Biodiversity and Entropy

On Tuesday, my Erdos number dropped from infinity to four. That’s right: after four years of grad school, I am now officially published!

The article, “A New Phylogenetic Diversity Measure Generlizing the Shannon Index and Its Application to Phyllostomid Bats,” by Ben Allen, Mark Kon, Yaneer Bar-Yam, can be found on the American Naturalist website or, more accessibly, on my professional site.

So what is it about? Glad you asked!

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Save the Madagascar Rain Forest

Last night, I was lucky enough to get a personal tour of the California Academy of Sciences from Dr. Brian Fisher, a taxonomist specializing in ants.  He’s doing some amazing work trying to help Madagascar prioritize and save the 10% of native rainforest they have left.  It’s reminiscent of Willie Smits‘ work in Borneo, though focused on preservation rather than revitalization.  But it has the same feel of getting the local people committed to managing their own ecological resources.

You can donate here (I gave them $500), but make sure to write “For the Fisher Madagascar Project” in the “Comments” field.  Otherwise, you’ll be paying for the building lights.  Go ahead and leave the “Allocation” field at the default, “Campaign for a New Academy”. Update: Forgot to mention that if you donate $2,000 they’ll name a new species after you or whomever you designate.

It’s hard to do justice to what I saw last night in a blog post, but here goes…

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Specifying a Climate Bet

As I mentioned in the comments on this post, I am currently in the process of negotiating a bet on Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) with another blogger. The challenges are interesting, so I thought I’d give you a peek inside the sausage factory.

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Splitting the Difference

Rafe Furst and I were discussing my predisposition for staying in the cheapest hotel within walking distance of the hotel I actually play poker in despite having the resources to pay for the more expensive properties. The money I save just stays in a fungible heap of other money and isn’t really earmarked for anything.

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Centmail: Fighting Spam With E-Mail Postage Stamps

Who wants to pay for email? You just might. Many people have suggested that adding a nominal cost to e-mail would serve to fight spam by rendering it largely unprofitable. With Centmail, some Yahoo researchers propose adding a penny postage stamp to each e-mail, representing a penny donation to charity. Since most people already donate to charity, it is not believed that this idea will actually cost anything.

In an effort to make Centmail a reality, a formal protocol and API has already been developed. While I am somewhat worried that a large-scale adoption of the protocol will incentivize significant non-profit and charitable fraud, the economic burden due to spam should be greatly reduced. It’s a cool idea by good people and I urge you to check it out.

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Robin Hood Foreclosure Fund, part II

Pursuant to my earlier post, it turns out there already is such a group:

Foreclosure Angel Foundation

Thanks to Marissa Chien who found it and pointed me to it.  She also suggests that people who are having trouble with their mortgage should seek advise from HUD.  Information is power and many people (I’ve learned) are irrationally scared of approaching their lender and negotiating.  More and more lenders are willing to cut deals to avoid foreclosures.

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Is Hunger Really a Problem in U.S.?

Given everything I hear about obesity stats in the U.S. and malnutrition in the developing world, the last thing I was expecting to find in my inbox this morning was a plea to join a Facebook cause to help end hunger in America.  Really?

I’m usually not skeptical in this way, and I’m loath to focus on the negative when it comes to philanthropy, but I can’t get these thoughts out of my head and I’d like some perspective from those who are better informed about the alleged U.S. hunger crisis.  In the mean time, here’s my food for thought:

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Global Warming Solved for 10 cents per Person

Stephen Salter wants to build a fleet of ships that will churn up seawater to create whiter, fluffier clouds that will reflect more sunlight away from the sea surface. The cost for the first 300 ships that should turn the clock back: $600 million.

Other ideas include spraying sulfur dioxide 65,000 feet up through a fleet of Zeppelins and firing 840 billion ceramic frisbees into orbit to block the sun’s rays. But this article also suggests that a rich “Greenfinger” could unilaterally do some Geo-Engineering without world consent and with disasterous consequences.

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Cool Solar Power

On a recent trip to the CalExpo site I was impressed to see rows and rows of solar panels supported over the parking lot. Instead of taking up valuable real estate it shades your car and generates 540kW.

Check out this even more interesting way of generating solar power at Cool Earth Solar. It is massively scalable and can compete on price with traditional sources.

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Wall Street Wizards? Not so Much.

Here’s a nice post on how little old Amherst Holdings of Austin, TX got the best of J.P. Morgan Chase, Royal Bank of Scotland, and Bank of America.  Amherst sold them all Credit Default Swaps (CDSs) against mortgages that were already under water.  CDSs pay out if the underlying mortgages default.  Everyone knew these mortgages were in bad trouble.  Sure thing for the big guys, right?  Wrong.

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A Middle/High School That Teaches Complex Systems Through Games??!

A new school is opening in New York for grades 6-12 that completely blows my mind. The Quest to Learn school combines games and complex systems in a way that pretty much would have made my life as a teenager. Hell, I wouldn’t mind going back to high school now if I got to go here. I’ll let them describe it:

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Paying Women to Not Get Pregnant

What’s fascinating to me about this is not that it works so well and or that there might actually be support in the Obama administration for doing it on a national scale, but rather that there has not been a backlash against it yet.  What are the odds that something like this will actually get implemented?  Is it actually a good thing?

hat tip: Annie Duke’s mom

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Fantastic Book on Terrorist Interrogation

Thanks to a pointer from Sandeep Baliga over at Cheap Talk, I recently Kindled Matthew Alexander’s How to Break a Terrorist. If this were a novel, it would be in the top 10% of thrillers I’ve read in the last 5 years.  But it’s a true story.

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IIASA

This is just a brief note to let everyone know I’m spending the summer at IIASA, a scientific policy research institute located just outside of Vienna. IIASA focus on systems analysis of global problems such as climate change, land use, demographic changes, public health, ecology, and energy. They don’t seem to use the phrase “complex systems” much, but they’re clearly talking about the same thing.

I happen to be one of 53 lucky graduate students to be selected for this year’s Young Scholars Summer Program, meaning I get to paid to live in Vienna and do research. Can’t really complain about that. Tomorrow I get to hear mini-presentations on everyone’s research proposals, which should be very interesting. My own project will be on the long term, gradual evolution of cooperation in spatially structured populations, using a mathematical framework known as adaptive dynamics.

I’m expecting to learn a lot here, and I’ll share as much as I can with you readers. Looking forward to it!

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Prediction Markets for Valuing Private Companies

Everyone seems to have an opinion on the future prospects of Facebook and Twitter. Some of us even feel strongly enough to want to bet on it. Unfortunately, the companies are privately held, and unavailable to be bet on in the traditional way, via the stock market. It is not just household names like Facebook and Twitter that people might want to bet on, but also smaller companies like Weebly, or the Universal Record Database (URDB.)

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Reinventing Liberal Arts Education

This was one of the most important and encouraging talks of this year’s TED conference:

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