Freelance Writing

I am not sure that this author isn't being overly pessimistic, but his concerns are sobering. In particular:

Don’t believe me? Amazon has killed Borders. Barnes & Nobles looks like it’s next. We’re not far from a time when the only vendor for books are virtual stores. And we’re not that far off from a time when print books are so expensive thanks to shorter print runs, folks will be forced to buy electronic media or not read at all.

It does make one wonder about shorter print runs and whether publishing on demand can keep with the cost of mass print runs or not. I am not informed, either way, but if it cannot them it's going to be tough to beat eReaders.

Too much silliness, too little time

I'm in the middle of a busy weekend, so I can't do justice to Brooks recent education column and Jonathan Chait's affectionate follow-up. Besides, regular readers can probably shoot down the fallacies as well as I can.

I can't, however, let this pass with getting off a quick shot just to get things started.

From Chait's column:

I thought David Brooks' column yesterday on education reform was generally quite good. But he conceded a point to critics of education reform that should not be conceded:

If you orient the system exclusively around a series of multiple choice accountability assessments, you distort it.

If you make tests all-important, you give schools an incentive to drop the subjects that don’t show up on the exams but that help students become fully rounded individuals — like history, poetry, art and sports.

The assumption that schools have had to make tests "all important" has deeply penetrated the debate, but it's not accurate. Different states have different ways of measuring teacher performance. But none of them use student test scores as more than 50% of the measure. Classroom evaluations and other methods account for half or more of the measures everywhere. I've also noticed, anecdotally, that many people assume test measures use a single, blunt scale so that poor children are measured against the same standard as wealthy ones. That's not true, either. Test measures account for socioeconomic status, and measure student improvement over the school year.

Now, this isn't to deny that some schools and teachers over-emphasize a narrow curriculum. But the non-test components of a teacher evaluation method can easily incorporate broader measures of student performance.

Just to sum up, we don't have to worry about schools dropping subjects that don't show on certain tests because these tests are only a part of the teacher evaluation.

This is one of those, for lack of a better word, arguments that leaves you wondering if you missed something. When a superintendent and a principal try to decide whether or not to hire an art teacher, does the non-test component of teacher evaluations guarantee the hiring in some less than obvious way?

Online Retailers and Sales Tax

I am actually pretty sympathetic to the argument that not requiring online retailers to collect Sales Tax in all states is bad policy. But I had not thought of it as a social justice issue:

Whatever scheme we can come up with to collect lost sales tax is one more step towards a level playing field for brick and mortar retailers, and a re-funding of our cities, counties and states. It's not an enormous amount of money, but it's a step in the right direction. Online retailers got a free pass in the early days, a kind of nod for fledgling e-commerce. Unfortunately, monsters were created and none is bigger than Amazon, destroyer of worlds and loser of a billion dollars of their own capital. But hey, it's an Internet company, we're willing to look the other way for a decade or so while the new world order manifests. It's time to level the playing field and make everyone play by the same rules.

The article as a whole is worth reading.

I know a lot of people argue that the loss of physical book stores is not a tragedy. But it is not clear to me thast we should be subsidizing their competition, either. Nor is it a great idea to reduce government revenue at a time where margins are tight.

So maybe I am on California's side in this discussion.

Jonathan Chait -- now to the right of David Brooks on Education

For those keeping track, Jonathan Chait has now chastised both David Brooks and the National Review's Jim Manzi for being too moderate on this subject.

It's like Groupon, only they don't even check with the merchants first

This certainly looks like a classic case of issuing the press release then trying to come up with a business model:

When it comes to MoviePass, a theater subscription service that would allow moviegoers to watch an unlimited number of films in theaters of their choice for $50 a month, most theater chains have taken a pass. So many, in fact, that MoviePass has canceled its test roll-out of the service that was supposed to take place in the San Francisco area this weekend. It’s not throwing in the towel just yet, however. In an interview with Wired magazine, MoviePass co-founder Stacy Spikes said that he’s confident that once exhibitors learn more about the service “they’ll be excited. We just haven’t had that opportunity yet.” But spokespersons for several chains maintained that MoviePass executives should have made a discussion of their service with them the first order of business. Ted Mundorff, the CEO of Landmark Theatres, told TheWrap.com that he wasn’t aware of the service prior to the announcement of this weekend’s test. “We are stunned that an announcement like this was made, and they ‘forgot’ to discuss it with their clients,” Mundorff said. “We are not interested in outside entities setting ticket prices for us.”

The Orphan Works Project

From Cory Doctrow via DeLong:

University of Michigan to stop worrying about lawsuits, start releasing orphan works: Bobbyg sez, "The University of Michigan Library will be sharing digital copies of their orphan works, that is, copyrighted works which have no identifiable owner, with the University community. Paul Courant, the University Librarian, says that the project is integral to the mission of the library, and that the sharing of the orphan works is a 'fair use' of the material, stating that 'sharing these orphan works does no economic harm to any person or organization, while not doing so harms scholarship and learning...'"

The Orphan Works Project is being led by the Copyright Office of the University of Michigan Library to identify orphan works. Orphan works are books that are subject to copyright but whose copyright holders cannot be identified or contacted. Our immediate focus is on digital books held by HathiTrust, a partnership of major research institutions and libraries working to ensure that the cultural record is preserved and accessible long into the future.

This effort is funded by the HathiTrust and is part of U-M Library's ongoing efforts to understand the true copyright status of works in its collection. As part of this effort, the Library will develop policies, processes, and procedures that can be used by other HathiTrust partners to replicate a task that will ultimately require the hand-checking of millions of volumes.

Bravo/a. I have no idea what will come of this, but pulling the default position of libraries, archives, and other institutions from one of debilitating fear or lawsuits to one of bravely sharing is something long past needed.

By the end of the Twentieth Century, we had reached the point where a company with enough lobbyists and lawyers could do anything they wanted with copyrights, whether it was getting a de facto permanent extension for Mickey Mouse or even removing a work from the public domain. As mentioned before, this reveals some tremendous hypocrisies from major players.

If you're serious about education reform...

You should question policies that devastate the families and communities of our most vulnerable children, reinforce the hold gangs have on those communities and divert tremendous amounts of money from schools and social programs.

From Mike Konczal:

Adoption studies as Rorschach test

As mentioned before, some (including perhaps Sacerdote himself) look at Bruce Sacerdote's research and conclude that parents don't have that much influence on children. David Leonhardt looks at the same research and sees something entirely different:

On Mr. Mankiw’s specific point, though, not all economists have the same view of the research on parents that he does. Bruce Sacerdote at Dartmouth has done one of the most-cited studies, and it finds that parents can make an enormous difference. From the abstract:

I analyze a new set of data on Korean American adoptees who were quasi-randomly assigned to adoptive families. I find large effects on adoptees’ education, income and health from assignment to parents with more education and from assignment to smaller families. Parental education and family size are significantly more correlated with adoptee outcomes than are parental income or neighborhood characteristics. Outcomes such as drinking, smoking and the selectivity of college attended are more determined by nurture than is educational attainment.

I look at this and see a cautionary tale about the perils of drawing inferences from non-representative samples, but I'm a statistician and that's how we see most things.

Another data dump

I should probably add Jared Bernstein to my regular reading list.

Felix Salmon points out another one of those things that make me nervous about the NYT.

Salmon also directs us to another great piece from the New Yorker.

Jonathan Chait has some smart things to say about the asymmetry of the political debate.

(Blogger's spell check just stopped working. The rest of the post may be a challenging read.)

Motorola's example doesn't really generalize. GE's run was better explained by other factors. Are there any Six Sigma success stories that don't fall in these two categories?

Dana Goldstein continues to bring objectivity and balance to the education debate.

more thoughts on geoengineering

I've previously discussed my mystification about how palatable many libertarians find geoengineering. I didn't get around to my confusion over the appeal of massive, unpredictable plans which, even if they work as well as promised (and that, my friends, is one freakin' big 'if'), will only partially address one of the problems associated with our dependence on fossil fuels.

When you have a plan that covers ocean acidification, maybe you can talk me out of supporting a carbon tax.

Ocean life on the brink of mass extinctions: study

OSLO (Reuters) – Life in the oceans is at imminent risk of the worst spate of extinctions in millions of years due to threats such as climate change and over-fishing, a study showed on Tuesday.

Time was running short to counter hazards such as a collapse of coral reefs or a spread of low-oxygen "dead zones," according to the study led by the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO).

"We now face losing marine species and entire marine ecosystems, such as coral reefs, within a single generation," according to the study by 27 experts to be presented to the United Nations.

"Unless action is taken now, the consequences of our activities are at a high risk of causing, through the combined effects of climate change, over-exploitation, pollution and habitat loss, the next globally significant extinction event in the ocean," it said.

Scientists list five mass extinctions over 600 million years -- most recently when the dinosaurs vanished 65 million years ago, apparently after an asteroid struck. Among others, the Permian period abruptly ended 250 million years ago.

"The findings are shocking," Alex Rogers, scientific director of IPSO, wrote of the conclusions from a 2011 workshop of ocean experts staged by IPSO and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) at Oxford University.

Fish are the main source of protein for a fifth of the world's population and the seas cycle oxygen and help absorb carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas from human activities.

Jelle Bijma, of the Alfred Wegener Institute, said the seas faced a "deadly trio" of threats of higher temperatures, acidification and lack of oxygen, known as anoxia, that had featured in several past mass extinctions.

A build-up of carbon dioxide, blamed by the U.N. panel of climate scientists on human use of fossil fuels, is heating the planet. Absorbed into the oceans, it causes acidification, while run-off of fertilizers and pollution stokes anoxia.

Extraordinary interview with Eric Sterling

[Coming off a big and busy week here at OE so you can expect to see a lot of catch-up posts over the next few days.]

Though we generally don't think about it in these terms, the war on drugs should be part of the education debate. The communities on the wrong side of the achievement gap are also the ones that have paid the price for congress's pathetic need to sound tough a quarter century ago. Here's a representative sample:

STERLING: The amounts ended up being very, very small, instead of a high-level quantity...

CONAN: Because the idea of the law, originally, was to go after kingpins.

STERLING: Exactly. We - the Justice Department had very broad discretion, and we recognized that the federal should be focused on the highest-level traffickers. The first proposal that we had used data that the DEA had suggested in terms of how they evaluate, internally, their highest-level traffickers. Those numbers were objectionable to a congressman from Louisville, Kentucky, who said: We'll never use this law in Louisville. And unfortunately, no one, given the speed of this, said: But congressman, Louisville is not Holly - Miami. It's not the center of the drug trade. Nobody goes to Louisville to do a major cocaine deal. Of course, we don't need it.

Bond villains can be so hard to shop for

This is not an opportunity you want to pass up.

Now their feelings are hurt

From Felix Salmon:

If you want a great example of the kind of mean things that people are saying about Groupon in the run-up to its IPO, you could do a lot worse than Rocky Agrawal’s TechCrunch essay entitled “Why Groupon Is Poised For Collapse”. It’s a great example of overstretch and dubious logic, with a couple of moments of brilliance and genuine insight thrown in at the same time. Groupon, of course, being in its quiet period, can’t react. Except, it just can’t help itself, and has put up a whiny post, supposedly authored by the company cat, about how unfair the whole situation is.

The fact is that when Groupon made the decision to go public, it invited exactly this kind of attention — both before the IPO and forever more. When Groupon was private, no one really knew anything about its financials, and CEO Andrew Mason could happily declare that he’d much rather talk about building miniature dollhouses. Once it’s public, however, he’ll have a fiduciary responsibility to his shareholders, and will have to answer such questions at length. Will that make him happier than answering such questions with a death-ray stare? I doubt it, to be honest. Revenues and business models and profits and forecasts are serious things, and you can’t kid around with shareholders in the same way you can with journalists.

In other words, Mason will have to go from saying nothing, which can be fun, to saying something, which almost certainly won’t be. Rather than moan about his inability to say anything in the quiet period, he should enjoy it while it lasts. From now on in, the boring financial questions are going to be unavoidable — from analysts, from journalists, from shareholders, even probably from merchants and customers who wonder whether Groupon’s profitability is a sign that they’re being ripped off.

After reading the post in question, 'whiny' is probably the first adjective that will come to your mind as well. It's easy to understand how Mason, Lefkofsky and company might feel wounded. A few months ago, between the investor buzz and love letters from the Wall Street Journal, the people at Groupon could easily assume that they had a world full of friends. Now everyone's pointing out problems in your business model and asking why your marketing techniques seem twenty years out of date.

Those darned Canadians

The Daily Show - Canadian Oilverlords
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

If your BS detector isn't going off, you need to check your battery

When it comes to politics and journalism, the people at Talking Points Memo are about the best bullshit detectors you'll find. When it comes to the world of business, however, thye seem to fare no better than the typical New York Times reporter.

Take, for example, their positive review of this Economist piece on IBM's hundredth birthday. Here's the key observation from the Economist:

IBM’s secret is that it is built around an idea that transcends any particular product or technology. Its strategy is to package technology for use by businesses. At first this meant making punch-card tabulators, but IBM moved on to magnetic-tape systems, mainframes, PCs, and most recently services and consulting. Building a company around an idea, rather than a specific technology, makes it easier to adapt when industry “platform shifts” occur.

True, IBM’s longevity is also due, in part, to dumb luck. It almost came unstuck early on because its bosses were hesitant to abandon punch cards. And it had a near-death experience in 1993 before Lou Gerstner realised that the best way to package technology for use by businesses was to focus on services. An elegant organising idea is no use if a company cannot come up with good products or services, or if it has clueless bosses. But on the basis of this simple formula—that a company should focus on an idea, rather than a technology—which of today’s young tech giants look best placed to live to 100?

The article, which goes on to argue that Apple, Amazon and Facebook live up to this while Dell, Cisco and Microsoft do not, is a nearly perfect example of perhaps the most popular genre of business writing, the secret of success story.

Here's the template:

1. Come up with a positive-sounding platitude like "successful businesses are obsessed with quality" or "a company should focus on an idea, rather than a technology";

2. Make a short list of companies that are currently hot. You may also choose to make a list of not-hot companies for the purpose of contrast. It is not necessary for the hot companies actually to be more successful;

3. Claim that your platitude explains the success or failure of these companies. This will usually entail stepping over some rather deep holes. For example, the Economist explains IBM's 100 year run with an insight* the company's management supposedly had in 1993. (If you have the nagging feeling that you've heard this basic argument before, you're probably right).

In real life, it's next to impossible to find a secret-to-success that is both widely applicable and pretty. This isn't to say that you can't learn something useful by studying successful companies, but those lessons tend to be complicated and difficult to apply in other settings. When you do find one that is simple and general, it's usual something like 'you can overcharge customers if you keep your pricing opaque.'

Somehow, though, "you can fool some of the people enough of the time" doesn't have the inspirational quality for a good business slogan.


* If at all possible, work a visionary CEO's brilliant insight into the story somewhere.