking in the window or pressing the Esc key).

The solution works for my Windows Vista machine and Windows XP laptop, both running Flash 10 inside Chrome.

One small tip: “Apply” the patch for each of the “Source file” selections listed by the IgnoFlash program. Don’t change anything else – just go through the list sequentially and “Apply” to each. Do this with all of your web browser windows closed. The patches should take effect immediately.

Sully Syed

Minimalist Planets

Last week Christabel and I purchased three large (20.7" x 32") prints from Justin Van Genderen‘s Minimalist Planets collection on Imagekind.com. We then had them mounted onto foam core at The Allen Gallery (with a turnaround time of two days).

Sully Syed

Short sellers as the fall guy
The Globe & Mail – Short-selling isn’t that bad

A recently published study by researchers at the University of Chicago and the University of Toronto examined 216 corporate fraud cases between 1996 and 2004. Shorts uncovered 14.5% of those frauds, not far behind the 17% that were exposed by whistleblowers within companies. And what about the SEC? It uncovered just 6.6% of the frauds.

Looking back, it’s also now clear just how right the shorts were about the poor condition of U.S. banks and investment dealers before the 2008 financial crisis. A recent bankruptcy examiner’s report shows that officials at Lehman Brothers created an off-balance sheet mechanism to shift liabilities off the books, concealing weaknesses caused by Lehman’s own recklessness. As Michael Lewis correctly points out in his latest book, The Big Short, the problem is not that regulators allowed Lehman to fail, but that it was allowed to succeed.

In the months before Lehman collapsed in September, 2008, Fuld complained that the firm was being targeted by so-called naked shorting, in which traders put in sell orders for shares without even borrowing them first. A study by three University of Oklahoma researchers published in May, 2009, examined trading in several major U.S. financial stocks—including Lehman—before and after the SEC imposed a ban on naked shorting of those issues in late July and early August in 2008. It found “no evidence that stock price declines were caused by naked shorting.”

The trouble was that U.S. regulators took the complaints from Lehman and other companies far too seriously. In fact, that SEC order actually hurt investors. A study by Arturo Bris, a professor at IMD business school in Switzerland, concluded that the order dampened trading in the stocks, which widened the spread between market bid and ask prices—a spread that investors have to cover. Erik R. Sirri, who ran the SEC’s division of trading and markets during the crisis, recently conceded that the decision to restrict short selling was based on political considerations.

Sully Syed

Entropy

Got linked to this by @willsmith. Thought it was fascinating enough to save a copy of my own.

Electronic Frontier Foundation – A Primer on Information Theory and Privacy

If we ask whether a fact about a person identifies that person, it turns out that the answer isn’t simply yes or no. If all I know about a person is their ZIP code, I don’t know who they are. If all I know is their date of birth, I don’t know who they are. If all I know is their gender, I don’t know who they are. But it turns out that if I know these three things about a person, I could probably deduce their identity! Each of the facts is partially identifying.

There is a mathematical quantity which allows us to measure how close a fact comes to revealing somebody’s identity uniquely. That quantity is called entropy, and it’s often measured in bits. Intuitively you can think of entropy being generalization of the number of different possibilities there are for a random variable: if there are two possibilities, there is 1 bit of entropy; if there are four possibilities, there are 2 bits of entropy, etc. Adding one more bit of entropy doubles the number of possibilities.

Because there are around 7 billion humans on the planet, the identity of a random, unknown person contains just under 33 bits of entropy (two to the power of 33 is 8 billion). When we learn a new fact about a person, that fact reduces the entropy of their identity by a certain amount. There is a formula to say how much:

ΔS = – log2 Pr(X=x)

Read More