The other (non-Shakespearean) thing I learned in my college Shakespeare class.

I've already mentioned that the tests in this class were unusual; the way I studied for them was a bit odd as well and though it wasn't a method that I'd recommend for wide usage, in this context it worked well.

I was, in my younger days, something of a procrastinator (a trait I've outgrown, of course, -- ask anybody). Papers were generally started at the last minute but I did, at least, make an effort to keep up with my reading (I was earning a BFA in creative writing so writing and keeping up with my reading was pretty much all that was asked of me).

Shakespeare was the exception with reading assignments being pushed back to marathon sessions the weekends before the tests. I wasn't that I didn't enjoy the material -- I did -- but the plays required a commitment and a focus that made them easy to put off.

I would therefore find myself with three or four plays that I had to know in considerable detail forty-eight hours after I cracked open my copy of the Riverside Shakespeare (which I still have, by the way). It's difficult to imagine a worse approach to studying but in this case it worked out surprisingly well.

I would spend the first couple of hours cursing myself for being an irresponsible moron and calculating how much sleep I'd be able to get if I continued reading at that glacial pace. After that, though, something changed: the rate at which I was reading increased; it became easier to focus; the characters became more vivid and the stories more coherent.

It wasn't until after the second test that I realized what was going on. Shakespeare is one of the most and least accessible writers most of us will ever read. He wrote in language that hasn't been used for centuries but if you can get past those centuries of linguistic drift, you find someone who could hold the interest of intellectuals like Ben Jonson while keeping what we would now call the cheap seats cheering and stomping instead of throwing rotten eggs.

If I would have shown some discipline and diligently put aside an hour a night to study for that course I would have devoted more time to it but I strongly suspect I would have done worse and gotten less out of it. I doubt that an hour, even an hour every night would have been enough time to acclimate myself to the language; I would have spent my time translating instead of reading. It took two or three hours to forget the plays weren't in the everyday vernacular.

It's important to note that waiting till the weekend before a test then doing a marathon study session would have been, in almost every other context, a horrible idea. Even in cases where language is a barrier (which includes math), you'd generally be better off working your way through in bite-sized chunks, but the plays were written to be experienced in a single sitting (or standing) and that's probably still how they work best.

So my experiences in that one class shouldn't suggest a general approach to studying but it is another reminder of the often made point that the "best" pedagogical methods are context sensitive, varying from student to student, teacher to teacher and subject to subject to subject. Beware of blanket solutions.

If we're going to discuss education, we need to make sure everyone's heard this one

From Bullfinch's Age of Fable:

Several similar contests with the petty tyrants and marauders of the country followed, in all of which Theseus was victorious. One of these evil-doers was called Procrustes, or the Stretcher. He had an iron bedstead, on which he used to tie all travellers who fell into his hands. If they were shorter than the bed, he stretched their limbs to make them fit it; if they were longer than the bed, he lopped off a portion. Theseus served him as he had served others.

"Of course, Shakespeare was much newer at the time"

Back when I was an undergrad I took a class in Shakespeare. I'm mentioning this because a couple of aspects came back to me recently while thinking about education. The first was the format of the tests the teacher used. They consisted of a list of quotes from the four plays we had covered since the last test. Each quote had a pronoun underlined which came with a two part question: who was the speaker and who was the antecedent?

I've never seen that format used in another class (even by the same teacher) and I always thought it was an interesting approach. I wouldn't necessarily recommend using it widely but I'm glad I had it in at least one course. It was a method that encouraged attentive reading (particularly useful with Shakespeare).

Experiencing different styles of teaching and evaluation are part of a well-rounded education. I've seen a wide range approaches. Some were successful. Some were not. Some successful as one-shots but weren't models I'd suggest routinely following, like the number theory class I took that didn't allow mathematical notation (all proofs had to be written out in grammatical sentences without abbreviations or symbols -- more or less the way Fermat would have done it). That pedagogical diversity has been of immense value.

A book on quality control I read a few years ago said that quality in a QC sense was equivalent to a lack of variation; quality meant all parts came out the same. Sometimes I'm afraid that the some in the education reform movement are starting to think of uniformity as an end to itself.

At the risk of stating the obvious, lots of cool things come out of MIT.

The secret is in a futuristic substance known as "LiquiGlide," a non-toxic, FDA-approved coating that can be applied to the interior of bottles. According to MIT PhD candidate Dave Smith, it's "kind of a structured liquid — it's rigid like a solid, but it's lubricated like a liquid." Regardless of what the bottle is constructed of, liquid or plastic, ketchup will flow out of it nearly effortlessly.

...
Interestingly enough, LiquiGlide wasn't initially designed to be used for ketchup — the original idea had the coating being used as an anti-icing coating, or a pipe coating that might help reduce oil and gas clogs. But as Smith explains, "most of these other applications have a much longer time to market; we realized we could make this coating for bottles that is pretty much ready. I mean, it is ready."

Putting our money in seed corn -- literally

Noah Smith has an excellent post arguing that spending our limited research dollars on bigger and bigger particle accelerators is, at this point in history, a bad idea.

Weinberg is a particle physicist, one of the heroes who developed the Standard Model. Thus it is not surprising that most of his article concentrates on particle physics experiments. Unfortunately, I think that appeals for governments to pour more money into particle accelerators are A) doomed to fall on deaf ears, and B) not really very convincing in the first place. Let me explain why.
First of all, the Standard Model of particle physics is good. Really good. In fact, we've never conducted an experiment where it makes an incorrect prediction at any level of precision!! In that sense, it is one of the most successful theories ever. Now, the Model may or may not fail at ultra-high energies (such as those that could be produced inside a black hole or a multibillion-dollar particle accelerator), or at galactic distances. But these are not environments that will ever matter for human beings on Earth. 

As Weinberg points out, the Standard Model is incomplete. It doesn't include gravity. But we have another theory, general relativity, whose track record is just as good, to describe gravity. Unifying these theories would increase our understanding of the nature of the Universe, but it's not clear whether it would improve our ability to predict our immediate surroundings. 

In other words, new particle accelerators may be able to answer interesting questions, but they are unlikely to produce much of technological value.

In fact, this has proven true for the last several generations of particle accelerators. We've discovered a zoo of new particles, and these discoveries have improved our theories greatly. But none of these new particles has been something we can exploit for technological applications. In the early 20th century, new fundamental physics led rapidly to applications like nuclear bombs, semiconductors, lasers, and GPS. But to my knowledge, nobody is even trying to make a device that exploits the properties of B-mesons or neutrino mass. 

To this, add another problem, which Weinberg discusses: We actually have no idea if the "next generation" of particle accelerators would find anything useful. In the past, we always had new theories that predicted stuff we should expect to see if bigger accelerators were built (for example, the Large Hadron Collider was built to search for the predicted Higgs Boson). As of now, new physics theories have made no new concrete predictions about what should come out of bigger and more expensive accelerators. If we build those accelerators, it will purely for speculative, exploratory purposes - to see what might be out there. 

Smith's piece was still fresh in my mind when I read this previously cited piece in the Washington Post:

On Wednesday afternoon, [Rep. Jim] Cooper rose to the defense of taxpayer-funded research into dog urine, guinea pig eardrums and, yes, the reproductive habits of the parasitic flies known as screwworms--all federally supported studies that have inspired major scientific breakthroughs. Together with two House Republicans and a coalition of major science associations, Cooper has created the first annual Golden Goose Awards to honor federally funded research “whose work may once have been viewed as unusual, odd, or obscure, but has produced important discoveries benefiting society in significant ways.” Federally-funded research of dog urine ultimately gave scientists and understanding of the effect of hormones on the human kidney, which in turn has been helpful for diabetes patients. A study called “Acoustic Trauma in the Guinea Pig” resulted in treatment of early hearing loss in infants. And that randy screwworm study? It helped researchers control the population of a deadly parasite that targets cattle--costing the government $250,000 but ultimately saving the cattle industry more than $20 billion, according to Cooper’s office.

My natural bias is pro-research and if the amount of money we spent on particle accelerators was unrelated to the amount of money spent on other research I'd probably say go for it, but in an era of tight money (or the perception of tight money), there are other areas that score higher on almost every non-ddulite criteria.

Smith suggests a number of projects related to replacing fossil fuels. Joseph would probably have a number of suggestions involving health and medicine. My first thoughts are agricultural. For starters I'd like to see something like the Human Genome Project for species that can have a potential impact (positive or negative) on our food supply.

It's easy to argue the economic benefits for this kind of research (discoveries like this can be worth $100 million a year which means, after a decade or two, you're talking real money). It's not so easy, however, to get journalists and politicians to give these fields the respect and support they deserve. Part of this comes from a combination of ddulite tendencies and scientific illiteracy -- the reporters love the high-tech stuff but really don't understand it -- but another (albeit related) problem is the tendency to approach the debate as a conflict between practical and pure science. The distinction is artificial and not particularly productive and it's less than clear which side the evidence comes down on.

I'd argue that, given the current state of the disciplines, you're more likely to make a major, change-the-way-we-see-the-world scientific advance digging for parasites in pig manure than analyzing results from the Large Hadron Collider. That's not to say that these results won't prove important, just that we're more likely to see bigger advances in the life sciences in the next few years and agricultural research is one of the best ways to pursue those advances (if not the best).

This could be an important shift

Felix Salmon:

And more generally, college is slowly moving from the “things which are bought” column into the “things which are sold” column — for-profit colleges, in particular, recruit aggressively in ways that would have been unthinkable to an earlier generation of tertiary educators. As a result, people drop out of college not just because it’s statistically certain that in any college class there will be some students who drop out, but increasingly because a lot of students, especially in courses offered by for-profit colleges, really can’t and shouldn’t be in those classes in the first place.

I think that this is a really dangerous trend for a purchase that is as expensive as education. Buying the wrong education is much worse of a mistake than buying the wrong car or house -- at least partially because you can have a car or house foreclosed on.  Furthermore, the focus on marketing will tend to make it more difficult to assess universities on quality.  Look at how hard it is to get good information on something as simple as an automobile (using Edmunds.com, for example).  Now considering needing to assess something as complicated as an educational program.

I do not think that this is a good trend at all.

"An overdose of pharmacy students"

As mentioned before, American Public Media's Marketplace has been doing exceptional work. Here's an example of particular interest to OE readers.

Exhibit A for our purposes today is the professional pharmacist. Just five years ago, a pharmacy degree was a near guarantee of permanent and well-paid employment. So much so that a lot of universities started their own schools of pharmacy. In Tennessee, they went from one pharmacy school to half a dozen. So you know what happens next.

More on the reaction to gutting the census

Mark Thoma sums it up:

The good news is this vote is being criticized across the political spectrum ... 

From the WSJ: Republicans try to kill data collection that helps economic growth... From the NY Times: Operating in the Dark... From AEI's Norman Ornstein at Roll Call: Research Cuts Are Akin to Eating Seed Corn... From the WaPo: The American Community Survey is a count worth keeping... And from Menzie Chinn at Econonbrowser: The War on Data Collection

"[N]ot a scientific survey. It’s a random survey.”

The first from DeLong. The LA Times ran a recent Op-Ed by John M. Ellis and Charles L. Geshekter complaining about liberals in academia.

Perhaps this is not surprising given that the tilt to the left among college faculty members has been growing nationwide for several decades. At UC Berkeley, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans even in the hard sciences had grown to 10 to 1 in 2004, many times what it was 30 years ago, according to a study by Daniel Klein and Andrew Western.

And the second courtesy of EconoSpeak

Catherine Rampell quotes Daniel Webster, who sponsored a bill to eliminate the American Community Survey, which was passed by the full House of Representatives: “We’re spending $70 per person to fill this out. That’s just not cost effective, especially since in the end this is not a scientific survey. It’s a random survey.” 

It should be noted that the LA Times Op-Ed is more or less a press release from the National Association of Scholars (Ellis, Geshekter, Klein and Western are all associated with the organization in some way) and that politically the NAS falls somewhere between the John Birch Society and Genereal Bullmoose.* Those concerned about subsidized research will find much to worry about here.

Just for the sake of argument, though, let's assume that the Klein and Western finding is valid. Is it possible that certain positions, statements and attitudes from prominent Republicans might have made people with scientific training uncomfortable with today's GOP?

In case you just joined the party, here are some previous posts of the anti-census initiative.



*obscure pop culture reference.

Adam Frank is better at science than business

This is Falcon 7, not Falcon 9

Astrophysicist Adam Frank is what you might call a fan of SpaceX:

So what's the big deal? Well, the Falcon 9 is a private spaceship, fully developed and owned by the private company SpaceX. And SpaceX is the brainchild of Elon Musk, the Internet billionaire who made his fortune from PayPal. With contracts from NASA to develop new launch platforms, SpaceX and other companies are poised to make space the domain of profitable businesses. And Musk has been explicit about his intentions to go beyond Earth orbit, to build commercially viable ventures that might take people to Mars in a decade or two.

His timing couldn't be any better or any more urgent. Even without the space shuttle, America needs to remain a leader in space. Now, when I was a kid, the U.S. space program fueled my imagination and led me into a life of science. But as I got older, it became clear that the real business of getting a human presence across the solar system was going to have to fall to business. Governments might get the exploration of space started, but the vagaries of election and budget cycles meant they could never go further.

Now, we've reached the point where it's the exploitation of space that matters. And while exploitation might seem a dirty word to some folks, they should stop to consider how dependent we are already on the commercialization of that region of space we call low earth orbit. Think of the billions of dollars in commercial activity tied to weather prediction, global broadcasting and global positioning. All this business depends on satellites orbiting overhead right now.

But if, as a species, we want to go beyond the thin veil of space directly overhead, then the basic principles of private venture and risk will have to apply. These are the ones that have always applied. While Queen Isabella may have given Columbus his ships to cross the Atlantic, it was private companies that built the seagoing trade routes and brought folks across to settle - for better or worse. Likewise, it's only through commercially viable endeavors that large numbers of humans are getting off this world and into the high frontier of space.

It's no small irony that the billionaires bankrolling the new space entrepreneurship built their fortunes not in jetfighter aerospace manufacturing but in the dream space of the Internet.

Frank's enthusiasm is understandable but his thinking about the business and economics of space ranges from the wishful to the hopelessly muddled, particularly when it comes to "the basic principles of private venture and risk."

Private space travel has not, if you'll pardon the phrase, taken off in a serious way because there is no credible business model to support it. No one has figured out a way to make money going beyond earth's orbit and until we see a major technological breakthrough, it's likely that no one will.

There's an important distinction that needs to be made, the economic forces Frank is alluding to only come into play when markets efficiently allocate resources where they will have the greatest return (and the markets have decided that doesn't include trips to Mars). What we're talking about here is having the government contract with an independent company. We can discuss the wisdom and practicality of that decision later, but claiming that this "the basic principles of private venture and risk" are behind SpaceX is like claiming that the hiring of Blackwater meant that the markets decided we should invade Iraq.

To salvage the Columbus analogy, before he returned with information about the existence and location of the new world, people didn't attempt voyages because the expected return on investment was negative. After people had that information the expected return was positive.

Giving some contracts to companies like SpaceX might be a good idea (that's a discussion for another time) but it will do virtually nothing to shift the economic fundamentals.

There are things that the government could do to improve those fundamentals -- research initiatives, mapping out resources, setting up infrastructure (ground and/or space based)* -- but they require lots of upfront money. Our only other option is to wait for technology to bring the costs of launching materials way down, but that is likely to take a long time.

When it comes to the exploration and exploitation of space, those are our realistic choices.



* This is a topic for another post but aerospace researchers are exploring some technologies that could shift those expected returns from negative to positive, such launching components and supplies by railgun.

Closing words on Facebook (in handy audio form)

Marketplace's Heidi Moore sums things up nicely. There's no transcript but it's worth taking a few minutes to listen to the story.

If I weren't on a business and technology kick

I'd probably be blogging about this fascinating example of modern journalism's ability to be both obsessively self-absorbed and incapable of self-examination.

(I'd also be saying mean things about MM, arguably my least favorite journalist, period.)

The continuing war on science part 46

We're back on the census beat thanks to another piece of news from Menzie Chinn:

From the National Association for Business Economics (NABE):
[t]he U.S. House of Representatives was considering an appropriations bill for Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies (H.R. 5326) that would drastically reduce funding for the Census Bureau and make participation in the American Community Survey voluntary.
... Regrettably, the legislation ultimately passed the House along party lines and was much more damaging than originally proposed. In its current form, H.R. 5326 will "devastate" the nation's economic statistics.
Specifically, the legislation will:

• Terminate the American Community Survey;

• Cancel the 2012 Economic Census; and

• Halt development of cost-saving measures for the decennial census.

Chinn points out that this would be devastating for researchers such as himself. It would also be a hell of a blow to business analytics people like me who use this data on a daily basis all to save a trivial sliver of the federal budget.

Yet another view on plagiarism

Quoted on Cheap Talk:

Oh, dear me, how unspeakably funny and owlishly idiotic and grotesque was that “plagiarism” farce! As if there was much of anything in any human utterance, oral or written, except plagiarism! The kernel, the soul—let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances—is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily use by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral calibre and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing.

Though I'm not sure how far I'd trust this guy; I'm pretty sure he's using a fake name.

How about a virtual social network?

This is a thought experiment, not a business plan, so don't expect too much here, but how hard would it be to set up something that worked along these lines?:

It would allow users to set up circles of contacts and permit different levels of access determined by user-assigned rank ("casual" contacts could see some pages while "close" contacts could see more), degrees of separation and visitor attributes ("let all visitors who list Justified on their favorites see this page);

The pages could be of any format and would be hosted by whoever the user chose as long as it used standard access protocols and had a few standard features like a favorites section; Adding friends and updating settings would be done through a central site;

If run on a for-profit basis, revenue could come in through the central site with advertising and surveys (both targeted on user information), mining user data and selling apps for mobile access.

I'm not saying this is a good idea for a business (you'll notice I put it here and not on Kickstarter) but it certainly seems to fall in the realm of the possible and virtual social networks did start popping up they could conceivably eat away at the potential user base for Facebook. You can (and probably should) object at this point that this is a somewhat farfetched scenario. You'd be right. You could also point out that Facebook is a good company with a sound business plan, loads of technical talent and a huge first mover advantage.

If we were talking about Facebook's chances of having a nice, profitable run those points would end this conversation, but the buyers in tomorrow's IPO are betting that the company will have a flawless, even unprecedented run. Under those circumstances, it's worthwhile to take a moment to think about the possibilities.