Outsourced blogging

I've been meaning to post something on the Collegiate Learning Assessment exam (which seems to be the main data source for the new book Academically Adrift, by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa). In the meantime, Dean Dad has a good post on the subject.

There has never been a greater time-wasting innovation than Wikipedia

Case in point: the details of the third voyage of Willem Barentsz are completely useless knowledge but the story is (if you'll pardon the adjective) undeniably cool.

And you thought statisticians were just good for counting cards

We're also handy if you have a handful of scratchers.

From Wired (via Felix Salmon):

The trick itself is ridiculously simple. (Srivastava would later teach it to his 8-year-old daughter.) Each ticket contained eight tic-tac-toe boards, and each space on those boards—72 in all—contained an exposed number from 1 to 39. As a result, some of these numbers were repeated multiple times. Perhaps the number 17 was repeated three times, and the number 38 was repeated twice. And a few numbers appeared only once on the entire card. Srivastava’s startling insight was that he could separate the winning tickets from the losing tickets by looking at the number of times each of the digits occurred on the tic-tac-toe boards. In other words, he didn’t look at the ticket as a sequence of 72 random digits. Instead, he categorized each number according to its frequency, counting how many times a given number showed up on a given ticket. “The numbers themselves couldn’t have been more meaningless,” he says. “But whether or not they were repeated told me nearly everything I needed to know.” Srivastava was looking for singletons, numbers that appear only a single time on the visible tic-tac-toe boards. He realized that the singletons were almost always repeated under the latex coating. If three singletons appeared in a row on one of the eight boards, that ticket was probably a winner.

The next day, on his way into work, he stopped at the gas station and bought a few more tickets. Sure enough, all of these tickets contained the telltale pattern. The day after that he picked up even more tickets from different stores. These were also breakable. After analyzing his results, Srivastava realized that the singleton trick worked about 90 percent of the time, allowing him to pick the winning tickets before they were scratched.

For example the ticket below has one winning row. If you're having trouble spotting it the article has a step-by-step solution.



To make things even more interesting, there's evidence that Srivastava may not be the only one to have spotted the pattern.

"What is the worst case scenario here?"

If you're in a hurry, skip to 6:30...





Does this mean I'll have to retract all of these posts?

"If you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao..."

This is probably a question for Andrew Gelman but this post by Jonathan Chait (previously mentioned by Joseph) raises some interesting points:

A Frum Forum writer notes an interesting trend: People who find their parents are watching Fox News and losing their minds. To wit:

Over the past couple of years, I’ve been keeping track of a trend among friends around my age (late thirties to mid-forties). Eight of us (so far) share something in common besides our conservatism: a deep frustration over how our parents have become impossible to take on the subject of politics. Without fail, it turns out that our folks have all been sitting at home watching Fox News Channel all day – especially Glenn Beck’s program.

Used to be I would call my mom and get updated on news from the neighborhood, her garden, the grandchildren, hometown gossip, and so forth. I’ve always been interested in politics, but never had the occasion to talk about them with her. She just doesn’t care.

Or didn’t. I don’t know when it happened, exactly, but she began peppering our conversation with red-hot remarks about President Obama. I would try to engage her, but unless I shared her particular judgment, and her outrage, she apparently thought that I was a dupe or a RINO. Finally I asked my father privately why Mom, who as far as I know never before had a political thought, was so worked up about Obama all the time.

“She’s been like that ever since she started watching Glenn Beck,” Dad said.

A few months later, she roped him into watching Beck, which had the same effect. Even though we’re all conservatives, I found myself having to steer our phone conversations away from politics and current events. It wasn’t that I disagreed with their opinions – though I often did – but rather that I found the vehemence with which they expressed those opinions to be so off-putting.

To add some heft to this anecdotal take, Fox News has the oldest audience of any news network -- the average Fox News viewer is 65 years old!

Assuming something even vaguely like a normal distribution, this means that a significant number of Fox viewers (and presumably Tea Partiers) were high school and college students in the Sixties and early Seventies. In other words, it appears that the generation that gave us the most annoying right-wing movement in recent memory also gave us the most annoying left-wing movement.

My question for Dr. Gelman is: how much overlap was there? What portion of the students who went around quoting the Little Red Book are now seniors quoting Glenn Beck?

Is geography destiny? -- walkability

[following up on this post and this one]

In comments, Joseph pointed out that, while I had argued that the stereotypes about LA (and by implication, other cities) were exaggerated, I hadn't addressed the larger question of location affecting lifestyle.

Does choice of city have a big impact on lifestyle? Certainly, but it may not be the impact you expect. Before I got to LA, I thought it would be something like Atlanta, a dense center of urban culture and activity surrounded by miles of faceless ring cities, but LA doesn't really have a center. What you normally think of as urban activity (screenings, plays, concerts, speakers, art shows, dining, night spots and places to hang out, etc.) is spread out over the four thousand plus square miles of LA county.

This leads to an odd paradox: LA is one of the most and least walkable cities you'll find. The city is filled with great neighborhoods where you can live or work without a car. You can walk or pedal anywhere you need to go. If, however, you want to experience more than a tiny portion of the social and cultural life of the city you have to have access to a car and accept the fact that a significant part of your life will be spent on the freeways.

Another Education Post

Dana Goldstein:

The fact is that where such programs exist, they are oversubscribed--parents don't seem to mind sending their kids out-of-district (sometimes just a 5 minute drive away) into a town where they do not enjoy political representation when the result is a better education.

I think this direction is non-controversial. However, this scenario assumes one of two things:

1) There are more students in the district which is accepting students. As the United States funds a lot of education out of local property taxes, this may create less resources per student in the destination district (and ways to try and balance this out are quite tricky)

2) Some students need to be sent the other way. If the perception is that going the other way leads to a lower quality education (even if untrue in fact) then that could be an issue.

In the second case, I suspect that the lack of representation will be a much bigger issue (as it makes it hard for parents to engage the new district to try and remedy issues that are seen as concerns).

LA, NYC and other imaginary places

from Penelope Trunk (via Joseph):

When I moved from LA to NYC, I was horrified at the lack of yoga studios in NY. Yoga was already huge in LA, but not yet in NY. I was also scared that New Yorkers were always a little bedraggled, and I had just spent ten years learning how to look perfect everywhere I went in LA. It’s fun. It’s fun to have no weather and no fat and no rushing in LA. It’s fun to get a day off from work to prepare for watching the Oscars. I grew up in Illinois, but I got used to living in LA.

I've been living in LA for a few years now and I have a pretty good read on the town. I can show you the trendiest parts of Silver Lake, the funkiest parts of Venice and the toughest parts of Watts. I can take you to the best taco stand in East LA and get you a milk tea with or without boba at four in the morning. I can introduce you to such diverse characters as rocket scientists, a mystic knight of Oingo Boingo, and Frenchy from the original run of Grease on Broadway.

Like I said, I've got a pretty good read on this town and I can tell you that the LA that you hear about doesn't exist. What does exist are little slivers where you can find passable facsimiles of the LA of an Aaron Spelling show, where you can see toned and tanned people who look like what you thought people in LA looked like.

What LA gives people like Trunk is a fantasy, a chance to convince themselves that life is like a TV show and they belong in the cast, but the only way to maintain that fantasy is to tune out or simply avoid almost all of Los Angeles, and that's a shame because it's a helluva town.

If you turn on the dome light, the whole thing explodes

There has been a lot of talk from the right recently (Megan McArdle is on the case) on the potential problems electric cars can have with cold weather. Most of the commenters seem to have rolled the Volt in with this group which seems strange for a plug-in hybrid. The comment that really caught my attention, however, was the following paragraph from the Washington Post's Charles Lane:

The exact loss of power these cars would suffer is a matter of debate, partly because no one has much real-world experience to draw on.* But there would be some loss. Running the heater to stay warm, or the car radio to stay informed, would drain the battery further.

Nerd that I am, the idea of significantly draining a hybrid's battery by running the radio reminded of the Simpsons' episode where a truck was so delicately balanced on the edge of a cliff that Homer was able to shift it back on the road by tuning the radio. I suppose it's possible but I wouldn't call it likely.



* Actually we do have real world experience thanks to the good people at Consumer Reports who tested the car under just these conditions and found the EV range dropped to the low end of what GM claims but the mileage running in standard hybrid mode remained remarkably good. This information is also available on Wikipedia.

Is geography destiny?

From the comments in Megan McArdle:

It is totally unsurprising that ground zero for the locavore and electric car movements is northern California, where you can find anything you want, from cacti to chunks of glacial ice, within a couple of hundred miles. And where the climate is such that electric cars don't face battery-killing subzero nights, don't need to run big heater loads during winter driving, and don't require big air conditioner loads half the year.

and from Penelope Trunk:

When I moved from LA to NYC, I was horrified at the lack of yoga studios in NY. Yoga was already huge in LA, but not yet in NY. I was also scared that New Yorkers were always a little bedraggled, and I had just spent ten years learning how to look perfect everywhere I went in LA. It’s fun. It’s fun to have no weather and no fat and no rushing in LA. It’s fun to get a day off from work to prepare for watching the Oscars. I grew up in Illinois, but I got used to living in LA.

The panic about New York was unnecessary, though. After ten years of living in NYC, when I imagined leaving, I thought I could never leave because the cultural opportunities are so amazing. The expertise people have in NYC is so vast and varied and I thought I’d never get that anywhere else.

When I left NYC I didn’t care about looking perfect everywhere I went. I didn’t care about the kind of car I drove. I was a New Yorker.

I have been thinking about this issue after visiting Northern California for the first time last week. Like Seattle, it seems to be an exceedingly pleasant place to live and seemed to be very walkable. But it lacks the freezing winters of the mid-west and the stifling summers of the south-east. Maybe it is just easier to live an environmentally friendly lifestyle there?

So I wonder just how important geography really is determining lifestyle? I am not sure but maybe the answer is that it is a lot more important than I might have previously thought.

Depressing thought of the day

From Jon Chait:

Basically, the optimal number of Fox News-like propaganda outlets is zero. But I suspect the next most optimal number is two, not one.

I worry not so much that this statement is wrong but that it is correct and that there will be a push to a local optima.

Just when you thought it was gone for good -- more thriller blogging

I had previously complained about the ads for James Patterson's books using the word 'unputdownable.' I would not have thought they could get worse, but they have.

The latest has Patterson say directly to the camera "New York has never had a great detective hero until Michael Bennett in Tick Tock."

This is a strange comment for a couple of reasons. First, New York has had its share of memorable fictional detectives from Nero Wolfe and Mike Hammer to Bernie Rhodenbarr and Matthew Scudder. The last two are the creations of Lawrence Block, whom Stephen King named the only writer who come close to replacing John D. MacDonald (a quote that still embarrasses Block). Block, who is still putting out books in his seventies, has received wide critical acclaim, particularly for his pitch-black Scudder novels and is one of those writers other writers tend to single out for praise.

Which, in a way, brings us to the second odd point: Patterson's suggestion that he's the man to fill in the gap. Patterson is not one of those writers other writers tend to praise while critics have mostly ranged from the brutal to the Lincolnesque.*

Perhaps Patterson is using this ad as a chance to slap down some of his critics (including Block's admirer, Stephen King).

Or of course this could just be a way of selling more books.





* "People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like."

Blog-snark as a high art

As only a Brit can do it.

Raising tuition

I have quite a bit to say about this post from Richard Posner but no time to say it at the moment. I'll try to get back to this but in the meantime feel free to start without me.

In any event, there is no case at all from an overall social standpoint for subsidizing students who would pay full college tuition, without the inducement of a subsidy; the subsidy does not induce students to obtain a college education who otherwise would not because they could not afford to; it is a windfall to their families. Private colleges recognize this. They charge very high tuition (though not high enough to cover all their costs—but they have other sources of funds, such as alumni donations), but grant scholarships or loans to students whose families can’t afford the tuition. Charging low tuition to everyone, as public colleges do for residents of the state in which the college or university is located), does not make economic sense; it merely as I said provides windfalls to families willing and able to pay the full tuition. As Becker points out, this results in regressive redistribution of income, because families that can pay full tuition are wealthier than the average taxpayer, who pays for the costs of public colleges that tuition doesn’t cover.

Brad DeLong needs to watch more TCM

If he did, the next time he saw a story about Microsoft's online losses he would realize they were simply following this time-honored business model (relevant quote at the end of the clip, but watch the whole thing).