San Antonio's Water Recycling

On Weekend Edition Saturday, Wade Goodwyn looks at how San Antonio has advanced their water conservation:

"We have a goal to save a billion gallons of water every single year by working with all of our customers," says Karen Guz, the water system's director of conservation. She says the plant is hitting that goal. "We are a community that has figured out that it is better to save water than to worry about having to always just acquire more water."
Guz says it started in the early '90s when the Sierra Club sued the city in federal court to protect an endangered species — the blind salamander — that lived in the water supply of the Edwards Aquifer.
When the judged ruled in favor of the Sierra Club, San Antonio politicians and newspapers spitted with rage. Twenty years later, the current San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro says his city has learned the judge was right.
"The city, over these last two decades, really has made lemonade out of lemons. In fact, the number of gallons per consumer in San Antonio per day that is used has gone down from just over 200 to about 130," Castro says.

All too often, the dreaded changes made by environmental regulations or other activities ends up being beneficial and cost-effective long-term.  But laziness and stubborness cause people to fight tooth-and-nail against change.  So much technological advancement wouldn't come about without the regulation forcing changes to be made.  Inertia is a mighty powerful force.

The Financial Disaster Tour Comes To California

Michael Lewis visits California, talks to Ahnold, goes to San Jose, and then Vallejo.  Along the way, he visits UCLA (h/t Ritholtz):

The road out of Vallejo passes directly through the office of Dr. Peter Whybrow, a British neuroscientist at U.C.L.A. with a theory about American life. He thinks the dysfunction in America’s society is a by-product of America’s success. In academic papers and a popular book, American Mania, Whybrow argues, in effect, that human beings are neurologically ill-designed to be modern Americans. The human brain evolved over hundreds of thousands of years in an environment defined by scarcity. It was not designed, at least originally, for an environment of extreme abundance. “Human beings are wandering around with brains that are fabulously limited,” he says cheerfully. “We’ve got the core of the average lizard.” Wrapped around this reptilian core, he explains, is a mammalian layer (associated with maternal concern and social interaction), and around that is wrapped a third layer, which enables feats of memory and the capacity for abstract thought. “The only problem,” he says, “is our passions are still driven by the lizard core. We are set up to acquire as much as we can of things we perceive as scarce, particularly sex, safety, and food.” Even a person on a diet who sensibly avoids coming face-to-face with a piece of chocolate cake will find it hard to control himself if the chocolate cake somehow finds him. Every pastry chef in America understands this, and now neuroscience does, too. “When faced with abundance, the brain’s ancient reward pathways are difficult to suppress,” says Whybrow. “In that moment the value of eating the chocolate cake exceeds the value of the diet. We cannot think down the road when we are faced with the chocolate cake.” The richest society the world has ever seen has grown rich by devising better and better ways to give people what they want. The effect on the brain of lots of instant gratification is something like the effect on the right hand of cutting off the left: the more the lizard core is used the more dominant it becomes. “What we’re doing is minimizing the use of the part of the brain that lizards don’t have,” says Whybrow. “We’ve created physiological dysfunction. We have lost the ability to self-regulate, at all levels of the society. The $5 million you get paid at Goldman Sachs if you do whatever they ask you to do—that is the chocolate cake upgraded.”

The article is worth reading, if just for the optimism at the end.  The first three pages (online) with Schwarzenegger didn't really do much for me, but the challenges in San Jose and Vallejo were very interesting.  In the end, Vallejo gives some hope.  I've always felt some concern with the position of Mish, that all the governments should file for bankruptcy and screw over the public workers, but once Vallejo hit bottom, they have seemed to have some real conversations about what matters.  I'd prefer to have such discussions before hitting rock bottom. 

While I'm generally pessimistic about the human condition, I do hold out some minor optimism about citizens being able to rationally deal with the problems that face us.  Here in Ohio, Senate Bill 5, which is facing a referendum, tried to deal with some of the issues mentioned in the article.  Unfortunately, it was a one-sided, one-size-fits-all approach, which was railroaded through the legislature.  It  made public employees out as the enemy, when they happen to be your neighbors.  Many of the bill's provisions will have to be enacted at some point, but bundling them all up and slamming them through the legislature wasn't the way to get there.  Republicans need to work on that civility thing, if we are going to work through the challenges we face.

What About China?

Stephen Roach says not to worry, they've got things under control (h/t Mark Thoma):

China’s economy is slowing. This is no surprise for an export-led economy dependent on faltering global demand. But China’s looming slowdown is likely to be both manageable and welcome. Fears of a hard landing are overblown. To be sure, the economic data have softened. Purchasing managers’ indices are now threatening the “50” threshold, which has long been associated with the break-even point between expansion and contraction. Similar downtrends are evident in a broad array of leading indicators, ranging from consumer expectations, money supply, and the stock market, to steel production, industrial product sales, and newly started construction.
But this is not 2008. Back then, global commerce was collapsing, presaging a 10.7% drop in the volume of world trade in 2009 – the sharpest annual contraction since the 1930s. In response, China’s export performance swung from 26% annual growth in July 2008 to a 27% contraction by February 2009. Sequential GDP growth slowed to a low single-digit pace – a virtual standstill by Chinese standards. And more than 20 million migrant workers reportedly lost their jobs in export-led Guangdong province. By late 2008, China was in the throes of the functional equivalent of a full-blown recession.

I would assume China will have some type of collapse in the not-too-distant future, but maybe not.  His explanations seem reasonable, and I have no insight into the market.  Maybe it is like folks in Britain might have expected the U.S. to stumble throughout the fifties and sixties, because the growth was too fast.  Anyway, a soft landing in China might prevent an even worse financial crisis when Europe and the U.S. grapple with our debt-induced double dip, and it will have to ease things in Australia.

Unintentional Irony

First International Bank in Plano, Texas was seized by the FDIC, and sold to American First Bank in Houston.

This Weekend's Trophy Games

Michigan and Minnesota play for the Little Brown Jug.

Notre Dame and Purdue play for the Irish Shillelagh Trophy.

 Cincinnati and Miami of Ohio play for the Victory Bell.

 Illinois and Northwestern play for the Land of Lincoln Trophy (a replacement of the Sweet Sioux Tomahawk).

Finally, in the big MIAC battle between St. Thomas and St. John's, the Holy Grail is on the line, along with Minnesota Catholic bragging rights.



The question may come up as to why I follow the MIAC. The main reason is Coach John Gagliardi at St. John's. I read this article in SI, back in 1992, and generally followed their results afterwards. Later, I read Austin Murphy's book on the 1999 season, The Sweet Season. This is what I really liked about the SI article:

Most coaches feel naked without a whistle. Gagliardi doesn't own one. He prefers to keep the trappings of his office to a minimum. He has only two assistant coaches. Seniors are expected to act as position coaches. Since the Johnnies block and tackle adequately during games, Gagliardi doesn't require them to block and tackle in the preseason or, once the season has begun, during the week. "Visualize it," he tells his players. "Fantasies don't always have to be about the opposite sex."

Nothing depresses Gagliardi more than an injury, and the Johnnies suffer very few. "You know how most coaches will make their quarterback off-limits in practice?" he says. "Well, what about the other guys? They've got mothers too."

It seems to work for the all-time leading college football coach in career victories.

Using Math To Ferret Out Fraud

The Guardian, via nc links:

Government figures are subjected to various audits already, of course, but alongside checking that things marry up with one another, forensic statisticians also have ways of spotting suspicious patterns in the raw numbers, and thus estimating the chances that figures from a set of accounts have been tampered with. One of the cleverest tools is something called Benford's law.

Imagine you have data on, say, the population of every world nation. Now, take only the "leading digit" from each number: the first number in the number, if you like. For the UK population, which was 61,838,154 in 2009, that leading digit would be "six". Andorra's was 85,168, so that's "eight". And so on.

If you take all those leading digits, from all the countries, then overall, you might naively expect to see the same number of ones, fours, nines, and so on. But in fact, for naturally occurring data, you get more ones than twos, more twos than threes, and so on, all the way down to nine. This is Benford's law: the distribution of leading digits follows a logarithmic distribution, so you get a "one" most commonly, appearing as first digit around 30% of the time, and a nine as first digit only 5% of the time.

Next time you're waiting for a bus, you can think about why this happens (bear in mind what leading digits do when quantities repeatedly double, perhaps) but reality agrees with this theory pretty neatly, and if you go to the website testingbenfordslaw.com you'll see the proportions of each leading digit from lots of real-world datasets, graphed alongside what Benford's law predicts they should be, with data from Twitter users' follower counts to the number of books in different libraries across the US.

It doesn't work perfectly: it only works when you're examining groups of numbers that span several orders of magnitude, for example.

This is an interesting subject to me, as I've noticed that I create a pattern when trying to come up with random numbers for something.  Nate Silver had a post on the subject when he was accusing Strategic  Vision of falsifying poll data.  Uses of math to catch criminals is as good of a use of math as using it for gambling.

Resurrecting A Local Beer

Fast Company looks at the cost of the ad campaign for National Premium Beer in Baltimore:

The resurrected brew goes for a second run with a new ad campaign.

BEER: National Premium, a 139-year-old Baltimore beer that died in 1996
NEW OWNER: Tim Miller, local real-estate agent

$200,000// Miller's estimated relaunch cost
That includes $100,000 for marketing, and $75,000 for the beer's first run. Rather than brew it himself, he'll save money by hiring a brewery to work off National's old recipe. He expects immediate interest. "It has big-time name recognition," he says.

$1,000,000// The beer's marketing value
That's what the owner of a similar regional beer--Mark Hellendrung of Narragansett Beer--estimated his brand's recognition was worth in advertising dollars when he relaunched it in 2005. He spent $10,000 on a billboard, and it was an instant hit.

$???// Cost of overcoming the past
"You can get caught up in the romance, but you have to keep in mind that there are a lot of people who lived through the demise and remember people being laid off," says Hellendrung. Winning over old-timers requires time, money, and lots of samples.

This brings to mind Greg Hardman's work trying to bring back the Hudepohl, Schoenling, Burger and Christian Moerlein.  It is tough work and not at all cheap, and I try to support it as much as possible.

A Positive Perspective

Steven Pinker gives us a somewhat reassuring chart (h/t The Dish):

The Challenges Of Managing Renewable Power

Europe is running into a situation of paying people to use power (h/t Ritholtz):

The 15 mile-per-hour winds that buffeted northern Germany on July 24 caused the nation’s 21,600 windmills to generate so much power that utilities such as EON AG and RWE AG (RWE) had to pay consumers to take it off the grid.
Rather than an anomaly, the event marked the 31st hour this year when power companies lost money on their electricity in the intraday market because of a torrent of supply from wind and solar parks. The phenomenon was unheard of five years ago.
With Europe’s wind and solar farms set to triple by 2020, utilities investing in new coal and gas-fired power stations no longer face stable returns. As more renewables come on line, a gas plant owned by RWE or EON that may cost $1 billion to build will be stopped more often from running at full capacity. It may only pay for itself on days like Jan. 31, when clouds and still weather pushed an hour of power on the same-day market above 162 ($220) euros a megawatt-hour after dusk, in peak demand time.

It would seem like pumping water to fill elevated reservoirs or some other fairly inefficient storage solution would be preferable to this scenario.  What about water electrolysis to store hydrogen for use in a fuel cell or something?  This would seem like the same kind of issue nuclear plants have run into over the years, but it is hyped more because it is renewable.  Overall, it seems like a very solvable problem to have.

From the Department of WTF?

Steve Bartman Night at the Dayton Gems exhibition hockey game?  Apparently:

The Dayton Gems professional hockey team, proud members of the Central Hockey League, are excited to announce that the team’s lone preseason exhibition game on Cassano’s Italian Ice at Hara Arena will be “Salute to Steve Bartman Night” when the team hosts division rival Fort Wayne Komets on Friday, October 14 at 7pm. In honor of Bartman, and his infamous foul ball grab which arguably set off the biggest professional sports controversy in the past decade, the Dayton Gems will salute him and his rather unfortunate distinction by offering Bartman a free ticket to the game, to be left for him at the Hara box office, to celebrate the eighth anniversary of his notoriety.
In addition, any fans dressed as Steve Bartman, complete with Cubs hat, green turtleneck and wearing headphones, will also receive one free admission to the game. Gems team president Joe Greene spearheaded the idea, noting “while our staff will be dressed like Steve, and there will be baseball and Bartman themed contests and promotions going on throughout the night, we would like to remind our fans to refrain from reaching over the glass for stray pucks.” The team will also offer prizes and special recognition for the best dressed “Bartman” lookalikes in attendance.

I take it that the promotions director watched "Catching Hell," and a light bulb went off.  Hey, leave this guy a ticket to a crappy minor league hockey game in Dayton, Ohio, we get a bunch of publicity, and it won't even cost us a ticket.  Instead of warning fans not to reach over the glass for pucks, they ought to have a contest where all the people who got in free by dressing like Bartman, try to catch a shot puck with their baseball glove. 

Anyway, let it die.  The guy has no connection to Dayton or hockey, and other than the documentary on ESPN, there is no reason to commemorate the 8th anniversary of the event.  If Alex Gonzales wouldn't have booted the ball later, Bartman wouldn't even be remembered.  But, it is minor league hockey, so publicity is publicity.