Month: September 2013

Builder Broker

I would imagine that building a house from scratch is pretty difficult for the regular lay person. It would be for me. Making the blue prints, figuring out the permits, what contractors I need and when. Especially if I want to change something or money changes etc there are many dynamic unpredictable things that can change the whole plan. Just think of what happened in Spain when they increased the number of floors during the building stage and they didn’t include a powerful enough elevator to go up the whole way (http://tinyurl.com/kx4jbyh)! I want to create planner and scheduler that will directly connect to the broker that will be dealing with the contractors.

One really has no hope of doing it on there own if you don’t know how a house is put together.

To tackle this problem I would need a someone that is familiar with dealing with contractors and building houses.
At first would most likely have to market this to larger projects. I think that this is necessary for the future of smart cities. Eventually the system would be able to plan how to put together a whole city.

http://www.esri.com/ products would be to figure out the layout of the city. Would want to work with them to make it more collaborative. The whole city planning thing needs to deal with a ton of data. That would be an awesome place to incorporate multiagent learning. Various entities will need to cooperate to decide on things. If we have a system that can ingest the preferences and distribute them across agents in the system then the agents can learn to cooperate to better.

This guy came up with my idea for the instant city in early January 2013!!!! http://video.esri.com/watch/2116/the-instant-citygeodesign-and-urban-planning around 19:32. I am sooo glad its not just me. He thinks it is possible. I not only want what he wants the creation of the plans of how it will look like to be automatic I also want the actually plans and schedules for caring out the “Master Plan” to be automated as well. So I had his idea and took it a step farther. Not only that I think that probably we could then simulate the entire city with the people in it and make improvements to the designs.

Microeconomics

I was learning a bit of micro to help my brother and here is a bit of what I learned.

The economics term for derivative is marginal.  Marginal revenue is the derivative of the revenue function.  Revenue is defined by R(q) = P(q)*q the price at a particular quantity times the quantity sold.  So, R'(q) = P'(q)*q + P(q) is the marginal revenue.  Usually P(q) does not change so P'(q) is zero. Therefore, R'(q) = P(q).  So, marginal revenue is the price I charged for producing one unit (remember P(q) is constant for any q).

Can also have marginal cost.  Which is similar to marginal revenue.

I also learned about elasticity.  Elasticity is the percent that Y changes in response to X changing by 1%.  In general elasticity is define by e = (dY/dX)*(X/Y).  This says the elasticity of Y with respect to X is the derivative of Y with respect to X times X over Y.  So, elasticity is a general thing you calculate for anything.  You just plug the words in for Y and X.  For example, the elasticity of demand with respect to price is: n = (dQ/dP)*(P/Q).  However, the demand curve usually has a negative slope so the derivative is negative.  Economists don’t like the negative so they usually write the elasticity of demand as n = -(dQ/dP)*(P/Q).  Remember D'(p) = (dQ/dP) and D(P) = Q = some equation in terms of P.  Usually, we like our equations to be in terms of one variable so I would substitute like this: n = -(dQ/dP)*(P/D(P)).  So, what does elasticity of demand tell us?  Well, first demand tells us how much a consumer buys at a particular price.  Elasticity looks at how the quantity changes as price changes.  So, 0<=n<1 if the demand for a good at that price is inelastic.  Meaning the quantity demanded doesn’t change radically.  If n > 1 then the demand is elastic meaning if we change the price the demand will change quite a bit.

Another interesting thing I learned was about the market demand residual.  This starts to be interesting because it is taking into account other (possibly identical) businesses.  The market demand residual is defined as Dr(P) = D(P) – So(P) where So(P) is the supply of all the other businesses that are identical and D(P) is the demand of the business that is being examined.  So, if there are n identical business then So(P) = sum(i = 1 to n-1) of Si(P).