Weekend Links

1) More on pirates and game theory (previously, and more generally)

2) The Brookings Institute's Fall 2011 National Survey of American Public Opinion on Climate Change

3) Is high ability necessary for greatness?

4) Stephen Wolfram analyzes data on his own productivity behavior (via Ben Goldacre)

5) "If you want to help, your first duty is to make sure you don’t make things worse." Blattman on Kony

6) The animated GIF as climatological commentary (via Krista)

7) A generalizable technique for solving difficult problems (via MR)

The impact of piracy on general circulation models

Sometimes the interdisciplinary research grant proposals write themselves. From last week's EOS:

Pirate Attacks Affect Indian Ocean Climate Research

Pirate attacks in the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean off the coast of Somalia nearly doubled from 111 in 2008 to 217 in 2009 [International Maritime Bureau, 2009, 2010]. Consequently, merchant vessel traffic in the area around Somalia significantly decreased. Many of these merchant vessels carry instruments that record wind and other weather conditions near the ocean surface, and alterations in ship tracks have resulted in a hole sized at about 2.5 million square kilometers in the marine weather–observing network off the coast of Somalia.

The data void exists in the formation region of the Somali low-level jet, a wind pattern that is one of the main drivers of the Indian summer monsoon. Further, a stable, multidecadal record has been interrupted, and consequently, long-term analyses of the jet derived from surface wind data are now showing artificial anomalies that will affect efforts by scientists to identify interannual to decadal variations in the climate of the northwestern Indian Ocean.

Link to abstract (full article is behind paywall). For more Fight Entropy posts on piracy click here. Note that this relationship has serious endogeneity issues.

Even pirates need contracts

My advisor, Bentley MacLeod, has successfully convinced me that incomplete contracts are a central problem in both environment and development economics.  In both situations, there are a large number of complex phenomena that are difficult to specify in advance. This makes it difficult to write contracts describing future contingencies, leading to incomplete contracts and market failures.


I came across this story by NPR, a nice example of how important complete contracts are: Somali pirates are writing increasingly complex contracts with one another. Here are the highlights:

Ransoms now average between $4 million and $5 million, and researchers estimate as many as 2,000 pirates operate from Somalia's shores. 

Law enforcement sources say the larger pirate syndicates are becoming increasingly sophisticated and professional. Last year, the coast guard in the Seychelles, an island nation in the Indian Ocean, found an 11-page, handwritten piracy contract in a seized skiff. Like many business ventures, the contract outlined everything from division of profits to an employee code of conduct. 

I would love to know the rate of return for lending capital to pirates:

Wayne Miller, a former police officer from Australia, spent last year teaching the Seychelles' police how to interrogate pirates. Miller has seen the contract and said it divided ransom money into shares based on investors' contributions to the operation. 

"If they provided AK-47s or RPGs [rocket-propelled grenade launchers] or fuel, even the skiffs and mother ship, they were given a certain share that was quite high, and that ensured that whatever was made, the bulk would come back to them," Miller said.

 And don't forget your risk premium:

Miller said ransom shares for pirate workers were divided between those who did the more dangerous jobs — hijacking on the sea — and those who did the safer tasks on land. 

"Shares on land would relate to taking care of hostages once they were taken ashore," Miller said in an interview in Somaliland, an autonomous region of Somalia. "We noticed that the biggest share went to one particular person, and my assumption is that would be the negotiator." 

... or some basic institutions to ensure the rest of the rules are followed...

The contract even outlined a pirate code of conduct. Pirates could not fight and had to obey the captain's orders. If they broke the code, they forfeited shares. But the contract was not all stick. 

"What was striking were bonuses for being first on board another ship," said Miller.In fact, piracy researchers say the first on board can sometimes win a Toyota Land Cruiser.

Weather-driven pirate risk maps

A variety of sources point out that Naval Research Labs' James Hansen* has come up with a piracy-risk model that takes as its two major sources of input current and forecasted weather and in-field reports on pirate activity:

"Usually, I'm doing theoretical stuff down in the weeds," said Hansen, a Seattle-area native and applied mathematician at the Naval Research Laboratory in Monterey, Calif. "This is the only project where I can actually show pictures of the impact," he said, projecting images of Somali boatmen armed with missile-launchers and automatic weapons.

The quote is from an article in the Seattle Times about a presentation that Hansen gave at the American Meteorological Society meeting. The model is driven by the fact that most if not all modern piracy depends on small, fast boats that can evade long-distance detection and can outpace larger slower cargo ships. In heavy weather the boats can't operate. Combine weather forecasts with observed pirate activity and voilà.

I can't locate any sort of working paper at present, so if any of y'all locate it please do send it to me. And as I wrote to the sdev-internal email list: someone please please please write a paper using this ASAP. Just be careful of your exclusion restrictions.

* As Sol points out: "How many climate scientists are named James Hansen? I now know of 3."