Thoughts on the NYT's attempt to reboot the Airport franchise

I first heard about this through Brad DeLong who did, I will admit, have me going until I clicked through the link to this James Fallows piece. Fallows, following the lead of Gene Weingarten and Jim Romenesko*, had some questions about this dramatic account entitled "The Plane Was About to Crash. Now What?" by Noah Gallagher Shannon.

Actually, 'dramatic' is  not really an apt description. A better word would be 'melodramatic/' complete with details like

The captain came out of the cockpit and stood in the aisle. His cap dangled in one hand. “All electricity will remain off,” he said. Something about an open current and preventing a cabin fire. Confused noises spread through the cabin, but no one said a word. “I’ll yell the rest of my commands from the cockpit.” I could see sweat stains under his arms. “Not going to sugarcoat it,” he said. “We’re just going to try to land it.”

(it later came out that the plane was an Airbus 320 which is a large enough plane to raise questions about the shouting-over-your-shoulder means of communication.)

Lots of these detail raised questions, particularly with real aviation experts like Patrick Smith, who demolished the NYT piece until there was little left than a pile of phonemes, then followed up by talking to someone who actually had access to the maintenance record:

According to the information I was given, the pilots' post-flight logbook entry, which references a caution message displayed on a cockpit advisory screen of the Airbus A320, reads as follows:

"ECAM HYD Y RSVR LO LVL"

What this means, essentially, is that one of the plane's three main hydraulic systems was indicating a low level in its fluid reservoir. Airbus color-codes its hydraulic systems; this would have been the yellow (Y) system.

Per checklist instructions, the crew would turned off this system off. This is unusual, but the loss of a single hydraulic system on a modern airliner is far from a serious emergency. All critical components have at least one alternate source of hydraulic power.

Further, the corrective action note in the logbook implies the issue was merely an indication problem. Fluid quantity was found to have been at the normal level all along.

But perhaps most importantly, Shannon's essay revolves around a supposed landing gear problem. As I explained earlier (below), even the most serious landing gear malfunction sits pretty far down in the hierarchy of potential disasters. Even lower, however, is a landing gear problem that does not exist: the yellow hydraulic system does not power the landing gear.

An A320 captain I spoke to says that a shut-down of the yellow system would have meant, at worst, a slightly longer-than-normal landing roll (due to loss of the right engine thrust reverser and some of the wing spoiler panels), and, in newer A320s, loss of the nose-gear steering system, requiring a tow to the gate.

Shannon had thrown up enough red flags to begin with, but this puts it over the top, tilting his entire account from one of eye-rolling embellishment toward one of outright fabrication.

What really caught my eye, though, was the NYT editor Hugo Lindgren's response to Fallows:

Some commenters have seized on certain details of "The Plane Was About to Crash. Now What?" by Noah Gallagher Shannon in order to question whether this emergency landing happened (and perhaps even whether the author was on the flight). But there is simply no question. The author was on Frontier Airlines flight #727 on June 30, 2011, from Washington to Denver. It was an Airbus 320. The author sat in seat 12A. This flight was diverted to Philadelphia. The FAA reports that the pilot declared an emergency due to a low hydraulics indicator light and that upon landing the plane needed to be towed to the gate. Frontier airlines confirms that an Airbus A320 experienced "a maintenance issue on departure from Washington DCA. The flight diverted to Philadelphia due to easier access. The aircraft and all passengers landed safely."

Did the author's personal recollection represent an accurate picture of what he experienced on that flight? Well, only he can attest to his own experience. But the author did provide receipts and took notes after the flight to back up his account. And his recollection, when run by an aviation specialist, did seem entirely plausible to him. While some of the author's language may have been imprecise, his recollection of his experience was consistent with recollections of passengers in similar air incidents. Naturally, not every detail matches everybody else's experience. Surely even people on that plane would remember it differently. The story was about the personal experience of a fearful moment. The author did not present himself as an authority in airline technology or emergency procedures. The airline, in fact, refused his request for more information about what happened after the fact. He only reported what he heard and felt, which is consistent with the magazine's Lives page, where the account was published.

Of course, out of the tons of criticism from Fallows, Smith, Weingarten, Romenesko and company, the suggestion that Shannon had made up the flight was, at most, a tiny and generally implicit part of the case against the article. Lindgren is using some rhetorical misdirection here; he's just not doing it very well.

More troubling is the now familiar nonchalance of journalists toward accuracy. "Perceptions are subjective." "Opinions differ." "Who are we to judge whose claims are valid?"

But of they do judge. Only a select few articles make it into the New York Times. By publishing those articles, the people who run the paper are putting their reputations behind those pieces. If they want to maintain those reputations, those people need to be more careful about what they publish and less weaselly when something like this slips by.

* Make sure to check out Jeremy Repanich's comment.

Property Rights

There is an argument that has been going around that is, roughly speaking, "if Libertarianism is so great why is no country organized along these lines".  Now, it is worth noting that this comment is only true with respect to extreme or Utopian forms of Libertarianism; the movement itself has done a lot to shape a number of modern societies.  But it is true, that on first glance, this method of governance seems scarce on the ground.  Now this isn't a fatal objection, outside of Athens there were few obvious Democracies before the High Middle Ages (and the flaws of the Athenian form of Democracy are only imperfectly present in modern representative democracy). 

Mike Konzal makes the claim that Feudalism is actually a good example of Libertarianism.  Part of me wants to dismiss this claim as "too cute by half".  I also note that it immediately offends a lot of Libertarians.  And I think that is a shame as I suspect we can learn a lot from the actual analysis.

The discovery that Democracy could end up as a form of impulsive mob rule comes directly from the Athenian adventure.  Modern democrats did not reject the system because of this (potentially terrifying) flaw but rather used it to understand how to build a better system. 

So consider this argument from Konzal:

When libertarians say they are for basic rights, what they are really saying is that they are for treating what liberals consider basic rights as property rights. Basic rights receive no more, or less, protection than other property rights. You can easily give them up or bargain them away, and thus alienate yourself from them. (Meanwhile, all property rights are entirely fundamental - they can never be regulated.)

Now there may be Libertarians for which this is a feature and not a bug.  But just like modern forms of Democracy had to grapple with the issues of mob rule as seen in Athens (the death of Socrates, the insane idea of invading Sicily), understanding how this kind of system might work can actually bring out some of the key features that need to be thought through.

Two things come immediately to mind.  Property rights in the feudal era got enormously complicated, with specific places coming with extremely complex ownership rules.  People could own the right to do one thing in a certain place but not own the underlying land.  Feudal relationships were confusing, to say the least.  I think this needs to be considered.

The other issue is whether or not there should be rights in balance with property rights.  The idea that property rights are fundamental does not mean that they should be the only item in consideration.  Democracy sacrificed the purity of open voting on all matters for additional stability.  I think that these issues could be thoughtfully addressed by Libertarians looking to build a feasible model.

I do think the Randian/Objectivist ideal doesn't exist for a reason.  I can also see reasonable people not liking the core idea of property rights.  After all, unequal starting points can lead to very unequal outcomes.  But I think that this analysis should be a challenge to understanding and enhancing the operationalization of the Libertarian model.

More adventures in intellectual property --- Ghost Rider rides again

Not long ago, Marvel managed to get a couple of unlikely hit movies out of a fairly obscure motor-cycle riding character called. Ghost Rider. That unexpected success has led to some lawsuits over who owns the character.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A comic book writer who claims he created the flaming-skulled character called Ghost Rider got another chance to press his claim on Tuesday when a U.S. appeals court revived his lawsuit against Marvel Comics.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals vacated a 2011 district court ruling that found the rights to the character belonged to Marvel Comics, owned by The Walt Disney Co. It returned the case to the lower court for trial.

Former Marvel freelancer Gary Friedrich, who claims he created the character, will pursue the case "aggressively and vigorously," his lawyer Charles Kramer said.

Ghost Rider, a motorcycle-riding vigilante whose head is a flaming skull, first appeared as a vigilante superhero in 1972.

Sorta.

It turns out that the 1972 character was something of a reboot of a Western-themed Ghost Rider Marvel launched in 1967 (again with the involvement of Gary Friedrich) and that's where the intellectual property question gets amusing because that incarnation was perhaps the most blatant example of plagiarism in what has always been a plagiarism-fueled medium.

Stan Lee's claims in the Sixties that he didn't read other comic books were a lot like Milton Berle's claims that he didn't listen to other comics' material. Lee had spent two decades in a closely-knit industry jumping on trends and borrowing ideas, starting with DC and EC derived books and ending with an unacknowledged appropriation of Julius Schwartz' successful formula for rebooting Golden Age heroes with science fiction origins and streamlined looks.

The difference between Berle and Lee was that a large part of Lee's audience didn't get the joke. Many of them had gotten serious about comics in the mid-Sixties when Marvel had hit its stride and really was putting out the best and most innovative comics. For them, Lee's comically over-the-top claims seemed entirely reasonable.

It's safe to assume that in 1967, few of those teen aged fans had any idea that Marvel's new Western themed hero, Ghost Rider, had a strong resemblance to another company's hero, a resemblance that included having the same name, costume, concept, atmospheric look, and artist. The retread only ran for seven issues but that was enough for Marvel to claim ownership of the name and, a few years later, launch another Ghost Rider.

(Yes, that is a Frazetta cover)

And here's the Marvel version:

Of course, the idea to introduce a character by this name in 1949 may have had something to do with a hit song introduced in 1948 (and covered a billion times since).

When the guys who are in for murder one start arguing about Jane Austen...

This is a bit outside of our normal education beat, but this account of a man's experience teaching English and Philosophy to lifers in a British prison is definitely worth checking out.

From American Public Media's the Story.

Evolution and the breakfast landscape

Here's a question about evolutionary psychology. Not a rhetorical question or a snarky question (even though I have been a bit snarky on the subject in the past). Everyone knows why we evolved to seek out salt, sugar and fat in our diet, but why did we evolve to favor an extremely rugged yet malleable culinary landscape?

Take breakfast, for example. Sometimes (though not often) I'll hit a diner and say what-the-hell and get coffee, juice, eggs, bacon, hash browns, and biscuits. With the exception of the juice and the bacon (which are already optimized), I will add the right level of flavorings to each dish to get it to its landscape maxima (sugar for the coffee, salt and pepper for the eggs, hot sauce and ketchup for the hash browns, jam or maybe even sausage gravy for the biscuits).

The optimization is done on a dish-by-dish basis and is, for the most part, independent. If only eggs are available, I'll have a sugar-free breakfast. If all I have around the house is coffee and fruit, I'll have a low-sodium breakfast. Though there's an evolutionary imperative that makes me crave sugar and salt, it is somehow dependent on the other coordinates of the landscape. I want sugar but not salt with my coffee, salt but not sugar with my eggs and both salt and (caramelized) sugar in my hot chocolate.

Small children complain loudly and adults mumble grumpily when certain foods mix on a plate even though, as parents often remind us, it all goes to the same place.

How did our places get so context-sensitive?

Matt Yglesias may not be helping his cause

There was an odd exchange recently between Diane Ravitch and Matthew Yglesias.

Ravitch wrote a post about James Cersonsky's American Prospect article on Teach for America's political power. She introduced the post with this:

Teach for America began with a worthy goal: to supply bright, idealistic college graduates to serve in poor children in urban and rural districts.

But then it evolved into something with grand ambitions: to groom the leaders who would one day control American education.

Yglesias's response is rather strange. He doesn't mention Cersonsky or the American Prospect his post but  he only explicitly addresses points that come from Cersonsky's article; not from Ravitch. I say explicitly because the example Yglesias uses is certainly relevant to Ravitch's claim (though definitely not in the way he intended).

I thought of this over the weekend at my college reunion, where I met up with an old friend of mine who right after graduation was a science teacher in a public school in New Orleans. Later, she taught at a KIPP-affiliated school turnaround venture in New Orleans and then became founding assistant principal of a KIPP-affiliated school there. Then she moved back to the Boston area and became principal of a charter school called Excel Academy. Now she's a fellow at an nonprofit called Unlocking Potential, but soon she's going to become principal of a troubled public middle school in a a Massachusetts town whose school district has been placed in state receivership.

The part about reunion caught my eye. That's a lot of jobs for a 2003 graduate (Matt Yglesias '03 as they say at Harvard) so I did a little digging. I may have missed some important details but here's what turned up:

Barring a really astounding coincidence, Yglesias is talking about an educator named Komal Bhasin. Here's Bhasin's job history:

She taught from 2003 to 2005.

With a bachelor's degree and two years teaching experience, she was named assistant principal of a school.

With a bachelor's degree, two years teaching experience, and two years experience as an assistant principal, she was named principal of a different school halfway across the country. (You will often find sudden promotions within a school where you're dealing with known quantities. Putting a fledgling assistant principal in charge of a different school in a different region is much more unusual, particularly an administrator with almost no teaching experience.)

With these qualifications, and five years experience as a principal, she got a principal-in-residence with a high-profile education reform institute -- a relatively short tenure and thin resume for this kind of position.

Obviously, there's a limit to how much we should infer here, but Bhasin has indisputably gotten a series of promotions that were surprising given her job history, education and (as far as I can tell) publications and she has also gotten considerable exposure as a rising star in the reform movement .

Just to be clear, I am sure that Komal Bhasin is a smart and dedicated educator and may well be an excellent administrator. Nothing should take away from that, but it is also true that, given what we know, her career path would seem overwhelmingly to support the idea that she was being groomed for a Michelle Rhee type leadership role just the way Ravitch suggests.

In other words, Yglesias came up with a great example, just not for his side.

Investment advice from Alfred Hitchcock

Mail Order Prophet, a 1957 episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents written by Robert C. Dennis (teleplay) and Antony Ferry (story) and starring E.G. Marshall and Jack Klugman

Appeared previously in You Do the Math.

"How do you make money doing this?" The answer is simple...

If they hadn't used cast members, I wonder how many viewers would have caught on?

Thoughts on Ray Fisman's much alluded-to charter school article

As mentioned before, Ray Fisman has a piece up at Slate discussing charter schools and it's quite good. Arguments for both sides are spelled out in a clear and balanced manner and, with a few exceptions (and only one of those major), data issues are addressed as thoroughly as is possible in a general interest publication.

That major issue is cheating and data manipulation and it's the one problem I would most like to get Fisman's take on, partly because I really do believe it's probably the biggest challenge facing the reform movement but mainly because of Fisman's expertise in the question of how best to set up metrics and incentives in order to keep things running smoothly.

My other issues are more the sort of technical points you probably couldn't get away with in Slate. For example, take a look at the following from Fisman:

At least part of the disagreement revolves around whether charter schools deliver on their promise to improve student outcomes. You might think this is a relatively easy proposition to evaluate—just compare whether charter school kids do better on tests than those in public schools. But any effort to compare performance is confounded by the fact that the kinds of parents who take steps to enroll their children in charter schools may be the kind of motivated and supportive parents whose children would have done just fine in any school system. (In the current study, charter school applicants do in fact have higher than average test scores even before they enroll. However, other analyses have seen charter school applicants with below-average scores, perhaps because kids struggling in the public system are more apt to look for other options.) And if the longer hours and additional school days that are a feature of many charter schools lead underperformers to drop out, the select group that remains may again be made up of those who would have tested well in any school environment.

This isn't just a question of underperformers. Based on my classroom and tutoring experience, I strongly expect we're seeing a strong interaction between treatment and selection. Different kids respond differently to different approaches. There's a very good chance that those kids (and families) who volunteer for more time and more work are also the kids who respond best to that approach. This is not an argument against charter schools; it is, however, an argument for caution in generalizing results.

A somewhat more serious issue shows up in the next paragraph

But for at least a subset of charter schools, researchers can come fairly close to running a clinical trial where some applicants are enrolled at charters and others are left in the public system purely by chance. The reason is that many charter schools are oversubscribed, and their scarce spots are allocated through a lottery. So whether a particular student gets assigned a slot at the charter school is luck of the draw. (This randomness in gaining admission to sought-after charter schools has been documented recently in the films Waiting for Superman and The Lottery.)

Numerous studies have used this lottery method to analyze the impact of charter schools on standardized test scores, and by and large they report similar findings: Charters in rural or suburban areas don’t do any better than public schools, while in urban areas they are associated with greater test score improvements in math and language. But another important point from past studies is that there is enormous variation in the effectiveness of charter schools. There are some great ones but also some real duds.

Normally, in clinical trials, we can treat our subjects as independent. After all, my odds of developing a side effect should have nothing to do with whether or not you developed that side effect. There is simply no way you can assume that the behavior of one student is independent of the rest of the class and that lack of independence can be extraordinarily difficult to account for. While useful, the lottery method is a long way from giving us the results we would expect from a good clinical trial.

But, that aside, Fisman's point about urban schools is tremendously important and is explored in more detail later:

Some charter school advocates will surely point to the new study as yet more evidence that public school districts should be replaced by a more decentralized approach to education, with a greater emphasis on charter schools. But that’s a very narrow interpretation of the mounting evidence of charter schools’ successes. Focusing on these successes glosses over the many cases where charter schools fail to outperform their public peers. For suburban districts in Massachusetts, for example, the numbers don’t favor the charter school advocates, in large part because suburban public schools in the state are pretty effective already.

This is a huge point and it addresses one of the biggest concerns of reform skeptics, namely that real problems might be used as cover to change the parts of the system that are working but which are ideologically disagreeable to some of the reformers and, as a result, leave a system more broken than it is now.

From the beginning of the debate, the question of how to close the achievement gap has gotten conflated with the question of general education reform. The wretched state of education in high poverty areas was often used to argue that we needed to make immediate sweeping changes to all areas of education and some of those changes were truly radical.

Until recently, many of the reform proposals (firing 80% of new teachers, extensive privatization, effectively removing teachers' right to unionize, and quite a few more) allowed for little if any middle ground, particularly given the amount of data that was not breaking in the reformers' favor. I strongly suspect that Diane Ravitch's Road-to-Damascus conversion came from her inability to move gradually away from her previous positions.

I realize I'm reading a lot into one recent article, but this seems to be where serious reformers like Fisman and Jonah Rockoff are now:

1. Charter schools have a great deal of promise;

but

2. They aren't right for all kids or all situations;

3. and there may be scaling limitations both in terms of teachers and parents;

4. so we should focus on areas where the need is greatest and the evidence for effectiveness is strongest.

This is not the exact list I would have made (OK, technically I did make this list but you know what I mean), still there's nothing here that I would disagree with. What we have now are questions of degree, which tend to be more productive and are much more likely to be convergent.

Which would be nice for a change.

Give my regards to bean town, but...

I found quite a bit to agree with in Ray Fisman's recent piece on charter schools (and even more to like about it), but I do have a couple of issues I wanted to get out of the way. The first involved the threat to reform presented by people who cheat and/or game the system. The second revolved around some of the issues with the heavy reliance on a small set of Boston schools as examples.

I haven't had time to go through the Boston report in detail, but assuming that it's solid (and I have no reason to think otherwise), there are still a couple of reasons to be careful about drawing overly broad inferences from this particular city at this particular point in history.

The first (which is pretty much self-evident) has to do with Boston's unique relationship with higher education. The second, and more important, goes to the heart of the problems with modern urban schools.

Here's Fisman:

Why wouldn’t parents try to get their children into charters that would get the kids on track to go to college? One explanation is that the debate about whether charter schools “work,” with its focus on testing and college placement, loses sight of the many reasons why people choose a school and what they value in an education. Charter schools can be set up for any purpose. Some focus on the arts, others emphasize cultural heritage (there are multiple Hmong charter schools in the Twin Cities alone); some are vocational, others rigorously academic. As Rockoff puts it, asking whether a particular school is good based on test scores or college placement is in many cases the wrong question: “To extend the restaurant metaphor, some people like Italian, others like Thai food. Similarly, many [charter] schools focus on tested subjects, while others might emphasize creative writing or the arts.” Not every charter school is right for every kid. Nor would it be an unmitigated good if all parents could segregate their children by their interests and beliefs.

But a big reason, maybe the big reason, that urban parents send their children to charter/magnet and parochial schools is left out of that paragraph. In general, parents want their children to be successful happy and safe, but of those, safety is the most immediate. These non-standard schools usually have a low or no-tolerance approach to gangs. More significantly, there's a huge anti-gang selection effect.

If you want to compare different urban education initiatives, you have to take into account gang activity and neighborhood violence, not just in terms of absolute levels but in terms of attitudes and expectations, and, while I have no expertise in the area, I do know enough to know that understanding urban crime in Boston over the past twenty years, a period that saw both the advent and apparent collapse of the "Boston Miracle," is something that does require considerable expertise.

None of this undercuts the findings of the study, but it does greatly complicate the process of drawing inferences from it. It's possible that what worked in Boston won't work as well in most urban areas. It's also possible that what worked there will work even better elsewhere. I'm not being cute here -- I could honestly see this going either way -- I'm just trying to emphasis just how messy this data is.

We have here everything your stat professor warned you about. Interactivity. Non-linearity. Heteroskedasticity. Nesting. Selection effects. Missing not at random. Falsification. Hawthorne effects. Volunteer effects. Peer effects. Researcher bias. Sample size issues.

Though I'm not a Bayesian by training, I think the appropriate response is at least in spirit, Bayesian. We will have to factor our doubts about the research in when we weigh our conclusions but that's not the same as ignoring those conclusions entirely.

This brings me back to what I liked about Fisman's article. It's balanced, it acknowledges the limitations of the data, and it suggests focus on areas where reforms will do the most good if their assumptions are sound and will do the least damage if they aren't.

But more on that later.

Two things you should read in their entirety

The first is Mike Konczal's analysis of the drivers of mass incarceration, "Against Law, For Order"

As Bernard Harcourt examines in The Illusion of Order, broken windows policing is predicated on separating neighborhoods into regular, ordered insiders and disordered strangers. [James Q.] Wilson’s view is that regular insiders are the “decent folks” who need to be protected from the disorder generated by strangers. The police, rather than upholding laws and the rights of citizens, uphold order by regulating the behaviors of disorderly insiders and excluding the disorderly outsiders. Criminals lose their insider status in this telling, and excluding them from the community becomes a goal of law. The approach is based on a privileging of order over law, for a lack of order is what attracts criminal behavior, always waiting in the wings to descend.

The second is this short piece from TPM.

A Texas man, Ezekiel Gilbert, has been acquitted of murder after shooting and killing a 23 year old escort he found on craigslist because she would not have sex with him even after paying her $150 fee.

Gilbert was acquitted under a Texas law that allows you to use deadly force to protect your property during a nighttime theft. In this case, the property was either the $150 or the use-rights to the body of 23 year old Lenora Ivie Frago. Frago said she couldn’t give back the money because she had to give it to the driver who was waiting for her.

At the risk of putting too fine a point on this, these deadly force laws have always been about keeping people in their place, socially, economically, racially. Crimes against people who rank low on the hierarchy are seen as less heinous in this Wilson-like view and Ms. Frago ranked low in the eyes of the jury. I think it's safe to say that if a prostitute had killed a man in Texas because he had refused to pay after sex, she would certainly be in prison and probably be on death row.

Contests big and small

This is a follow up of sorts to the recent Project Gutenberg Project post, not in that it involves similar data or statistical techniques but in that both are part of a loose thread on the possible (and in some cases, inevitable) tranformative movements in statistics and research that are generating a lot of talk but perhaps not enough discussion.

Last time I had a post on how we might want to open big data. This time the focus is big contests. Things like the X-Prizes or proposals to offer awards for the development of new drugs. The qualifier 'big' is important; scale plays a significant role in the second half of the post and I'll get to some smaller contests then. For now though, let's consider big contests for huge organizations.

If you put aside reputational capital (which might be a big deal to a small start-up but which wouldn't have much impact on a big multinational), in order for contests to make sense, you're left with the following two inequalities:

Existing incentives < Cost of development

but

Existing incentives + (Prize * Probability of winning) > Cost of development + Uncertainty penalty

That's the picture for the competitors and it's hard to imagine them being satisfied that often.

What about the party offering the prize? For them, much of the benefit comes from the number of groups competing for the prize; presumably the quality of the winning entry should increase monotonically as you add competitors. Number of entries is, of course, inversely related to cost of development.

These contests have long had a special appeal for freshwater economists, but when you get past the open enrollment aspect, the process looks awfully bureaucratic. The competitions are driven by artificial criteria determined by a committee. What's more the criteria generally only have to be met once during a relatively short time frame rather than over the lifetime of the product. This produces a great incentive to cheat.

If you were to sit down and, given these factors, try to come up with the worst possible product to develop with a contest it would probably be in pharmaceuticals. Drug development has huge costs, is largely limited to a small pool of players and is highly vulnerable to fraud (fraud which comes with substantial social costs). Despite this drugs are one of the most frequently proposed applications of the contest model.

The various X-prizes are fortunately not vulnerable to fraud, but they are also poor choices for the contest model: massive projects (though, with the exception of the tricorder, not necessarily that ambitious from a technological standpoint) requiring huge start-up costs that can be undertaken by only a handful of competitors (think dozens instead of hundreds).

The contest model can, however, make a great deal of sense assuming you can meet the following conditions:

A relatively large pool of potential competitors;

Relatively low cost of development;

A relatively high secondary reward/cost of development ratio (secondary rewards include reputation, access to future contracts, publications and for students, grades and thesis material);

Largely ungameable criteria;

Significant positive externalities (for example, a text mining competition might increase the competitors' programming skills and thus increase the skilled labor pool).

For example, DARPA's Grand Challenge contests met all of these conditions. Hundreds of teams competed in the various events and almost certainly produced more quality research and innovative thinking than we would have gotten spending the same money in a straight grant arrangement.

Here, however we run into a different question of scale, not in participants but in number of projects. The Grand Challenge worked not only because it met the conditions listed above but because it took advantage of a certain slack in the system. There were enough people in engineering and computer science departments who were looking for an interesting, high-profile project and who didn't care that the expected value of the compensation didn't come close to paying for the time, facilities and equipment required to compete. How many of these competitions can we introduce before we start cannibalizing the talent pool?

When done badly, contest-based research makes little sense, but even when done well, it can't really be more than a small part of our overall research strategy.

More thoughts on dumping

I'll have more (mostly positive) on this Slate article by Ray Fisman, but first here's (hopefully) one last point on looting.

As part of a good discussion of the state of charter schools, Fisman uses a not-so-good example:

The secret of many charter schools’ success isn’t a mystery: longer hours and additional school days, which are part of a “no excuses” philosophy that emphasizes frequent testing and often requires even longer days from charter school teachers. When public schools integrate these elements—as in a pilot project run by Harvard economist Roland Fryer in Houston, early evidence suggests those schools are seeing the same gains as high-performing charters.

But the success of charters doesn’t necessarily provide us any answers about what will improve education on a larger scale. KIPP, the nationwide network of charter schools and one of the great success stories of the charter movement, has 125 schools serving 41,000 students, making it less than one-twentieth the size of the New York City Department of Education. It isn’t clear that there are enough teachers willing to put in 10-hour days or enough parents who will force their kids to endure the extended hours of instruction. To this point, one recent study by MIT graduate student Christopher Walters argues that lack of demand by parents will be a significant limiting factor in the further expansion of charter schools.

Before we jump to success story in this case, we need some context. We know that KIPP at the very least tolerates principals who engage in large scale dumping (see here and here) and for reasons I've mentioned before and will recap shortly, dumping is one of the nastiest but most effective ways of gaming the system.

Of course this isn't just a KIPP issue. Here's an excerpt from a letter sent by a principal of an LA public middle school principal to Diane Ravitch:

Since school began, we enrolled 159 new students (grades 7 and 8). Of the 159 new students, 147 of them are far below basic (FBB)!!! Of the 147 students who are FBB, 142 are from charter schools. It is ridiculous that they can pick and choose kids and pretend that they are raising scores when, in fact, they are purging nonperforming students at an alarming rate—that is how they are raising their scores, not by improving the performance of students. Such a large number of FBB students will handicap the growth that the Audubon staff initiated this year, and further, will negatively impact the school's overall scores as we continue to receive a recurring tide of low-performing students.

The specific problem here is that even though principals at most charter schools (including KIPP) are almost certainly concerned about their kids, the incentives are tragically misaligned, encouraging schools to shuffle students in ways that are far worse than zero sum.

If you've taught in one of these achievement-gap-closing schools, you know that a small number of students demand a disproportionate amount of your resources, both in terms of instruction and classroom management (particularly for inexperienced teachers). These same students also tend adversely affect morale and social norms.

While it's true that sometimes a transfer turns out to be a good thing for a kid in the long run, at the time, being forced out of one school and shoved into a strange one is disruptive, stressful and insulting. Kids who were confused by the material will generally find themselves even more confused. Kids who were angry will generally find themselves even angrier. Kids who were overwhelmed and stressed out will... You get the drift.

This is a serious, perhaps even fatal flaw in the current configuration of most reform proposals, a misalignment of incentives that actually allows administrators to improve their schools' ratings and make life easier for themselves and their faculties by increasing one of the worst possible outcomes for students.

It is also a surprisingly easy flaw to fix. You simply assign an appropriate penalty for attrition. The difficult part is getting the issue into the debate.

I should add that most administrators don't treat this question lightly. When I taught at a parochial prep school in Watts, the principal agonized over every decision to transfer out a student and I believe she was much more representative of administrators than is KIPP's Randy Dowell. Most educators will try to do the right thing despite the incentives, but that's not a set-up you want to rely on. Incentives have a way of eroding good intentions, particularly in systems where the ethical players actually have less job security.

At the risk of pounding this point in too hard, you cannot have a reform movement without trustworthy data. The level of gaming and outright cheating we've seen greatly undercuts our ability to make rational, data-driven policy decisions and that level is only going to get worse until we fix the incentive system that's driving it up.

You can listen to this before I do... if you hurry

A couple of years ago, This American Life did one of the best pieces of reporting to date on patent trolling. Now they have a followup which Felix Salmon calls "fantastic," though I'm not sure if he means 'great' or 'the stuff of fantasy' (both would seem to apply).

I just downloaded the episode and I didn't pay these guys a dime:

Host Ira Glass and Zoe Chace from NPR’s Planet Money talk with Jim Logan and Richard Baker of Personal Audio, which claims it holds a patent used by all podcasters. Podcasters, they say, owe them money. Only catch: their company never made a digital podcast or invented a way to download it into a listening device. What they did, back in 1996: they patented the idea that such a thing can be done. Now they’ve asked podcasters to pay them licensing fees.

Thomas Friedman demonstrates the Roommate Effect

I have mixed feelings about criticizing Thomas Friedman. For one thing, it's been done. For another, he did some really impressive reporting on the Middle East and I suspect that, if he stuck to that topic, he would still be adding a great deal to the conversation.

In the role of public intellectual, though, he's pretty much been a disaster (insert Peter Principle digression here), and he keeps coming up with passages that are simply too representative not to use as examples of bad punditry.

Which brings us to the roommate effect. The roommate effect is one of the reasons that people who go to elite schools to tend do well professionally.

Imagine a small town populated predominately by people in their early 20s with similar backgrounds who are new to the area. Young people are good at making friends and this scenario is almost perfect for forming new relationships. You have roommates and friends and friends of roommates and roommates of friends. You meet people in the cafeteria and in the coffee houses and in the bars. You find people with common interests in music or movies or art or sports. These people tend to form much of the base of a social network that you will rely on for the rest of your life.

This part of the experience is common to anyone who has gone to a traditional college. But in an elite school, there is a fairly good chance that a new friends will be someone who is or is connected to someone who is rich/famous/powerful. Playing in a college pool league with the son of a Fortune 500 CEO is likely to be a good career move.

And that brings us to this recent Friedman column (mercilessly but not inaccurately satirized by Timothy Burke). The column is basically an unpaid advertorial for the job placement firm HireArt. The weaknesses of the column are a subject for another post; Friedman's lack of understanding of education and the job market is genuinely profound. However he does manage, quite unintentionally, to make an important point about the way things actually work (emphasis added for those who like to skim):

One of the best ways to understand the changing labor market is to talk to the co-founders of HireArt (www.hireart.com): Eleonora Sharef, 27, a veteran of McKinsey; and Nick Sedlet, 28, a math whiz who left Goldman Sachs. Their start-up was designed to bridge the divide between job-seekers and job-creators.
...

The way HireArt works, explained Sharef (who was my daughter’s college roommate), is that clients — from big companies, like Cisco, Safeway and Airbnb, to small family firms — come with a job description and then HireArt designs online written and video tests relevant for that job. Then HireArt culls through the results and offers up the most promising applicants to the company, which chooses among them.

In case you're wondering, Eleonora Sharef got her bachelor's from Yale.

Making hand-to-mouth as difficult as possible

Over at the better-than-it-ought-to-be Cracked.com, columnist John Cheese has a very good piece called "5 Things Nobody Tells You about Being Poor" which includes this sharp observation:

Because having a checking account while poor doesn't just mean you have to be responsible and good at math -- you have to be perfect. Meticulous, flawless record keeping is the difference between surviving and having the bank seize your next paycheck.

It turns out things are even worse than Cheese thought according to this excellent article by Denise Grollmus:

In May, she wrote a check for $91 at an Albertson's grocery store. A few days later, while reviewing her bank account, she noticed that the check had bounced. Orr headed back to Albertson's to make good on her payment. But she was told that the store had already placed her in collections. It was out of the grocer's hands.

A month later, Orr received a letter from the district attorney's office. It inexplicably accused her of intent to commit fraud, noting that she was now eligible for "up to one year in the county jail." The only way to avoid criminal charges: participate in the county's "voluntary" bad-check restitution program.

"The letter really made me think I'd go to jail if I didn't," she says.

But the DA wanted more than $91 back. Though California law restricts the penalty on bad checks to $25, the letter demanded $333.51, which included $175 for a "voluntary" financial accountability class she'd have to take.

Orr didn't even consider arguing her innocence. She just wanted the problem solved. So she called the phone number on the letter to make arrangements to pay in cash at the sheriff's department. When she was told she could only send a check to a P.O. box, Orr grew suspicious.

"That's when I asked if I was actually talking to someone in the DA's office," she says. "And they said no, that they were a company being paid to represent the DA."

In fact, Orr had contacted Corrective Solutions, a private company from San Clemente. According to its website, it handles bad-check cases for 140 district attorneys nationwide — jurisdictions that oversee 65 million people, from Colorado to Florida, Michigan to Washington.

Consider it the privatizing of justice. Instead of investigating bad-check complaints, prosecutors simply pass them along to Corrective Solutions. The company then uses official DA letterhead to threaten jail time if consumers don't pay up. Corrective Solutions also runs the "voluntary" financial-accountability classes, and prosecutors get a cut of the profits while barely lifting a finger.

The entire system runs on a one-size-fits-all presumption of guilt. No one's bothering to investigate whether the check-writer was working a scam or merely suffering from a momentary lapse of mathematics.

Orr e-mailed Corrective Solutions, saying she'd be happy to repay the $91 plus a $50 fee, though she wanted to skip the "voluntary" class, which she couldn't afford.

Corrective Solutions didn't respond — but the threatening letters kept coming.
...
"That's what they do," Arons says. "Whenever we win one of these cases, they declare bankruptcy in order to avoid paying out damages. It's absolutely maddening."

The same thing had happened a year earlier, when Arons won a similar suit against American Corrective Counseling Services. A federal court ruled that, despite the company's claims of immunity, it had misrepresented itself, made false threats of prosecution and charged exorbitant penalties.

Once again, Arons's clients were unable to collect on their victory. American Corrective also declared bankruptcy, saying it couldn't repay investors — despite having collected $47 million in fees over the previous four years.

A few months later it was back in business, re-formed as Corrective Solutions and "free and clear" of all liability, according to court records.

Today it's the biggest bad-check collector of them all.

...
Consumer-rights lawyers estimate the company sends out around 2 million letters annually. (The company did not respond to repeated interview requests.)

The Corrective Solutions website does its best to imply that it's an arm of law enforcement. A slide show gently fades in and out with statements about "holding offenders accountable for their actions." An interactive map shows its 140 contracts with DAs nationwide.

Nowhere does it say that most of these "offenders" have never been investigated or formally charged with a crime.

The site boasts dozens of quotes from pleased prosecutors, who sing praises of reduced caseloads and crime rates. Contra Costa District Attorney Robert Kochly offers the most telling endorsement, noting he's grateful for "more revenue to my office."

District attorneys don't pay a cent for Corrective Solutions' services. Instead, the company pays them to run their bad-check programs. All a prosecutor must do is hand over official letterhead, along with a list of bad-check writers and a bit of "case criteria."

Between 2005 and 2008, Los Angeles County raked in more than $1 million. Miami-Dade made over $375,000.

Looting phase in education reform part... [damn, lost count again]

I apologize to long-time readers who have had to listen to this rant for years now but if you:

1. Spend billions of taxpayer money on privatization projects

2. with little scrutiny and easily gamed metrics

3. and view the whole process through a simplistic hero/villain narrative conducive to charlatans and con artists

... what in the hell do you expect to happen?

Laura Macomber writing for Bill Moyers and company:

On to education: Among ALEC’s 2013 legislative priorities is a call for “improving education” — a goal that, conveniently, can also improve corporate bottom lines. In 2011, Tennessee passed an ALEC-inspired bill allowing taxpayer money to be spent on for-profit education. K12 Inc., an online education company, pounced immediately — and landed a multi-million dollar deal to provide online education to Tennessee students. K12 is one of ALEC’s corporate members and a member of its education task force. The company helped to craft the ALEC model bill that inspired Tennessee’s for-profit education law. And the legislators responsible for introducing the bill? That’s right: they’re ALEC members too.

Fast forward to February 2013, when Nashville’s News Channel 5 conducted an investigation into K12’s Tennessee Virtual Academy and found what appears to be evidence of grade-fixing. An internal school e-mail reads: “After looking at so many failing grades, we need to make some changes… [Each] teacher needs to take out the October and September progress; delete it so that all is showing is November.” If, as the email suggests, student progress reports for September and October included “so many failing grades,” then simply excluding them might mislead parents — and K12 investors — into thinking that the school is succeeding — even if it’s not. Is this the kind of “educational improvement” ALEC was striving for when it published its 2013 priorities?

I came across this as part of a good piece by Charles Pierce arguing that the political press needs to focus on events outside of DC.

If you have the stomach for more on the topic, both the New York Times and Nashville's CBS affiliate have done good reporting on the story. Here's a taste of the NYT story:

Some teachers at K12 schools said they felt pressured to pass students who did little work. Teachers have also questioned why some students who did no class work were allowed to remain on school rosters, potentially allowing the company to continue receiving public money for them. State auditors found that the K12-run Colorado Virtual Academy counted about 120 students for state reimbursement whose enrollment could not be verified or who did not meet Colorado residency requirements. Some had never logged in.

p.s. I've got a thread on charter schools in the pipeline prompted by this generally well-balanced article by Ray Fisman. That makes this a good time to emphasis something about these looting stories. These incidents represent an existential threat to the reform movement. If you believe in choice, competition and accountability, then your biggest obstacle isn't unions or reform skeptics; it's the people who cheat and game the reforms. As long as we have widespread issues like test answers being changed, results being suppressed, and extensive student-dumping, then none of our data will be trustworthy enough for data-driven strategies.

Interconnectivity

One of the things that is easy to forget is just how interconnected everything is in the modern economy.  Consider this discussion of public employee conferences versus private industry conferences:

When much more lavish conferences are held by private sector US corporations or professional associations (including academic associations, if your university doesn’t pay for it), they cost the US government lots of money too. Within various rules and strictures, they’re considered legitimate tax deductible expenses which people and (as best as I understand it) businesses can declare against earnings. You can make the case, obviously, that these conferences and events are mostly useless boondoggles. You can equally well make the case, if you want to, that they’re useful opportunities for social networking, building up esprit de corps and all of that good stuff. What you can’t make the case for, unless there’s some very subtle argument which escapes me, is a distinction under which conferences (for government employees) that cost the US government lots of money are obvious cases of abuse and waste, while more lavish conferences (for non-government employees) that cost the US government lots of money, are perfectly legitimate business expenses that we shouldn’t be bothering our pretty little heads with.

While this argument does gloss over some important distinctions (in theory, corporations can do all sorts of sub-optimal things if their owners agree), it does point out that the modern economy is deeply interconnected and all sorts of demarcation points miss just how interconnected it is.  It is true that we see a difference between reducing a bill and giving money.  But if charitable deductions are tax deductible then we have made the decision to subsidize things that people who give money value.  This may be a completely sane and wise decision -- I am not going to take a side on that point -- but it is a reduction of government revenue under the current social structure that we have. 

This sort of thing is common in all sorts of ways -- governments are also customers and act as important service providers in a number of contexts (I think it is reasonably non-controversial that purely private armies has tended to result in sub-optimal outcomes whenever it has been tried). 

As for the conference piece -- it is a big country and personal relationships improve the operation of any organization.  It seems to me that we pay a lot for government and it makes sense to have it run smoothly.

A new* kind of poker

[*Probably not -- as with chess, fresh variants on poker are rare]

I've been thinking that some of our recent threads come down to how information flows or fails to flow through a system and sometimes when trying to find a new way of thinking about a problem, I find it useful to find an analogous situation in a game, or, failing that, to tweak a game to get an appropriate analogy out of it.

Here's what I came up with. I'm not sure it's all that playable (and I'm open to improvements), but it does raise some of the right questions.

This is  a variant of seven card stud with one major addition.

Start by dealing the cards, three up, four down. Players check their cards then complete a normal round of betting.

Starting with the player to the left of the dealer, the bidding round starts. The bidder indicates another player and offers a certain amount to see a certain card* (for example "five dollars for the second hole card from the left"). If the offer is accepted, the card is shown to the bidder. A bid can be extended even if the other player has folded. Each accepted offer starts another round of betting. Additional bidding rounds continue until there is a round with no offers accepted.

Would this work? I'm not sure, but it does give one a chance to think through different situations involving the exchange of information in a zero sum game. For example, the information of what's in your hand is almost certainly worth more than what you'd be offered if you intended to play out the hand but is of almost no value (other than giving some insight to your playing style) if you intend to fold. I believe that bids should run the highest with seven players, a large pot and a small number of folds.

I believe there are other games with negotiated exchanges of information but I'm drawing  blank on what they are.


*Unlike roll-your-own games where the player chooses which card to reveal.

Drug Policy

Megan McArdle has the goods on a really depressing reverse correlation between people in prison for drug offenses and drug prices.  Insofar as harsh prison sentences were intended to keep the price of illegal drugs high, they have failed. 

Drug policy is really complicated.  Drugs that are essential for helping people cope with acute pain can become problematic with long term use.  The incredible efficacy of opioids at reducing short term pain has led to less assessment of the efficacy for long term use for chronic pain.  Ironically, these sorts of dilemmas can lead to both under use and over use of the same medications. 

I wish I had a happy and optimistic solution.  I remain interested in the experiments in Washington and Colorado in hopes that this might show some evidence of harm reduction.  But no path forward is without tough compromises. 

Burger King vs. Jack in the Box -- More thoughts on corporate competence

While on the subject of corporate competence, this recent story  seems like a good excuse to do a post on on one of the most consistently incompetent companies on the business landscape.

One of the most intriguing and for those inclined toward schadenfreude entertaining things about Burger King is the way that for about the past thirty years, with a variety of managers and owners, the company has been so bad at so many things.

Their PR is often clumsy (you generally want to avoid headlines about you copying your competitor's products).

Their relationship with their franchisees is terrible.

Relations became so antagonistic that last year the [franchisees'] association took the extraordinary step of filing two class-action lawsuits challenging management decisions. One suit, filed in U.S. district court in San Diego, came after the company sought to divert to national advertising millions of rebate dollars that franchisees get from Coca-Cola Co. and Dr. Pepper Snapple Group Inc. for selling their beverages. That suit was dropped after the company agreed to augment its ad budget by other means.

The other association suit opposed a company mandate that franchisees sell a double cheeseburger for $1. That suit, still pending in federal district court in Miami, contends that management can only suggest prices franchisees charge. Franchisees had voted down the proposed sandwich, arguing they would lose money at $1, but Burger King introduced it anyway. In court papers, the company argued that an appeals-court ruling in another suit involving pricing gave it the right to make the move. Since the filing, Burger King has taken the double cheeseburger off its $1 Value Menu, and raised its suggested price, but announced plans to add more items to that menu.

Burger King also faces a suit brought by three franchisees—two are in the company's Hall of Fame for exceptional franchisees—challenging a mandate that they keep their restaurants open late at night. It "costs franchisees $100 an hour, but they gross only $25 to $30 an hour," says Robert Zarco, a Miami attorney representing the plaintiffs. The two sides are awaiting a hearing on the company's motion to dismiss that litigation, which was filed in Dade County Circuit Court in Florida in December 2008.

The dealings with the franchisees demonstrates another reason why BK schadenfreude is so satisfying. The incompetence often comes mixed with a curious nastiness.

Here's Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation, writing for the New York Times:

In 2005, Florida tomato pickers gained their first significant pay raise since the late 1970s when Taco Bell ended a consumer boycott by agreeing to pay an extra penny per pound for its tomatoes, with the extra cent going directly to the farm workers. Last April, McDonald’s agreed to a similar arrangement, increasing the wages of its tomato pickers to about 77 cents per bucket. But Burger King, whose headquarters are in Florida, has adamantly refused to pay the extra penny — and its refusal has encouraged tomato growers to cancel the deals already struck with Taco Bell and McDonald’s.
...
Telling Burger King to pay an extra penny for tomatoes and provide a decent wage to migrant workers would hardly bankrupt the company. Indeed, it would cost Burger King only $250,000 a year. At Goldman Sachs, that sort of money shouldn’t be too hard to find. In 2006, the bonuses of the top 12 Goldman Sachs executives exceeded $200 million — more than twice as much money as all of the roughly 10,000 tomato pickers in southern Florida earned that year. Now Mr. Blankfein should find a way to share some of his company’s good fortune with the workers at the bottom of the food chain.

And then there are the ad campaigns. You would be hard pressed to find a comparable company with a worse run of advertising. You have to go back to the Seventies and early Eighties to find effective BK commercials. Since then a variety of agencies have produced a steady stream of mediocre ads ranging from forgettable to off-putting (try Googling "creepy Burger King").

Actually, there is at least one BK campaign that people in the advertising industry are still talking about, but not in a good way. In response to the proto-viral success of Joe Sedelmaier's "Where the Beef" ads, BK engaged J Walter Thompson (who were and are kind of a big deal) to set up a massive nation wide campaign of ads and cash prizes for people who spotted "Herb."



Here's Wikipedia's description of the aftermath:

The promotion met with some positive reviews. Time called it "clever", and a columnist for the Chicago Tribune stated that Herb was "one of the most famous men in America". Ultimately, however, the Herb promotion has been described as a flop. The advertising campaign lasted three months before it was discontinued. One Burger King franchise owner stated that the problem was that "there was absolutely no relevant message". Although some initial results were positive, the mystique was lost after Herb's appearance was revealed during the Super Bowl. Burger King's profits fell 40% in 1986. As a result of the poorly-received campaign, Burger King dropped J. Walter Thompson from their future advertising. The US$200 million account was given to N. W. Ayer.

Recently, an MSNBC article listed this as the second worst Superbowl ad of all time.

Burger King has little competition for worst managed large fast food company and absolutely for worst marketed. McDonald's, Wendy's, Subway, Hardee's/Carl's Jr, and the Yum brands have all had better campaigns, but my vote for best (at least for the past 18 years) is the smart and innovative regional chain Jack-in-the-Box.

The commercials come from the aptly named ad agency, Secret Weapon which has an interesting policy.

We will never take on more than three clients at a time. This means our clients get hands-on attention from the principals of the agency. You may have been promised this before by other agencies, but it’s tough to give 25% of your time to 18 different accounts.

Our three client rule means you get to work with the people you meet in the pitch. And since we rarely pitch we’re able to keep our attention on existing clients, not potential ones. As it should be.

The ads are sharp and funny (sometimes too sharp -- certain competitors were decidedly unamused by an ad for a sirloin burger that pointed at a diagram of beef cuts and asked "where's the angus?"). More importantly, they're good ads; they focus on the product.





Check out Jack's expressions on this one.




The following comment appeared on the site where I found the following mini sirloin burgers ad.  Could say something about the cultural impact of advertising but I'll just leave you with the image.

"Shit you not, guard controlled TV for the cell block, most of 128 inmates singing along to this. Almost magical except for the whole incarceration thing."



And in the did-they-just-say-that-? category.

Interesting article in the New York Times by Motoko Rich on why it seems to be more difficult to raise reading scores than it is to raise math scores. I don't have time to discuss this in depth, but I will say that having taught math, English and  reading, I always found math to be the easiest subject to teach. By comparison I never felt I had a handle on the best way to teach language (or even if there is a best way).

That said, these are all excellent points:

Teachers and administrators who work with children from low-income families say one reason teachers struggle to help these students improve reading comprehension is that deficits start at such a young age: in the 1980s, the psychologists Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley found that by the time they are 4 years old, children from poor families have heard 32 million fewer words than children with professional parents.

By contrast, children learn math predominantly in school.

“Your mother or father doesn’t come up and tuck you in at night and read you equations,” said Geoffrey Borman, a professor at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at the University of Wisconsin. “But parents do read kids bedtime stories, and kids do engage in discussions around literacy, and kids are exposed to literacy in all walks of life outside of school.”

Reading also requires background knowledge of cultural, historical and social references. Math is a more universal language of equations and rules.

“Math is really culturally neutral in so many ways,” said Scott Shirey, executive director of KIPP Delta Public Schools in Arkansas. “For a child who’s had a vast array of experiences around the world, the Pythagorean theorem is just as difficult or daunting as it would be to a child who has led a relatively insular life.”

Education experts also say reading development simply requires that students spend so much more time practicing.

And while reading has been the subject of fierce pedagogical battles, “the ideological divisions are not as great on the math side as they are on the literacy side,” said Linda Chen, deputy chief academic officer in the Boston Public Schools. In 2011, 29 percent of eighth graders eligible for free lunch in Boston scored at proficient or advanced levels on federal math exams, compared with just 17 percent in reading.

The (ongoing) War on Data

I know we've been through this before, but from the New York Times (via ataxingmatter):

One bill, introduced in the House by Jeff Duncan of South Carolina, would effectively end all surveys by the bureau, except for the decennial census, and even that would be limited to counting noses — a silly interpretation of the census’s mandate. Banning the surveys would make it impossible to compile reliable data on employment, productivity, health, housing, poverty, crime and the environment, to name a few of the affected fields.

This bill would be too wacky to worry about, but its lunacy makes the other know-nothing bill look moderate. That bill, introduced in the House by Ted Poe of Texas and in the Senate by Rand Paul of Kentucky, targets the American Community Survey. Started in 2005 to replace the long-form census, the survey is the indispensable source of information on factors that define American life, including family configurations, education levels, work and living arrangements, income and insurance coverage. Credible information is the basis for a responsive government, an efficient economy and, by extension, a functional society. It also gives American policy makers and businesses a competitive edge, because it encourages decisions based on hard data as opposed to guesses or other faulty rationales that dominate in the absence of credible data.

About three million people receive the survey every year, and, as with the census, answering it is required by law. Mr. Poe and Mr. Rand want to make it voluntary, which would make the results less reliable, and potentially worthless, because fewer people would answer and those who did would not be a representative sample.

Canada recently replaced its mandatory long-form census with a voluntary survey — and now lives with the sorry results. To try to get an adequate level of response, the voluntary survey was sent to one in three Canadians instead of one in five, which increased costs. The response rate plunged anyway, from 94 percent to 68 percent. In a staggering one-fourth of Canadian communities, not enough people responded to make the data usable.

There are bets then there are bets -- developments in the rabbit ears war

Fox launched its terrestrial superstation, Movies!, on Memorial Day with the following line-up.

8:00AM / Take a Hard Ride

10:10AM / House of Bamboo

12:20PM / Backlash

2:25PM / Michael Shayne: Private Detective

4:10PM / The Man Who Wouldn't Die

5:45PM / Jumpin' Jack Flash

8:00PM / High Anxiety

10:05PM / Silent Movie

The channel is a collaboration with Weigel Broadcasting and there's definitely a Neal Sabin touch with lots of dog whistles for movie lovers (Goldsmith, Fuller, Sturges, Brooks), widescreen format and an emphasis on the pretty-good but hard-to-catch (Emperor of the North is playing muted as I write this). The channel also introduces the welcome practice of not editing for length.

Looking through the schedule for the next few days, I see a number of interesting titles, more than I'll have time to watch. I also see indications that a great deal thought went into scheduling, making NBC's COZI secure in its position as worst run terrestrial superstation.

When I rescanned my channels to pick up Movies!, four other new channels also showed up, including what appears to be a new subchannel from the CBS affiliate. At present, it simply rebroadcasts the same programming as the main channel, but if they really have gone from broadcasting one channel to broadcasting  two, it would seem to indicate that CBS is at least considering jumping into the terrestrial market (which would mean that all four of the big four networks would have terrestrial-only channels).

In the past week I also noticed an LA company that sells and installs outdoor antennas has launched a fairly sizable ad campaign. Along similar lines, I recently started seeing store windows in East and Central LA carrying a wide selection of motorized and/or amplified indoor antennas.

As we've mentioned before, there are two wildly divergent pictures of the state of over-the-air television: healthy and growing according to the 2012 Ownership Survey and Trend Report; or small and shrinking according to Nielsen. It appears that pretty much everybody with first hand knowledge and skin in the game (networks, broadcasters, regional media players, retailers, manufacturers) are putting their money on the first scenario, while the only prominent backers of Nielsen appear to be reporters for the New York Times and Reuters.

Noah Smith recently observed that trivial bets do not necessarily reveal beliefs. That's true, however the multimillion dollar ones do indicate a certain level of sincerity.

One more of these and I'm back to writing about old TV shows...

It's late, I hadn't planned to do another on this and I've got a logjam forming upstream, so I'm going to rush through this one.

Take a look at the following from the the Hartford Courant:

Rates Of Suspension Vary

The difference in rates of suspension between suburban and urban districts is substantial, with West Hartford and Farmington having five or fewer incidents of suspensions in this age group in 2012, while Bridgeport had 293 and Hartford had 238.

In some cases, the rates of suspension are quite different even between somewhat similar districts and schools.

For instance, Hartford has only about 240 more children enrolled in kindergarten and first grade than New Haven, but had 238 instances of suspension compared to 89 incidents in New Haven.

Amistad Academy in New Haven and Achievement First Hartford Academy are both public charter schools run by Achievement First, with very similar enrollment numbers in the early grades. But while Amistad had 38 instances of suspension during the last school year among children age 6 and younger, Achievement First Hartford Academy had 114 in the same age group.*

An even more dramatic comparison: The incidence of suspension of kindergartners and first graders at Achievement First Hartford Academy last year was an estimated nine times the rate in Hartford public schools.
...
Marc Michaelson, regional superintendent for Achievement First, said the school, where students annually out-perform their Hartford peers by significant margins on state standardized tests, has "a very high bar for the conduct of our students and that's because we've made a promise to our scholars and our families that we are going to prepare them for college."

And from another Courant article:

For the 2012-13 year, the state is spending about $67.7 million on 17 charters with 6,451 students, including Achievement First's network of schools in New Haven, Bridgeport and Hartford, said Jim Polites, a spokesman for the state Department of Education. Last fall, the state budget was $52.8 million for nearly 6,100 charter school students.

State Education Commissioner Stefan Pryor is a former board member and co-founder of Amistad Academy, Achievement First's flagship school in New Haven.

A few points:

1. There is a great deal of money changing hands, often with little scrutiny...

2. And despite decidedly mixed results, the money seems to be increasing.




3. Selection effects matter.

4. These effects can be amplified by social dynamics.

5. Add to that the natural extremes of childhood and you get certain kids who are 80/20 for experienced teachers and 95/5 for the newbies.

6. Thus even a small change in class roster can cause a big change in class behavior and performance.



7. Under movement reforms, one of the best ways to get ahead financially and politically, is to find a way to dump certain students.

8. If you repeated suspend five-year-olds, their parents will take them elsewhere.



9. The hardest-to-reach kids should be the ones you care about the most.

10. If you don't feel that way, you shouldn't be working with kids.



* In case I haven't mentioned it lately, there is a huge range in quality and professional ethics among different charters.

More on the looting phase of the education reform movement

Having watched the rise and fall (?) of the education reform movement for years now, I often find my attention split the story and the metastory. The story is what's being done in education, how it's working and what should be done differently. The metastory is about the way the reform narrative grew and entrenched itself (particularly with parts of the left) and about the way movement reformers (again, particularly on the left) failed to deal with certain longstanding concerns.

Putting aside the question of political agendas (which really shouldn't be considered when assessing arguments -- bad motives don't preclude good reasoning), the concerns fell into three broad categories:

1. The underlying pedagogical and economic assumptions were flawed;

2. There were intractable data issues that were being overlooked;

3. The system was vulnerable to (and had huge incentives for) gaming at a level that could undo any of the benefits that might come from the proposed reforms.

It is the third concern that prompted me to speculate about affinity effects (a point disputed here). Though evidence supporting all three has been accumulating for years, discussions of the first two got very technical very quickly. Support for the third, though, was obvious on a common sense level.

When a group repeatedly fails to notice something as it becomes increasingly obvious, you can legitimately start looking for some external influence, and the problem with gaming has become increasingly obvious. We started with clear vulnerabilities, then saw the rise of charismatic figures who asked us to trust them with tremendous amounts of money and power based on extravagant but questionable claims. Almost immediately after this, reports starting flowing in of suspicious test results, extensive student dumping and other signs of aggressive data manipulation.

How were so many otherwise alert and skeptical movement reformers caught off guard by problems anyone could have seen coming? I believe part of the answer lies in the culture and narratives of the reform movement. Cultural affinity meant that reformers (who generally had good intentions themselves) tended to project similar values on those who displayed the correct cultural signifiers while hero/villain narratives made it difficult to accept the idea that some of those cast in heroic role might be corrupt while some of those cast in the villainous parts might be right.

Though overt cheating has been getting most of the press lately, larger, more systemic data manipulation is potentially the bigger concern. Mike the Mad Biologist has been on this beat and sends us to this depressing data point.[emphasis added]

One of the first things a visitor sees when stepping into Kipp Academy is a graph that shows how Kipp is outperforming Metro schools in every subject.

However, Kipp Academy is also one of the leaders in another stat that is not something to crow about.

When it comes to the net loss of students this year, charter schools are the top eight losers of students.

In fact, the only schools that have net losses of 10 to 33 percent are charter schools.

"We look at that attrition. We keep an eye on it, and we actually think about how we can bring that back in line with where we've been historically," said Kipp Principal Randy Dowell.

Dowell said Kipp's 18 percent attrition is unacceptable.

MNPS feels it's unacceptable as well, because not only are they getting kids from charter schools, but they are also getting troubled kids and then getting them right before testing time.

"That's also a frustration for the zoned-school principals. They are getting clearly challenging kids back in their schools just prior to accountability testing," said MNPS Chief Operating Officer Fred Carr.

Nineteen of the last 20 children to leave Kipp Academy had multiple out-of-school suspensions. Eleven of the 19 are classified as special needs, and all of them took their TCAPs at Metro zoned schools, so their scores won't count against Kipp.

"We won't know how they perform until we receive results and we see. We would be happy to take their results, frankly. The goal is getting kids ready for college. The goal is not having shiny results for me or for anyone on the team," Dowell said.

There's a surreal quality to Dowell's responses here. The kind of attrition we're talking about in this case is almost entirely at the administrator's discretion. What's more, it generally takes a great deal of time and paperwork to make it happen.

As mentioned before, these schools already have selection bias and social norming working in their favor. If, on top of that, a principal like Dowell selectively gets rid of almost one out of five students based on behavior and performance, it is difficult for a school not to look good.

In a sane society, this would have been the lead story the day it broke

David Biello writing for Scientific American (via Thoma):

That's the message from the U.S. Geological Survey's evaluation of how the U.S. is managing its aquifers. Or mismanaging. For example: water levels in the aquifer that underlies the nation's bread basket have dropped in some places by as much as 160 feet.

The rest of the world isn't doing any better. A conference of water scientists just issued the so-called Bonn Declaration, which declares that this lack of foresight will cause the majority of people alive in 2050 to face "severe" freshwater shortages.

Ethics and Ayn Rand

James Kwak:

This idea is obviously echoed in Ayn Rand’s novels, which celebrate the individual genius standing out against the backdrop of collectivist mediocrity. It has also trickled into the contemporary conservative worship of the ultra-rich. The phrase today is “job creators” (whatever that means), but it has the same moralistic overtones as in Nietzsche and Hayek—a class of people who are better than the rest of us, on whom we depend for our salvation and prosperity, and whom we should not presume to question or constrain through, say, safety regulation or higher taxes (“penalizing success,” in the jargon).

This really has been one of the more insidious ideas of the twenty-first century-- that wealth and success are evidence of moral character.  One problem with this philosophy is that it replaces a creed of "it isn't whether you win or lose, it is how you play the game" with an unfortunate alignment between moral virtue and business success.  Under these conditions, how do you restrain the quest for wealth to within a code of ethics?

Instead we have a purely outcomes based ethic, that talks about the good that comes from the wealthy without asking hard questions -- like would things be better if wealth were more equal?  In particular, the logical connection between rich people becoming more rich and more employment opportunities being created are less than completely clear.  I don't want to say that the effect size is actually zero, but rather that it seems odd to neglect other possible sources of variation.

The Project Gutenberg Project

Joseph and I have been going back and forth on the best way to get the most out of the tidal wave of open data of which we are only seeing the beginning.

Joseph tends to be more skeptical on this subject. He almost has to be. He's approaching this both as an epidemiologist (where privacy and ethical issues create huge headaches) and an academician (where open data can create tremendous perverse incentives to rush out mediocre work in order to beat out other researchers looking at the same data). The promise of open data is very much field specific.

I tend to be more optimistic about the subject. I'm more the data miner of the blog and to find myself living in an age when anyone with a refurbished desktop computer, a copy of R and Python and a decent internet connection can do real, interesting research is tremendously exciting.

There is at least one area, though, where I am possibly more skeptical than Joseph and that's in the chances of these huge data initiatives self-organizing along anything near an optimal configuration...

I started to write something here about market forces in research and incentives and non-rival goods but then the phone rang and by the time I got off I realized that would be a lot of work (at least it would if I did enough research to make sure I wasn't making an idiot of myself). Chances are, that discussion would just be a long winded way of saying if we want to effectively coordinate all these researchers so that information flows where it needs to flow and data is fully explored and we can keep track of what's going on, we need to think this thing through.

Which brings me to the Project Gutenberg Project. Project Gutenberg has, of course, a huge and growing database. It's set up to be researcher-friendly and the system readily lends itself to automated approaches. The possibilities for text-mining are endless and a tremendous number of interesting research questions can be addressed with nothing more than a reasonably up-to-date computer and some free software (I previously posted a couple of examples here).

This would seem to be an ideal test case for setting up procedures and sites for dealing with large, open databases . Here are a few possibilities:

A place to submit and comment on proposed hypotheses;

A place to report preliminary findings;

A place to report negative findings;

A place to report confirmation of previous findings;

A database connecting approaches, hypotheses and data points;

Multiple ranking systems;

A way of identifying under-explored parts of the data.

Obviously this is a first pass and I'm just throwing out some ideas. Some might be impractical. Others, as Joseph would point out, will not be applicable to other data sets. And I have a nagging feeling that I've left something obvious out.

But that, of course, is the nature of a blog post.

Maybe they're hinting at something

I've been experimenting with different blog formats over the past few years with a couple of pop culture blogs and a fairly serious one (You do the math) on education. They've definitely been on the back burner recently but they are active and they continue to improve slowly in traffic and page rank so if I decide to put one in gear (which I may do with the You Do the Math fairly soon), I won't have to start from zero.

These sites run ads. To date I haven't seen any money from them (my account is around forty dollars and you apparently have to have one hundred for them to cut you a check), but like I said they've been in a groundwork stage and I have plans to go after at least one of them more aggressively in the future.

Which is why this email from Google is a tad troubling:

Hello,

As part of our internal audit review, we identified a credit under your AdSense account that may be due and owing to you.

Since the date of your last transaction, there has been no activity from your account. As such, these funds are in danger of being escheated to the state. Unless we are informed of your ownership or beneficial interest in these funds, they will be placed in the custody of the State of California. If these funds are transferred to the State, you will be required to submit a claim in accordance with the statutory provisions of the State's unclaimed property laws in order to recover it.

Should you wish to discontinue using AdSense, you can close your AdSense account. If you close your account, you'll no longer have access to the Google code and you'll receive no further emails from us. Your remaining earnings will be paid out according to the payment schedule outlined in the AdSense Terms and Conditions. Provided there are no holds, you have accrued more than 10 USD and we have a valid form of payment on file, you should receive your payment in the cycle following your account closure. For detailed instructions on how to cancel your account, click here.



Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

Here's the funny part... There doesn't seem to be any way for me inform them of my ownership other than to click the link and cancel. There is no link in the middle paragraph. The email was sent from a no-reply address. When I go to the Adsense contact page I am told that my account is not eligible for direct email consultation and I am limited to "specialized contact forms," none of which seem to come even close to fitting my situation.

Are they trying to get me to leave or are they really this bad at business communications?