Data visualisation

Although I’m at work, I figured I could do a really quick post about this to reinforce the point I am about to make: Data visualisation is awesome!

My friend Frank sent me a link to the Public Data Explorer at Google Labs, saying he figured I’d like it as an economist.  He was right!  I watched  the bubble graph visualisation embedded in the front page about three times…. the first time just because I was curious, the second time because the first time was over so quickly and random things had caught my eye, and the third pausing and retracing to check who those little outliers bouncing off to the sides and back again were about.

Try it! You can pause at any point and hovering over each bubble will tell you which country the bubble represents.

So in the space of about 5 minutes I had been able to pick out the devastating effect on average life expectancy that the civil wars in the 70s in Cambodia and Timor-Leste had, and the insane genocide in Rwanda in the late 80s/early 90s.  You can also see the South African countries moving out to the left in the late 90s – average age expectancy falling undoubtedly by the spread of AIDS (although the drastic fall in Zimbabwe’s life expectancy may be a bit more than that!).  In recent years however you can see that some of them are coming back up.  Is this due to better medicine to treat AIDS or a fall in victims?  We don’t know, but the data can tell us where to look.

In a nutshell, data visualisation is great for quickly picking out anomalies in data and telling us where to dig deeper.

Now please excuse me as I should get back to work as well as satisfy my curiosity by looking up why the fertility rate in Guinea-Bissau plummeted in the 60s!

RSS feeds – Shared Items

After talking too much about my RSS Feeds last night, I realised a good complement to the post would be to introduce my Shared Items. I use Google Reader to manage my RSS feeds and it allows me to share posts. As I read through my feeds I typically share posts I think are interesting, relevant, or fun. I also attempt to write little notes on why I think particular articles are interesting.

As I mostly use my feeds to keep me current in my profession, it is heavily slanted towards the environment and economics.

I don’t know whether it will be of much interest to anyone, but you can access it via this link and I have also put it on the side as (very creatively) ‘Interesting articles from RSS feeds’ under ‘Other’.

MMOs for Economics research

Massive Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games. I can’t claim this idea for my own, but I was talking to some guy called Ian while at EnvEcon. Unfortunately I didn’t pick up his last name but he is currently a masters student on Imperial College’s Environmental Technology course and speciailising in Environmental Economics and Policy (yes, the same course and option that I did).

Anyway, he mentioned the idea of testing out economic theories in Second Life. Which, when I thought about it, sounded like an absolutely astonishing idea. Obviously there would be many caveats, a few of which I will discuss, but, unless someone can point out something I am missing, it seems like an stonking good idea. Data from everquest and WOW has already been pulled for study by social scientists ( http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/sociologists-using-mmo-games-for-research-556582 ), so it is perhaps only another step to design economic experiments in Second Life.

The obvious caveat would be that second-life characters are virtual. Unless you are one of the truly obsessed, the welfare of your second-life character is not going to be as important as your own welfare. Furthermore, the wealth of your character doesn’t (and I am guessing here, I have never played second life or even read that much about it) affect the health of your character. You will also probably take higher risks with your character than you would in your real life. This all said, I know there are people out there who put a lot of time and energy into their online virtual characters, which may change reduce these issues somewhat if you could somehow cherrypick your players.

Then there are the moral implications – if you design an economic experiment in second life, do you have to tell the players? If not, are there moral implications in the fact that people are participating in an experiment without knowing it? If you do, will this change behaviour due to Observer Effect?

Then there are the socio-economic factors in play. Who are the people playing second life? My guess is that the majority of the population is made up of young/middle age (Late 20s to 40s) people, probably middle class, and probably at least slightly geeky. This will undoubtedly affect the decisions they make for their characters.

Links: Article talking about whether Second Life’s economy is in recession – Showing that yes, Second Life does have an analysable economy.
Google search for second life economics

Having said all this though, I think it is a very interesting concept and lots more thought should be given to it. Perhaps social scientists and computer scientists can get together to build a MMO specifically designed to carry out social experiments and selectively invite people to play with a bit of cheap talk*?

Comments, discussion?

(H/t Tom for first coming up with the articles on social scientists data mining MMORPGs).

* Cheap talk is used in suveys that ask participants how much they are willing to pay for a service or a good to get more realistic amounts. This is achieved by saying something along the lines of “In these kinds of surveys many people say they are willing to pay more than they actually are willing to pay. Please think carefully before stating your amount, evaluate your finances, and ask yourself whether you really are willing to pay the amount you state”. In this case, of course, it would be something along the lines of “Look, we know this is a game, but pretend the outcomes really affect you, and act accordingly”.

Payments for Environmental Services Peace

(Before reading this note, if you are not familiar with payments for environmental services, you may want to look at this link )

I was watching the February 10th episode of The Daily Show last night (my friend pointed out the reason we know more about american politics than British politics is that Jon Stewart makes it worth knowing about) and his interview for the night was with Thomas Ricks, author of Fiasco ). You can find the interview here.

During the interview, Stewart and Ricks talked about how the Americans, or rather General Petraeus, decided to pay the Iraqis; not just the allies, but the people trying to kill them as well, in order to… well, get them to stop trying to kill them.

In actual fact, during the interview, Ricks tells an ancedote about how an american soldier turns to one of the insurgents and says “You still want to kill me?”, to which he replies “Yes, but not today”.

Now is it just me or does this remind anybody else about payments for environmental services, but instead of environmental services, for peace? It has never crossed my mind that people who may be trying to kill people would actually have a willingness to accept to change their behaviour. The situation even addresses continual payment (so long as you keep paying me, I will not cut down this lovely rainforest do not want to kill you today).

Of course an interesting question here is “how are the insurgents using this money?” Another interesting and related question is, “What does this money substitute for?”, and question that is related to both of these questions is “How much can the americans pay or what can they do to permanently change insurgents’ behaviour?”  Is the money they’re paying them “Giving a man a fish” rather than “Teaching him how to fish”?

“Risk – averse”

I’m starting to hear the words ‘Risk-averse’ a lot these days and I’m wondering how the recession we are (most of us) in has affected people’s risk perception? And how permanent is it? I recently read a comment to a blog post or article about Madoff which said “Now I know why old ladies hide all their money under their mattresses”.

So I’m wondering how this is affecting research in social sciences like economics? In about 10 years from now would researchers have to explain crazy data with recession anxiety? Would we still be seeing the effects in ten years, would data before the recession be significantly different to data after?