Boggle: measuring how sunshine alters the moon's orbit

The July 11, 2009 issue of New Scientist ran a series of stories of why the moon still matters to astronomy, in celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing. One of them, by Stuart Clark, described how reflectors left on the lunar surface are helping test Einstein's theory gravity. Laser pulses bounced off these reflectors allow researchers to measure the distance between the earth and the moon to a precision of a few millimetres.

At such accuracy one has to factor in the effect of solar radiation pressure "which pushes the moon's entire orbit from its calculated path by about 4 millimetres."

Factoid: 78% of bottom-quartile employees don't have employer-provided health coverage

-- From a McKinsey analysis reported in their Chart Focus Newsletter, May 2009. It reports "growing disparities in the percentage of employees at different income levels receiving employer-paid health benefits: only 22 percent of employees in the lowest income group (earning an average of $14,800 a year), but 56 percent, 81 percent, and 89 percent of those in the lower-middle, upper-middle, and top income groups, respectively."

Factoid: more Americans are killed every year by preventable medical mishaps than breast cancer or AIDS

From an Economist special report on health care and technology, April 18th, 2009

A report by the Institute of Medicine estimated that up to 100,000 Americans are killed each year by preventable mishaps such as wrong-side surgery, medication errors and hospital-acquired infections—a larger number than die from breast cancer or AIDS.

Flying Blind, The Economist, April 16th 2009

The story continues:

Sometimes such errors can be prevented without fancy technology. It helps to write “not this leg” on a patient’s left leg before surgery on his right leg. When Kaiser Permanente’s innovation laboratory looked into errors in medication dosage, it found that a lot of them were due to interruptions. Now nurses preparing complex medications wear “do not disturb” sashes, which has caused errors to drop noticeably. A striking study in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that surgical errors and complications fall by one-third if hospitals use a simple safety checklist before, during and after surgery.

Factoid: Vista is worth negative-$150

According to Silicon Valley Insider, Dell is now charging customers $150 to downgrade from Vista to Windows XP. According to the story, Dell started charging customers an extra $20 to $50 for a downgrade to Windows XP in June, and by October, Dell's XP premium was up to $100.

Not a happy product if people will pay large amounts to avoid having to buy it.

And I thought that old joke about "first prize is a week in Palookaville, and second prize is two weeks there" was just a joke. . .

Factoid: more computers than people in Israel

According to a country ranking of computer ownership published in the 2009 edition of The Economist’s “Pocket World in Figures”, there were 122.1 computers per 100 people in Israel in 2006.

Russia was in the same league as Namibia, with 12 computers per 100 people. The US, Britain and Australia were at 76 per 100 people.

Cisco's 2007-2012 IP network traffic forecast

A Cisco outlook for IP traffic makes fascinating (if probably a self-serving...) reading: Cisco Visual Networking Index - Forecast and Methodology, 2007–2012.

• IP traffic will nearly double every two years through 2012. Total IP traffic will increase by a factor of six from 2007 to 2012.
• Despite the growth of P2P traffic, as a percentage of consumer Internet traffic it dropped to 51% at the end of 2007, down from 60% the year before.
• Video is now approximately one-quarter of all consumer Internet traffic, not including the amount of video exchanged through P2P file sharing.
• Internet traffic is growing fastest in Latin America, followed by Western Europe and Asia-Pacific

Thanks to David Hytha for the link.

Factoid: The US has less than 5 percent of the world’s population but almost a quarter of its prisoners

The New York Times story Inmate Count in U.S. Dwarfs Other Nations’ is a staggering litany of American exceptionalism. A few excerpts:

Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations. . .

The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation . . . China, which is four times more populous than the United States, is a distant second, with 1.6 million people in prison [excluding those in administrative detention]. . .

The United States comes in first [in] incarceration rates, [with] 751 people in prison or jail for every 100,000 in population. [Next]is Russia, with 627 prisoners for every 100,000 people. . . . England’s rate is 151; Germany’s is 88; and Japan’s is 63. The median among all nations is about 125, roughly a sixth of the American rate.

The story cites a variety of causes, including higher levels of violent crime, harsher sentencing laws, a legacy of racial turmoil, a special fervor in combating illegal drugs, the American temperament, and the lack of a social safety net, and elected judges.

Factoid: The prevalence of Alzheimer's is about 1% at 65 years of age, and doubles every five years after that

Source: Guy Brown, "Death special: The bitter end" New Scientist 13 October 2007

It's not a pretty picture. The Big Hope used to be that we'd live longer, but that disease and disability would be compressed into short period at the end of life. Well-being would be a step function that dropped off quickly just before we dropped dead. Unfortunately, increasing lifespan is combining with an increase in degenerative disease to create "expanded morbidity," a long and painful decline towards our demise.

The factoid in context:

The prevalence of most degenerative diseases, such as cancer, and vascular and neurodegenerative disease, increases roughly exponentially with age. For example, the prevalence of Alzheimer's is about 1 per cent at 65 years of age and approximately doubles every five years after that, to around 25 per cent for 85-year-olds. In the US, 46 per cent of people over 85 years of age are thought to have Alzheimer's. There are an estimated 5 million people with Alzheimer's in the US today, and as people live longer this number is projected to rise to 12.5 million by 2050 (Journal of Psychiatric Research, vol 36, p 281).

. . .

Of Americans older than 80 years, 74 per cent have a disability. They are also more likely to be forgetful, confused or depressed. Almost a quarter of non-institutionalised Americans over 85 are thought to be severely depressed.

A friend who teaches geriatric nursing tells me that the Boomer Generation is particularly unprepared for this fate: they have always rejected the prospect of growing old.

Guy Brown argues that we need to put "death, dying and dementia" on the political agenda. He advances the need for more research and hospice funding - and for a new attitude to death.

The hard part is teaching our hearts what our heads (in their more sober moments) already know: death is a part of life. It's hard enough accepting the small inconveniences of life; learning to accept death seems almost impossible. At least longer life spans means we have a little more time to practice than our forebears.

Factoid: A quarter of users who wanted to use Google couldn't do so

Jakob Nielsen says that in their current round of usability research, only 76% of users who expressed a desire to run a Google search were successful - and these were "above-average" users. Instead, Nielsen reports, they either completely failed to get to any search engine or ended up running their query on a different search engine — usually whatever type-in field happened to be at hand.

That's a good reality check for the digerati...

Factoid: Half of all Americans fall into poverty for a year at some point in their lives

This is a striking reminder of the fragility of daily life, and a selfish reason for everybody to care for the poor.

Source: Mark R. Rank & Thomas A. Hirschl, 2001. "Rags or Riches? Estimating the Probabilities of Poverty and Affluence across the Adult American Life Span," Social Science Quarterly, The Southwestern Social Science Association, vol. 82(4), pages 651-669.

From the abstract:

Between the ages of 25 and 75, 51.1 percent of Americans will spend at least one year below the poverty line, 51.0 percent will encounter a year of affluence, while only 21.0 percent of Americans will avoid either of these economic extremes.

The research is based on an analysis of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). Poverty is defined using the US Census Bureau criteria. Affluence is defined as ten times the poverty levels. For more on income volatility, see here.

The oil industry collects 51 cents in federal subsidies for every gallon of ethanol it mixes with gas and sells as E10

BusinessWeek reports that oil companies are trying to stop the spread of E85, a fuel that is 85% ethanol and 15% gas (Big Oil's Big Stall On Ethanol, 1 Oct 2007).

Some academics claim that ethanol takes more energy to produce than it supplies. This is contested; but even a UC Davis study says the energy used to produce ethanol is about even with what it generates, and that cleaner emissions would be offset by the loss of pasture and rainforest to corn-growing.

There's also a nasty little problem with E85: drivers apparently lose about 25% in fuel economy with E85.

Mind-boggling

Not the usual fare for this blog, but I found this tidbit amazing: A female Bar-tailed Godwit touched down in New Zealand following an epic, 18,000-mile-long (29,000 km) series of flights tracked by satellite, including the longest non-stop flight recorded for a land bird: a non-stop flight of more than eight days and a distance of 7,200 miles, the equivalent of making a roundtrip flight between New York and San Francisco, and then flying back again to San Francisco without ever touching down.

For more, see USGS story, USGS satellite tracks, and APSN summary.

Lobbying Pays

The September 17th BusinessWeek has a fascinating look Inside The Hidden World Of Earmarks. The tell the story of how the Navy got itself an executive jet that the Pentagon didn’t ask Congress for. Gulfstream lobbied heavily, and the Navy got special funding, known as an earmark. The Georgia Congressional delegation, and Senator Saxby Chambliss in particular, were very helpful - no surprise, since the Gulfstream is built in that state.

BusinessWeek concludes that on average, companies generated roughly $28 in earmark revenue for every dollar they spent lobbying. The top twenty in this game in $100 or more for every dollar spent. For context, the magazine provides these factoids: companies in the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index brought in just $17.52 in revenues for every dollar of capital expenditure in 2006.

In Gulfstream’s case, that exec jet deal was worth $53 million. It was just one of 29 earmarks valued at $169 million given to General Dynamics (its parent) or its subsidiaries that year; a nifty 30:1 ROI given that the company spent only $5.7 million on lobbying in 2004.

Animal Instincts

American spend $41 billion per year on their pets according to a feature article in BusinessWeek. That’s about $400 per household, and more than the GDP of all but 64 countries in the world.

It’s good to know that the old hard-wired priorities – relationships, even with animals, and schtuff – still trump the new intangibles. According to BW, the yearly cost of buying, feeding, and caring for pets is more than the combined sum of what Americans spend on the movies ($10.8 billion), playing video games ($11.6 billion), and listening to recorded music ($10.6 billion).

Pet care is the second-fastest growing retail sector after consumer electronics. But the intangible economy is unavoidable even here: services like ‘pet hotels’ (kennels, to you and me), grooming, training, and in-store hospitals, have helped PetSmart expand its service business from essentially nothing in 2000 to $450 million, or 10% of overall sales, this year.

(It seems that pets are now more popular as companions for empty-nesters, single professionals and DINKYs, than as kids’ sidekicks. With this kind of infantilization, will it be long before more grown-ups start admitting to still sleeping with teddy bears?)

Factoid: 19 million programmers by 2010

According to Evans Data Corp, the global developer population will approach 19 million in 2010. (I found this via ZDNet's ITFacts blog; the EDC site requires registration to even see the press release.) That's quite a big number - the total population of Australia, for example.

Programming will not be a marginal activity, and any fundamental cognitive constraints on our ability to develop increasingly complex problems will be impossible to avoid.

A lot of the growth will come from new countries bringing programmers online: EDC forecasts that the developer population in APAC will grow by 83% increase from 2006 to 2010, compared to just a 15% increase in North America for the same period. This will keep the skill level high, since only very talented people will enter the population, rather than expanding the percentage of the programming population - and thus reducing average skill - in a given country.

Therefore, the qualititative problems of programming won't change much in the next 5-10 years. However, beyond that we may also face the issue of reducing innate skill levels of programmers.

Factoids: cost of clinical trials

According to Thomson CenterWatch, a publishing company that focuses on the clinical trials industry, companies need to recruit about 4,000 people to test an experimental drug at a cost of up to $25,000 for each person. That translates into $100 million at the high end.

Source: Advertorial on Clinical Trials in New Scientist, 16 June 2007

Factoid: A typical cellphone user spends 80% of his or her time communicating with just four other people

--- Source: Stefana Broadbent, an anthropologist who leads the User Adoption Lab at Swisscom, cited by the Economist in Tech Quaterly story on June 9, 2007: Home truths about telecoms.

They also quote her thus: "The most fascinating discovery I've made this year is a flattening in voice communication and an increase in written channels. . . . Users are showing a growing preference for semi-synchronous writing over synchronous voice." The Economist's gloss: "Her research in Switzerland and France found that even when people are given unlimited cheap or free calls, the number and length of calls does not increase significantly. This may be because there is only so much time you can spend talking; and when you are on the phone it is harder to do other things. Written channels such as e-mail, text-messaging and IM, by contrast, are discreet and allow contact to be continuous during the day."

It seems writing really is a useful alternative channel. I guess there's a reason why the Blackberry was so succesful.

Trading on News

Follow the money, if you want to know where the action is in AI (and most other things). Trading houses are buying tagged news feeds so that they can process them as input for algorithmic trading. That'sll have to be a pretty smart news reader.

The Economist story that reports this development contains these factoids:

• Algorithmic trading accounts for a third of all share trades in America
• The Aite Group reckons it will make up more than half the share volumes and a fifth of options trades by 2010
• The new London Stock Exchange system catering to the growth of algorithmic trading cuts trading times down to ten milliseconds; on its first day, it processed up to 1,500 orders a second, compared with 600 using its previous system

The story closes with the observation that "the news may come from reading the algorithmic trades, not the other way around," because these systems may be able to spot early price signals of a takeover decision before it's announced.

Taken a step further, I can imagine the trading houses selling re-tagged news feeds back to Dow Jones and Reuters. Suitably anonimized, aggregated, and delayed to protect the individual movers, information on which news items triggered trades would be useful at second order. And then the news providers can sell the re-re-tagged feeds to the traders, who'll then sell back the re-re-re-tagged . . .

Factoid: Americans spent only 0.2% of their money but 10% of their time on the internet

Source: Austan Goolsbee and Peter Klewnow, "Valuing Consumer Products by the Time Spent Using Them: An Application to the Internet," draft available at http://faculty.chicagogsb.edu/austan.goolsbee/research/timeuse.pdf. This result suggests that conventional consumer surplus calculations significantly understate the value of the internet.

Paper abstract:

For some goods, the main cost of buying the product is not the price but rather the time it takes to use them. Only about 0.2% of consumer spending in the U.S., for example, went for Internet access in 2004 yet time use data indicates that people spent around 10% of their entire leisure time going online. For goods like that, estimating price elasticities with expenditure data can be difficult and, therefore, estimated welfare gains highly uncertain. We show that for time-intensive goods like the Internet, a simple model in which both expenditure and time contribute to consumption can be used to estimate the consumer gains to a good using just the data on time use and the opportunity cost of people's time (i.e., the wage). The theory predicts that higher wage internet subscribers should spend less time online (for non-work reasons) and the degree to which that is true determines the elasticity of demand. Based on expenditure and time use data and our elasticity estimate, we calculate that consumer surplus from the Internet may be around 2% of full-income, or several thousand dollars. This is an order of magnitude larger than what one obtains from a back-of-the-envelope calculation using data from expenditures.

In the last fifty years, the ten most extreme days in the financial markets represent half the returns.

Factoid (verbatim) from Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Random House 2007, p. 275.

In the caption to Figure 14 on the following page, which illustrates S&P 500 returns, Taleb observes: "This is only one of many such tests. While it is quite convincing on a casual read, there are many more-convincing ones from a mathematical standpoint, such as the incidence of 10 sigma events."

(This post marks the end of my attempt to use MSN Spaces for my Factoids site. It was just too clunky. I'll now post factoids here; as they pile up, you'll find all of them by clicking on the "factoids" label at the end of the post.)