MsPoirier.com



Fewer 16-year-olds with licenses = more 16-year-olds alive

Tougher Illinois laws are only part of the reason

June 22, 2010|By Ted Gregory, Tribune reporter

For their parents, a driver's license was a symbol of adulthood, a gateway to freedom, a long-anticipated rite of passage.

For today's teens? Not so much.

Fewer 16-year-olds in Illinois[pic] are getting their licenses. That drop, it turns out, has kept more of them alive to see their 17th birthdays.

[pic]

[pic]

The easy explanation for the decline is Illinois' tougher new teen licensing requirements, started in 2006. But it's clear that's not the only reason.

"I didn't particularly need a license because I didn't have a car," said Sean Allen, 18, of Elmhurst, who got his license in November but still hasn't driven alone. "I don't have money for a car, and my mom made it pretty clear that I needed to pay for everything myself.

"Besides," he added, "I get around pretty easily by bike. And, I'll admit it: I'm kind of a cheapskate."

Anna Block, 16, of Lake Forest, took driver education[pic] at Lake Forest High School in 2009. But, "I just never made it a top priority" to get a license, she said. Part of her delay stemmed from being a cheerleader, which kept her busy five days a week after school and provided her with older teammates who had licenses and could drive her to and from school.

"Also," Block added, "I've seen a lot of stuff happen with some people who have gotten their licenses." That includes a friend who got a DUI and other students who have had similar scrapes with the law, Block said. Many of her friends do have their driver's licenses but getting one "depends on parents' trust and how well they're doing in school[pic]," she said. "Some parents just don't trust their kids."

Her mother "at first was scared," she said. "Now, she's been asking me, do you want to go get your license?"

That's a more involved undertaking since June 2006, when Illinois lawmakers doubled the number of hours — to 50 from 25 — of adult-supervised driving required before a driver with a learner's permit could get a license. The next year, the number of 16-year-olds with licenses dropped by nearly 5 percent — to 74,675 from 78,250 — even though the state's teen population increased.

Then, on Jan. 1, 2008, Illinois imposed a sweeping overhaul of teen driving laws, the heart of which tripled the length of time — to 9 months from 3 months — a teen driver must possess a learner's permit before acquiring a license. That year, the number of 16-year-olds with licenses dropped again, this time by 17 percent, to 61,862.

The decrease is continuing. The Illinois secretary of state's office estimates that fewer than 60,000 driver's licenses were issued to 16-year-olds in 2009.

Rob Foss, who has been studying teen drivers[pic] for decades, contends that Illinois' comprehensive graduated driver licensing (GDL) — an increasingly popular system that eases teens into full driving privileges after they safely navigate a period of restrictive driving — "certainly is a piece" of the recent drop in 16-year-olds with licenses.

Chasing Facebook's Next Billion Users

By Douglas MacMillan on July 25, 2012

Later this year, Facebook (FB) will hit the 1 billion user mark. To casual observers, the spread of Mark Zuckerberg’s social network site across continents appears effortless. Yet for the past five years, the company has relied on a dedicated team charged with bringing new members into Facebook and getting them hooked. A kind of special-ops unit with influence over nearly every area of Facebook’s business, this growth squad has swelled to 150 people, from a founding group of five.

Core to this group is product manager Naomi Gleit, the second-longest-tenured Facebook employee. (Zuckerberg is first.) Gleit describes her team’s mission as making “Facebook available to everyone in the world.” Nearly half of the Internet’s worldwide 2 billion-plus population visits Facebook at least once a month. That’s a powerful draw for advertisers and makes life very difficult for social media up-and-comers (looking at you, Google+ and Twitter) that aspire to unseat the company as the world’s largest online network.

Keeping global expansion in the fast lane has taken on more urgency, given recent signs Facebook’s growth rates may be slowing down—and a big earnings disappointment on July 25 from Zynga (ZNGA), its largest game developer. The company’s U.S. users declined 1.1 percent over a six-month period ended in July, according to a research note published by CapStone Investments analyst Rory Maher on July 17. Since Facebook’s botched initial public offering in May, its shares have fallen more than 22 percent, to about $29 per share. (Facebook declined to comment on the CapStone research.)

[pic]

Gleit joined Facebook in early 2005, when the site had just over 1 million users and fewer than 30 employees. She had become obsessed with the social network as an undergraduate at Stanford, writing a senior thesis about how Facebook beat out a rival website called Club Nexus on campus. After getting turned down for a position as assistant to then-President Sean Parker, she eventually landed a job on the marketing team. “She wanted to work at Facebook more than anything,” says Matt Cohler, an early executive at the company who hired Gleit and is now a general partner at the venture capital firm Benchmark Capital.

Gleit helped lead early efforts to expand Facebook’s reach beyond Ivy League schools to other colleges, followed by high schools, businesses, and, in 2006, to basically every living organism on the planet. “My job has been, over the years, to remove barriers that are preventing people from joining Facebook,” says Gleit, who turned 29 in July.

The growth team was formed in late 2007, when Zuckerberg decided expansion was so important that it warranted a unit with its own resources. The site was approaching 100 million members, but its growth rate had cooled. Led by former AOL (AOL) executive Chamath Palihapitiya, the original team included Microsoft (MSFT) engineering alum James Wang; Javier Olivan, who had founded a small social network in Spain; marketing whiz Alex Schultz; and Blake Ross, a programmer who had helped create the Firefox Web browser. To lead product management for the group, Zuckerberg tapped Gleit. “She is someone that the engineers both tremendously respected and also feared,” says Palihapitiya, who left Facebook last year. “We used to call her ‘the Mom.’”

The group was challenged by Zuckerberg to multiply the site’s user base. To accomplish this, the growth team struck a deal with Google (GOOG) to let the search engine show Facebook profiles in its results. They also launched a feature called “People You May Know,” which helped new users build their social network by showing them cousins, former classmates, and others they may have connections to on the site. Gleit and Olivan led a companywide push to create a translation tool that let users in Spain, France, and Germany navigate the site in their native languages. Within two years of its creation, the team had expanded Facebook’s roster of users sevenfold, to 360 million.

When Palihapitiya left, he handed leadership of the growth team to Olivan, who sits in Building 17 of Facebook’s new Menlo Park campus, across a walkway from the office occupied by Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg. In an open workspace on the second floor, international flags line the rows of desks and computer dashboards display a running tally of monthly active users. “That’s the first thing we look at every morning,” Olivan says of the monitors. Recently, his team was renamed GEM—an acronym for growth, engagement, and mobile. Facebook’s new priority is keeping existing members active and logging in from mobile devices.

The 11 Ways That Consumers Are Hopeless at Math

By Derek Thompson

The Atlantic Jul 6 2012, 12:34 PM ET 280

This is your brain on shopping, and it's not very smart

You walk into a Starbucks and see two deals for a cup of coffee. The first deal offers 33% extra coffee. The second takes 33% off the regular price. What's the better deal?

"They're about equal!" you'd say, if you're like the students who participated in a new study published in the Journal of Marketing. And you'd be wrong. The deals appear to be equivalent, but in fact, a 33% discount is the same as a 50 percent increase in quantity. Math time: Let's say the standard coffee is $1 for 3 quarts ($0.33 per quart). The first deal gets you 4 quarts for $1 ($0.25 per quart) and the second gets you 3 quarts for 66 cents ($.22 per quart).

The upshot: Getting something extra "for free" feels better than getting the same for less. The applications of this simple fact are huge. Selling cereal? Don't talk up the discount. Talk how much bigger the box is! Selling a car? Skip the MPG conversion. Talk about all the extra miles.

There are two broad reasons why these kind of tricks work. First: Consumers don't know what the heck anything should cost, so we rely on parts of our brains that aren't strictly quantitative. Second: Although humans spend in numbered dollars, we make decisions based on clues and half-thinking that amount to innumeracy.

Here are 10 more ways consumers are bad at math, with an assist from historian and author William Poundstone.

(2) We're heavily influenced by the first number. You walk into a high-end store, let's say it's Hermès, and you see a $7,000 bag. "Haha, that's so stupid!" you tell your friend. "Seven grand for a bag!" Then you spot an awesome watch for $367. Compared to a Timex, that's wildly over-expensive. But compared to the $7,000 price tag you just put to memory, it's a steal. In this way, stores can massage or "anchor" your expectations for spending.

(3) We're terrified of extremes. We don't like feeling cheap, and we don't like feeling duped. Since we're not sure what things are worth, we shy away from prices that appear too high or too low. Stores can employ our bias for moderation against us. Here's a great story:

People were offered 2 kinds of beer: premium beer for $2.50 and bargain beer for $1.80. Around 80% chose the more expensive beer. Now a third beer was introduced, a super bargain beer for $1.60 in addition to the previous two. Now 80% bought the $1.80 beer and the rest $2.50 beer. Nobody bought the cheapest option.

Third time around, they removed the $1.60 beer and replaced with a super premium $3.40 beer. Most people chose the $2.50 beer, a small number $1.80 beer and around 10% opted for the most expensive $3.40 beer.

In short: We are all Goldilocks.

(4) We're in love with stories. In his book Priceless, William Poundstone explains what happened when Williams-Sonoma added a $429 breadmaker next to their $279 model: Sales of the cheaper model doubled even though practically nobody bought the $429 machine. Lesson: If you can't sell a product, try putting something nearly identical, but twice as expensive, next to it. It'll make the first product look like a gotta-have-it bargain. One explanation for why this tactic works is that people like stories or justifications. Since it's terribly hard to know the true value of things, we need narratives to explain our decisions to ourselves. Price differences give us a story and a motive: The $279 breadmaker was, like, 40 percent cheaper than the other model -- we got a great deal! Good story.

(5) We do what we're told. Behavioral economists love experimenting in schools, where they've found that shining a light on fruit and placing a salad bar in the way of the candy makes kids eat more fruit and salad. But adults are equally susceptible to these simple games. Savvy restaurants, for example, design their menus to draw our eyes to the most profitable items by things as simple as pictures and boxes. Good rule of thumb: If you see a course on the menu that's highlighted, boxed, illustrated, or paired with a really expensive item, it's probably a high-margin product that the restaurant hopes you'll see and consider.

(6) We let our emotions get the best of us. In a brilliant experiment from Poundstone's book, volunteers are offered a certain number of dollars out of $10. Offers seen as "unfair" ($1, let's say) activated the insula cortex, "which is otherwise triggered by pain and foul odors." When we feel like we're being ripped off, we literally feel disgusted -- even when it's a good deal. Poundstone equates this to the minibar experience. It's late, you're hungry, there's a Snickers right there, but you're so turned off by the price, that you starve yourself to avoid the feeling of being ripped off. The flip-side is that bargains literally make us feel good about ourselves. Even the most useless junk in the world is appealing if the price feels like a steal.

(7) We're easily made dumber by alcohol, time, decisions. When you're young and drunk at a bar, you're more likely to do stupid things with strangers. "Am I fully assessing this complex romantic situation?" is a difficult question to answer on seven glasses of wine, so we're more likely to ask ourselves a simpler question: "Is s/he hot?" When we're drunk, stressed, tired, and otherwise inattentive, we're more likely to ask and answer simple questions about buying things. Cheap candy bars and gum are situated near the check-out at grocery stores because that's where exhausted shoppers are most likely to indulge cravings without paying attention to price. Boozy lunches are good for deal-making because alcohol narrows the range of complicating factors we can hold in our heads at once. If you want somebody to take an under-examined risk, get him boozed, tired, or ego-depleted.

(8) We're pained by transaction costs... In a personal finance column here, Megan McArdle implored her readers to give up recurring payments like gym memberships and subscriptions to papers and services they don't use. "Don't buy stuff you don't consume" seems like obvious enough advice, but Megan had a great point. We're drawn to subscriptions and memberships and bundles partially because we seek to avoid transaction costs. We'd rather overpay a little than suffer the psychological pain of pulling out a wallet and watching our money go to each gym season/movie/etc.

(9) ... but we're weird about rebates and warranties. Now that I've just told you that consumers try to avoid additional payments, I should add that there are two additional payments we love: rebates and warranties. The first buys the illusion of wealth ("I'm being paid money to spend money!"). The second buys peace of mind ("Now I can own this thing forever without worrying about it!"). Both are basically tricks. "Instead of buying something and getting a rebate," Poundstone writes, "why not just pay a lower price in the first place?'

"[Warranties] make no rational sense," Harvard economist David Cutler told the Washington Post. "The implied probability that [a product] will break has to be substantially greater than the risk that you can't afford to fix it or replace it. If you're buying a $400 item, for the overwhelming number of consumers that level of spending is not a risk you need to insure under any circumstances."

(10) We're obsessed with the number 9. Up to 65 percent of all retail prices end in the number 9. Why? Everybody knows that $20 and $19.99 are the same thing. But the number 9 tells us something simple: This thing is discounted. This thing is cheap. This thing was priced by somebody who knows you like things discounted and cheap. In other words, 9 has transcended the status of charm price to become a cable of silent understanding between buyer and seller that a product is being priced competitively and fairly. Putting a 9 on a shell-fish platter at a high-end restaurant is ridiculous. Nobody spending $170 on lobster is looking for a discount. But the same person shopping for underwear is (research has shown, again and again) more likely to buy a product that ends in 9. Remember: Shopping is an attention game. Consumers aren't just hunting for products. They're hunting for clues that products are worth buying. In the number 9, the bargain-hunter/discount-gatherer corner of our brain spots a pluckable deal.

(11) We're compelled by a strong sense of fairness. I've already explained how our brains light up differently based on seeing a bargain vs. a rip-off. The shopper's brain is motivated by a sense of fairness. Again, it comes back to the idea that we don't know what things should cost, and so we use cues to tell us what we ought to pay for them. An experiment by the economist Dan Ariely tells the story beautifully. Ariely pretended he was giving a poetry recital. He told one group of students that the tickets cost money and another group that they would be paid to attend. Then he revealed to both groups that the recital was free. The first group was anxious to attend, believing they were getting something of value for free. The second group mostly declined, believing they were being forced to volunteer for the same event without compensation.

What's a poetry recital by a behavioral economist worth? The students had no idea. That's the point. I don't know, either. That's also the point. What's a button-up shirt "worth"? What's a cup of coffee "worth"? What's a life insurance policy "worth"? Who knows! Most of us don't. As a result, the shopping brain uses only what is knowable: visual clues, triggered emotions, comparisons, ratios, and a sense of bargain vs. rip-off. We're not stupid. Just susceptible.

Battle for presidency remains close in new CNN poll

Posted by

CNN Political Unit

Washington (CNN) – Two days before the first presidential debate, a new national survey indicates a very close contest between President Barack Obama and Republican nominee Mitt Romney in the race for the White House.

And according to a CNN/ORC International poll, neither candidate appears to have an edge on the economy, which remains the top issue on the minds of Americans and which may dominate Wednesday night's debate on domestic issues in Denver.

Fifty-percent of likely voters questioned in the CNN survey, which was released Monday, say that if the election were held today, they would vote for the president, with 47% saying they would support Romney, the former Massachusetts governor. The president's three point margin is within the poll's sampling error.

Three other national polls of likely voters released in the past 24 hours also indicate a tight race. The other surveys are from ABC News/Washington Post, Politico/George Washington University, and American Research Group. A CNN Poll of Polls which averages all four surveys plus a Fox News poll released late last week puts Obama at 49% and Romney at 46% among likely voters.

In the CNN/ORC poll, the national horse race stands pretty much where it was just before the two back-to-back party conventions in late August and early September.

[pic]

"That's a strong suggestion that whatever bounce President Obama received from his convention has, as expected, faded away," says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. "That's why they call them 'bounces'."

When it comes to issues, the survey indicates that Obama and Romney are effectively tied when likely voters are asked which candidate would best handle the economy. Romney, however, appears to have an edge on the top two economic issues: unemployment and the budget deficit. Obama, by contrast, has the advantage on a variety of non-economic domestic issues such as education, Medicare and health care, and also polls strongly on taxes, traditionally a GOP issue. All of these issues will most likely be debated by the candidates Wednesday night.

The president has a 52%-45% advantage over Romney on foreign policy, which will be the focus of the third and final showdown between the two candidates on October 22.

But debates are not just about issues; voters judge the candidates' personal qualities as well. Among likely voters, Obama's personal favorability rating is 52%, with 48% saying they view the president in an unfavorable way. The president's numbers are basically unchanged since mid August, before the conventions.

The public is divided on Romney, with 49% holding a favorable impression of him and 50% seeing him in a negative light. Romney's favorable rating was at 50% and his unfavorable at 46% in mid-August.

When the dust settles after the debates, it will all come down to turnout and getting out the vote, and the poll suggests when it comes enthusiasm, neither campaign seems to have the upper hand.

"Only half of Romney's voters strongly supported him in May, but despite that slow start, he now gets the same level of strong support from his voters that Obama enjoys," adds Holland. "And there is no indication of an 'enthusiasm gap', with 65% of Republicans and 64% of Democrats saying they are extremely enthusiastic or very enthusiastic about voting in November."

The poll indicates Democrats overwhelming supporting the president and Republicans overwhelmingly backing Romney, with independent voters going for Romney by a 49%-41% margin, which is within the sampling error for independents.

According to the survey, Obama holds a nine-point 53%-44% advantage among females, with Romney with a 50%-47% margin among men. Romney had a larger edge among men in CNN polling prior to the conventions.

"The president seems to have held onto some of that support among men, opening the possibility that their votes may be in play. Obama also held onto most of his bounce among rural voters, but they are still solidly in Romney's camp. On the other hand, Obama's biggest losses since the Democratic convention have come among lower-income voters and urban residents - two key elements of his coalition," says Holland. "But it's worth noting that support for Obama in those groups is back where it was before the conventions, indicating that the Democratic convention mobilized that portion of the Democratic base but only temporarily."

The president's approval rating in the new poll stands at 49% among all adults, with 48% saying they disapprove of how Obama handling his duties in the White House. The president's approval rating stood at 50%-44% before the conventions.

In addition to the three presidential debates, Vice President Joe Biden and Rep. Paul Ryan, the Republican running mate, face off next week at a debate in Kentucky. The poll indicates that Biden has a 47% favorable rating, with 44% saying they see him in an unfavorable way. Ryan has 46%-40% favorable/unfavorable rating.

The CNN Poll was conducted by ORC International Sept. 28-30, with 1,013 adult Americans, including 883 registered voters and 783 likely voters, questioned by telephone. The survey's overall sampling error is plus or minus three percentage points, with a sampling error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points for questions only of likely voters.

– CNN Political Editor Paul Steinhauser contributed to this report.

|Auto Sales Are Nearing Pre-Recession Levels |[|

| |p|

| |i|

| |c|

| |]|

|Kyle Kennedy   |  The Ledger |  September 15, 2012 | |

|This is shaping up to be a very encouraging year for auto dealers, including those in Polk County. | |

| | |

|U.S. auto sales had a big month in August, and projections call for 2012's sales to be the highest in five years as consumers make long-delayed purchases amid | |

|improving lending conditions. | |

|"I would say 2012 will probably be our best year since the downturn," said Benny Robles Sr., president of Bartow Ford. "Last year was a good year for us, and | |

|we've noticed this year has been even better." | |

| | |

|New vehicle sales at Bartow Ford are up roughly 14 percent from the same time last year, Robles said, and used sales have climbed more than 25 percent. Fleet | |

|sales are seeing strong growth, and Robles said Bartow Ford's staff has bulked up to more than 230 employees after cutting down to approximately 180 a few years| |

|ago. | |

| | |

|Still, "I'm not back to where I used to be before the crash, before the housing market collapsed and all that stuff," Robles said. "I'm probably 70 percent of | |

|where I used to be in 2006 and 2007." | |

| | |

|Winter Haven Honda is another local dealership doing well in 2012. | |

| | |

|"We should sell 1,650 cars this year, new and used, compared to 1,350 last year. And last year wasn't horrible," said Joe Wagner, general manager. "Overall, the| |

|economically-fueled vehicles are still holding strong, but we're seeing it across the board; some of our bigger vehicles are doing fine too." | |

|U.S. auto sales were up 20 percent in August from the year before, with nearly 1.3 million units sold, according to Autodata. Last month was especially good for| |

|Honda and Toyota, and robust demand for full-size pickup trucks signaled more confidence among businesses. | |

| | |

|Nationwide, auto sales are on track to exceed 14 million units this year for the industry's best performance since 2007. | |

| | |

|The boost in activity comes at time when the average vehicle on U.S. roads is pushing a record 11 years old. After holding off for years, many consumers are | |

|finally springing for newer models. | |

| | |

|Lakeland resident Barbara Whitman replaced an 18-year-old Toyota Paseo in March, opting for a new Corolla. The Paseo "was on its last leg ... the transmission | |

|was getting ready to go" said Whitman, 70. "I should have gotten rid of it a year before." | |

| | |

|At Lakeland's Regal Automotive Group, "the average car we're trading in is around 10 years old, where it used to be six years, seven years," said owner Sal | |

|Campisi Jr. "Many of the cars we're taking to the auction have 180,000, 190,000 miles." | |

| | |

|New and used sales at Regal are up about 20 percent this year across all franchises (Honda, Chevrolet, Kia, GMC), Campisi said. | |

| | |

|Also helping car sales: better lending conditions. The credit reporting firm Experian said outstanding auto loans totaled $725 billion at the end of the second | |

|quarter, up about 6 percent annually and the highest level in three years. | |

| | |

|"We are seeing the banks lighten up," Wagner said. "Two years ago, if someone had a foreclosure or was even currently late on a mortgage, the banks wouldn't | |

|touch them." | |

|In addition, many auto dealers are doing well this year simply because there is less competition. Urban Science, a Detroit-based consulting firm, says there | |

|were 17,770 dealerships operating nationwide as of the end of June, down 15 percent from five years ago. | |

| | |

|John Frith, vice president of Urban Science, said much of the decline can be attributed to small and underfinanced dealerships that were forced to shut their | |

|doors during the height of the recession, as well as General Motors and Chrysler downsizing their dealer networks. | |

| | |

|There is reason for dealers to still be cautious. The forecasting company LMC Automotive recently lowered its 2013 sales projections slightly to 15 million | |

|vehicles, because of slower than expected economic growth in the second half of 2012. | |

| | |

|"Dealers just need to not lose sight of their financial controls they put in place to get through the recession," Frith said. "The dealers who survived, they | |

|need to keep doing those things." | |

|Urban Science gives auto dealers clean bill of health |[|

| |p|

| |i|

| |c|

| |]|

|Nathan Bomey   |  Detroit Free Press |  August 14, 2012 | |

|Auto dealers have returned to profitability and stability, and the average number of vehicle sales at each dealership is expected to reach an all-time high in | |

|2012, according to projections released this morning by Detroit-based Urban Science. | |

|After a major reduction in dealerships during the auto crisis in 2008 and 2009, the industry has stabilized. | |

| | |

|The average dealer is expected to sell about 805 vehicles in 2012, up from 719 in 2011 and an all-time low of 513 in 1991. | |

| | |

|“That’s really good news for the dealers and the industry in total,” said John Frith, vice president for retail channel solutions at Urban Science. “It really | |

|looks like we’re going to hit a record this year.” | |

| | |

|Urban Science is a retail consulting firm that works with auto dealers to help them choose locations where they are likely to make the most profit and use | |

|practices that satisfy most customers. | |

| | |

|Some dealers are thriving in part because they survived the cuts enacted by General Motors and Chrysler during their 2009 bankruptcy restructurings. | |

| | |

|The U.S. had 17,770 dealerships at the end of June, virtually unchanged from the end of 2011. Saab, a former GM brand, has closed 59 standalone dealerships this| |

|year. That included four in Michigan, which lost 10 dealerships overall during the first six months of the year. | |

| | |

|Frith said the market seems to be “settling in” at about 17,770 dealerships after an average annual decline of 2.5% since 1990. | |

| | |

|Dealers cut 147 “franchises,” or brands, in the first six months of the year, reflecting a 1% decline, Urban Science reported. Discounting Saab, U.S. dealers | |

|added about 40 brands. | |

| | |

|“Saab’s the big one down,” Frith said. | |

| | |

|U.S. vehicle sales are expected to be about 14.1 million to 14.4 million in 2012. | |

| | |

|In China, where vehicle sales are expected to hit about 19.5 million for 2012, the average dealer is expected to sell about 980 vehicles, said Hamilton Gayden, | |

|Urban Science’s managing director in China. Gayden said customer service at Chinese dealerships is starting to suffer. | |

| | |

|“The sales network in China is at a crossroads,” he said. | |

| | |

|Despite continued sales growth, many Chinese dealers are reporting excess inventory, a sign that the market may be softening. | |

| | |

|“It’s a big challenge for the dealers right now,” Gayden said. “Their margins are eroding very quickly.” | |

Math for hungry birds

By Stephen Ornes/ May 19, 2012

[pic]

People may say that math is for the birds. A new study shows this may be true, at least for a giant seabird called an albatross.

A team of scientists in Europe recently studied the flights of these large birds as they hunted for food. The scientists did not observe the birds adding, subtracting, multiplying or dividing. But when the researchers looked at the shapes traced by the birds’ flights, the formations looked familiar.

The twists and turns of the flight path looked a lot like a fractal, a mathematical design. Fractals are curves or shapes that look almost the same no matter how far you zoom in or how far you zoom out. (Mathematicians call this feature “self-similarity.”) The shape of a country’s coastline, for example, looks like a fractal. Observed from a faraway satellite, the coastline looks like a squiggle. If you fly over the coast closer, in a helicopter, you’ll see that the squiggles have their own, smaller squiggles (like large jutting rocks or cliffs). And if you walk along the coast on your own two feet, you’ll see even smaller squiggles where the tide laps against the land.

The scientists who studied the albatrosses found self-similarity in the birds’ flights. They attached GPS devices to 88 birds. Each GPS device recorded the position of the bird it was attached to either every second or every 10 seconds. Using this method, scientists could trace the path of the bird on a map. The team found that the birds often flew long distances in a straight line and then made lots of turns and shorter flights as they hunted for food over a new section of the ocean.

“Think about searching for your car keys,” team member David Sims told Science News. “You intensively search in one area, but if you don’t find them there, you jump to someplace else and search there.” Sims is a behavioral ecologist at the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom in Plymouth, England. Behavior ecologists study how where an animal lives influences its behavior.

This kind of fractal-like pattern is called Lévy flight. Like a fractal, the shape of the birds’ flight path looked similar when viewed from far away or close-up. However, the birds’ path wasn’t a true fractal: The pattern disappeared at extreme distances. But within a certain range, the pattern was self-similar.

Scientists suspect that many animals, including sharks, jellyfish and penguins, follow a Lévy flight path when hunting for food. This approach — a long trip, followed by a short and choppy hopscotch around an area — may help them find more food faster.

Not every scientist believes the giant seabirds use math to hunt, however. Simon Benhamou, an ecologist at the National Center for Scientific Research in Montpellier, France, told Science Newsthat he’s not convinced. He said he thinks the new study is interesting but limited. Scientists can get a truer view of hungry birds’ flights, he said, by looking for even more complicated patterns.

POWER WORDS

fractal A curve or geometric figure, each part of which has the same basic character as the whole. Fractals are useful in modeling structures (such as eroded coastlines or snowflakes) in which similar patterns recur at progressively smaller scales.

GPS, or global positioning system An accurate worldwide navigational and surveying facility based on the reception of signals from an array of orbiting satellites.

behavior ecology The study of how animal behaviors help them survive in their environments.

albatross A very large oceanic bird with long, narrow wings. Some species have wingspans greater than 10 feet.

-----------------------

Scientists have found that when albatrosses forage for food, their flight path looks like a mathematical pattern called a fractal. Credit: Coedekoven/SWFSC/NOAA

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download