The near miss effect -- what compulsive gamblers and tech reporters have in common

A few days ago I posted a bit of a rant about how excited tech reporters got over a Google press release about the company's driverless car. The problem was that, based on the details available in the reports, there didn't seem to be any significant indications of increased functionality.

Of course, reporters have a strong incentive to see signs of progress -- "just around the corner" sells better than "don't get your hopes up" -- but I think this eagerness has more than one cause (most things do) and I wonder if one of those factors might have something to do with the near-miss effect as described in this memorable story from This American Life:

Sarah Koenig

Habib and especially Dixon have spent a long time studying what's called the near-miss effect. In slot machines, a near miss is just what it sounds like. It's when, say, two cherries line up on the payoff line, and then the third is about to come but stops just short or just past the payoff line.

...

Sarah Koenig

In 2006, Dixon teamed up with Habib to see if they could figure out what was happening to people neurologically when they saw near misses. They scanned the brains of 22 gamblers-- 11 addicted, or what they called pathological gamblers, and 11 non-pathological gamblers-- as all these people watch near misses on slot machine displays.

The results surprised them. Because while both addicted and non-addicted gamblers said the near misses felt more like wins, their brains said something different. Here's Reza Habib.

Reza Habib

What you see in the non-pathological gamblers is that the regions that are activated for losses, those same regions tend to be also activated for near misses. And so the brain, at least, processes these near misses in the same way that it processes losses in the non-pathological gamblers. In pathological gamblers, the same regions that are activated for wins are also activated for near misses.

And so these include regions such as the amygdala, which is a region involved in emotional processing, as well as parts of the brain stem which are involved in reward and dopamine function, which is part of the reward system. So the pathological gamblers, their brains, at least, are responding to these near misses in the same way that they respond to wins.

Mark Dixon

This is Mark again. And one of the effects of this, or the implications of these data, are that a pathological gambler going into the casino who's actually losing, his brain is firing like he's winning. Disturbing, isn't it.

Sarah Koenig

Yeah. It's crazy.

Mark Dixon

Oh, it's way crazy. And so you are experiencing those same sensations as a win when you're not winning.

Just as casinos are very good at eliciting the reactions associated with winning even when very little winning is going on, companies like Apple and Google have become very good at eliciting the reactions associated with technological progress even when the technology is advancing little and sometimes not at all. In this case, Google assumed correctly that, by showing journalists a prototype that looked different but apparently did nothing new, the reporters would react as if they had seen an advance in the technology. They respond to these meaningless press conferences in much the same way as a pathological gambler responds to two cherries out of three.

If anything, the shift to custom-made, low-speed cars would seem to be a sign of trouble. Google's stated goal is to release this technology to manufacturers in 2018. Whenever you're designing complex systems that have to work with complex systems designed by others, compatibility is usually more than half the battle. I would therefore expect some of the most daunting engineering challenges to come from getting Google's technology to work smoothly with a wide range of makes and models. The decision to go from road testing Toyota Priuses ('Prii' believe it or not) and Audi TTs to track testing what are basically go-carts does not make the four year goal look more likely.

What happens if that deadline isn't met? I suspect it will still be business as usual. Google has proven that merely symbolic progress or, failing even that, just bringing the subject up is enough to create the desired effect of public perception. My guess is that the only real deadline is beating GM, Mercedes-Benz, or Nissan or any of the other companies that have equally gifted engineers working on these problems (but with less gifted PR departments to promote them).

"[N]o revenue, no patents, no trademarks, no manufacturing facilities, and no experience"

Most of the coverage of this story has been focused, understandably, on the political side, but part I find much more interesting is the rise, if you could call it that, of Global Digital Solutions Inc. We are, by this point, accustomed to people pouring money into companies with incomplete and/or unrealistic business plans, but this takes it to an entirely new level. As far as I can, the people running this seem to have no intention of actually being a business. They issue press releases, give big checks to  prominent people and rake in tens of millions of dollars of investor money. They don't even bother to make a convincing show of trying to actually do anything productive.

If we were talking about some kind of fly-under-the-radar, boiler-room pump and dump, this would be about what I might expect, but this has been going on for years in an aggressively high profile manner. You have to wonder how long it would have taken people to notice it if hadn't hired a soon-to-be candidate in a highly covered Senate race.

This also raises some interesting questions about effenciency in the darker corners of the market. GDS was not a particularly successful stock, but it was almost certainly more successful than it deserved to be.

An obscure company in West Palm Beach that markets itself as a firearms manufacturer made a splashy announcement last summer: It was appointing Scott Brown, the former Massachusetts senator, to its advisory board.

Not revealed at the time was what Brown received in exchange for lending his name to the venture. But a report the company made to the Securities and Exchange Commission last month, which has not been previously made public, shows that Brown received stock that was worth $1.3 million at the time. Its value has declined considerably since then, as the stock price has fallen by half.

Global Digital Solutions Inc. does not yet sell or make guns. It has no revenue, no patents, no trademarks, no manufacturing facilities, and no experience developing weapons, according to its most recent corporate filings.

It was founded as a beauty supply company in New Jersey — selling hair spray, conditioners, and shampoos, before reinventing itself as a wireless data firm from California and then again last year as a South Florida-based firearms maker and gun technology innovator.

It is the kind of company, with scant assets and a shifting business model, that some financial professionals warn investors to steer away from.

The company, instead of selling firearms, has churned out press releases to attract small investors, including the one about Brown joining the firm, and issued millions of shares of stock to fund its operations. Shares closed at 46 cents on the OTCQB Marketplace on Friday.

During a brief encounter after a campaign event in Hopkinton, N.H., on Saturday, Brown declined to answer questions about his involvement with the company or the level of scrutiny he applied to its business methods before agreeing to associate himself with it. He referred to a campaign statement given to the Globe Friday.

“GDSI is a start-up company that does not have significant operations at this point,” his communications director Elizabeth Guyton said in an e-mail. “Scott Brown has an advisory role but he is not involved in the day to day management or decisions of the company.”

Accountants said in interviews that Global Digital’s filings raise a number of warning signs for investors, including its varying business model and lack of actual products. The firm reported it has four employees, $271,776 in cash and had $19.7 million in losses as of March 31.
...
Barry R. Goldsmith, a former lead lawyer for the SEC and chief of enforcement for the National Association of Securities Dealers, said the company’s actions raise a number of issues “that I think a regulator would look at,” including its bold press releases and the company’s quick transitions in its business model.
...
Many congressional candidates and former officials have served on corporate boards. Brown’s involvement as “senior adviser’’ in Global Digital raises questions about the amount of work he is doing for the company in exchange for his large equity stake and the amount of attention he gave to the company’s practices before lending it his name and prestige.

The company’s chief executive officer and president, Richard J. Sullivan, declined an interview request. But Sullivan provided a statement saying the company was attracted to Brown because of his experience in the military and on the Armed Services and Homeland Security committees in the Senate.

Sullivan said the company issues press releases about possible acquisitions because it is required by regulators to disclose strategic plans.

“The GDSI executive management team has a strong record of success in growing and acquiring fast-growing technology companies,” he added, directing further inquiries to the company website.

Global Digital lists a prestigious address in West Palm Beach with a majestic view of the water and the Island of Palm Beach as its headquarters.

A reporter who went to the address Friday found the company was not listed on any building directory. A receptionist in the suite listed as the company’s address told a reporter: “They’re not here. It’s by appointment only.”

The building directory lists another company at the suite: HQ Global Workplaces, which advertises that it provides clients with an address and access to furnished conference rooms as needed. Global Digital reported in a securities filing that it signed a 12-month lease last year for a “virtual office” in West Palm Beach for $299 per month.

Global Digital generated a wave of publicity after Brown agreed to join the advisory board Sept. 9. In exchange for his involvement, Brown received 1.5 million shares of company stock, worth about $1.3 million when they were granted, or about $690,000 at today’s prices, according to the company’s quarterly report filed on May 9.

The shares were scheduled to vest between January and September of this year, allowing Brown to sell them. His picture is prominently featured on the company’s website as an adviser.

The company’s stock price did not move from 88 cents a share on the day Brown’s appointment was announced, and it has declined by 48 percent in the months since.

Brown’s campaign said he has yet to sell any of the stock.

Brown is not the only high-profile politician the company has recruited to boost its profile. Global Digital announced in April 2013 that Jennifer Carroll had become a senior adviser, a month after she resigned as Florida’s lieutenant governor after investigators questioned her about her involvement in an Internet sweepstakes operation.

Carroll is now listed as the company’s “future president and chief operating officer.”

In addition, more than a half-dozen penny stock newsletters reported they were paid by an investor relations firm to promote Global Digital in 2012 — when it was still focused on telecommunications — including $20,000 to ClubPennyStocks Network and $10,000 to PennyStockExplosion.com, according to OTC Dynamics Inc., a Winnipeg, Manitoba, firm that tracks penny stock promotions.

To become publicly traded as an over-the-counter stock, so it could raise money from small investors, Global Digital merged in 2004 with a struggling cosmetics company called Creative Beauty Supply Inc.

The company then repositioned itself as a telecommunications firm before pivoting again last year to say it would become a firearms manufacturer, a security and technology company, and a leader in “cyber-related, culturally attuned social consulting.”

It has also drawn attention with announced plans for several major acquisitions that it never consummated. An announcement in March that it intended to buy Remington Arms Co. LLC, one of the world’s largest gun manufacturers, for more than $1 billion was greeted with derision by Remington and others in the industry, who dismissed it. Global Digital’s stock value is only about $45 million.

...

It also announced it had signed a letter of intent to buy another tiny Florida firm, Cool Sound Industries Inc., saying its sound-wave technology had “potential for game-changing defense-related and commercial applications.” However, there is no indication in its securities filings that it completed the deal.

The company said in a January press release that it would soon unveil digital technology to track and lock guns. So called “smart-gun” technology has been the subject of widespread interest in recent years after mass shootings. But Global Digital’s news release did not say how the technology works, when it will be available or how much it would cost.

One of Brown’s fellow members of the advisory board, Richard J. Feldman, said he was asked to join at the end of April, a week after he called Sullivan to express interest. Feldman, who said he is a former gun lobbyist based in New Hampshire, said he had lunch with Sullivan and the chairman of the advisory board, but knows of no scheduled meetings with the full advisory board and has never seen the company’s office.

“There’s no production that I’m aware of so that makes perfect sense,” he said. “It’s at the beginning stages of putting it together.”

Feldman said he did not know about the company’s history or much about its business plan, other than the expectation that it will use new technology and attempt to buy Remington. He said he has never met Brown.

Flawed analogy watch -- Comcast edition

As if there weren't enough to dislike about this deal, we now have the CEO talking to us like we're morons.

Faced with difficult questions about his company’s pending takeover of Time Warner Cable — which would combine the two largest cable internet providers in the U.S. into a company consumers will likely hate twice as much — Comcast CEO Brian Roberts made one thing very clear: his company is determined to sit directly in the middle of the tech world. ...

That means it wants to preserve a gatekeeper role. In a series of analogies, Roberts likened his company’s role to that of a postmaster, pointing out that Netflix pays hundreds of millions of dollars to mail DVDs to its customers but now expects to be able to deliver the same content over the internet for free.

“They would like it all to be free. I would like to not have to pay for cable boxes,” he said. Delivering bits over a pipe seems just a wee bit more cost-effective than paying the energy and labor costs of physical distribution, but Roberts didn’t get into that.

Where to start...

The most common model for deliveries is one where the sender pays the cost of shipping. A less common, but not unheard of model is for the receiver to cover the cost on delivery ("postage due"). ISPs basically operate under something similar to the second model. The receiver pays to get the digital packages, and pays more to get larger packages or to get them faster.

Roberts is proposing a model where both the sender and the receiver pay, which he thinks he can get away with because there is very little competition in the industry and because, based on this quote, he doesn't seem to think we're very bright.

The sad part is this doesn't significantly lower my opinion of Matt Miller

Joseph and I try to avoid the overtly partisan at this blog. We frequently endorse Democratic positions but that has a lot to do with the current state of the GOP, which recently disavowed most of their best ideas because they saw that some Democrats liked them. When we do like an idea that Republicans still hold like expanding nuclear power, both Joseph and I have been fairly open with our support.

We certainly aren't in the business of endorsing candidates but I'm about to come damned close to endorsing anyone in today's primary who isn't named Matt Miller.

From Lee Fang via Brad DeLong:

Ethics forms filed by Miller to the House Clerk’s office, a standard procedure for any candidate for Congress, reveal that Miller received $239,099 from Burson-Marsteller, the influence and public relations firm, in 2013.

The ethics forms show a laundry list of other corporate clients, including American Express, General Electric, Linder & Associates, RLM Finsbury, and Wal-Mart. The New York Times’ Mark Leibovich, in his write up of the race, described Miller as a former consultant to McKinsey & Company. The ethics forms show that Miller continued to receive a salary at the firm up until announcing his run: $295,927 in 2013 and 2014, and $318,721 in the previous year, 2012. Many of Miller’s clients continued to pay him up until he announced his candidacy, including RLM Finsbury, which bills itself as a public affairs firm that helps influence lawmakers and regulators. RLM Finsbury says Miller left the firm as he launched his campaign.
...
The many corporate consultancy gigs held by Miller may cast his policy and pundit positions into question. For instance, when Miller penned a column for the Post defending corporations that take full advantage of the tax code to dodge paying billions in corporate income taxes, he did not disclose at the time that he was being paid by GE, a company that has become a symbol of this problem. Miller has endorsed cutting entitlement programs such as Social Security. As PR Week reported, Miller’s Burson-Marsteller was retained by billionaire Pete Peterson’s Fix the Debt campaign to help advocate for spending cuts to reduce the national debt.

Miller, in response to a query from Republic Report, says he has “always kept my editors and producers at my various outlets informed about my business activities, and have routinely made disclosures on air or in print where a reader or audience member should know of such work to avoid any conflict.” On KCRW radio, where Miller has hosted the popular show “Left, Right, and Center,” Miller says he has mentioned on air that he is an advisor to GE chief executive Jeffrey Immelt.  ”I advised on strategy, policy and communications, and helped lead work on two reports issued by McKinsey’s education practice on the achievement gap and on elevating the teaching profession in the US. At Burson, I advised clients on external communications and reputation matters, and helped with client development,” Miller says.

For me, Miller has long been among the worst of the professional centrists, eagerly jumping on any passing bandwagon that conventional wisdom has deemed sensible. What I did not realize how often he was getting fat checks to take those opinions.

I have to admit that I was caught off guard by the McKinsey/ed reform connection, not because it was unbelievable but because it seemed almost too apt to be true. I've already discussed McKinsey from the David Coleman side while Joseph has talked about the company's comical health care study. Here's Barry Ritholtz on McKinsey's overall record and culture:

McKinsey, the global consulting firm, has created dubious strategies for all manners of companies ranging from Enron to General Electric. Indeed, where ever there has been a financial disaster in the world, if you look around, somewhere in the background, McKinsey & Co. is nearby.

That’s a pretty significant accusation. But it is bore out by the track record of the firm. Some of the more questionable strategies of McKinsey:

• Advocating side pockets and off balance sheet accounting to Enron, it became known as “the firm that built Enron” (Guardian, BusinessWeek)

• Argued that NY was losing Derivative business to London, and should more aggressively pursue derivative underwriting  (Investment Dealers’ Digest)

• General Electric lost over $1 billion after following McKinsey’s advice in 2007 — just before the financial crisis hit. (The Ledger)

• Advising AT&T (Bell Labs invented cellphones) that there wasn’t much future to mobile phones (WaPo)

• Allstate reduced legitimate Auto claims payouts in a McK&Co strategem (Bloomberg, CNN NLB)

• Swissair went into bankruptcy after implementing a McKinsey strategy (BusinessWeek)

• British railway company Railtrack was advised to “reduce spending on infrastructure” — leading to a number of fatal accidents, and a subsequent collapse of Railtrack. (Property Week, the Independent)

No consulting firm that has been around as long as McKinsey has a blemish free record. But the total number of clusterf**ks and McKinsey foibles they are associated with goes on and on.

The question of today goes beyond the illegal insider trading of their former managing director — what is it about McKinsey that allows them to give some very awful, legally questionable advice, and yet escape blame?

Probably the same way a journalist does it and manages to keep his reputation.

When it comes to technology journalism, reports of progress don't have to be directionally accurate

First the disclaimer: I have a number of friends and relatives who, for reasons of age or vision, do not or cannot drive. For these people, a self-driving car would be a tremendous, life-changing technology. That reason alone more than justifies the time and money going into this research.

Still, as eager as I am to see this realized, I am completely sick of the Pavlovian coverage it invariably generates. Every year or so, Google calls a press conference and the tech reporters start to salivate. This latest example is particularly embarrassing:

Whether we like it or not, self-driving cars are coming. Soon. Perhaps sooner than we may think. Research and development by Google has been going on for some time, but now the technology giant has revealed its latest project: its own self-driving car prototype. In the past, Google used the Toyota Prius and Audi TT as the test bed for this technology. Its latest prototype is just a two-seater and has a top speed of only 25 mph.

There is no steering wheel, gas or brake pedals, just a display screen showing the planned route and buttons to start and stop. The interior is limited to two seats with seatbelts and a space for passenger’s belongings.

I apologize for another ddulite tirade but in commercial and public policy discussions, technology needs to be evaluated in terms of functionality and costs. Being more advanced means doing more and, if possible, doing it for less. At least based on the short version you get in most news stories, Google's new approach represents a far less technologically ambitious project. Compared with their earlier prototypes, their current cars have more limited functionality, less compatibility and are constrained to a very low speed.

That's not to say that Google isn't making progress (I'm sure they are) nor an I saying that focusing on this less ambitious approach won't, in the long run, actually lead to faster progress (we often end up getting more done when we don't try to do too much too soon). It is, however, difficult to see how, in and of itself, switching over to prototypes that require customized cars and which simply avoid the thorny problem of going from automated to manual and back again suggests an advance.. .

Just to be clear, the point of this post isn't to criticize Google or its X lab. First because, barring strong evidence to the contrary, I'm going to assume these are smart people who know what they're doing and second because, even if I doubted their competence, I wouldn't be qualified to discuss what they were doing wrong.

All I know, as the saying goes, is what I read in the papers, but that's the problem. The story I read doesn't seem to support the conclusions the reporters drew.

Weekend blogging: before the man with no name, there was...

My first thought on first seeing Yojimbo years ago was that Kurosawa had been watching a lot of spaghetti westerns. Then I remember which came first...

This time it's different

Adriene Hill had a strangely schizophrenic story yesterday (CLASSROOM TECH: A HISTORY OF HYPE AND DISAPPOINTMENT). It came with the ominous title Classroom Tech: a History of Hype and Disappointment and the first half lived up to the claim:

That’s been the story of technology in the classroom, pretty much from the start. Great hope, ambition, and expense. Followed by disappointment.

Back in 1922, for instance, Thomas Edison thought he'd figured out the future of education.

“I believe that the motion picture is destined to revolutionize our education system,” he said, according to Larry Cuban's  Teachers and Machines: The Classroom Use of Technology Since 1920, “and that in a few years it will supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks.”

“Edison was a better inventor than prognosticator,” said Robert Reiser, Associate Dean for Research in the College of Education at Florida State University.

Films fizzled out. They were expensive. Projectors were unreliable. It was hard to find the right film for the right class.

Enter radio.

School boards and universities, even commercial networks like CBS and NBC, poured money into creating classroom broadcasts,  or  “textbooks of the air.” Then, said Reiser, “the enthusiasm died out.”

Next up were “teaching machines” with names like Cyclo Teacher, Instructocard, and the Edumator.

One of the best known was created by psychologist BF Skinner, in 1954. Here he is explaining the devices.

According to the 1962 book Teaching Machines and Programmed Learning, there were dozens of companies that made these devices in the early 60s.

Turns out buttons and levers weren’t a great way to learn.

Which brings us to television.

TV combined sight and sound, and could bring live events — like space missions — right into the classroom. It was also seen as one answer to the teacher shortage. The money poured in. The Ford Foundation invested millions into programming, according to Cuban's book. The federal government also pitched in cash. By 1971 more than $100 million had been poured into educational TV.

Again, the same story. “We see one medium after another coming along, a lot of enthusiasm for that medium, followed by disappointment in the extent to which that medium changed the nature of the instruction taking place in classrooms,” said Reiser.

So, when computers exploded into classrooms  in the early 80s, with basic video games like Oregon Trail.

And when, as Todd Oppenheimer writes in The Flickering Mind, the numbers of computers tripled between 1980 and 1982, and tripled again by 1984.

And when Time magazine ran a cover story called “Here Come the Microkids,” in 1982. Educators were skeptical.

At this point, for no apparent reason, the tone shifts radically.

But now, some are reconsidering. Maybe this time is different.

and

“We’re on the cusp now of that big revolution,” said Themistocles Sparangis, chief technology director at Los Angeles Unified School District. LA Unified has bet big on tech--a billion dollars big-- to give every student an iPad.

It turns out that Los Angeles schools Supt. John Deasy, who has a rather cozy relationship with Apple, paid more than he had to for those iPads and way more than he would have if other tablet makers had been allowed to bid. Furthermore, they didn't work as promised (particularly not the firewall) and -- here's the part that jumps out for me -- the team that put together the proposal didn't check the specs closely enough and later discovered the district had to come up with an additional $38 million for keyboards.

In past, I've used the term ddulites to describe people who are irrationally enamored with technology but who don't get the subtleties of thinking in terms of functionality. The LAUSD's iPad misadventure is a perfect example of the damage this approach can cause.

I firmly believe that educational technology can do great things, but the first step in achieving that potential requires keeping people like Deasy and Sparangis out of the process.

Bookable, readily bookable, semi-bookable, ebookable

While we're on the subject, Jeremy Kilpatrick of the University of Georgia has an interesting eye-witness take on the math reforms of the post Sputnik era. Check out the whole thing if you get a chance, but for now I'd like to focus on one section:

Lesson Two: Mathematical thinking is not bookable.

"Bookable" is a term used by publishers to describe the capability of a concept or mental process to be captured in print in a form that teachers will accept and can use. Many of the new math projects concentrated on bringing about reform primarily through the production of innovative materials. In particular, by providing sample textbooks for mathematics courses, the SMSG attempted to influence the commercial textbook publishing process, which would presumably then change how mathematics was taught. The SMSG author teams, by providing fewer problems for students to work, expected that those problems would be treated by teachers in greater depth and detail. The problem-solving process, however, proved not to be bookable. Books are not good at handling tentative hypotheses, erroneous formulations, blind alleys, or partial solutions. Teachers misunderstood what they were to do and called for more problems instead.

Max Beberman, in the new math materials he designed for the University of Illinois Committee on School Mathematics, attempted to incorporate into many lessons what he called guided discovery. Students would be led to see patterns in mathematical expressions and thus to arrive at generalizations that would not need to be made explicit in the materials (until a later lesson). The materials apparently worked well when restricted to teachers who had been trained in their use. When they were later published in the form of commercial textbooks, however, the guided discovery feature was greatly attenuated in order to capture a larger market.

Several recent curriculum projects have run into the same phenomenon. When efforts are made to encourage students to think about mathematical ideas rather than having them enshrined in a text, teachers who are not familiar with how those ideas might be handled criticize the books as incomplete and unsatisfactory. Textbooks are expected to contain authoritative rules, definitions, theorems, and solutions. Consequently, asking students to think about and formulate their own versions of these things rather than providing them ready-made can make a textbook unusable for many teachers.

There's an important point here but I don't think Kilpatrick quite nails it. For starters, speaking as someone who has recently been working with a number of students coming of different courses, grades and schools, I can attest that being familiar with the ideas doesn't always help and sometimes hurts (see Feynman for details). Until you've done it, you have no idea how distracting it can be to teach out of a text where the authors don't really understand the material.

In order to get get the concept into more usable form, let's introduce a couple of subcategories:

Semi-bookable.  These are concepts or mental processes that can be partly but not entirely captured in print in a form that teachers will accept and can use. For example, lots of people teach themselves a foreign language from a book, but the process is almost always supplemented by conversing and by listening to live or recorded speakers;

Readily bookable. Some ideas and processes are difficult to convey in print, either because they can be hard to express or because most textbook authors have a weak grasp of them and miss the subtleties. Feynman's critique hit this point heavily;

Ebookable. An idea or process that becomes much more readily or completely bookable with the introduction of other media.

I'll come back to this later, particularly with regard to why attempts to incorporate Pólya into math textbooks often go so badly.

What exactly are the stakes?

I want to be careful how I frame this, partly because it's a big, complicated question and partly because it would be easy to imply an extreme position that I do not hold.

All that said, there's a thought that's been nagging at me for years, particularly since I've been digging into the education reform debate. Over the Twentieth Century, America has swung from one pedagogical and curricular extreme to another. The data from these initiatives are confusing and inconclusive when we look at the various metrics we use to capture educational performance, but when we pull back and look at two of the big objectives we want the policies to accomplish, economic growth.and technological progress, it's difficult to see a clear relationship between how and what we teach kids and how well they do.

This table (from A Brief History of American K-12 Mathematics Education in the 20th Century by David Klein) really brought this home for me. One of the big and not entirely unreasonable drivers of the reaction to Sputnik was the belief that we had been neglecting math and science.

Percentages of U.S. High School Students Enrolled in Various Courses

School Year	Algebra	Geometry	Trigonometry
1909 to 1910	56.9%	30.9%	1.9%
1914 to 1915	48.8%	26.5%	1.5%
1921 to 1922	40.2%	22.7%	1.5%
1927 to 1928	35.2%	19.8%	1.3%
1933 to 1934	30.4%	17.1%	1.3%
1948 to 1949	26.8%	12.8%	2.0%
1952 to 1953	24.6%	11.6%	1.7%
1954 to 1955	24.8%	11.4%	2.6%

It has become fairly standard to use the number of and enrollment in advanced course as a measure of a school's quality. By this standard, American schools weren't just bad, they were horrible and they had been in steady decline for half a century. Looking at the numbers for the Thirties and Forties, this generation would appear to be woefully ill-prepared to deal with the STEM-heavy world of the late Twentieth Century, but of course they weren't. The students who graduated high school in the quarter century preceding Sputnik were responsible for an incredible period of across-the-board advances.

From  Dewey Progressivism to New Math to Back-to-Basics to the modern reform movement, we have applied all sorts of theories to our kids' education. I'm sure that, if we thought through the problem, sharpened our analytic tools and devoted adequate resources to the question,  we could definitively say that for a given student and a given goal a certain approach is best.

I just wondering how big the magnitude of those differences will be compared to the impact of other public policy developments.

Adding in base 8, counting by ten, and other reform fixations

With all of the usual caveats about small samples, I've been reading up on education reform movements past and present recently and I've noticed something. There seems to be a tendency to latch onto some interesting but non-essential concept and impose upon it considerable, even central importance. Mastering these concepts is often seen as necessary conditions for truly understanding the material, despite the generations of students who had managed to get by without them.

Counting by certain intervals and ELA concepts like close reading, and the distinction between perspective and point of view are a couple of examples associated with Common Core, but the richest stake might well belong to the New Math movement of the post-Sputnik era. Some of the concepts were extremely important in higher level math courses (such as set theory). Others (such as performing operations in bases other than ten or two) seldom came up  even for mathematicians.

It's worth noting that both Richard Feynman and Tom Lehrer singled out working in other bases when criticizing New Math, Lehrer in song and Feynman in memorably scornful prose:

I understood what they were trying to do. Many [Americans] thought we were behind the Russians after Sputnik, and some mathematicians were asked to give advice on how to teach math by using some of the rather interesting modern concepts of mathematics. The purpose was to enhance mathematics for the children who found it dull.

I'll give you an example: They would talk about different bases of numbers -- five, six, and so on -- to show the possibilities. That would be interesting for a kid who could understand base ten -- something to entertain his mind. But what they turned it into, in these books, was that every child had to learn another base! And then the usual horror would come: "Translate these numbers, which are written in base seven, to base five." Translating from one base to another is an utterly useless thing. If you can do it, maybe it's entertaining; if you can't do it, forget it. There's no point to it.

Part of the standard narrative about New Math was that the new concepts being introduced were too advanced and unfamiliar for teachers to handle or parents to accept, but in many cases, the greater tension was between authors of the reforms and the people who actually understood the math.

A good day for a recommendation

There is, of course, no such thing as the military perspective -- no single person can speak for all the men and women who have served in the military -- but if you are looking for a military perspective, my first choice would be Lt. Col. Robert Bateman who writes eloquently and intelligently on the subject for Esquire. Here are Bateman's recent thoughts on Memorial Day.

When the guns fell silent in the Spring of 1865, they all went home. They scattered across the country, back across the devastated south and the invigorated north. Then they made love to their wives, played with their children, found new jobs or stepped back into their old ones, and in general they tried to get on with their lives. These men were no longer soldiers; they were now veterans of the Civil War, never to wear the uniform again. But before long they started noticing that things were not as they had been before.

Now, they had memories of things that they could not erase. There were the friends who were no longer there, or who were hobbling through town on one or two pegs, or who had a sleeve pinned up on their chest. There were the nights that they could not shake the feeling that something really bad was about to happen. And, aside from those who had seen what they had seen and lived that life, they came to realize that they did not have a lot of people to talk to about these things. Those who had been at home, men and women, just did not "get it." A basic tale about life in camp would need a lot of explanation, so it was frustrating even to talk. Terminology like "what is a picket line" and "what do you mean oblique order?" and a million other elements, got in the way. These were the details of a life they had lived for years but which was now suddenly so complex that they never could get the story across to those who had not been there. Many felt they just could not explain about what had happened, to them, to their friends, to the nation.

So they started to congregate. First in little groups, then in statewide assemblies, and finally in national organizations that themselves took on a life of their own.

The Mid-1860s are a key period in American history not just because of the War of Rebellion, but also because this period saw the rise of "social organizations." Fraternities, for example, exploded in the post-war period. My own, Pi Kappa Alpha, was formed partially by veterans of the Confederacy, Lee's men (yes, I know, irony alert). Many other non-academic "fraternal" organizations got their start around the same time. By the late 1860s in the north and south there was a desire to commemorate. Not to celebrate, gloat or pine, but to remember.

Individually, at different times and in different ways, these nascent veterans groups started to create days to stop and reflect. These days were not set aside to mull on a cause -- though that did happen -- but their primary purpose was to think on the sacrifices and remember those lost. Over time, as different states incorporated these ideas into statewide holidays, a sort of critical legislative mass was achieved. "Decoration Day" was born, and for a long time that was enough. The date selected was, quite deliberately, a day upon which absolutely nothing of major significance had occurred during the entire war. Nobody in the north or south could try to change it to make it a victory day. It was a day for remembering the dead through decorating their graves, and the memorials started sprouting up in every small town in the nation. You still see them today, north and south, in small towns and villages like my own home of Chagrin Falls -- granite placed there so that the nation, and their homes, should not forget the sacrifices of the men who went away on behalf of the country and never came back.

Here's one for the Unqualified Offerings crowd...

I'm taking this with a small grain of salt (there are a couple of things in the Georgetown report that concern me a bit), but with those caveats I think we can call this a point for Thoreau and company.

High Unemployment Major #1:
Information Systems
Unemployment rate for recent grads: 14.7 percent*
In the digital age, it may seem as though all bachelor's degrees in the computer science field would be a safe bet. But numbers from the Georgetown Report suggest that this is not the case. In fact, the report found that recent grads in this major faced an unemployment rate of nearly 15 percent.
Why the depressing job prospects? The simple answer: Too many job applicants, not enough spots. "The market is saturated for this industry," says Hallie Crawford, a job search expert and certified career coach.
With the rise of technology, many people have opted to pursue information technology paths, says Crawford. And the influx of new candidates for positions within this field has made the job market very competitive, she says.

Here's what I'm taking away from most of these stories and from what I'm hearing from people in the STEM job market:

The world of the STEM job hunter is brighter than that of the non-STEM crowd, but much dimmer than you've been told;

Because many of these specialties are fairly narrow, a small increase in supply or decrease in demand can gut the market (see above);

Even in hot, high-demand fields, fewer people are making big bucks than you might think. "Only 4 percent of software developers in the burgeoning app economy have made over a million dollars. Three-quarters of them made less than $30,000."*;

You hear stories about companies willing to do anything to acquire talented people and keep them happy. At best these examples are unrepresentative. At worst, they're fraudulent.

I would certainly encourage people with any interest in the field to go into one of the STEM fields. The subjects are interesting and you can probably get a pretty good job, but keep your expectations reasonable, your debt low and, whatever you do, don't believe the hype.


* I'm willing to bet you dinner that most of that 4% got a significant portion of that million through their talents as entrepreneurs, investors or managers.

Weekend blogging -- Memorial Day Roger Corman Marathon

I was having a cup of coffee and a cookie this evening at a place on Beverly I frequent a lot. The bakery's first rate, the coffee's good and I have no trouble picking up the wifi from the Starbucks next do. I happened to look at the theater across the street and the marquee read "Roger Corman and Joe Dante in Person." That sort of thing happens to you when you live in LA.

Unfortunately, none of the Poe films appear to be available for streaming but Hulu does have a few worth checking out. Roger Corman never made a bad film under the circumstances, and even when the circumstances were particularly dire, he always did something interesting.

A Bucket Of Blood (1959)

Though Little Shop (also included here) gets more attention, I think this is the better movie, largely due to the rare lead by beloved character actor Dick Miller.




The Little Shop of Horrors (1960)

Still, you do have to give this one its props, shot in a couple of days for $30K. A pretty good little film in absolute terms but amazing when you realize what he had to work with.








The Terror (1963)

In some ways an even more impressive example of high speed, low cost movie making. Though there are differing accounts, most go something like this: when he realized that the film The Raven was going to wrap up three days early so he had Leo Gordon* write a script over the weekend. They started shooting that Monday, scheduling shots based on which part of the set was supposed to be torn down next.





* Gordon is more familiar to movie and TV fans as a menacing character actor in countless shows like Andy Griffith and Maverick, but he was also a highly successful self-taught writer. He had learned the craft while reading most of the books in the San Quentin library while serving time for armed robbery.

Can nobody work out the incentives?

I hate to do the both sides are out to lunch meme, but this response to the Levitt/Dubner/Noah Smith health care plan missed the main point: 

The L/D plan would, in its majestic equality, allow the affluent person with a well-stuffed savings account and the low wager-earner drowning in debt alike to set aside $1,000 for health care expenses and to take the risk of incurring 4 grand of debt through events they have little or no control over. Indeed, their always-smarmy tone (“if they are being prudent”) suggests that the point of the plan is not so much health care provision as setting up a cheap moral lesson in thrift, a lesson that not coincidentally will be much easier for people similarly situated to Levitt than for the ordinary working person in 2014 to pass.

But let’s assume arguendo that we should ignore questions of equity, and also assume that the only relevant question is trying to determine how to collectively spend health care dollars in the most efficient manner. Even on its own terms, the plan doesn’t make sense. The L/D wouldn’t disincentivize health care spending per se; it would massively disincentivize seeking cheap preventive care. If you get regular check-ups, it costs you money; if you save money by skipping checkups and get an illness that could have prevented, the costs are largely paid collectively. In other words, the L/D plan discourages the most cont-effective forms of care while doing little to discourage the least cost-effective. Even on its on terms, I don’t see how this plan makes any sense.

Cheap preventative care isn't where this system is going to go wrong.  Nor is it in the poor equality properties of the law, as some young people might end up ahead on total revenue (while others get crushed).  behind the veil of ignorance it isn't clear how it will all work out.

Now let's look at this plan:

On January 1 of each year, the British government would mail a check for 1,000 pounds to every British resident. They can do whatever they want with that money, but if they are being prudent, they might want to set it aside to cover out-of-pocket health care costs. In my system, individuals are now required to pay out-of-pocket for 100 percent of their health care costs up to 2,000 pounds, and 50 percent of the costs between 2,000 pounds and 8,000 pounds. The government pays for all expenses over 8,000 pounds in a year. 

So you have two efficiency problems here.  One is that you now have a whole bunch of extra paperwork and IT to track where people are on the cost spectrum.  Do we mail people bills after we determine if they have not hit the cap?  What about people will marginal addresses and living situations.  You are replacing a cheap system with average outcomes with one that is immediately more complicated to administer. 

But where this will go terribly wrong is for those people who go over 8,000 pounds per year.  Did you notice that piece where the government pays for all expenses over 8,000 pounds.  How do we know that these costs are acceptable?  After all, every single hip replacement might exceed 8,000 pounds in expenses.  How do we know if we are getting ripped off? 

So you end up needing to do the same schedule of acceptable costs as any socialized medical system has.  This rather removes the benefit of the free market in setting prices, as you have a single payer for all expensive conditions.  Will hospitals not offer free parking to get people to have a procedure at their (more expensive) hospital?  Why would the patient say no?  Altruism?

Even worse, this makes outcomes worse for patients with chronic conditions, at least until they hit the 8,000 pound ceiling in any year (and note the billing issues here -- if people have to pay and be reimbursed there can be a liquidity issue).  Now these people pay 4,500 pounds with a 1,000 pound subsidy.  Hopefully nobody will have trouble paying the 3,500 pounds per year?  That is around $450 a month -- what if the worker gets $5 an hour? 

And this gets back to the most important issue -- these people completely misunderstand the whole idea of insurance.  We insure against risks that exceed our ability to pay.  Is 3,5000 pounds a sum that every British person could pay without hardship?  A cost of zero would make it possible for everyone to be able to afford health care, regardless of financial circumstance.

Now, what I want to make exceedingly clear is that the nation with the highest private sector portion of payments also has the highest public sector as well, as even libertarian Megan McArdle notes:

A lot of people seem to think that "per-capita government spending" means "spending per person covered by government insurance." That's understandable, but wrong. "Per-capita government spending" means "government spending on health care per U.S. citizen." In other words, we spend as much to cover a fraction of our population as other governments spend to cover everyone. So pointing out that Medicare beneficiaries cost more on average than younger people is true but irrelevant. We spend more covering old people, poor people and veterans than many other governments spend to cover all those people, plus the rest of the population.

 So if you are advising the English on health care reform, why would you suggest the politically unpopular move of putting more "skin in the game" when the country that does the most of this ends up paying more money (out of government revenues) to cover fewer people?  And England allows private health care, so the benefits of a more private system (over and above current options) isn't absolutely clear. 

Finally, there is the issue of prioritization.  Is the NHS really the biggest policy challenge that the UK faces?  Is it in the top 10?  Now it is possible that innovation is under-supported by this approach.  Of course, they could simply increase research grants, if this was thought to be the most important issue.

But wouldn't issues like persistent unemployment and industrial decline be better places to focus efforts?  And how would increasing the government's expenditure on health care (likely financed by higher taxes) work to improve these issues?  Or is it expending political capital on an experiment that might well not work out to reduce costs? 

A pretty good one-page intro to New Math

Not what you'd call 'in  depth,' of course, but this primer by Calley Connelly of MSU Bozeman does a pretty good job hitting the major points and players.

Update: For something more in depth, try this and of course this.