The Google Scholar ‘Common Currency Ratio’

I’m a big fan of Google Scholar (and Google Scholar Citations). I use them both regularly to identify academic literature on a wide range of topics, and to trace, at least in outline, the responses to specific papers. I was fiddling about with it the other day, and wondered whether I could use it to try to develop a measure, even if a rough one, of the extent to which reference to common currencies occurs in a person’s published research.

My first attempt is the following:

• An author’s Common Currency Score (CCS) is the number of results on Google Scholar for the author’s name (in quotation marks), plus “common currency” (also in quotation marks).
• An author’s Common Currency Ratio (CCR) is their CCS divided by the number of results for their name alone.

This is rougher than a warthog’s shins, and will be hugely unsatisfactory in cases of names corresponding to multiple authors. (It’s pretty bad for authors whose names are indexed in more than one way - for example “PW Glimcher” returns about 3 times as many correct results as “PW Glimcher”. But searching for “DJ McFarland” picks up irrelevant McFarlands including false positives.)

Rough and ready though this is, it isn’t devoid of interest. George Ainslie has the highest CCS and CCR of anyone I thought to search for. I might update this in the future - as I apply it to other authors, or refine it in some way or other.

George Ainslie (22 June):

Common Currency Score (CCS) = 117

“George Ainslie” = 1680

George Ainslie CCR: 0.07

John McNamara (23 June)

Common Currency Score (CCS) = 151

“JM McNamara” = 3560

John McNamara CCR = 0.04

Paul Glimcher (22 June)

Common Currency Score (CCS) = 92

“PW Glimcher” = 1510

CCR: 0.06

David McFarland (22 June)

Common Currency Score (CCS) = 61 (for “DJ McFarland”)

“David McFarland” = 1130

David McFarland CCR = 0.05

David Spurrett (22 June)

Common Currency Score (CCS) = 25

“David Spurrett” = 455

David Spurrett CCR = 0.05

Peter Shizgal (23 June)

Common Currency Score (CCS) = 36

“P Shizgal” = 1070

Peter Shizgal CCR = 0.03

Michel Cabanac (23 June)

Common Currency Score (CCS) = 109

“M Cabanac” = 2320

Michel Cabanac CCR = 0.04

Inner Conflict - TEDxUmhlanga

Back on 7 September of last year, I did a talk at TEDxUmhlanga, on the topic of 'Inner Conflict'. Some of what I spoke about is relevant to the common currency topic, in the sense that it concerns a reward-based explanation for inconsistency in choice patterns. (Inconsistency might otherwise be taken as an argument against a common currency.) The talk is embedded below.



(If you've seen the video of my talk at 'Thinking Things Through' in December, you might be wondering whether I ever wear anything else. Yes. Yes, I do.) I've also been doing some more serious research work on this topic, and hope to have more things to post really soon.

Aristotle!

While following a trail of references relating to the notion of 'lexical' ordering for preferences or values, I came upon a reference to a passage in Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics which makes an argument about the function of money that is relevant (in a somewhat distant and historical way) to my topic. The passage is the following:

"So money acts as a measure which, by making things commensurable, renders it possible to make them equal. Without exchange there could be no association, without equality there could be no exchange, without commensurability there could be no equality. Strictly speaking no doubt things so widely different can never become commensurable. Still in demand we have a common measure which will be found to work pretty well. Some one standard there must be, and it must be accepted by a general agreement or understanding. Such a standard has the effect of making all things commensurable, since they all can be measured by money." (Book five, Chapter Five, translated by J.A.K. Thomson.)

This passage follows reflections on the requirements for exchanges "according to the right proportion", where Aristotle points out, among other things, that there's no point in trading the same types of things for each other ("Two doctors cannot associate for the purpose of exchanging what they have to give, but a doctor and a farmer can..."). We trade precisely because means and wants differ:

"Where there is not an original equality between them it has to be created. This implies that all products exchanged must somehow be commensurable."

He reasons that money mediates this process, but that the "one standard by which all commodities are to be measured" is demand.

Aristotle's point is, of course, not one about cognitive processing. That said, it's not hard to see how one could use his reflections as a template for an argument about the processes of choosing between different goods.

If there's a historically older statement of an argument for a common currency I'd be very interested to hear about it.

Image collection: Brain dollars, dollar brains

The field of neuroeconomics has been attracting a certain amount of popular press, and also generating a growing number of book and special issue publications. Both of these drive appetite for illustrations. And people sometimes seem very keen to distinguish their illustrations from the general sorts of “pictures of brains” that go with other publications about neuroscience. So what are they to do?

It turns out that a fairly common approach is to throw together something that superimposes images of brains and images of cash, or that show brains and cash in some kind of interaction.

It takes only a little thought to see that some of the images are actually pretty silly. My reading (about common currencies) keeps taking me to places where I see these things, and so I’m going to start collecting them and posting them here. If you run into an image that you think belongs in the gallery, please either comment below or email me. (I’d also really welcome pointers to good images relating to the idea of value representation in the brain, such as the Society for Neuroeconomics logo below. This gallery is not just a Hall of Shame.)

Category 1: Brains or skulls with money on or in them

It is common to think that different motives can compete, and that that individual ones can differ in how motivating they are. At different times people have been tempted to use different metaphors to express this. When Newton was a relatively fresh and salient inspiration, it was more common to use the term ‘force’ to describe what motives had, and what some of them had more of. I’m not sure when it became popular to describe the process of deciding between competing motives as a kind of ‘weighing’, but I’d guess it was when balance scales were part of everyday experience. These days the fashionable metaphors are economic, and specifically related to cash. This is part, I think, of why ‘common currency’ talk is increasingly popular.

Exhibit 1.1: A skull with a hand holding a fan of cash in it.

Source: http://historiesofthingstocome.blogspot.com/2011/12/neuroeconomics.html

It's not clear what to make of this. What controls a hand sticking out of the spinal column? Who or what might see or interact with the money?

Exhibit 1.2: Synapses forming a suggested dollar sign

Source:  http://www.neuroeconomics.org/

This is the rather cool logo of the Society for Neuroeconomics. I like that the dollar sign is suggested and entangled rather than superimposed.

Exhibit 1.3: Clunky dollar signs on a murky brain

Source: http://www.apa.org/monitor/2009/01/neuroeconomics.aspx

This one is a 'bottom of the barrel' FAIL on the APA website. It's pictures like this that made me think of posting this gallery.

Exhibit 1.4: Single clunky dollar sign on a murky brain

Source:  http://xvatit.com/school/sch-online/compet/120473-urok-keys-dlya-chogo-potriben-internet-banking.html

This is remarkably similar to exhibit (1.3) above. The page it's from is in Russian, and I have no idea what it's about, but it turns up on searches for 'neuroeconomics'.

Exhibit 1.5: Skull looking at a dollar bill

So this is basically exhibit 1.1 above, but with the hand and the bill outside the head.

Source: http://financelongrun.blogspot.com/2013/10/neuroeconomics.html

Category 2: Money with brains on or in it

Showing cash in or on the brain can suggest the idea of brains processing representation states related to value or utility. So some category 1 pictures can sort of make sense. The converse idea, that there might in any sense be a coherent metaphor where there are little brains in the cash, is rather farcical. This does not prevent some designers from adopting it, and some editors from approving it. Here are a few examples.

Exhibit 2.1: Dollar bills with heads and brains on them

Source: http://cas.umkc.edu/psychology/brain/current.html 

This (the logo for a project on the "Neuroeconomics of controversial food technologies") really speaks for itself. But what is it saying?

Exhibit 2.2: One Dollar bills with one brain on it

Source: http://disinfo.com/2011/11/the-neuroeconomics-revolution/#sthash.x321F4oj.dpbs

The brain in this money is glowing. Maybe it was bitten by a radioactive banker, or something.

Category 3: Brains and money in some kind of interaction

Exhibit 3.1: The weighing metaphor, with brains and cash

Source: http://www.cns.nyu.edu/symposia/sympo2008.html

This is pretty odd if you think about it. Unless your concern is the price of brains. Which I suppose it might be, if you were an economically active zombie. But if the brain is in the scale, then it isn't doing the weighing, or reading off the values. So what or who is? Maybe there are little brains inside brains, and the little brains do all the processing. (The same picture also appears on the cover of the important collection "Neuroeconomics: Decision Making and the Brain" edited by Glimcher, Fehr, Camerer and Poldrack. [Publisher link.])

Category 4: Miscellaneous

Exhibit 4.1: Head chart

So here's a quite fetching little image. There's no cash in the skull, or bits of brain somehow stuck onto the cash. But there's a data line of some kind that looks price-like, and with an arrowhead suggesting a projection beyond where the data runs out. It makes much more sense to think that brains represent costs and/or returns, and projects trends, than to think that they've got little banknotes in them.

Source: http://blogs.cfainstitute.org/investor/2012/02/27/bankable-insights-eight-lessons-from-neuroeconomics-for-money-managers/