Today thousands of cyclists around the country hit the streets for Bike to Work Day in the United States. In a country dominated by the car, bike transit - as opposed to recreational cycling - is still somewhat of a novelty. Even in large, densely populated cities, you’re more likely to find shared cars than shared bikes. And despite the fact that a car costs 40 times more than a bike, daily fees for renting bikes often exceed those for renting a car. (See WashCycle for a good missive on this.)

But several major cities in Europe have embraced the idea of shared bikes. Shared bikes are low-cost rental bikes parked at stations across the city, optimized for one way trips. For-profit companies like Cyclocity or SmartBike work in conjunction with city planners to help link transportation nodes that are too close for a bus or car, but too far to walk. And unlike shared cars which must be returned to the same parking space, bikes can be returned to any station in the system.

Members provide a refundable deposit (~$200) and pay a nominal annual fee (~$15).  Whenever they need a bike, they simply swipe a card to release an available bike. Rides under 30 minutes are usually free, with increasing fares after that. Most bikes have internal gears and solid tires minimizing muss and fuss - ideal for commuters.

Paris announced this week that it is introducing 20,600 shared bikes at more than 1,400 stations across the city by July 15. The idea has been popular in other European cities, from Lyon to Munich, but with nearly one shared bike for every thousand Parisians, the Bastille Day rollout is nothing less than… revolutionary (see statastic below).

Several US cities including San Francisco, Portland, and Chicago are studying the idea of shared bikes, but it looks like Washington DC will be the first American guinea pig. Early indications are that the DC plan will initially be modest. Like shared cars, shared bike systems greatly benefit from network effects. But now that the planet is heating up, this is no time to be modest. The more shared bikes, the more locations near potential riders, and the users more likely to give it a try, the more profitable, etc.

So can DC match the French passion for shared bike? Not just yet. In order to have the same density of shared bikes in DC as in Paris, Washington would need 5,700 bikes or about 80 Smart Bikes per square mile. And if shared bikes help gets tourists off of those goofy Segways, all the better.

Previously, I hypothesized that widespread adoption of the shared cars would decrease demand for streetside parking (especially with this concept), allowing for more, safer bike lanes. Shared bikes and shared cars could easily work in harmony with one another - there are certainly times when you need a car. But it is time for local leaders to shun the one-car, one-driver paradigm and shared bikes are a great way to start.

.

.

.

.

.

Tomorrow kite enthusiasts from around the country will converge on the National Mall for the 41st annual Smithsonian Kite Festival. Kite makers can can test their creations in a contest with rules and regulations you would expect in the nation’s capital:

By order of the Federal Aviation Administration, the weight of a kite must not exceed 5 pounds and altitude of flight must not exceed 500 feet. When informed that a Presidential helicopter is approaching, all kites must be pulled down immediately, and not re-flown until the all-clear announcement.

Kites have been a pastime since 3,500 years when they were invented in China. There is also some evidence that Malaysia, Indonesia and South Pacific islands developed kites for a more practical purpose: fishing. This clever technology mashup - still practiced today - enabled them to reach fish in shallows where there boats could not.

But fisherman weren’t the only ones to recognize the utility of kites - so did surfers. Kite surfing, also known as kite boarding, powers surfers through and above the water with a large inflatable kite usually attached to the user by a harness. Although the sport is only 13 years old, there are now more than 200,000 kite surfers around the world.

And if you’re more likely to pilot a large boat rather than a surfboard, you can just attach a Sky Sails to your ship. Cheaper than retrofitting large ships with sails and masts, these enormous kites can help reduce energy costs by taking advantage of ocean surface winds.

While the average five & dime kite is lucky to use all 500 feet of its discount cotton string, more serious kite enthusiasts upped the ante a few years ago. They started with a kite 30 feet in width, tethered it to a 3 inch thick Kevlar line and flew it to a record-setting height of 13,500 feet - more than two and a half miles in the atmosphere.

But recent research into using kites as a renewable energy source would shatter that world record.

Environmentalists were quick to hail wind turbines as a viable alternative to our reliance on fossil fuels, but bird lovers hated them. It seems that Don Quixote’s giants were swatting down some of their favorite feathered friends. So why not build the windmills farther from the ground?

Indeed there are several companies considering this. Treehugger reported that a Canadian company called Magenn has invented a wind-powered generator that is a cross between a kite and a helium balloon. Held aloft by helium 1000 feet in the air, winds cause the Magnus effect where “rotation increases, lift increases, drag will be minimized because of reduced leaning, and stability increases.” Electricity generated by these floating turbines is then sent to the ground via an electrical line.

Another idea takes windmills and attaches kites. The Italian company Kite Wind Generator uses kites 1000 meters in the troposhere that “are anchored to a revolving structure on a vertical axis, analogous to a giant merry-go-round, which conveys the energy… (to a) power-plant.”

And if kites pulling a merry-go-round isn’t innovative enough, imagine if Thomas Edison invented a kite today. Recent research proposed that flying electric generators (FEGs) could harness kinetic energy in jet stream winds. These winds more than six miles above the surface of the earth produce up to 100 times more energy than winds on the ground. According to the Washington Post, “just tapping into 1 percent of the energy in high altitude winds would be enough to power all of civilization.”

Of course, if none of these other kite-based solutions solve U.S. energy problems, President Bush can just go fly his What Would Jesus Do? kite.

.

It seemed like a simple question. One any Australian dentist should be able to answer: How many teeth does a platypus have? As it turns out, adults don’t really have any teeth in that duck-billed mouth of theirs (the infant platypus has milk teeth that are shed before adulthood). This egg-laying oddity does share its toothless status with the blue whale. Not bad company if you’re a fan of gorging yourself on krill (I am). Another oddity that inhabits the waters north of Alaska is the Narwhal. The males grow a 10 foot tusk from their jaw which is often classified as a single, very impressive tooth.

Once you move to more solid land, things start to look more familiar. Sumatran rhinos have 28 teeth, four more teeth than their endangered African cousins the White Rhino. Northern White Rhinos may have more teeth in their huge mouths than there are survivors in the wild. Wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo have reduced their numbers to fewer than ten.

Size is no guide on land when it comes to guessing how many teeth it has. Rabbits have more teeth than African elephants. And don’t count on carnivores needing more teeth. Cats and koalas each have 30 teeth, but no self-respecting koala would trade his eucalyptus leaves to bat around a half-dead mouse.

Coming in at 32 teeth are humans and chimps. Apparently, Darwin also had 32 teeth. But giraffes, too? Indeed, they have 32 pearly whites surrounding an enormous, blue tongue. Such intelligent design might provide fodder to the 46% of Americans who believe that “God created man in his present form sometime in the past 10,000 years.”

Pandas and possums also share the same number of teeth: 50. This is hardly surprising. They are both adorable creatures that attract visitors from all over the world, inspire stuffed animals, adorn t-shirts, and evoke squeals of delight from children. The new possum cam at the DC Zoo is something of a national phenomenon.

Closing out the list are the 60-toothers. Say, have you heard the one about the dentist, the crocodile and the sperm whale?
.

While you’re straining your tongue trying to count the number of teeth in your mouth, be sure that Unrest’s album Perfect Teeth is playing in the background. It’s a dose of high-BPM sugary sweet alt pop courtesy of DC’s own Mark Robinson. It may not match Unrest’s sublime 1992 album, Imperial, but for today Perfect Teeth fits the bill.
.

With the advent of e-ink and e-paper, the only thing missing is the electronic content: e-books. E-books offer several clear advantages over print media: students able to tote all of their textbooks back and forth to classes in one 7 ounce e-reader; traveling the world with detailed guidebooks and foreign language dictionaries for dozens of countries; the ability to store hundreds of your favorite books in a tiny urban apartment; and finally, the potential to revolutionize libraries around the world (more on that tomorrow).

Many analysts agreed that e-books would revolutionize publishing. In 2000, Accenture predicted that e-books would make up 10% of the book market by 2005. Unfortunately, e-books didn’t live up to their great expectations. In fact, e-books only made up .07% of the 2.3 billion books sold in 2005: less than 1 of every 1200 books sold was in electronic format. Moreover, sales of e-books were flat between 2004 and 2005.

So why has the public rejected the digitization of print media? One problem is that, unlike CDs, there is no way to digitize your current library of paperbacks. E-books and e-readers also present the classic chicken and egg conundrum. Without most titles available in e-book form, expensive e-readers lose their appeal. And without flashy new e-readers to energize consumers (as iPod did for digital music), publishers are naturally less willing to commit to the new format.

Some of that may be changing: Apple’s new iPhone is making bloggers like Booksquare all tingly:

“…the iPhone could either kill the nascent e-reader business or take it to new levels. We’ve been saying just about forever that the problem with dedicated e-reader is the fact that the consumer isn’t seeking a device that does only one thing. With its “smart” orientation features, the iPhone could usher in the mass market e-book era.”

Even as Apple might revitalize the market, if they insist on Digital Rights Management (DRM) as they do in the music market, they may undermine their potential success. Just as Apple iTunes makes it difficult to share digital music downloads with friends, some e-book sellers impose similar restrictions. That makes the paperbacks more attractive than DRM-controlled e-books: you bought it, you can share it with friends. Not so with DRM e-books.

Traditional publishing houses are also delusional when it comes to pricing e-books. If you want to read Tom Sawyer’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, for example, you can buy the Penguin Classic paperback for $5.95, or for a modest 10% discount, you can download the same Penguin Classic from ereader.com.

But consider this: Copyrights on many classic titles have entered public domain. This means that almost everything written before 1923 in the United States is free to use.

In the past, Penguin Classics made profit by reprinting classic titles that would otherwise be unavailable.The Internet changes the equation. Take away the public’s need for the printing press, and e-books would seemingly be a major threat to Penguin Classics.

Fear not, for lovers of classics there is good news: Project Gutenberg has taken the Wikipedia approach to sharing e-books in the public domain. With 20,000 free e-books in their catalog - including Huck Finn - Project Gutenberg claimed more than 2 million downloads last month. Contrast this with the 1.7 million e-books sold in all of 2005 and we see once again that consumers of e-books are extremely price sensitive. (More on price sensitivity in music here.)

And the pricing premium for e-books isn’t restricted to the classics. Jimmy Carter’s bestseller, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid is actually cheaper in hardback at amazon.com ($16.20) than the e-book version at ereader.com or fictionwise.com ($16.99).

Publishers seem wedded to the paper publishing business model. This antiquated pricing model is bad for consumers and worse for the environment. If the 2.3 billion paper books sold in 2005 had been e-books, we would have saved more than 7 million trees. Until publishers drop prices and loosen Digital Rights Management restrictions, the convenience and sensibility of e-books may remain a pipe dream.

But what if our public libraries could help revolutionize the e-book market? More on that soon.

.

Sources: Statastic research, Accenture, International Digital Publishing Forum

Yesterday Foreign Policy and the Center for Global Development released their 4th annual Commitment to Development Index (CDI). This index attempts to quantify how well rich countries “help poor countries build prosperity, good government, and security.” The index measures seven policy areas: aid (per capita and quality), trade, investment, migration, environment, security, and technology.

Many countries’ own policies stand in direct contradiction to one another showing, perhaps, that internal politics are primary, and policies affecting the poorest countries on earth are secondary. Andrew Natsios, the former head of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), pointed out some of these contradictions before resigning in January, 2006. As Foreign Policy notes:

“Natsios criticized a law that requires the U.S. government to buy food from U.S. farmers, ship it on American boats, and deliver it to famine-stricken regions via U.S.-based organizations. The U.S. government must deliver food aid this way even when it depresses local food prices, pushing more farmers into poverty, and even when it could buy food from farmers just outside a famine zone for much less. Some nongovernmental organizations that get a large fraction of their funding from the program defended the status quo, arguing that dropping the ‘made in America’ requirement would undermine the program’s support among American farmers and shippers. Congress quickly axed Natsios’s proposal for reform. That the U.S. government must pay off American interests to feed the starving is a sad commentary on how low the commitment to development may still be.”

In an unrelated but equally interesting measure, Transparency International has for several years been publishing the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) in order to draw attention to the role of corruption in stifling economic development. When we look at corruption in rich countries, there appears to be a parallel between increased corruption and decreased effectiveness at helping poor countries. To be fair, the 21 rich countries ranked in the Corruptions Perceptions Index are squeaky-clean relative to the countries they are trying to help (with the exceptions of Italy and Greece).

Is there a link? Perhaps pandering at home - the constant political pressure from competing interests - creates economic inefficiencies that hurt poor countries. These policies could come in the form of unfair trade policies (e.g. Switzerland’s $987.58 per-cow subsidy) or environmental indifference (the United States’ ultra-low gas taxes).

Then again, it’s also easy to be small. The 5 countries “most committed to development” have an average population of 7.9 million whereas the bottom five have an average population 53.7 million. Similar ratios hold for corruption: the most transparent rich countries have smaller average populations.

.
Sources: Statastic research; Foreign Policy; Center for Global Development; Wikipedia

It should come as no surprise that war made quick inroads into gaming. It translates well: war is a vastly simplified solution to complex problems. War is good versus evil, it has an enormous historical body of work to draw upon, and it appeals to men who make up 62% of gamers. But in 2005, “shooter” and “fighting” games only made up only 13% of total games sales. In fact, when you look at the $1 billion computer game market, strategy games outsell shooter games by 2 to 1.

As games have become more sophisticated, they have also become less black and white in interpretation of the world. The gray areas are starting to be addressed by a genre of gaming dubbed “serious gaming.” Serious games include any training and simulation games - including the games developed for the military mentioned in pt. 2 of this series - and they are an emerging resource for policymakers as well as war mongers.

The DC-based think tank Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars founded the Serious Games Initiative to “help usher in a new series of policy education, exploration, and management tools utilizing state of the art computer game designs, technologies, and development skills.” A growing subset of serious gaming is known as activist games. Activist games are designed to raise social awareness of issues near and dear to many non-profits - issues such as poverty, war, environmental protection, even genocide. Nonetheless, the oxymoronic genre of “serious games” has met some resistance in the world of social activism, despite good intentions:

“It’s like what Adorno said, the idea that it’s barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz. But you saw this around film too, when it first started: ‘The medium isn’t serious enough to allow for serious discourse.’ I find it somewhat contradictory because people criticize games for saying there’s nothing good in them, nothing serious. But when games try to talk about a serious issue, they say, ‘You can’t talk about that in a game.’ ”

-Professor Ian Bogost, an assistant professor at the George Institute of Technology, whose book on serious games will be published next spring by M.I.T. Press - New York Times, July 23, 2006

So what do activist games look like? While some of the games have share war games’ complex interactivity in massively multi-player online games (MMOG), most are much simpler. These stripped-down games often reflect the limited non-profit budgets which support the development costs of activist games. And with few exceptions, activist games are significantly lower quality than commercial games, which may further limit their reach.

Activist gaming still faces an uphill battle with more mature media: video games are hard to create on the cheap. Activist leaflets are cheap, web sites and blogs for social change are almost free. But even comparing the motion picture media reveals that blockbuster independent documentaries such as Supersize Me, which was produced for a budget of $65,000, can be made for less than blockbuster games.

The game A Force More Powerful is a role-playing game that puts you in the position of planner for a nonviolent movement seeking social change, pitting you against a regimepowered by artificial intelligence. The game required $3 million in funding and sells for about $20. Whether it will break even is doubtful.

But do games that inspire social change need to be as complex and expensive as Sim City? The online game Darfur is Dying was produced with a $50,000 grant and has attracted almost a million users. And one of the most simple and effective meassages highlighted below is conveyed in the editorial game September 12. The harder you try to exterminate the terrorists with violence, the more you terrorists you create. Perhaps President Bush should have played this before he invaded Iraq.

If our president is unconvinced that his current tactics create more terrorists than they destroy, at least he can take solace in the fact that there is a virtual suicide bus simulation in development for the treatment of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Games have come full circle to reflect the complexity of the world around us. They train U.S. war fighters, inspire terrorists, rally the local activists, teach diplomacy to the next generation, and treat the victims of our wars that exist not only in virtual reality.

.

.

A Survey and Screenshots of Activist Games

.

International Aid & Development Games

Food Force

About: World Food Programme’s “Food Force” simulates a country threatened by a hunger crisis. Acting as a humanitarian aid worker, the player completes a series of missions to plan and complete a successful emergency response. Players have to complete a series of missions ranging from dropping food parcels from the air to using food aid to rebuild a country’s economy.

Developer: United Nations World Food Program

Reach: Downloaded 4 million times in its first year online, audience target is children ages 8-13

Price: Free

Download at: www.food-force.com

.

.

.

3rd World Farmer

About: Players manage an African farm, and are confronted with the difficult choices caused by poverty - drought, war, and starvation.

Developers: The first prototype of the game was developed as a students’ project at the IT-University in Copenhagen, Spring 2005.
Price: Free

Play online here: http://www.heavygames.com/3rdworldfarmer/showgame.asp

.

.

.

Water Alert!

About: UNICEF’s unfortunately pedantic and un-engaging game, Water Alert takes you through the minutae of collecting water sample. This is more educational than most of the games mentioned here.

Price: Free

Play online here: http://www.unicef.org/voy/explore/wes/explore_1818.html

.

.

.

Activist Games

Darfur is Dying

About: Users play the role of a Darfur refugee. In the simualation, your character runs to fetch water risking rape or abduction by Janjaweed militae before returning to the refugee camp.

Developed by: University of Southern California, Reebok Human Rights Foundation and The International Crisis Group

Funding: Reebok Human Rights Foundation

Reach: 700,000 in the first seven weeks of its release

Developer: Susana Ruiz, Ashley York, Mike Stein, Noah Keating, and Kellee Santiago - all graduate student at the University of Southern California

Cost: $50,000 grant from Reebok Human Rights Foundation and the International Crisis Group in partnership with by MTVu, MTV’s online network geared toward fostering actvism amongst university students

Price: Free

Play online: www.darfurisdying.com

.

.

.

A Force More Powerful (AFMP)

About: AFFMP is a strategy game that is intended to teach budding activists how to use non-violent methods to influence government policies. Non-violent resistance tactics include training, fund-raising and organizing, protests, strikes, mass action, civil disobedience, noncooperation, and even such mundane actions as leafletting.

The game was developed by Ivan Marovic, co-founder of Otpor (Resistance) the Serbian youth movement, the non-violent movement that helped topple Milosovic in Serbia. Another apparent collaborator is the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC), which claims to have helped oust tyrants in Serbia, Georgia and most recently Ukraine.

Developer: International Center on Nonviolent Conflict allied with commercial game developer Breakaway LTD.

Funding: $3 million from International Center on Nonviolent Conflict

Price: $19.95 Order here

Web site: http://www.afmpgame.com/index.shtml

.
.

.

September 12

About: Newgaming.com has created a new sub-genre of editorialized serious games that they call newsgames. September 12 is a simple, browser-based game where your apparent goal is to bomb terrorists who are wandering amongst civilians through an Arab market. When you bomb them, collateral damage kills innocent bystanders. Grief-stricken relatives are drawn to terrorism themselves and you see that bombing only produces more terrorists.

Developer: Newsgaming.com and Gonzalo Frasca, a game designer and professor at the University of Copenhagen

Price: Free

Play online: http://www.newsgaming.com/games/index12.htm

.

.

.

Peace & Peacekeeping Games

Madrid

About: Produced by the creators of September 12, Madrid was designed within two days of the Madrid train bombings as a memorial to the 192 victims.

Developer: NewsGaming.com – “This new site showcases video games that editorialize on current international news. Its team gathers a group of professional game developers and artists who believe that videogames can not only entertain but also encourage critical thinking. Periodically, Newsgaming.com will launch online video games related to major international news events.”

Play online: http://www.newsgaming.com/newsgames.htm

.

.

.

Foreign Ground

About: A first-person perspective training game used by the Swedish military to that simulates peacekeeping operations. Instead of focusing on combat it deals mostly with solving problems using non-violent means without relying on duels and combat. The user play the role of a UN Peacekeeper and solves various tasks while on foot or vehicle patrol.

Developer: Swedish National Defence College

Web site: http://www.defencegaming.org/foreign_ground.htm

.

.

.

Diplomacy Games

Peacemaker

About: Simulates the violence and political turbulence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Players choose between the role of an Israeli prime minister or a Palestinian Authority president, making policy decisions and communicating with the international community while dealing with unexpected violent events. The games teaches high school and college students about the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by focusing on the goal of cohabitation rather than on occupation and destruction.

“It’s meant to teach people about the different perspectives. It’s just a turn-based strategy game, but we’ve inverted the war model so it’s about conflict resolution. The end goal is to create a peaceful resolution to the conflicts.” -Eric Brown of Impact Games

Developer: Impact Games

Reach: Developers are currently testing the game in limited pilots and have not yet announced a release date.

Web site: http://www.peacemakergame.com

.

.

.

Global Kids Island

About: “Second Life is a 3D virtual world in which the residents are provided with the tools required to lliterally shape the world around them. Teen Second Life is a space restricted to 13-17 year olds. Beginning in February, 2006, Global Kids has been exploring how to bring a youth development model around global issues into an island within this teen grid.”

Price: First Basic Account is free. Premium: ranges from $6.00 to $9.95 per month

Second Life blog: http://www.holymeatballs.org/second_life/

.

.

.

Treating Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder with Virtual Reality

Suicide Bus Bomber Virtual Reality PTSD Prototype

About: Researchers Tamar Weiss (Haifa, Israel), Azu Garcia-Palacios (Spain) and Hunter Hoffman (U.W. Seattle) are developing an immersive virtual reality simulation to help survivors or witnesses of terrorism who have developed Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The simulation of a terrorist bus bombing is designed to give the therapist control over the progression and intensity of the experience, including the addition of realistic visual and audio affects.

Developer: Imprint Interactive

Developer web site: http://www.imprintit.com/index.html

More info: http://seriousgamessource.com/features/feature_053006_ptsd.php

.

.

.

9/11 Virtual Reality PTSD Prototype

About: A Weill Cornell Medical College therapist and a virtual reality researcher from the University of Washington HITLab are using virtual reality to treat victims of the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center, and their regimen appears to be effective in helping patients cope with the severe psychological trauma of the event.

Web site: http://www.hitl.washington.edu/projects/ptsd/

.

.

.

.

.

Serious and Activist Gaming News

New York Times: Saving the World, One Video Game at a Time - reprinted in full here

Business Week: Getting Activist Video Games to Market

Overview of Games for Change Conference

Newsweek: Gaming the Poor

PBS Newshour: Can “Serious Games” Improve Your Mind?

NPR: Video-Game Designers Target World Peace

Interview with Professor James Paul Gee, professor of educational psychology, UW-Madison who recently received $1.5 million from the MacArthur Foundation to support his research on learning and video games

Use of virtual reality for treating post-traumatic stress disorder

.

Blogs about Serious Gaming
Blog from Games for Change Conference

Blog from Susana Ruiz, a graduate student in the School of Cinema-Television’s Interactive Media Division at the University of Southern California, part of the team behind Darfur is Dying

Good essay about the Syrian company Afkar Media that produced Under Siege

.

Serious Games Web Sites
Games for Change

Serious Games Source

Social Impact Games

With crude oil prices hovering around $75 per barrel, big oil companies once again announced record profits yesterday. Congressional inquiries into price fixing went nowhere, primarily because oil companies don’t need to fix prices. They have a U.S. population addicted to driving (never mind what makes the car go), high switching costs, and fuel standards that make China look progressive.

How did this happen? After the record oil prices in the late 1970s - prices that produced the 1981 U.S. historical high of $3.01 per gallon (in 2006 dollars) - Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards were made more stringent. From 1978 to 1981, U.S. car and truck fuel efficiency standards rose by 24%.

Then came the cheap oil of the 1990s and the SUV revolution. As a percentage of income, the average American was able to buy three times more gas in 1998 than they could in 1980. Fuel standards reflected the cheaper oil. CAFE standards in 1983 were 24.8; in 2004 the average was 24.7 miles per gallon (MPG). The U.S. has long lagged behind Europe in fuel efficiency standards, but more surprisingly, even the developing world makes us look bad.

China’s red-hot economy has meant a rapid shift from bicycles to cars, and the government is taking stern measures to increase fuel efficiency. One major difference with the U.S. CAFE standards is that Chinese standards are based on weight rather than class of vehicles. The lightest vehicles in China were required to get 38 MPG in 2005, increasing to 43 MPG by 2008. Contrast that with the U.S. CAFE standard of 27.5 MPG for cars.

The United States fuel efficiency peaked nearly two decades ago, and today the oil companies are posting record profits. But don’t blame the oil companies. They’re just small-brained, carnivorous, profit-making sharks that swim and devour money. It’s the bloated American, SUV-loving consumer that we should blame for willingly wading into these shark-infested waters. Chomp!

Notes & Sources: # Historical Real GDP per capita is in 2006 dollars. 2006 GDP estimated by statastic.com using latest Economist forecasts. Gas prices are the annual average gas price and were adjusted to 2006 dollars.
^CAFE fleet standards for cars and trucks. 2005 and 2006 data unavailable, so 2004 standards of 24.7 MPG were used.

Given the choice, Statastico would rather read expertise than opinion. Recent polls concentrate on the latter. More interesting, however, is the wide gap between the public’s opinion and the opinion of experts. So why the obsession with public opinion polling?

The media use polling data not only to guide their own stories and advertising, but often as the basis for stories. So reporting what people think to the people who are thinking it becomes a self-reinforcing cycle.

And then there are the politicians. They guide their district gerrymandering, their campaign messages and financing with public opinion polls. And of course politicians themselves also guide public opinion. Just look at how many times the phrase “addicted to oil” has appeared in the media, and you’ll understand why the public suddenly has a passion for energy independence.

But experts are polled less often. The Atlantic Monthly often polls its foreign policy experts, and Foreign Policy recently released polling data highlighting the divide between the experts and the public. These types of polls are crucial to moving debates forward.

So what informs public opinion? The average American is not devouring policy blogs, obsessing over exit strategies in Iraq, evaluating the efficiency of turning corn into ethanol; they’re not even reading newspapers. They’re thinking about what to have for dinner, searching for low airfares, and keeping up with the latest news about Brangelina.

The public is also increasingly fragmented. The Internet facilitates specialization of interests and opinion, so Americans who do pay attention to the news are more likely to get it from a partisan source. Public opinion polls supposedly help us understand the political climate, but politics are shaping that opinion. Polling the public on important issues is no more than politicians’ PR departments checking to see whether their messaging sticks.

So please poll the experts. Statastico doesn’t care what the American public thinks about pulling out of Iraq. We should care about what Iraqis think. We should care about what experts in the State Department think. Instead of obscuring scientific consensus as the Bush administration has done with global warming, help us understand possible solutions. Scientists and experts are not always right, of course. But politicians’ job is to listen to the experts and help the public understand real options for hard problems.

Sources:

1: http://www.religioustolerance.org/ev_publi.htm#earth

2: http://web1.foreignpolicy.com/issue_julyaug_2006/TI-index/thepopularfront.html

3: http://abcnews.go.com/images/Politics/1009a1GlobalWarming.pdf

4: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/5702/1686

The polling data about scientific consensus and global warming is based on a scientific review of 928 scientific papers related to global warming. None of the papers reviewed, “disagreed with the consensus position.” Several scientists do disagree with different aspects of global warming. Here is a list of scientists who disagree with the global warming consensus.