Over The Counter Culture

Just came across an interesting behavioural economics paper by Stutzer & Frey. Behavioural science is an extremely ‘hot’ field of academia at the moment, hitting the mainstream with books such as Freakonomics (Dubner & Levitt), Predictably Irrational (Ariely), Blink (Gladwell), Nudge (Thaler), etc), and with increasing influence in politics, notably within the Conservative Party here in the UK.

The key finding is this:

Our main  result  indicates [...] that people with  long  journeys  to  and  from work  are systematically worse off and report significantly lower subjective well-being

So you make yourself systematically worse off,  and much unhappier, by buying a large suburban house (with long commute) with an extra bedroom for the rare occasions when your parents come to visit, instead of a short-haul townhouse - even though at the time of purchase, going for the larger suburban house seemed like a totally rational decision.

Same deal with getting a highly paid city job in Canary Wharf or on Wall Street or Madison Avenue even though it dramatically extends commute time - when we would lead a happier job working a ‘worse’ job locally. 

The conclusion is not totally unexpected, but it’s an interesting example that makes you think about how irrational human existence can be - pretty depressing really. It highlights the importance of behavioural economics: we may be able to achieve a much happier society if it can succeed in revealing these paradoxical lifestyle choices and thus helping us to avoid them.

We don’t understand, long term, the relative contributions to our happiness and well-being of different factors in our lifestyle. Behavioural science in the 21st century could have a similar ‘enlightenment’ effect to nutritional/dietary science in the 20th.

I’d be interested to know what other examples there are, from your life, where you now think/suspect a decision you took at some point in life *thinking* it was totally rational has led to you being worse off overall?

(hat tip)

Spectre’s put together a great set of articles about Surrey Satellite Technology ltd. (SSTL). Get this, from a 2005 article: “A company formed by a small team of boffins in Guildford yesterday launched the first Galileo satellite, beating a rival consortium of three of Europe’s technology giants [Alcatel, EADS and Thales].

“SSTL expects to have a turnover of £30m this year, with pre-tax profits of  around £1.5m. The company has grown by 25pc a year since it was spun out of Surrey University in 1985. The consortium, Galileo Industries, originally tendered at five times the price quoted by SSTL, but their satellite is still in testing and not expected to launch until mid-2006.”

“We specifically make low-cost and quick satellites,” he said. Giove-A, which weighs 600kg, has gone
from drawing board to launch in 30 months. “We take these components out of iPods and so on, and work out whether we can fly them in our spacecraft.” Sir Martin said conventional components can take up to 15 years to test, by which time they may be obsolete. “Imagine if you bought a PC that was 15 years old.”

The best thing about this: Surrey University owns 80% of the company (the rest is owned by the employees, and by Elon Musk, a name that should be familiar to anyone in the dotcom scene). So they held 80% of a very profitable company growing 20-25% y/y that makes its living stripping bits out of your gadgets to make ultra cheap, ultralight satellites - in a country with no real culture or history of space exploitation/exploration - in fact, SSTL was formed just when Maggie Thatcher nabbed the entire UK space budget! Surrey University really cashed recently when it sold SSTL to EADS earlier this year.

I don’t think we in the UK realise just how much potential we have locked up in our universities, waiting to be exploited and to take on commercial giants from way out leftfield.

Stanford owns the patent to Google’s search engine technology. Would tuition fees faced by students be so onerous if UK universities were doing the same with their bright stars?

A US cleantech company called Blacklight Power has raised $60m for a new, very clean form of electricity production. Nothing astounding there, really - cleantech is very much du jour. What’s “WTFotd”-worthy about this story is that the technology they claim to have developed runs against a key part of quantum physics: they claim that they have discovered a lower energy level for electrons than the 1s shell resting state: the hydrino.

To the layman: hydrogen has been extensively studied because it’s the simplest periodic element, and when you’re talking quantum physics, studying basic, simple systems helps… a lot. So physisicts think they understand it pretty damn well. A fundamental tenet is that the lowest energy ’shell’ (think of it as an orbiting satellite around a planet) that electrons can take around a hydrogen nucleus is called 1s. This is the ‘resting state’, and most physicists don’t believe it could be pushed any lower. *If* it could, then you could take out the difference in energy, use it to power a plant. But physicists believe that hydrogen electrons can’t go any lower: try to squish it in any closer, and it will just press back; so the only energy you would get out of it is energy you put in. Not the way to run a power plant. This is something that the general scientific body holds to be true (or so I understand - but IANAQP).

The hydrino controversy last churned up in 2005 - even hitting mainstream media. Apparently Blacklight is now moving on to scaling up to a 50kW reactor. It would be earth-quaking enough for this key tenet of physics to be proven false in a physics lab somewhere in a university. But for it to have been discovered by a startup in the industry by a non-physicist, and to be on its way to becoming a commercially viable power source? And for it to be roughly 10x cheaper than the cheapest solar power we have available (and even cheaper than the cheapest coal power?), at just 1cent a kWh? This scenario isn’t impossible, but seriously, come on!!

There’s a lot to be skeptical about here. The fact that none of his papers have been coauthored, or that a discovery as revolutionary as this can’t get into Nature or Science, or even any attention in New Scientist. Some scientists claim Randell Mills’ papers are ‘riddled with mathematical errors’, and with Mills’ background in medicine, not theoretical physics or even chemistry, that would be understandable. Various scientists have taken turns ripping his research to shreds. And yet Blacklight’s got great backers, NASA has taken an interest, and $60m has been stumped up. Wtf indeed.

[cf Venturebeat]

(just did some reading on means for capturing sunlight and how efficient they are; it challenged some of my preconceptions of where the solution might lie, so I though I’d share it with you guys too. I omit energy sources that are many thermodynamic steps removed from incident solar radiation, like hydroelectric, wind and waves - I *assume* these are extremely inefficient converters).

Chlorophyll (in plants, converts sunrays into ‘redox potential’ - useful chemical energy that can smash carbon dioxide and water together to form hydrocarbons - like sugar or biodiesel): ~100%

Conversion of chlorophyll-derived energy to useful molecules, like sugars: 50%

Factor in the energy spent by the plant so that it can live, and the sunlight reflected off the leaves, and your big green plant could theoretically convert just 11% (other sources quote 34%). Sugar cane is at the top end of the ones that have been measured: 4%; corn is 0.5% (corn is a major crop being used for bioethanol); wheat is 0.3%

Solar panels: 20%

Algae: 13%

I’d also like to know what the energy efficiency of a snickers bar or a sausage is (in terms of energy used by plants to make the individual components, energy to make the bar, energy to transport it to me, versus the energy it refuels my body with); my (largely baseless) guess is that it must be anywhere in the 0.000x - 0.0000000x% range. What a waste of sunrays!

UPDATE: http://venturebeat.com/2008/05/29/sapphire-energy-gets-open-checkbook-from-investors-for-algae-based-gasoline/ “Green crude” project putting bacteria in dirty water or seawater and extracting petroleum gets ‘blank cheque’ to make it happen, and quick. The Wellcome Trust is getting in on this, which is interesting - and probably a good sign for the viability of the technology