I am very busy this week preparing for a presentation for my research thesis. My topic is regarding the proposal of increasing gasoline (petrol) taxes in the US in order to reduce petroleum consumption, thereby reducing carbon dioxide emissions and slowing the inevitable global warming trend. I am looking at federal and state gasoline taxes as compared to other OECD countries. US gasoline taxes are significantly lower and do very little to encourage conservation of oil. One of my favorite economists, Dr Greg Mankiw, is a champion of Pigovian taxes which are taxes that correct negative externalities. In other words, a graduated increase of the federal gasoline tax will correct the market in order to reduce oil consumption, reduce carbon dioxide emissions, and encourage innovative technologies and cleaner alternative fuel sources.

Dr Mankiw’s manifesto has inspired me to research this further. My research will examine the optimal tax at which consumption will be reduced and will study the proposal of offsetting payroll or income taxes so that there will be zero gain or loss in tax revenue overall.

If your head isn’t spinning and I still have your attention. You will see that I am extremely busy and likely will not post again until the dust has settled from my presentation on Thursday evening. I might have to have a few pints and some good craic. See you soon!

Image credit: Wikipedia

I spend a good deal of time on flickr, but wow, someone has loads of time on their hands! Flickr user el frijole has taken the time to break down the iPhone ad shown during the Oscars Sunday night frame by frame in order to identify from which movies or TV shows each character hails. It’s fun to look through the slideshow and relive some great moments from the big and small screen. The Dude from The Big Lebowski is my favorite. Can I get a White Russian please?

If you haven’t watched the ad yet, it’s brilliant marketing that perpetuates the “must-have” brand of the iPod.

I ran the same route yesterday that I did last week which was about 5.5 miles. I feel much better today than I did after last week’s run. I am going to get on a run schedule and post my results, routes, and iPod playlists here mostly for a personal record but also for a way to share my progress as I train for the 2007 Dublin Marathon. If I can inspire just one person to get off the couch like I did almost 3 years ago and aim for something big, then this will all be worth it. I know that sounds cheesy but training for my first marathon changed my life and health for the better. So sign up for the Dublin Marathon today. I’ll be running around Galway, so join if you see me in my black North Face hat, blue shirt and black shorts.

1. Hook, Blues Traveler
2. (I’m) Gonna Kick You Out, The Caesers
3. So What’cha Want, Beastie Boys
4. Benny And The Jets, Beastie Boys
5. Where It’s At, Beck
6. Battle of Who Could Care Less, Ben Folds Five
7. Just a Friend, Biz Markie
8. Let’s Get It Started (Spike Mix), Black Eyed Peas
9. Takin’ It to the Streets, The Doobie Brothers
10. Flathead, The Fratellis
11. For The Girl, The Fratellis
12. Push It, Garbage
13. Superfreak (Roca Sound Remix), Rick James

While Al Gore was busy preparing his acceptance speech, Apple aired this commercial last night during the Oscars. Watch the video and come back, please?.

Do I still have your attention or were you completely distracted like I was for a few moments? What a great teaser! I’m so in love with this phone. First unveiled this year at Macworld Expo in January, the iPhone has left me and about a million other gadget geeks salivating ever since. Apple’s marketing machine has done it again with a clever, memorable commercial that, like any good movie trailer, captures your attention, plays on your emotions and fills you with anticipation for the release date.

The iPhone, which is about the same dimensions as a full size iPod, features an innovative touch-sensitive screen that fills the entire surface. There is only one physical button on the device, all other input comes by way of touching the icons on the screen. This interface allows for endless possiblities such as a full-blown web browser, contacts, organizer, music, games and movies. Speaking of movies, the other killer feature is the ability to rotate the phone 90 degrees and watch movies or music videos in widescreen format, how cool is that? The phone contains a sensor that is smart enough to detect the orientation and automatically switch to widescreen or normal modes. In wide-mode, album art will appear as covers on a CD rack, just as in the latest version of iTunes. Two models of the phone will be released; a 4 GB capacity model for $499 USD and a 5 GB capacity model for $599 USD. These prices will also require a 2 year contract with AT&T Wireless (formerly Cingular). It remains to be seen what the prices and contract terms will be elsewhere.

The iPhone is due to be released this June in the US and 4th quarter 2007 for most of the rest of the world. Damn, I don’t think I can wait until the fall. Who do you think the provider will be in Ireland/UK: O2? 3? Vodafone? My guess is O2 since their stores already feature several Apple products.

Now that the other billion people watching the Oscars know about the iPhone, you had better hold off upgrading your mobile phone plan and get in the queue behind me for one.

On a related note, check out my favorite track on the soundtrack from the Oscar winning film, Little Miss Sunshine.

Chicago - Sufjan Stevens - Little Miss Sunshine

As some may know, I have an interest in the environment and so does a recent Academy Award winner and Nobel Peace Prize nominee, Al Gore, so I came across this site and had to post something.

Yahoo just partnered with Nielsen to create 18seconds.org, a flashy (no pun intended) site aimed at keeping track of the number of compact flourescent lamps, CFLs purchased in the in the United States. Apparently over 16 million bulbs have been purchased which is the equivalent of keeping over 100,000 cars off the road. Since the average American home is responsible for twice the greenhouse gas as a car, these bulbs are an easy way to make a dent without buying a Prius. The bulbs produce similar light color and output with 70% less energy and heat output. This may death of the incandescent bulb may be near pending legislation in California and the ban of them in Australia by 2009.

I just purchased 2 of the CFLs for my apartment to do my part to reduce carbon emissions. Sure they cost more, but in the long run you’re going to save money and the environment. If you’re in the US, check out the site and see how your city and state fare with others. Congratulations to Al Gore and An Inconvenient Truth.

244 days to go…

I’m officially registered for the 2007 adidas Dublin Marathon, as I mentioned earlier. The marathon, 26.2 miles, is set for 29 October 2007 which is the public bank holiday. The race is truly international with half of the 12,000 participants hailing from outside Ireland.

I decided to register in order to kickstart my training and I may have to re-read Dean Karnazes’ book for a little inspiration. I’ve already run in Phoenix and St. Louis so this will be my third. I shaved 20 minutes off my time from Phoenix to St. Louis and this time I am aiming for 10 minute miles which puts the finish time at 04:42. As I said before, anyone interested in training with me in the Galway area, leave your comments below and we’ll plan a run.

I apologize to those who were not able to access the blog this weekend. DreamHost, my provider, was down for a bit due to an unexpected emergency power repair required for one of their data centers. Fortunately this sort of thing does not happen often and they have a special site to keep customers updated on events and outages.

All this aside, I have been very pleased with the service DreamHost povides and you can’t beat their features for the money. They offer over 160 GB of storage for a Level 1 account, and an amazing 1.7 TB of monthly bandwidth. For you newbies, that’s 1700 GB of monthly transfers, i.e. a hell of a lot of traffic! WordPress is literally a one-click install with DreamHost and they are always increasing storage and bandwidth limits.

Thank you for your patience during this brief outage. You can support me and this blog by joining DreamHost today for as little as $7.95 per month and right now that includes a free domain name registration and unlimited domain name hosting. Or, feel free to donate if you already have a hosting plan!

Have a great week, and now for the flood of posts I have been meaning to post this weekend…

No, it’s not an illicit substance glamourized in the movies, craic is the Irish term for fun or good times. As promised this post is the first in what will be a weekly, possibly even more frequent, post about Irish culture. Craic in a sentence or phrase might be “What’s the craic?” or “How’s the craic?” when you want to ask someone if they’re having a good or how the pub scene is tonight. The Irish may also say things like “We had a crackin’ time last night” or “It was great craic.” I thought I would post about craic since I have been referring to it so much in my posts lately. So I have to keep this post short since it’s Friday and I need to find the craic. Cheers!

What do you get when you cross Miss Marple, Bad Boys II and Shaun of the Dead? A brilliant side-splitting comedy starring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. Hot Fuzz is the latest project from Pegg and Edgar Wright with a big cast, loads of great one-liners and non-stop craic.

For the first time since last August I got to see a movie before anyone in the US! Usually big blockbuster films are not released until a few months after the US opening date. Hot Fuzz was released last week on February 14 and will not make it to US cineplexes until April 20 and the Aussies will be able to catch it on March 15. You must see this movie opening night so mark you calendars! If you saw Shaun of the Dead then you’ll love Hot Fuzz. Nicholas Angel (Pegg) is a highly regarded police officer in London that is transferred to a small village in the English country for making all the other cops in The City look bad. He is made sergeant of the local police service and his law enforcement expertise is seemingly wasted on this safe, quiet little community. Danny Butterman (Frost) is the lumpy son of the police inspector that followed his father into a life of police work and who’s idea of crime fighting comes from his favorite cop movies, Bad Boys II and Point Break. The most action Danny has seen is sitting on a stool at the local pub. You can only imagine what happens from here when you put these two unlikely characters together. Hot Fuzz has a great cast with some big, and unlikely, stars such as Bill Nighy, Jim Broadbent and Timothy Dalton.

I went to the cinema on student night with a big group of friends for only €4 and it was easily worth the admission. We were certainly the loudest with our gut-busting laughter and this one is a must see with the craziest of your mates. You can’t help but love the slapstick gore and violence for which Pegg and Frost are known. I give Hot Fuzz 4.5 out of 5 stars. So if you’re in Ireland or the UK check it out this weekend, otherwise here’s a quick trailer for the rest of you. Enjoy!

Team America World Police Just Added - Download Now on iTunes

Today has been a busy day for blogging, in case you haven’t read the other post yet. It must be my blood pumping after my first run in a while. Yesterday I ran about 5.5 miles along Galway Bay from the city centre to Salthill. I mapped it here using MapMyRun.com. Switch it to satellite or hybrid view to get a great view of the bay that was to my left on the way out. Cool site, eh? It was a gorgeous psuedo-spring day and Galway is going to be a great place to train. Which brings me to my next point…

I’ve run two marathons already, one in Phoenix and the other in St. Louis and and I’m ready to start training for my third. I have decided to run the adidas Dublin Marathon on 29th October where, I understand, instead of water and PowerBar stations you can grab a pint o’ Guinness. So if you’re in the Galway area and you are as crazy as me, please no Dean Karnazes wannabes, then post a reply and we’ll find out how to start a drinking, er, training program. So get off your arse and let’s run!

Yesterday was a busy and interesting day. I met with a PhD student on campus and we discussed the idea of shifting from a wealth or money-based economy to a knowledge-based economy. In a nutshell, money is a scarce resource that only a few of us in the world claim a majority stake.

Let’s take a look at an oversimplified example. If one man has, for example, $100 and another man has $0, then the poor man will do what he can to get some of that money, whether that involves work, begging, or stealing. The rich man will do everything he can to prevent giving up any of his money to the poor person. This creates a dichotomy and the rich man will only get richer and the poor man will either gain a small amount of money by means of working, begging, or stealing or else die and be forgotten. There exists a highly accepted theory that amount of education one attains is highly correlated to amount of wealth and thus the more education one has, the higher the wages one receives. Therein lies the conundrum; in order to make money, one must be educated and in order to be educated, one must have money. This nearly inescapable loop makes it impossible for the poor to rise to the level of education of the rich. Wealth accumulation is simply unsustainable.

Knowledge, on the other hand, is not a scarce resource if it is defined as a good. In other words, it is certainly possible for more than one person to know Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. The transfer of knowledge, unlike the transfer of money, does not reduce the holder’s wealth. A teacher does not lose knowledge when his or her student learns it. In fact the opposite occurs, in most cases, and that new knowledge is spread throughout a society when the students become teachers themselves. The only thing that happens is that teacher has given up some time to transmit that knowledge to others.

If the poor man in the example cannot afford an education he will always be poor and the rich man will always have the edge. If knowledge were the basis of the economy rather than money there would be a greater balance of wealth and power in the world. This is obviously a very simple example in a two person economy but the central idea is important.

Shifting away from money and toward knowledge may be a just a pipe dream, but it is certainly worth striving to achieve. This discussion was brought about by the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project by MIT that I have written about many times before. It is a simple idea perhaps inspired by the old adage: “If you give a man a fish, he will eat for a day and if you teach him how to fish, he will eat forever.” The project seeks to produce laptops for children in developing nations with poor education for $100 each. The laptop, it is believed, will be a lifetime learning tool, especially when connected to the Internet. A few books costing a similar amount will only teach a few subjects, while networked laptop will give a child unlimited learning opportunities.

The OLPC project is exactly the kind of idea that is necessary for the poor and developing nations in the world need in order to be able to succeed. Short term welfare such as food and medical supplies are still important, but for long term growth, knowledge is the answer.

Please refer to Paul Romer or David Warsh’s book for more information. Please leave your thoughts in the comments section.

You may have heard the catchphrase “Web 2.0″ before, but what is it exactly? I don’t believe anyone knows for sure, but this 5 minute video from the Digital Ethnography group is about the best explanation I’ve seen.

Blogging has allowed me to express myself in a unique way to people all over the world in a relatively easy way. I am amazed to see some of the places my readers come from such as Mumbai, Sydney, or Juneau, Alaska. I am still pinpointing a focus for this blog, but on the other hand does it really need a specific focus? In the meantime here’s where I’m at…

My intent with this blog is to connect readers with similar interests to me such as Ireland, economics, environmental policy, to name a few, and create a community with an active dialog of sharing and learning while having a good time. With “Web 2.0″ design elements/features, the world is quickly shrinking place that is connecting people and ideas in amazing new ways. To me, this was the original spirit of the world wide web.

Watch the clip and tell me your thoughts in the comments section after the video…

The dinner was great, but I think we went a little overboard on the scope of it. The scallops were delicious and the cake was chocolatey but not too sweet. Yesterday I spent most of the day periodically hunching over with stomach pain. Needless to say, I didn’t eat much yesterday and certainly didn’t feel like posting anything on this blog.

I had a meeting with my research advisor today. My project consists of an 8000 word essay on the research of gasoline taxes in the US. I’ll keep you posted on the progress. In addition, I have an econometrics project using STATA as well as a short (2000 word) essay on the diffusion of solar technology in the US. The workload for the semester is finally piling on at a rapid pace. I might have to be brief with some of the posts, but stay tuned…

I have loads of fun content coming your way and I plan to do a weekly Irish culture post. See you soon!

So I was surfing around on MyBlogLog.com communities and I came across A chuisle mo chroí… at
http://reflectionofadream.blogspot.com/

Macoosh, as the blogger is so affectionately named, is in a similar situation as me. She is:

• an American
• a postgraduate student (at University College Dublin)
• living in Ireland (duh, see previous item)
• a blogger

Macoosh’s blog is a peek into the life of a self-adopted Dubliner who studies film, reviews the latest episodes of LOST, writes inspired poetry. She has some real gems posted you just have to go lurking around her archives. It would be nice to see some kind of ‘Popular Posts’ feature, something I plan to do here soon once I have some solid Google Analytics numbers.

Most of all, it’s nice to see someone out there that is crazy like me and packed up their previous life to embark on a 2 year chapter in one of the most beautiful countries in the world, Ireland. At least Macoosh has some Boston-Irish blood, my surname is Britton for cryin’ out loud! I will leave you to read what I think is the most inspired post, one of her first.

While you’re there, don’t forget to subscribe to her feed. Erin Go Bragh!

I am surprising my wife with a gourmet dinner this evening

• Syrah for starters
• Fresh Irish Goat Cheese and Kalamata Olives from Sheridan’s Cheesemongers
• Fresh Baguette from Griffin’s Bakery
• Tomato, Basil, Fresh Buffalo Mozarella Salad
• Scallops from Galway Bay Seafood @ the docks in Irish Butter and Garlic Sauce served with Pasta
• Fancy Chocolate Cake with Glazed Strawberries, Kiwi and Lemon Slice served with Riesling from The Gourmet Tart Co. on Lower Abbeygate Street, Galway

The display was too good to pass up…Happy Valentine’s Day and sleep tight tonight!