The Internet Knows EVERYTHING: Stopping My Car Alarm from Randomly Triggering

Scott BuchananLeave a comment

I have an oldish Honda that still runs smoothly. It is true that the cruise control does not work, and the left front fender is held on by a large binder clip, and I had to patch over a big rust hole in a rear wheel well, but as I said, it runs.

I sometimes park it down at the end of the street, under some shade trees, to get it out of the hot summer sun. A couple of times, for no reason, the antitheft system kicked on, so the car was honking and honking for hours on end because we didn’t hear it down there. Some neighbors down there finally figured out who it was and came and told us. They were nice about it, but I heard some other folks down there were pretty irritated.

That happened again two weeks ago, so I decided to keep it in front of our house all the time where we could keep an ear on it. Supposedly the alarm is triggered when the car thinks that a door or the trunk or the front hood has been opened without a legitimate unlocking by a key or a fob. Therefore, I opened and closed all four doors, and the trunk and the hood, and locked the car and hoped all will go well. But a few hours later there it was: honk, honk, honk….

As a temporary measure, I simply left it unlocked, so the system would not arm. But that’s not a long-term fix. So, I rolled up my sleeves and went to the internet to see what help I could find there. One common suggestion was to find the fuse that controls the alarm system and just pull it out of the fuse box. That would be great, but I checked multiple fuse diagrams for my model, and it does not seem to be a fuse that controls just the alarm system.

Other web sites mentioned that day sensor on the front hood latch is a common failure point. The sensor there can start giving spurious signals when it gets old. If you are sure that’s the problem, you can have a garage replace it for labor plus maybe 100 bucks for the replacement latch.

Alternatively, you can just pull apart the connector that connects the hood latch sensor to the alarm system. That connection is in plain sight near the latch. If the latch is the problem, disconnecting that sensor should make the alarm system think the latch is always firmly closed, so it will not trigger an armed system.

But what if the hood latch is not a problem? What if the problem is the common but elusive damage to wiring caused by rodents gnawing on the insulation which contains soybean derivatives??  After sifting through about 10 links that were thrown up by my DuckDuckGo search on the subject, I finally found a useful discussion on the “civicsforum.com”.

A certain “andrickjm” wrote that he had disconnected that wire junction, and his car alarm was still randomly going off. Some savant going by the moniker “ezone” wrote that what you needed to do then is to insert a little wire jumper between the two sockets of the connector that go to the alarm system. That will make the alarm system think the hood is always raised, never closed, and this will keep a system from ever arming.

So I cut a 1-inch piece of wire, stripped the insulation from the two ends, bent it into a U-shape, jammed the two bare wire ends into the two holes in the connector socket, and sealed it all up with duct tape.


The alarm has not sounded since. Victory at last, thanks to the distributed intelligence of the internet, resting on the efforts of millions of good-hearted souls who share their problems and solutions in all areas of life.

Publications and Grants, LLC

mdmakowsky1 Comment

Francesca Gino has been acused of academic fraud. She claims she is innocent. I am not going to adjudicate here whether she committed fraud. What I am going to argue is that she and many other high volume researchers aren’t actually engaged in research. They are grant procurers, managers, high volume writers, globetrotting presenters. But they are not researchers because they are too far removed from the actual production of research. Now, to be clear, that doesn’t necessarily mean the world is worse off. Their comparative advantage may lie in everything from management to carnival barking, but there is a threshold, a degrees-too-far removed from the problem solving at which point you are you no longer a scholar. What that threshold is, I can’t say, but I would argue that if you can’t defend your work, investigate it’s own integrity, if you don’t know who your research assistants are or what they did, then you have likely crossed that thresold. From Gino’s (since updated) website:

We’ve all see the presentations or heard the stories of the leading scholar called on the carpet about something in their project or analysis, only to respond “I’m not sure. My RA did that.” Which is fine. But at some point that started to become assumed as characterizing whole researchers, whole agendas, whole fields. There are always going to be the prodigiously productive, but those people used to be one or two in a generation. Glorious anomalies. Universities are now littered with faculty with hundreds of publications, sometimes dozens in a single year, and we all know that it is physically impossible for them to conduct that work themselves. Gino received her PhD in 2004 and in the 19 years since has 460 (!!!) publications listed on google scholar. Some of those are probably duplicate listings, but it’s probably safe to say she has more than 20 publications per year for 20 years. It’s hard enough to imagine having energy enough to write and present that many papers even if they are produced entirely by others. This is not unique to Gino and there is no doubting the prodigious work ethic in evidence within her and others. What is in question is whether the ever raising bar on output is lowering the quality of work done by the field as a whole. It’s a tax on us all if research concentrated within the labor of the most qualified, competent, and creative no longer produces an acceptable return to scale. Some people really are better managers of other people’s work, at some point the work has to be attributable to one or more people. Who is doing the work? Who is responsible for the work?

Maybe this isn’t really useful and I don’t feel like yelling at clouds for 5000 words. As I was saying…

But I’ll tell you this- truly great researchers work with other greater researchers, employ smart people, mentor promising RAs. And they know who they are and what they did. Because when you’re in the weeds trying to answer questions, its almost impossible not to know. That doesn’t mean mistakes won’t be made and errors overlooked. But when it comes time to audit your work, you’ll know where to start and what might have gone wrong. If you don’t know, well, maybe you’re lying, but maybe more likely you just weren’t around when the work was getting done. You were promoting your last project and getting your next grant. Because you’re not a researcher. At least not anymore.

You’re a manager, promoter, figurehead, pitchman, traveling roadshow. You’re likely useful and valuable. Publication and Grant, LLC.

But you’re not a scholar. And the institutions employing you aren’t producing scholarship. These faculty are following their incentives, and those incentives are at the moment treating research as a game to be played. Not science. Not the answering of questions. An expensive hustle to grind and empty race to win. They’re getting what they’re paying (and tenuring) for.

Solving the Participation Pickle with Pick.al

Joy Buchanan2 Comments

Joy: This post was written by my friend and fellow econ professor Cameron Hardwick.

One of my biggest ongoing teaching challenges is keeping students engaged during lectures.

Sure, there are ways to add interactivity here and there, but sometimes there’s just no way around an old-fashioned lecture.

There are a few ways of dealing with this, and I haven’t been satisfied with any.

  1. It’s their grade, if they zone out that’s on them. In terms of the incentives, sure, the externalities are all internalized. But as a macroeconomist, I also know: if time-inconsistency problems are hard for policymakers, how much more for students! We shouldn’t be surprised when students do poorly if the main feedback they get from paying attention or not comes a week later with the homework grade.
  2. Posing questions and waiting for answers. Either you get a minute of awkward silence, or you get the same two engaged students answering everything while everyone else keeps zoning out.
  3. Cold calling. I started doing this a few years into teaching. The advantage is that it keeps students on their toes and paying attention. But a few problems left me unsatisfied:
    1. “How about you in the red shirt”. Hard to catch a student’s attention that way, and in a class of 40 or more, learning names takes a good chunk of the semester.
    1. I had no systematic way of keeping track of participation. Every semester I’d look at the roster and still have a few names I couldn’t put a face to.
    1. Humans are really bad at making random choices! Much as I tried, I couldn’t guarantee I wasn’t biased toward or against (say) the corners of the room, or students whose names I knew.
  4. LMS software. These can offer a lot of great student participation tools. But students have to pay for them – which isn’t worth it if you’re just looking for one feature. On top of that, then you’re locked into an ecosystem.

So, I made an app myself. It does one thing and does it well.

Pick.al (pronounced Pickle) picks students at random from a roster and keeps track of participation points. I can now pose a question in class, ask “what do you think…”, pull out my phone and hit a button, and have a name.

I can also record the quality of their answers:

  • ✓: 1 point, good attempt! (Since this is for participation points, I record ✓ whether right or wrong, as long as they give it a good shot)
  • ?: 0.5 points, if they ask “wait, what was the question?”
  • ×: 0 points, if they’re not there or don’t respond at all.

There’s also a 1-5 scale option, for those who want a more fine-grained evaluation.

This has a lot of benefits in the classroom:

  • Since I can call on students by name, I learn names more quickly.
  • Pick.al chooses randomly from the pool of students who have been called on the least so far. So, I know my participation points are as fair as possible.
  • Students know they can get called on at any time, so they pay attention more in class, and then do better on the homeworks and tests.
  • Students appreciate being brought in more frequently. One noted on the evaluations the first semester I piloted it: “something specific I like is he got the class involved by calling people out which forced them to test their knowledge which is something teachers need to do more of.”

Using Pick.al is as simple as registering (with an email address or an OrcID), uploading a roster, and then hitting a button during class. You can also swipe through the history and edit or undo participation events, and go back in the admin interface and add, edit, and remove participation events after the fact if necessary.

Pick.al is secure and password-protected, and has a number of handy features:

  • You can set excused absences if a student lets you know beforehand, so their name doesn’t come up until a certain date.
  • You can select specific students from the roster in a sidebar, if you want to give credit to – say – a student who raises his hand unbidden.
  • If you’d like to use the classroom computer instead of pulling out a phone, you can use it with full keyboard navigation.
  • Scores can be downloaded as a CSV to be put in your own gradebook.
  • Private notes can be added to students to show up when their names are selected, e.g. “sits in the back corner”

If you use it and find a bug or have an idea that would make it more useful to you, feel free to let me know. It’s been a great tool in my own classes, and I hope it’ll be useful for other teachers to keep students engaged too.

Review of Cowen Tabarrok Econ Textbook

Joy Buchanan1 Comment

It’s been almost a decade since I taught principles of economics classes. One major allocation of my time this semester is course prep, since I am teaching 3 different classes.

For my Principles of Microeconomics course, I chose Modern Principles of Economics, because I figured Tyler and Alex had done a good job and I have heard good reviews from others.

I’m writing a short review of their instructor resources, and then I’ll have to get back to course prep.

  • Like most textbooks, they provide you with slides that you can modify. Not having to start from scratch on lecture slides is great.
  • They also have teacher guides for each chapter. I find these helpful, because I have not taught this class in many years. Even though “I’m an economist,” there is still a technique to presenting these ideas for the first time to undergraduates. No need to re-invent that wheel completely.
  • They have suggestions for in-class activities. For example, to illustrate demand shifts, ask the students about a recent celebrity scandal and how that created a fall in the demand for concert tickets. It works. Everyone loves talking about celebrity scandals. It will be an evergreen idea. There are always new scandals for each semester – the students know more about it than the professors. My students (Fall 2023) informed me that Lizzo got in hot water for fat-shaming.
  • Their online learning platform called Achieve within MacMillan works well. It integrates really well with Canvas, our LMS. One warning I would give you is to make sure that students buy Achieve through an account on their .edu email address. I have headaches over students signing up with a personal email address and then not having their data integrate with Canvas.
  • You can sign up for EconInbox, which will email you topical relevant news stories right before you would want to present them in class. You’ll have to tell them ahead of time what your schedule of topics is, but that is something you ought to have worked out in your syllabus at the beginning of the semester. Obviously, you can’t cover every chapter in one semester. There are far more resources, generally, than you can use. But picking and choosing from a great library is easier than trying to build something from scratch yourself.
  • Lastly, the Cowen Tabarrok textbook integrates nicely with the free Marginal Revolution University video library. MRU is free to all. So, as an instructor you could still use it heavily even if you are not assigning their textbook or even if you are not doing Achieve. Still, I think that making use of the MRU resource is easiest if you are using their textbook. A fun video that might even be worth using class time for is Avengers: The Story of Globalization

It Takes a Village

Zachary Bartsch3 Comments

Many households are now 2-income households. And that can make parenting a slog.

You go to work for 8-10 hours, you may or may not need to provide transportation for children to/from school, and child-care can eat a substantial portion of income. If the children are small, then the parents clean the floors, the dishes, and the clothes. Not to mention any home improvements or repairs. And food! Do you want to eat a home-cooked meal as a family? If both parents work typical hours, then prepare to eat no earlier than 6 PM, and maybe as late as 7:30.

Hey but there’s the weekend, right? NOPE! Someone has to do that big weekly shopping trip. How long is that going to take? The whole ordeal is enough to make someone think twice before having that 2nd kid. After all, if one kid getting sick throws a wrench in even a single day’s routine, then the whole week can be affected. How many sick kids before things stop getting done? Having a grandparent around to help would be a huge privilege and blessing.

At this point, I think that I can begin to call myself an experienced parent. I’ve got 4 kids who are ages 6 and younger. Plenty of modern conveniences make life easier. Many groceries can be purchased ahead of time for ‘order pick-up’ or online for delivery. Nice. Books are super cheap, and so are bubbles and drawing supplies. If I have to get some work/chores done while the kids are awake, then I can buy myself some time. But, like it or not, when the kids are asleep in the evening is when most chores will get done.

Continue reading →

New Center for the Restoration of Economic Data

James Bailey1 Comment

Regular readers will know that we love not only economics, but also history and data. We especially love it when “data heroes” take data that was difficult or impossible to access and make it easily available to everyone. The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia just announced a project that brings together all of these things we love, their new Center for the Restoration of Economic Data:

Our mission is to advance research in topics related to regional economics and consumer finance by making economic data available in readily accessible, digital form. CREED combines state-of-the-art machine learning technology with deep subject matter expertise to convert natively unstructured data (information in books, images, and other undigitized formats) into readily accessible digital data.

The CREED research team shares the original analog or unstructured data as well as the code used to recover and clean these data, which are aggregated for use in novel economic research. Our collection features volumes of old, often overlooked, and frequently inaccessible data, which have been mined, restored, and converted into unstructured digital and analytically usable formats.

Their first project is to map all of the racially restrictive covenants in the city of Philadelphia. Until the U.S. Supreme Court declared such covenants to be unenforceable in 1948, they often barred properties from being sold to non-whites or non-citizens. After 1948 redlining took different forms, some of which may still persist today.

CREED shares the underlying data used to build the map here, and they say much more is one the way. I love it when economic historians (and regular historians) digitize old paper records and share the resulting data, and hope to see more examples like this to share in the coming years.

Disclaimer: I am a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia but I was not involved with this project

Who is the Wealthiest Generation? Mid-2023 Update

Jeremy Horpedahl1 Comment

The Federal Reserve has released the latest update to their Distributional Financial Accounts data, which the data underlying several of my past posts on generational wealth. With that recent data, I have updated the chart of wealth for Baby Boomers, Generation X, and Millennials.

The data is shown on a log scale to better show growth rates and allow for easier visual comparisons. But if you are interested in the more precise numbers, in the most recent quarter (2023q2) Generation X has, on average about $620,000 in net wealth, which compares favorably with Baby Boomers at about the same age (in 2006) with about $539,000 in net wealth per person. That’s about 20 percent more.

Millennials have about $115,000 in net wealth on average, which also compares favorably with Baby Boomers, who had slightly more at about the same age (in 1990) with $121,000 in net wealth on average. Given the uncertainties of all the data that goes into this, I’d say those are roughly equal. Gen X had a bit more around the same age (in 2007) with $149,000, but that fell significantly the next two years during the Great Recession.

(For more detail on my approach to creating the chart, see the linked post above, but in short I’m using the Fed DFA data for wealth, Census Bureau data by single year of age for population, and the Personal Consumption Expenditures price index for inflation adjustments (I also have a chart with the CPI-U — it’s not much different). Wealth data is for the 2nd quarter in each year (to match 2023), except for 1989 since the 3rd quarter is the first available.)

Given how much wealth can fluctuate based on housing values (see above for Gen X from 2007-2009), it might be useful to look at the data with housing. Housing is also a weird kind of wealth — for the most part, you can’t access it without selling (other than certain home equity loans), and when you do sell, unless your home appreciated more than average, you just have to move to another home that also appreciated.

Here’s the chart excluding housing value and mortgage debt:

The chart… doesn’t change much. The values are all lower, of course, but the comparisons across generations look pretty similar. Gen X right now is 17 percent wealthier than Boomers at the same age. And if we look at all three generations around the median age of 35, they are pretty close: Gen X with $123,000 (but slipping over the next few years), Boomers with $99,000, and Millennials with $90,000.

Wastewater Testing: COVID Surge Maybe Delayed for Now

Scott BuchananLeave a comment

We reported last month on yet another COVID surge beginning, driven by yet another new, highly transmissible  variant. When I checked in on the state of affairs this week, I found two different narratives.

With the demise of widespread public testing, it has become more difficult to track the progress of the disease. One means to do so now is to monitor hospital admissions for COVID. The New York Times provides this service, and it shows a continued uptrend in cases, at least through September 8:

Source: The New York Times

The chart above is for the whole country. It turns out that these cases are highly localized in certain hot spots, especially along the Atlantic seaboard (Delaware through  South Carolina), plus the region of St. Joseph, Missouri:

Source: The New York Times

Wastewater Analysis Suggests a Plateau

An alternate means of monitoring the progress of COVID is to do ongoing testing of municipal wastewater. The virus is “shed” (to put it delicately) in sewage, and can be detected there some days before a person reports any symptoms. Most recent wastewater analyses indicate that incidence of the disease is plateauing for now, according to an NBC News article by Erika Edwards:

Biobot Analytics, a company that tracks wastewater samples at 257 sites nationwide, said that the current average Covid levels across the United States are approximately 5% lower than they were last week.

“All fingers crossed,” Cristin Young, a Biobot epidemiologist said, “this wave is plateauing and may be declining.”

While data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show a rise in Covid-related hospitalizations and deaths, wastewater may indicate what’s to come.

After a mid- to late-summer rise, the CDC’s Covid wastewater surveillance now shows declines in mid-Atlantic states, such as Virginia and Maryland.

The findings are backed up from surveillance in North Carolina, said Jessica Schlueter, an associate professor in the department of bioinformatics and genomics at the University of North Carolina Charlotte. Her lab is responsible for testing 12 sites across the state.

The increase in Covid wastewater samples during the last six months “seems to be peaking and starting to taper off,” she said. …Wastewater collection sites in the Midwest and the Northeast, however, show a steady uptick in Covid spread.

Hospitalizations and deaths are lagging indicators, whereas wastewater analysis provides something of a leading indicator. Putting it all together, it may be that what we are seeing now is the usual late summer COVID increase, which may come down in the next two months, to be followed by another winter surge. Do get your latest booster shots.

The NFL doesn’t want to pay for risk

mdmakowsky3 Comments

The NFL has filed a grievance against the players union, alleging a conspiracy to fake injuries on the part of running backs to gain greater leverage in salary negotiations. To grant necessary context as succinctly as possible: running backs carry the ball while giant humans attempt to harm them. They do this 15 to 30 times per game. They are important to team success, but not as important as they once were. At the same time, they incur significant traumatic and cumulative damage, resulting in the shortest expected career length of any position in professional football. The NFL has a cap on total team salaries negotiated between the players union and the owners group/cartel/partnership. Running backs have seen their salaries decline even as the damage incurred as become more apparent and measurable. This raises an interesting question: where are the compensating wage differentials for risk? Everyone gets paid more if their job is dangerous. Do running back wages reflect their physical risk?

Supply and demand always come first, and any explanation for the (relative to other positions) decline in running backs salaries has to start with declining demand. Running backs are viewed as less valuable, more interchangable than they once were. At the margin, the returns to employing the best running back relative to the 30th best running back are viewed as thinner than in earlier eras. And that could be 95% of the answer, but it’s worth investigating the supply side as well.

The understood risk of injury facing running backs has increased. With greater risk typically comes less labor supply, the shifting equilibrium pushing wages up. Is this what we are seeing in football? Are fewer athletes interested in being a running back? Are running backs retiring earlier? Maybe, but that can cut both ways, reducing supply and demand.

But the supply side has multiple dimensions: both players entering the market (the “extensive” margin) and the amount they are willing to play (the “intensive” margin). Has the injury “threshold” shifted for running backs who are now less willing to play while already carrying significant damage? Because that’s exactly what I think we are seeing. I think running backs are beginning to reduce the amount of their bodies’ usable careers they are willing to sell at the current market price. They have reduced supply on the intensive margin. Running backs are demanding greater compensating wage differentials for risk and the owners don’t like it. They thought the supply of running back labor would remain almost perfectly inelastic under the terms of the collective bargaining agreement, but they were wrong.

Now, is trying to organize a collective reduction in labor supply in order to better negotiate compensating wage differentials fair play on the part of the players? Absolutely. Why do I say absolutely? Because they are not only bargaining against a cartel of owners, they are implicitly bargaining against the rest of the players association, who have failed to deliver compensation for their risk, at least in part, because the rest of the players, the non-running backs, benefit from every dollar under the cap not spent on running back salaries.

I’ll put it bluntly. Everyone has the right not to supply their labor. Everyone has the right not to incur physical risk and damage if they aren’t being sufficiently compensated. Organizing to collectively restrict that supply is fair game, triply so if there are explicit (the owners) and implicit (the other players) groups that are collectively organizing against you.

I’ve seen NFL games. I know how much you’d have to pay me to carry the ball once on an NFL field, let alone dozens of times every week. If I wasn’t getting paid my reservation wage, there is no collective bargaining agreement you could wave in my face, no public shaming, no pressure from fans that could get me on that field.

All the collective bargaining in the world can’t make the laws of supply and demand go away. Professional sports are a labor-intensive industry, and football is a high risk endeavor for labor. If you want millionaires to show up every week to willingly endure the equivalent of a half-dozen car accidents, you’re going to have to pay them. Oh, but you can’t pay them that much, they’re a depreciating asset since the damage incurred shortens their career? Good point, the price just went up. You don’t want to commit to long term contracts because injury can end a career on any play? Good point, the price just went up. We have a big game this week, we need …you…to…ohhhhh

Now you’re getting it.

Pilates Works and Free Videos Make It Easier to Commit

Joy Buchanan1 Comment

One of today’s best econbloggers, Matt Yglesias, just wrote “What I learned losing 70 pounds: Medical interventions work, among other things”

This is not about lemon juice or cutting out dessert. Matt wrote about getting surgery that he paid for out of pocket. No one wants to talk about medical stuff publicly. No one wants to admit that they have a hard time doing obvious correct things like eating less and exercising. Matt did this to help people. He’s inspired me to share something about health, too.

Around the time my second child was 6 months old, I decided it would be nice to get back into some kind of “shape.” So, it was time to head out the door and try to run around the block. Ouch. My knee was wrong.

To keep this short, so I’ll just say that I already knew what a doctor would tell me to do. I knew that I should do targeted exercises to strengthen the muscles around the knee. There are very boring ways to do that, such as counting reps by yourself in a quiet room.

Likewise, Matt Y knew that he could lose weight by simply eating less. It’s easier said than done. Matt took advantage of money and new technology to get results. In a less extreme way, so did I. Instead of doing “physical therapy,” I joined a friend’s Pilates studio. I paid someone to talk to me and count my reps and play music. I paid for accountability. It worked.

There is even better news. If you have Youtube access, you can get almost the full benefit of Pilates classes for free by following along with videos. Or, you can pay a little bit for even better videos with no ads. This is just one way that economic growth and technological innovation have made our lives much better.

A lot of our readers are men. You might think this only applies to women in yoga pants. Not so.

There is a certain stigma surrounding Pilates due to its vast popularity amongst women owing to its numerous health benefits and its versatility (suitable to all age groups and ability levels). However, Pilates was actually developed by a man named Joseph Pilates to help rehabilitate injured soldiers imprisoned during World War 1.

https://www.thephysiocompany.com/blog/2020/6/8/10-reasons-men-should-do-pilates-too

Soldiers! World Wars! Dude stuff!