Land of the Pyramids

I can't quite give this TPM/Slice article on multilevel marketing of dietary supplements an unqualified recommendation (for this and other reasons), but it's worth reading.

You can find a better treatment of multilevel marketing from the good people at This American Life (specifically Bianca Giaever and Brian Reed). And, if you really want to get deep into the weeds, check out this video from the Internet Archive...

Then follow the link to see what became of that Nutrilite.

Damn you, Jessica Williams!

God as my witness, I was working on a post about how open carry laws like this have have huge de facto exceptions.

The Daily Show
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Coming attractions

This is Joseph

Mathbabe (Cathy O'Neil) has been on a roll lately.  Expect to see some comments on her recent articles coming up in the weeks to come (Mark has an impressive queue at the moment).  In the meantime, one could do worse than to check her out.

Good cop, bad cop

Quick recommendation. I thought this TPM analysis of the McKinney, Texas incident by a former policeman turned law professor did an excellent job comparing the responses of the different officers on the scene. Obviously there's a limit to what you can tell from this video, but the difference certainly appears stark.

The issue isn't (just) excessive CEO pay

Nothing particularly new here, but it does reinforce the argument that current levels of CEO pay are impossible to justify even if you ignore the inequality question and limit yourself to value added to the company. 

The best-paid chief executive of a large American company was David Zaslav, head of Discovery Communications, the pay-TV channel operator that is home to "Shark Week." His total compensation more than quadrupled to $156.1 million in 2014 after he extended his contract.

Les Moonves, of CBS, held on to second place in the rankings, despite a drop in pay from a year earlier. His pay package totaled $54.4 million.

The remaining four CEOs, from entertainment giants Viacom, Walt Disney, Comcast and Time Warner, have ranked among the nation's highest-paid executives for at least four years, according to the Equilar/AP pay study.

One reason for the high level of pay in the industry is that its CEOs are dealing with well-paid individuals.

"The talent, the actors and directors and writers, they're being paid a lot of money," said Steven Kaplan, a professor of finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. "In industries where the talent makes a lot of money, the CEO makes a lot of money as well."

Pay packages for CEOs overall grew for the fifth straight year in 2014, driven by a rising stock market that pushed up the value of executive stock awards. Median compensation for the heads of Standard & Poor's 500 companies rose to a record $10.6 million, up from $10.5 million the year before, according to the Equilar/AP pay study.

Peer pressure is another factor driving up executive compensation. The board members responsible for setting CEO pay typically consider what the heads of similar companies are making. If pay for one goes up, it will likely go up for others.

For the chieftains of media, there are also other factors boosting pay.

Several work at companies where a few major shareholders control the vote.

The media magnate Sumner Redstone controls almost 80 percent of the voting stock at CBS and Viacom. Because of his large holdings, Redstone can easily override the concerns of other investors about the level of CEO pay. Discovery's voting stock is heavily influenced by the brothers Si and Donald Newhouse and John Malone, another influential investor in the media industry.

At Comcast, which owns NBC and Universal Studios, CEO and Chairman Brian Roberts controls a third of his company's voting stock. That means he has substantial influence on the pay that he is awarded.

Comcast had no comment when contacted by the AP for this story.

What strikes me in these cases is the lack of correlation. You can make a good case that Moonves brings more than $54.4 million of value, but I'm not sure you can say that for any of the other names on the list. Zaslav is still being paid top dollar for a run that appears to be over. Iger got enormously lucky with Marvel (and you have to wonder how much longer that run will continue). Those, in turn, are more defensible than Roberts of Comcast, a company that proves that no amount of bad management can sink a de facto monopoly.

What happens when someone actually tests one of Nathan Myhrvold's culinary tips?

Myhrvold's wine tip doesn't appear to hold up.

From over at the food blog,

Privacy in and out of the classroom

This is Joseph.

From Dean Dad's comments section on a discussion of a taped conversation at Kennesaw showing an advisor acting poorly towards the student:

You will have a hard time getting and keeping good employees if you always assume that a selected video clip like that one indicates a pattern of behavior rather than a response to repeated misbehavior that even extensive training cannot always eliminate. As a man, you might not be aware of how often women on a campus are disrespected by male students when they do the same things that men do in a classroom or an office.

I am not in complete agreement with this perspective.  But I do agree that it is dangerous to use a minute long video clip (that one party knew was happening and the other did not) as a proxy for the entire interaction. 

This sort of "selective sampling" is likely to become a bigger and bigger problem as the ability to record in public becomes more and more trivial.  What do you do when it's not just phones that can record but eyeglasses as well?  But the ability to edit out previous interactions and to control the timing of the recording can be a powerful tool to drive the conversation. 

Just one more point to ponder.

Revisiting the SNAP challenge

We've already established that Trader Joe's is not where you want to shop if you have to live on a food stamp budget, but is it even possible to stave off hunger for a week with $28 worth of Trader Joe's groceries?

Yes, but just barely.

The internet has made historical revisionism so much easier

[UPDATE: Brad DeLong found an arguably more embarrassing example from the National Journal.]


This may be the best example of New York Times political reporting you will see you all day.

It started as a standard narrative journalism/puff piece. Amy Chozick and Trip Gabriel used a handful of anecdotes and a couple of well-received speeches to build a breathless account of political underdog Carly Fiorina surging toward the lead.

Hack political writers love this narrative. They also gravitate toward positive stories about candidates with whom they are comfortable. When I say "comfortable" I am talking about culture not politics. I will try to back this up in future posts, but I have long argued that left/right biases are far less common than more significant biases involving class, race, religion, region, education, etc. While the New York Times probably disagrees with most of Fiorina's politics, they are more than comfortable with almost everything else about her, from her prominent family to her CEO background to her wealth and extravagant lifestyle.

So far, all of this is just another day at the office for the New York Times election beat. Soon after the piece ran, however, people started to notice that the writers had really buried their lede. Deep in the story, it was revealed that Fiorina's surge was not quite as substantial as the headline suggested.

From paragraph 8 (as pointed out by Duncan Black):

While supporters in Iowa noted that she had doubled her standing in state polls, it was a statistically insignificant change from 1 percent to 2 percent, according to a Quinnipiac University Poll released May 6. (That may seem piddling, but the same poll had Mr. Santorum, who won the Iowa caucuses in 2012, also at 2 percent, while 5 percent supported Mr. Bush.)

It is one thing to have a paragraph in the middle of your story that completely undercuts your premise; it is quite another to have people point out a paragraph in the middle of your story that completely undercuts your premise. A quick rewrite was definitely in order.

The resulting headline doesn't make a lot of sense -- if the polls are a reflection of the state's voters, Iowans appear to be swoon-shrugging over Fiorina -- but it does partially inoculate the story from further mockery.

Of course, the NYT has standards. They don't just rewrite a published story without even acknowledging it. The original headline is right there at the bottom of the page.

In small print and pale gray letters.

Yes, I am taking the pro side here on autonomous vehicles

In a comment on my recent relatively positive post on autonomous vehicles, Joseph points us to a Megan McArdle article that takes a different view.

While it is good to see that the conventional wisdom is starting to acknowledge some of limitations with driverless cars, I still have quite a few problems with the piece. McArdle makes some good points about the labor implications, but she does not seem to have a strong grasp of the technological or the implementation issues involved with using autonomous vehicles for long-haul trucking. We can get back to implementation later; for now let's talk about tech.

Here's McArdle:

You hear a lot about how Google cars have driven an amazing number of miles without accidents. You hear less, however, about how they have achieved this feat: by 3-D mapping every inch of those roads so that the car has a database of every stationary object, from traffic lights to guardrails. That allows the car to devote its processing power to analyzing the movement of objects that aren't in its database.

Such mapping is incredibly labor intensive, which is why, according to Lee Gomes, those amazing mile counts that Google's driverless cars are racking up "are the same few thousand mapped miles, driven over and over again." Most of them are near Google's headquarters in Mountain View, a place that gets only 15 inches of rain a year and never has snow or ice -- three common weather hazards that long-haul truckers must frequently contend with.

Just getting Google's technology to a point where we could have self-driving trucks would require mapping every inch of the nation's more than 164,000 miles worth of highways. But then what do you do with the truck? You're probably going to have to map some of the roads that connect to those highways too. And then constantly remap them, because things change all the time. You'll also have to teach the computer system what to do in a blinding snowstorm on Wolf Creek Pass. As we wrote in January, "The technology giant doesn’t intend to offer a self-driving car to areas where it snows in the near term."

McArdle makes a couple of common mistakes: assuming that, because Google dominates the coverage of driverless cars, it also dominates the research (which we'll get to later); and assuming that what is difficult for humans is difficult for robots and vice versa.

Rain and snow are problematic for us humans both because they can limit visibility and because they tend to create very complex physics problems that have to be solved in a fraction of a second. Bad weather visibility is much less of an issue with autonomous vehicles* than it is with human drivers while classical physics problems are the sort of thing that roboticists are very good at.

Along similar lines, McArdle observes [emphasis added] "But it seems like getting from there to fully automated trucks--necessarily huge, heavy, and  capable of horrific damage, with handling capabilities that change depending on the load, and a stopping distance almost twice that of a car at high speeds, will probably take a while." Yes, this will take a while, but not for the reasons McArdle imagines. Load effects and long stopping distance do make truck driving much more difficult for humans, but for computers they just represent simply another set of parameters. Furthermore, the biggest factor in real-life stopping distance is often reaction time, an area where computers have a distinct advantage.

Nor does the fair-weather testing complaint hold up. It is true that Google has largely limited its testing to clement conditions, but you certainly can't say the same for the upcoming Volvo test in, you know, Sweden.

Google's PR department has done a masterful job identifying the company with autonomous vehicles. This is not simply a matter of corporate ego. As I said earlier:

Google has a lot of reasons to want to be seen as a diversified, broadly innovative technology company, rather than as a very good one-trick pony cashing in on a monopoly (possibly two monopolies depending on how you want to count YouTube). A shiny reputation helps to keep stock prices high and regulators at bay.

It is enormously telling that McArdle cites Google ten times in her article while she doesn't mention Daimler by name and she never refers to Volvo at all.

* As far as I can tell, Daimler's prototype is doing its mapping independently in real time. While impressive, I'm sure the production models will share data and will also rely on existing maps.

CLEPs and MOOCs

Dean Dad makes a tremendously important point about MOOCs:

As a commenter correctly noted, there’s nothing stopping someone now from taking a MOOC in a “gen ed” area and then taking a CLEP exam to get credit.  CLEP fees are often lower than even community college tuition.  The ASU model is a more expensive and clunkier version of CLEP.  The MOOC-to-CLEP option has existed for a couple of years now, but students haven’t taken advantage in significant numbers.  

In case you're not familiar:

The College Level Examination Program (CLEP) is a group of standardized tests created and administered by College Board. These tests assess college-level knowledge in thirty-six subject areas and provide a mechanism for earning college credits without taking college courses. They are administered at more than 1,700 sites (colleges, universities, and military installations) across the United States. There are about 2,900 colleges which grant CLEP credit. Each institution awards credit to students who meet the college's minimum qualifying score for that exam, which is typically 50 to 60 out of a possible 80, but varies by site and exam. These tests are useful for individuals who have obtained knowledge outside the classroom, such as through independent study, homeschooling, job experience, or cultural interaction; and for students schooled outside the United States. They provide an opportunity to demonstrate proficiency in specific subject areas and bypass undergraduate coursework. Many take CLEP exams because of their convenience and low cost (typically $15) compared to a semester of coursework for comparable credit.

I plan to spend a lot of time this summer writing about better using CLEPs  and improving MOOCs. For now though, I want to get a couple of big points.

The Internet has a way of producing deceptively large numbers. This has certainly been true with MOOCs. Articles have breathlessly reported huge enrollments despite the fact that for online classes enrollment is an almost meaningless statistic. When we have tried to assign meaningful metrics to online classes, they have tended to do very poorly. CLEP-usage would appear to be another example.

CLEP exams are a well-established, easy, and cheap way for students to get college credit for taking online courses, but very few seem to be taking advantage of it. That's a bad sign, but it does suggest a way forward.

Now, just to be clear, I am not saying that CLEP tests are a perfect solution for this problem – – I am certain we could come up with a better system, particularly once we have some experience to build on – but for the time being these exams are probably our best option and the fact that we're not seriously exploring them indicates a deeper lack of seriousness about MOOCs.

Tired blood and Nazi superman vitamin pills

One of the reasons I enjoy going through old pop culture ephemera is the perspective it can give on the way popular thinking has evolved or, in some cases, stayed the same. Check out the topics a popular comic book superhero chose when making conversation in 1945.

Having spent a lot of time recently going through food related ads and instructional films, I've noticed a strong mid-Twentieth Century fascination with the scientific basis of nutrition. Much of this expressed itself as pseudo-science, but it was driven by a string of real breakthroughs. Remember, he very concept of a vitamin was largely a Twentieth Century discovery.

From Wikipedia:

The discovery dates of the vitamins and their sources

Year of discovery	Vitamin	Food source
1910	Vitamin B1 (Thiamine)	Rice bran
1913	Vitamin A (Retinol)	Cod liver oil
1920	Vitamin C (Ascorbic acid)	Citrus, most fresh foods
1920	Vitamin D (Calciferol)	Cod liver oil
1920	Vitamin B2 (Riboflavin)	Meat, dairy products, eggs
1922	(Vitamin E) (Tocopherol)	Wheat germ oil, unrefined vegetable oils
1926	Vitamin B12 (Cobalamins)	Liver, eggs, animal products
1929	Vitamin K1 (Phylloquinone)	Leaf vegetables
1931	Vitamin B5 (Pantothenic acid)	Meat, whole grains, in many foods
1931	Vitamin B7 (Biotin)	Meat, dairy products, eggs
1934	Vitamin B6 (Pyridoxine)	Meat, dairy products
1936	Vitamin B3 (Niacin)	Meat, grains
1941	Vitamin B9 (Folic acid)	Leaf vegetables

It is easy to see how all of this got people thinking about vitamins as an almost mystical cure-all. Even instructional US govt. films included lines like "The Nazis are supposed to have a superman vitamin pill." Of course, the mystique of the vitamin combined with the marketing power of television presented huge profit potential.




After vitamins, food advertisements loved to talk about 'energy.' They were always vague about exactly what they meant by the word but they wanted you to know their products were packed with it.

Companies even promoted dextrose as healthy.

It's easy to mock, but you have to remember how fast nutritional science was advancing. We've had decades to process this information and I'm not sure we're doing that much better.

Dining tip – when eating out with Maureen Dowd, don't share an appetizer

Given her attitude toward people in the service industry, I would be nervous about what goes on in the kitchen.

Brad DeLong handles today's garbage collection.

Why Don't New York Times Writers Possess Any Awareness of Their Presentation-of-Self?

Before we talk about 21st Century technology...

...we need to spend some time thinking about the 20th Century technology that got us here.

A controlled-access highway provides an unhindered flow of traffic, with no traffic signals, intersections or property access. They are free of any at-grade crossings with other roads, railways, or pedestrian paths, which are instead carried by overpasses and underpasses across the highway. Entrances and exits to the highway are provided at interchanges by slip roads (ramps), which allow for speed changes between the highway and arterial roads and collector roads. On the controlled-access highway, opposing directions of travel are generally separated by a median strip or central reservation containing a traffic barrier or grass. Elimination of the sources of potential conflicts with other directions of travelers dramatically improves safety, fuel consumption, and travel times.

It turns out that many of the innovations mid-20th Century engineers came up with to maximize throughput (controlled access, divided lanes, etc.) also tend to make the jobs of today's engineers much easier when it comes to autonomous vehicles. This relationship between technologies will be a big factor when we get back to this.

Jack Shafer, poster child [repost]

You might have heard about Bruce Bartlett's recent paper on the effect that Fox News has had on the Republican Party. I don't entirely agree but it makes some interesting points about the way information flow affects politics.

The paper raises serious questions not just about Fox but about the entire journalistic ecosystem. For a long time and for a variety of reasons, major mainstream outlets like the New York Times and Politico have been reluctant to call Fox out on its most egregious lapses (these days, the news media is pretty much one long row of glass houses).

It's not surprising that Politico media apologist Jack Shafer took umbrage. If you really want to read Shafer's comments, you can find a link in this piece by Eric Boehlert, but, before you do, I would recommend that you take a few minutes to review Shafer's rather... flexible standards for journalistic quality and ethics.



More on journalistic tribalism
from WEDNESDAY, APRIL 3, 2013

Having brought up the charge in a previous post, I should probably take a minute to spell out exactly what I'm talking about. I'm using a very broad reading of the term 'tribalism' (perhaps so broad I should say something like 'tribalism and other social psych phenomena'). The traits I'm thinking of include:

1. Us/them mentality;

2. Excessive reliance on in-group social norms;

3. Deferring to and preserving hierarchies;

and as a consequence

4,   A tendency to use different standards to judge interactions based on the relative positions of the parties.

There is inevitably going to be a degree of subjectivity when deciding who goes where in the hierarchy, but I think it's fairly safe to say that Maureen Dowd and (till his death) Michael Kelly were in the innermost circle with writers like David Brooks and most prominent, established Washington and, to a lesser degree, New York journalists fairly close.

In this tribal model, it makes perfect sense that Politico would view Chris Hughes' (outsider) request for a small change in the copy of Timothy Noah (insider) as a major affront. It also explains Politico's attacks on Nate Silver (outsider) when his work started making established pundits (insiders) look bad.

The press corps's treatment of Al Gore in 2000 is another case in point. Following the lead of Dowd and Kelly and reinforced by a general dislike of the candidate, the group quickly established social norms that justified violating the most basic standards of accuracy and fairness.

The poster child for this kind of journalistic tribalism is Jack Shafer, or at least he was a few years ago when I was first experimenting with blogging. One of my main topics was the press's inability to face up to its problems and Shafer was the gift that kept on giving (I haven't read him much since). That blog is gone now but I still have my notes so here are some highlights.

Shafer was openly disdainful of readers and generally dismissive of their interests which is an extraordinary starting point for a journalism critic. Consider this passage from the aptly named "Why I Don't Trust Readers"

I'm all for higher standards, but I draw the line when journalists start getting more complaints about less serious professional lapses. Serious: Plagiarism, willful distortion, pattern of significant errors, bribe-taking. Not serious: campaign donations in the low three-figures for reporters distant from that beat; appearance of conflict of interest; a point of view; friendships with the rich and powerful.

First, notice the first item on the list. Plagiarism is certainly a serious offense, but the other serious offenses are the sort of things that can destroy people's lives, conceal crimes and enable corruption. Even more interesting is what didn't make the list: unintentional distortion due to laziness or bias; patterns of minor errors; isolated cases of serious errors due to negligence; selective reporting (as long as it doesn't rise to the level of distortion); failure to dig into important aspects of a story; cozy relationships with subjects as long as it doesn't involve the quid pro quo of a bribe.

What's important here was the victimology. In plagiarism, the primary victim is a fellow journalist. In all of these other cases, the primary victim is either the subject or the reader. Shafer was a tribalist and his main objective was almost always the defense of his tribe and its hierarchy.

There's a remarkable inverse correlation between the rank of Shafer's subjects and the harshness with which he treats them.  This is particularly apparent when different subjects of the same article have different positions. Shafer provided an excellent example when he wrote a post complaining about liberals writing books that actually called conservatives liars in the titles.

The books were Al Franken, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them,  Joe Conason's Big Lies and David Corn's The Lies of George W. Bush. Of these three, Conason was something of a pariah (Shafer dismissed him as a Clinton apologist) and Franken was clearly a journalistic outsider. Corn, on the other hand, was very much an insider in the Washington press corp (Shafer even described him as a friend in the post).

Under these circumstances, it's not surprising that Shafer finds a way to shield Corn from much of the blast.

This criticism applies more to Franken and Conason than it does Corn—you can't expect a book about Bush's lies to also be about Clinton's lies. And Corn acknowledges in his intro that Bush isn't the first White House liar and that Clinton lied, too. 

Of course, you could easily make a similar but more persuasive argument in Franken's behalf. Lies was largely focused on the relationship between the GOP and conservative media and since the book was published in 2003 when there was no Air America and MSNBC was just starting to experiment with liberal programming, there was no way to provide similar examples on the left.  Just to be clear, I'm not making that argument; I'm only saying that it's just as viable as the one makes for Corn.

For an even more dramatic bit of paired data, consider two obituaries Shafer wrote, separated by only a few months. The first was for Walter Annenberg, best known as a philanthropist and founder of TV Guide. The second was for Michael Kelly, journalist and former editor of the New Republic. Once again there's a clear hierarchical distance between the subjects: Annenberg, though decades earlier a power in publishing and to his death a major force in philanthropy, was not a journalistic insider; Kelly, on the other hand was about as inside as you can get.

As you've probably guessed by now, Shafer's approach to these two obituaries differs sharply. Though they don't fully capture the difference, the epitaphs give a good indication of the respective tones:

Michael Kelly: "Husband. Father. Journalist"

Walter Annenberg: "Billionaire Son of Mobster, Enemy of Journalism, and Nixon Toady Exits for Hell—Forced To Leave Picassos and van Goghs at Metropolitan Museum."

The contrast is sharpest when Shafer addresses journalistic scandals and cozy relationships with controversial right wing politicians, areas where there are definite parallels between the two men. Shafer actually explains away the New Republic/Glass scandal as an instance of Kelly being too loyal for his own good.

Shafer often judges figures on the periphery of the journalistic establishment based on a much higher standard than "Plagiarism, willful distortion, pattern of significant errors, bribe-taking." For someone like Larry King, a few disputable errors and minor discrepancies (such as changing the date of an incident from 1972 to 1971 when retelling an anecdote) merit an entire column. (It's worth noting that this column ran in the middle of 2009, a period when the coverage of politics, the economy and the European crisis were raising all sorts of journalistic questions, questions that didn't get a lot of space in Shafer's column. This raises the issue of trivialism in media criticism -- see On the Media for a myriad of examples -- but that's a topic for another thread.)

If marginal figures committing minor offenses are treated harshly by Shafer, what happens when someone at the top of the hierarchy does something that Shafer normally considers a serious offense like plagiarism? We got an answer to that one when Maureen Dowd was caught lifting a passage from Josh Marshall.

Here's her explanation in Bloggasm:

“i was talking to a friend of mine Friday about what I was writing who suggested I make this point, expressing it in a cogent — and I assumed spontaneous — way and I wanted to weave the idea into my column. but, clearly, my friend must have read josh marshall without mentioning that to me. we’re fixing it on the web, to give josh credit, and will include a note, as well as a formal correction tomorrow.”

And here Shafer explains why it's not so bad:

1. She responded promptly to the charge of plagiarism when confronted by the Huffington Post and Politico. (Many plagiarists go into hiding or deny getting material from other sources.)

2. She and her paper quickly amended her column and published a correction (although the correction is a little soft for my taste).

3. Her explanation of how the plagiarism happened seems plausible—if a tad incomplete.

4. She's not yet used the explanation as an excuse, nor has she said it's "time to move on."

5. She's not yet protested that her lifting wasn't plagiarism.

6. She's taking her lumps and not whining about it.

And here was my response at the time:

1. 'Responded.' Not to be confused with 'confessed,' 'owned up,' 'took responsibility,' or any phrase that uses a form of the word 'plagiarism.'
2. "[A] little soft"?
3. Yeah, near verbatim quotes make it through convoluted processes all the time.
4. "[M]y friend must have read josh marshall without mentioning that to me." -- What exactly would an excuse look like?
5. No, she just implied it wasn't plagiarism. That definitely gives her the moral high ground.
6. What a trooper.

(I apologize for the tone. I was in a snarky phase, but I'm trying to play nicer these days.)

I've spent a lot of time on Shafer because he's a good example,  I was familiar with his work and, as a media critic, he has an important role in journalism's self-correction process, but he's is not an isolated case, nor is he the worst of bunch (particularly not since the rise of Politico).

The point of all this is that journalism has a problem with tribalism and other social dynamics. These things are affecting objectivity, credibility and quality. What's worse, journalists seem to have so internalized the underlying mindset to such a degree that most of them don't even realize what's going on.