EclectEcon

More on Pennies

from Seinfeld (h/t Kip):

 

More on Eliminating the Penny in Canada

Scoop just sent me this link to the actual budget document.

I wonder how long it will take the US to follow our lead.

YES!! Canada will stop minting the penny!!

As my friends informed me earlier, Canada will stop minting the one-cent coin in the fall. From the National Post,

The Royal Canadian Mint will no longer make pennies as of this fall, with Mr. Flaherty calling the penny a “currency without any currency” that costs more than a penny-and-a-half to make. He suggested Canadians donate their stockpiled pennies to charity.

And from the Globe and Mail,

Perhaps the measure that will have the most visible and universal effect on Canadians is a plan to eliminate the penny. Starting this fall, the Royal Canadian Mint will no longer put pennies in circulation, saving the government $11-million a year and bringing Canada in line with countries such as New Zealand and Australia. (Consumers will be able to continue using pennies “indefinitely,” but prices will be rounded to the nearest five-cent increment if pennies aren’t available.)

There are some errors (I hope) in these stories and/or in Flaherty's statement. 

• It may cost a cent and a half to make a penny, but it also costs another 3-4 cents to distribute and collect them. And that's just explicit costs. See my earlier posts to look at the other costs.
• I hope the Globe meant "nearest 5-cents" not nearest 5-cent increment.

I'm ecstatic!!!

Will Canada FINALLY Get Rid of the Penny?

Friends tell me that today's budget calls for Canada to get rid of the penny. I can't find any link to that item in the online news, yet, but if so, you can thank me. I've been urging Canada to eliminate the penny for over 20 years. See here for just one example.

Correlation Is NOT Causation, Part 7,435,983: Canada's Robocall Scandal

The allegations of wrong-doing during Canada's last federal election are rife: people were directed to the wrong polling stations, people were phoned with misleading information and outright lies about various candidates, and further allegations have been made that many of the complaints were orchestrated by opposition groups.

One interesting question is whether any of these immoral, if not illegal, actions affected the outcome of the election. An early study indicated they did, but that study has been pretty seriously ridiculed and criticized here (h/t GN). The summary:

 A Note on Robocalls in the 2011 Federal Election

            Summary

Recently Prof. Anke S. Kessler of Simon Fraser University published a working paper on a regression model that suggests alleged robocalling had “a statistically significant impact on voter turnout and election results” by suppressing anti-Conservative turnout in 27 ridings in 2011.

I estimated her regression model using 27 other, similar ridings, where there were no robocall allegations (though the PMO may have used secret mind control devices to suppress anti-Conservative turnout). Not surprisingly (to me), Prof. Kessler’s model suggests that the effect of theentirely fictional mind control devices was greater than the effect of the alleged robocalls.

I have been upset by dirty tricks during elections ever since I first learned about the extent of them in All the President's Men. They upset and bother me now, too. But being upset about them should not colour our willingness to examine the issues critically.

 

Correlation Is NOT Causation, Part 7,435,982 (or whatever)

In a recent article in the NYTimes, it was reported that people who are bilingual do better on lots of different mental tests [h/t DF]. I'm not sure if it was the reporter or the researchers, but the implication throughout the article is that if you raise your children to be bilingual, they will be smarter; and if you, yourself, become fluent in a second language, you will be smarter.

My first reaction was to wonder whether the causation goes the other way. Surely, on average, smarter people find it easier to become fluent in an additional language. 

This is almost surely a simultaneous equations estimation problem, and I wonder whether the researchers saw it that way. What are the determinants of IQ? What, if anything does bilingualism add to the determination of IQ? What are the determinants of bilingualism? Clearly geographic and demographic variables are important, but does IQ play a role?

Note: I am not bilingual. I studied Latin in high school and Russian as an undergrad, but I remember essentially nothing of them. I became minimally fluent in French many years ago, but didn't work at improving or even maintaining it. 

Snow? When the Temperatures Are > 20C?

The gubmnt weather office shows very useful radar screens for our area, but the folks there really need to change their precipitation measures from "snow" to "rain". 

Here's a screen shot from this afternoon. Note the word "snow" in the heading and in the scale along the right side, even though the current temperature is 22C [72F].

Maybe Form and Content Are Important or maybe clothes do make the person.

During the periods of my life when I was a good student, I often wore a dress shirt and necktie when I wrote exams. I felt sharper, but I never knew for sure whether that had an impact on my actual performance. 

Maybe it did. From WaPo, "New Study: What you wear could affect how well you work". 

A recently published study from professors at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University shows that when research subjects wore a scientist’s or medical doctor’s white coat, they performed better on a test known as the “Stroop test,” which asks participants to say the color of a word being shown on a flash card, rather than the word itself. The group who donned white jackets identified as lab coats performed better on conflicting flash cards, such as when the word “blue” is spelled in red letters. Those wearing the lab coats, which people typically associate with care and attentiveness, made about half as many errors as their peers.

The article also says that when the subjects were told their white coats were artists' coats, their performance did not improve. [nor did it get any worse, a relief to know, given some of my artistic tendencies!]

I expect these results are both important and yet common sense. Dressing in a way that a person thinks is consistent with or emblematic of their goals quite likely does affect their behaviour. One would not ordinarily wear a coat and tie to work in an office that emphasizes casual dress for fear of appearing officious; at the same time, a male prof might not be as effective if he showed up for class wearing argyle unitards (depending on the class being taught, of course).