Simulation and foolish cost-cutting

Wired's Jonah Lehrer has a good post on the use of simulators to train pilots.

According to a recent report in The Wall Street Journal, United/Continental Airlines wants to use less realistic (and less expensive) simulators for many of their pilot training tasks. Instead of simulating the motion and vibrations of the plane, these static training devices are fixed to the ground:

The disagreement within United Continental revolves around using fixed-base simulators—which don’t mimic the movements of planes in flight—rather than full-motion devices to conduct certain types of mandatory, recurrent pilot training.

A decade ago, Continental received Federal Aviation Administration regulatory approval to use such devices, costing roughly one-third less than full-motion simulators, during the last phase of periodic proficiency checks for pilots flying its Boeing Co. 777 fleet. Continental was moving to expand the practice to its Boeing 737 pilots before last year’s merger agreement with United shifted the combined airlines’ focus to integrating all FAA paperwork.

Continental believes its novel approach is superior to traditional practice by stressing human factors and cockpit interaction and thereby enhancing safety. But the position, according to some safety experts, appears to run counter to at least some of the latest guidance coming from parts of the FAA and international standard-setting groups such as the International Civil Aviation Organization, an arm of the United Nations.

“We should be aiming for the greatest possible realism to teach crews how to use both mental skills and motor skills to most effectively deal with emergencies,” according to Mark Rosenker, a former member of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board. The NTSB continues to champion full-motion simulators for recurrent training. Except for cost considerations, Mr. Rosenker said, “why would anyone opt for anything less?”

I can only hope United/Continental has some solid research to support this proposed change, because it strikes me as a bad idea. For starters, there’s no reason to mess with success, even if it saves a few dollars. And modern pilot training is an astonishing success story. Let’s begin with the dismal history: Despite a long list of aviation reforms, from mandatory pilot layovers to increased classroom training, the percentage of crashes due to pilot error refused to budge from 1940 to 1990, holding steady at around 65 percent. It didn’t matter what type of plane was being flown, or where the plane was going. The brute fact remained: Most aviation deaths were due to bad decisions in the cockpit.

According to the latest statistics, however, mistakes by the flight crew are responsible for less than 30 percent of all plane accidents, with a 71 percent reduction in the number of accidents caused by “poor decision-making.” The end result is that flying has become safer than ever. According to the National Transportation Safety Board, flying on a commercial plane has a fatality rate of 0.04 per 100 million passenger miles, making it, by far, the least dangerous form of travel. (Driving, by contrast, has a fatality rate of 0.86.)

What caused the dramatic reduction in pilot error? One widely cited factor is the introduction of highly realistic flight simulators, starting in the mid 1980’s. (The first simulators were put into place during WWII, as the Air Force didn’t have enough real planes to train thousands of new pilots.) For the first time, pilots could practice making decisions in extremely stressful conditions. They could refine their reactions to a sudden downdraft in a thunderstorm, or practice landing with only one engine. They could learn what it’s like to fly without wing flaps, or land on a tarmac glazed with ice. And they could do all this without leaving the ground.

The benefit of a flight simulator is that it allows pilots to internalize their new knowledge. Instead of memorizing lessons on the blackboard, they were forced to exercise emotional regulation, learning how to stay calm and think clearly when bad stuff happens. (I’ve been in these realistic flight simulators and let me assure you – they can be terrifying. After I crashed my jetliner, I left the simulator drenched in sweat, all jangly with adrenaline.) The essential point here is that pilots were the first profession to realize that many of our most important decisions were inherently emotional and instinctive, which is why it was necessary to practice them in an emotional state. If we want those hours of practice to transfer to the real world – and isn’t that the point of practice? – then we have to simulate not just the exterior conditions of the cockpit but the internal mental state of the pilot as well. For far too long, we’ve assumed that expertise is about learning lots of facts, which is why we settled for the “chalk and talk” teaching method. But it’s not. True expertise occurs when we no longer need to reference facts, because we already know what to do.

Needless to say, the potential of simulators goes far beyond pilot training. In recent years, the medical profession has discovered the virtues of virtual reality. Recent studies have found big benefits when medical students use simulators to practice colonoscopies, laparoscopic surgery and even the varied techniques of general surgery. What’s not surprising is that this simulated training was even more effective when it was physically realistic, providing surgeons with “haptic feedback.”

The moral is that we need to make our simulators more realistic, not less. Pilots have pioneered a key concept in professional training. It would be a shame if airlines began to backtrack to save money.

What's notable here is that the cost of the technology behind these simulators has dropped over the past twenty-plus years and will almost certainly drop further over the next twenty, while the potential costs of this change remain high (imagine the legal and reputational consequences when one of these pilots is involved in a crash, even if the official cause is not pilot error).

Unless there's more to this story, shifting to less realistic simulators would seem to be a classic case of cost-cutting that defies cost-analysis. This kind of thing is not hard to find in both the private and public sector. It can usually be attributed to a lack of alignment (the people devising and championing these proposals get their bonuses and promotions almost immediately. By the time true costs become apparent, attrition and short institutional memories will rule out any significant repercussions.*) and to an understandable but dangerous tendency to believe in easy answers.

*Thank God the financial sector is immune to this sort of thing.

Dean Dad on Higher education

While I was away, I missed this gem by Dean Dad about the argument that college isn't worth it:

The whole enterprise just smells to me like the latest variation on “let’s privatize Social Security” or “let’s replace Medicare with vouchers.” It’s the wealthy and their worshippers sloughing off any social obligation, basically dropping the ladder behind them. If that weren’t the case, if they actually believed what they said, I’d expect to see the best and brightest from Choate and Philips Exeter eschewing college and doing startups or joining the military instead. Um, no.

I had not made this connection but it does seem to be a coherent interpretation of an otherwise puzzling argument. I must admit that I remain mystified with the current interest in the United States with disassembling the social infrastructure. Not only is it in the opposite direction of most countries, but the ones that have tried it seem to end up being bad places to be. Think of Russia, for example.

The real issue, to me, is that the real remedy to these types of escalating prices is the high quality public university system that countries like Canada and states like California have. The University of California is a high quality set of institutions and much less expensive than the alternatives.

Why is this approach not the one that rising prices brings us back to? Okay, we'd have to go back to the brutal taxes of the Reagan or Clinton eras, but I am not convinced that this move would lead to an immediate dystopia.

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.