What's a Menstrual Cup?

Now here's a peer effect paper you don't see everyday. From Emily Oster and Rebecca Thornton, and the paper is entitled, "Determinants of Technology Adoption: Private Value and Peer Effects in Menstrual Cup Take-Up". The abstract reads:

We estimate the determinants of technology adoption using data from a randomized evaluation of menstrual cups in Nepal, focusing on the role of technology value and peer eects in driving adoption. A menstrual cup is a small, silicone, bell-shaped device which is used internally during menstruation. The individual randomization of cup allows us to estimate causal eects of peer exposure on adoption; differences in the need for mobility and inconvenience of the alternative menstrual protection allow us to estimate effects of cup value. We find both peer exposure and cup value matter for adoption. Further, because our data includes measures of cup trial and cup usage we are able to identify mechanisms through which these eects operate, differentiating between desire to use (trial) and ability to use (usage conditional on trial). We find evidence that peer exposure matters both because people want to act like their friends, and because they learn how to use the cup from their friends. Higher cup benefits increase individual desire to use the cup, but do not aect ability to use it. Policy simulations suggest that targeting distribution based on either cup value or social networks yields higher usage than random distribution, but which type of targeting is better depends on whether early adoption or longer-term adoption is targeted.

This is great, in all seriousness. The peer effect and randomized experiment methodology is turning out to be a really fruitful avenue for understanding the importance of social networks in determining labor and health outcomes.

Casillero del Diablo, Carmenere 2007

I read in Wine Spectator that the Concha y Toro Shiraz (not sure the vintage) was an 87 or an 88, and priced really low, like around $10. But when I was at the grocery store, I couldn't remember the grape, and saw too many from that vineyard. I remembered it was red, and that narrowed it down, so I went with the Carmenere 2007. It's a Chilean wine, but I'd never heard or had the Carmenere grape before. Here's a review. My first impressions are that it's awful. Not awful the way really bad wine is awful. More like something is wrong with this wine. Like I'm drinking water in which a mechanic was soaking tools and other metal objects. The smell is overpowering. No trace of fruit at all in the taste as far as I can tell (despite what that reviewer said, I neither smelled nor tasted anything remotely vegetative too). The smell, instead had the same kind of deep mineral smell to it. I decided to cap it and give it another try tomorrow. I'll update then with what I think on second impressions.

Update: Redemption! Definitely better the second day. If you get this, and I think it's pretty much everywhere, I'd recommend letting it decanter for a few hours.

Elizabeth Alexander to Read at Inauguration

I think one of the things that I have liked so much about Obama winning the Presidency is all the stories that come out surrounding him, who he knows, where he's from, and what it means for Black Americans. He was so clearly moved when he announced that he'd won in Chicago, for instance. It seemed so uncharacteristically non-political when he mentioned in that speech he mentioned the Civil Rights movement. You could just feel what it meant for Black Americans, even if you're not Black (like I'm not), and specifically what it meant to him to be a part of that.

So like I said, I've enjoyed the smaller stories that have come out, too. For instance, I just learned today that Elizabeth Alexander, who is a poet at Yale's African-American studies program, will be reading at his inauguration. The entire article is short and has some interesting anecdotes about Obama and her that I enjoyed. For instance, she is what you might call a second-generation Civil Rights activist. Secondly, she and Obama are friends because she had been on faculty at the University of Chicago that same time as him, making (in her words) this a double important ceremony for her. What a unique thing that must be for those who knew Obama, and her were progressive activists in this ongoing Civil Rights movement. Not only did a Black man win, but one of their good friends at that! That makes this historical event personal, which is so rare as to get to have even the first happen, but even rarer to have both. It'd be like being MLK's dissertation adviser, or the guy who cut Malcolm X's hair, or to have gone to church with Rosa Parks - to see history unfurl like that around you and including you is a powerful thing. Congratulations to Professor Alexander. I look forward to reading her poems.

PDF now in Gmail

FYI, when someone sends you a PDF in Gmail, you have the option to view or download the file. It used to be the case that if you clicked "view," that Google would strip the text and whatnot out of the PDF and simply present it as a text file. That worked fine for about 90% of the file unless there were figures and equations in which case it obviously got a little ugly, but it wasn't a big deal really most of the time. I still tended to view it, since I hate downloading PDFs all the time, and because I read so many academic papers, I tend to get a "download" folder that fills up all the time. Anyway, I checked out just now a file someone sent me in PDF by clicking on "view" and for the first time that I had noticed, Google is presenting the PDF as a PDF.

But, I scrolled through this document and noticed that only the first few pages are clear. After the 7th page of this particular document, everything is blurry - figures, tables but also the main body text. Strange. Anyway, I guess if you want to look just at the few pages, this is better than before, but if you want to read the entire document in google's viewer, it's worse.

Nixon/Frost - 4 stars (by Ebert)

Let the MoLT family (and the other half of the Kinsey family) consider themselves warned that when we are using Borda counts to decide what to do with the night, I will be putting Nixon/Frost on the list. I'm just saying, because Ebert put it in his top movies of 2008, it's directed by Ron Howard, and the historical events on which the movie is based sounds fascinating.

What [screenplay writer, Peter] Morgan suggests is that even while Nixon was out-fencing Frost, two things were going on deep within his mind: (1) a need to confess, which may have been his buried reason for agreeing to the interviews in the first place, and (2) identification with Frost, and even sympathy for him.

Of course, like all my movie recommendations, I fully expect Borda counts to reveal that it will be ranked last when all the votes are cast. Sigh.

#1 in the "When Bad Things Happen To Good People" Series

The Max Planck Institute wanted to put some pretty Chinese writings on the cover of a recent Max Planck Institute Journal volume, more or less as decoration. Great idea, right? Well, that depends on whethera Chinese advertisement for a brothel falls within the bounds of taste, I suppose. Lo tov!

The Lost Decade

That's what people call the 1990s for Japan. The country went into a major slump from which they emerged only a decade later. Not only has Krugman openly worried that that will happen to us, but now others are murmuring as well. A decade lost. If so, we will remember it til we're old. How hard and dark are these times? I only hope I'm exaggerating when I say "hard. dark."