Environmental and Urban Economics

Kevin Hartnett has written a very interesting piece about the mistakes that AI makes when evaluating the content of a computer screen image.  This matters for many different scenarios such as automated vehicles.  Would a human make a different (and better) decision than the computer if the two are given the same information?  Hartnett's piece is based on this new academic study.  

Hartnett writes:

"Researchers are still trying to understand exactly why computer vision systems get tripped up so easily, but they have a good guess. It has to do with an ability humans have that AI lacks: the ability to understand when a scene is confusing and thus go back for a second glance."

It appears that people are more humble than the computers.

This piece in The Chronicle is worth reading.  The physicist argues that academics have weak incentives to interact with the public.  Academics respond to these incentives by writing esoteric pieces that few can read and understand.   This piece raises the issue of how should academics interact with the public?   In New York City, my parents attend events where Paul Krugman speaks at CUNY.

The New Yorker magazine has a very interesting new profile of Mark Z of Facebook.     This piece reminds me of my interest in the issue that Linkedin has been able to avoid all of the recent controversy that Facebook faces.  There are "firewalls" between these firms. Linkedin focuses on our "work life" while Facebook focuses on our "home and peer life".

In West Los Angeles, young people zoom around on "the Bird". This electric scooter travels at about 10 to 15 miles per hour and is a substitute for walking, the bus or UberX.  As I understand it, Bird riders are supposed to ride while wearing a helmet but I estimate that less than 5% of riders actually use one.  So, this is the opposite case of the "Peltzman effect".  In his 1975 JPE paper, Peltzman discusses the consequences of mandatory seat belts for driving behavior.

Since August 2017, I have been working hard as the Chairman of USC Economics.  While certain anonymous websites like to beat up on USC,  the department is hiring a new cohort of really good young faculty and we are now ranked #18 on REPEC.   Perhaps to celebrate this progress, I was invited to attend yesterday's first football game and to meet some of the University's trustees and the Provost.

In the middle of the game, I was thrilled to see this.