What is Zanran? |
| Jump if you're a doctor! |
My own work has focused on whether economic productivity can be influence by temperature through its impact on worker productivity. I recently dug up "Effects of Heat on Wireless Telegraphy Operators Hearing and Recording Morse Messages" by N. H. Mackworth (British Journal of Industrial Medicine, 1946) and have decided its one of my favorite papers. The British military asked Norman Mackworth to put Morse code operators in rooms of varying temperature and humidity and recorded the number of errors they made. These guys were put to work in 3 hour stretches, decoding random sequences of letters and numbers for 5-7 weeks (see fig). 
I was doing a literature review of the effects of temperature on brain function and cognition, when I ran across this amazing literature. In a famous 1982 Science article, Francis Carey of WHOI demonstrated that swordfish had evolved a specialized organ that simply sat next to their brain and kept it warm by burning calories quickly. This was important, he argued, because these fish rapidly dove to depths where the water temperature was 20 degrees (C) colder than their normal environment. Because brain function is important to these hunters, it seemed reasonable that it was worth it for them to evolve specialized organs to keep their brains warm.
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| LICRICE model for the global distribution of tropical cyclone winds |
Anisa found this one: The World Bank has made data on all its projects available. They've even made a nice GUI for exploring it all: maps.worldbank.org.Prior to the Spring Meetings 2011, Mapping for Results has identified more than 1250 active Bank financed activities working in 16,520 locations. These activities are a subset of more than 2,500 active financed Bank activities with a volume of more than $160 billion.
"I was a meteorologist as my military service during World War II, and we were TAUGHT that carbon dioxide was going to make the world warmer."
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.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.
If you had already been advised that Long Island was close to perfection on earth, that we had no worries about floods, earthquakes, hurricanes or other natural disasters that had befallen other unfortunate parts of the earth, the chances are pretty good that you could have gotten fooled on the 21st day of September, 1938.
Only a few months before, the local theater had shown a saga called “Typhoon,” and among the things I had gotten out of that was an observation by one of the characters in the movie that “the birds were acting peculiarly.” They were portrayed (how do you get a flock of wild birds to act?) as being excited, nervous, anxious and so forth. Not being an avid bird watcher, I couldn’t really tell if our birds were doing the same thing that day around lunch time, but it was close enough for me to mention it to my Grandmother, and her Mother, a visitor at the time. And you could have bet money on the reply. “One thing you never have to worry about on Long Island is floods, hurricanes, earthquakes and all those other things everybody not smart enough to live here worry about.”The hurricane was a Category 3 on the Saffir-Simpson scale when it made landfall (after peaking at Cat 5 out to sea) and devastated much of eastern Long Island and the south New England coast. Wind damage in New York City wasn't extreme but flooding was (viz the photo above). Of course, this wasn't the only major hurricane to hit New York City; the 1893 Hog Island Hurricane, for example, is so named because it washed away most of Hog Island in between Long Island and Long Beach.
