The death of the comic book industry (circa 1970)

I've been working my way through the archives Mark Evanier's site. I was familiar with his work as a writer and comics historian, but I only recently caught on to his blog. Many of the posts from a decade ago suffer greatly from a loss of topicality, but most stand up fairly well and a few actually benefit from the added perspective.

This post from 2004 has certainly remained current. We frequently see stories (many of which grow into accepted narratives) about media and industries that are shrinking and facing serious new challenges. The standard response is to assume that trends will hold and business models will remain unchanged until the institution in question rides off into the sunset to join the ice wagon and the rag-picker.

This does, of course, happen, but not that often. In order to completely wipe out a product or service, you have to replace it with something that's better in almost every respect (think chemical film, 8-tracks and, while we're on the subject, ice boxes). If there is still value in something, the market is very good at finding a way to exploit that value.

Creative destruction has become one of the most beloved buzzwords of the Twenty-first Century. It is seen as a moral good, an inevitable force of nature and an irrefutable argument (you can't stand in the way of creative destruction"). The result falls somewhere in between conventional wisdom and a better-a-gram-than-a-damn Pavlovian response. In these cases of groupthink, it is always useful to remind yourself of counter-examples, in this case a major branch of the publishing industry that looked like it was about to disappear.

Around 1970, when I got into the comic book business, the consensus was that there wouldn't be a comic book business for long…and not because of me.  The traditional method of distribution — comics sold on a returnable basis to newsstands around the country — was failing, or at least it was failing comic books.  The biggest distributor, Independent News, was making large sums off more expensive, adult publications like Playboy and Penthouse, and some there suggested that newsracks were no longer a place for kids or low-priced periodicals. Since comic books were low-priced and largely for kids, this was a pretty ominous suggestion, especially when you considered that Independent News not only distributed DC Comics but was a part of the same company.  In other words, DC's wares were being sold by an outfit that no longer believed there was a future in selling comic books.  With that attitude, there couldn't be much of one.

The "returnable" part was what was really hurting comics.  Marvel would print 500,000 copies of an issue of Spider-Man and would get paid only for those that actually sold.  So if the racks were crowded (or the distributor trucks filled with an extra-thick issue of Playboy that week), 50,000 might not make it to the racks at all.  Many more copies would get damaged and returned with all the unsold copies for credit.  300,000 might actually be sold and the rest would get pulped…obviously, not the most efficient way to do business. In the past, the ratio had not been that bad, and a publisher could make a tidy profit…but by the seventies, the numbers were closing in on the comic book industry.

To the rescue came not Superman or Batman but a Brooklyn school teacher named Phil Seuling.  Phil ran the big comic conventions in New York for years so he knew the fan market and its buying power.  Around 1973, he began proposing to DC and Marvel that he sell their comics in a different manner, by-passing traditional newsstands and getting them directly to comic book dealers and shops.  He would pay slightly less per copy to the publisher but he'd be buying the comics on a non-returnable basis, so a sale would be a sale; no printing five copies to sell three.

At first, publishers rebuffed his proposal.  The "direct market," as it would come to be called, did not seem lucrative enough to warrant the attention, to say nothing of how it might further destroy the old method.  But before long, it became apparent that the old method was being destroyed, with or without selling books the Seuling way, so DC, Marvel and other companies tried it.  Within a year, around 25% of all comic books were being sold via "direct" distribution, through Seuling's company and about a dozen others, with 75% still on conventional newsstands.  Within ten years, those percentages were reversed.  Today, the "direct market" is the primary market…though Phil, sadly, did not live to reap the full benefits of his idea.  He died in 1984 at the age of 50.

There's also an interesting demographic side to this story, but that will have to wait for another post.

I should really come back to this one

"The Splendid Table" is one of those names that make it easy to get annoyed at public radio, but it's a pretty good show and this is a very good story, both for the points it makes and the issues it raises. Lots of threads intersect here, from nutrition and public health to behavioral economics to class tensions. Definitely worth a listen.

Infrastructure

This is Joseph

Larry Summers (via the Mad Biologist):

Walk from the US Airways shuttle at New York’s LaGuardia Airport to ground transportation. For months, there has been a sign saying “New escalator coming in Spring 2015.” The Charles River at a key point separating Boston and Cambridge is little more than 100 yards wide. Yet traffic has been diverted for over two years because of the repair of a major bridge and work is expected to continue into 2016.

The world is said to progress, but things that would once have seemed easy now seem hard. The Rhine is much wider than the Charles, yet Gen. George S. Patton needed just a day to create bridges that permitted squadrons of tanks to get across it. It will take almost half as long to fix that escalator in LaGuardia as it took to build the Empire State Building 85 years ago.

I think that this really does hit on something important.  Yes, in some cases things like safe labor practices matter and have a real cost.  But on the other side, it seems impossible to think that we have simply lost the ability to generate infrastructure.  At the very least, regulatory and financial incentives are failing to properly align. 

Whatever it is that is causing this malaise, I think it is crucial that we understand it -- no matter how much it may annoy entrenched interests.  By that I do not only include workers/unions, but also things as diverse as courts, regulatory structures, and the rest that make it hard for public infrastructure to be efficient, or which impede a properly competitive private sector. 

Agon alert -- a post for board game geeks

I believe I mentioned earlier that I recently set up an Amazon store to sell Kruzno, an abstract strategy game I developed a few years while I was teaching high school math. I'll be posting more on the game (partially for the obvious promotional purposes but also because this corner of the blogosphere is actually nerdy enough to read posts on developing abstract strategy games).

On a related note, I used a six by six by six hex board so it could serve as a "utility player" in the game library. Lots of very cool games are played on this board including Gliński's hexagonal chess and the forgotten gem, Agon. I have a write-up over on the teaching blog. Definitely worth a look if you're into two player strategy games.

From commie to Randian and back in under four minute

Nat Hiken was a writers' writer. William Faulkner, who disliked television as a rule and who did not own a set, was a fan of Car 54 and would regularly go over to a neighbor's house to catch the show. Ken Levine called him the "greatest sitcom writer of his era." Larry David lists Bilko as a primary source for Seinfeld.

The Seinfeld connection is easy to spot. Hiken was perhaps the all-time master of the unexpected-consequence plot, where a small and seemingly harmless event would spiral into a series of bigger and bigger complications. An attempt to get a citation or help a couple avoid their weekly fight would spiral out of control, often upending the precinct, the police department or the entire city.

"Toody & Muldoon Meet the Russians" is not good introduction to the series. Rather than building up, the Russian characters pretty much start at eleven and much of the political satire has age poorly (One, Two, Three is one of my least favorite Billy Wilder films for similar reasons). It is, however, an interesting time capsule of JFK's America. Check out the specific business strategies the commissar proposes before spotting his KGB tail.




p.s. It doesn't come up in this clip but both Bilko and Car 54 were notable at the time for their integrated casts featuring African-Americans as as professionals and co-workers.

The challenge of discussing racism is finding definitions under which you and your friends don't qualify as racists.

We are probably all guilty of the above from time to time but among the commentariat it's more or less a job requirement. One popular technique is to couch racist statements in terms of class. Arguing that poor people are genetically inferior -- less intelligent, less disciplined and less moral -- has somehow become an acceptable position in publications like the New York Times. 

Other times, journalists avoid acknowledging the racism of colleagues by simply pretending to ignore what's in front of their faces. This leads us (via Brad DeLong) to a couple of pieces on the New Republic.

Here's Ezra Klein writing in 2009 about TNR and its editor-in-chief Marty Peretz [emphasis added]:

[Jeffrey ] Goldberg's article was a particularly weird piece of work, but it fit neatly into the "anti-anti" Israel genre. The thing about criticizing Israel is that you get called an anti-Semite rather a lot. This doesn't happen when you criticize sugar subsidies or come out against the stimulus bill. And make no mistake: Anti-Semitism is a serious charge. A genuine anti-Semite would be, should be, drummed out of political journalism, just as a legitimate racist should find no home at a serious opinion outlet. For that reason, being called an anti-Semite by hobbyist Zionists who happen to own and control prestigious domestic political magazines seems like it would be a bad thing. But the charge has been rendered tinny through overuse.

That 'should' gives Klein a bit of wiggle room but a reader could certainly come away with the impression that this sort of thing is not tolerated.

Via Max Fisher (who provides a notable exception to my first paragraph), here's a sample of what Peretz was routinely printing in one of the country's most prestigious journals.

The truth is that no one has ever really cared about the lives of Africans in Africa unless those lives are taken out by whites. No one has cared, not even African Americans like [Jesse] Jackson and [Susan] Rice. Frankly -- I have not a scintilla of evidence for this but I do have my instincts and my grasp of his corruptibility -- I suspect that Jackson was let in on the diamond trade or some other smarmy commerce.
...
Well, I am extremely pessimistic about Mexican-American relations, not because the U.S. had done anything specifically wrong to our southern neighbor but because a (now not quite so) wealthy country has as its abutter a Latin society with all of its characteristic deficiencies: congenital corruption, authoritarian government, anarchic politics, near-tropical work habits, stifling social mores, Catholic dogma with the usual unacknowledged compromises, an anarchic counter-culture and increasingly violent modes of conflict.
...
But, frankly, Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims. And among those Muslims led by the Imaam Rauf there is hardly one who has raised a fuss about the routine and random bloodshed that defines their brotherhood. So, yes, I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.
...
I actually believe that Arabs are feigning outrage when they protest what they call American (or Israeli) "atrocities." They are not shocked at all by what in truth must seem to them not atrocious at all. It is routine in their cultures. That comparison shouldn't comfort us as Americans. We have higher standards of civilization than they do. But the mutilation of bodies and beheadings of people picked up at random in Iraq does not scandalize the people of Iraq unless victims are believers in their own sect or members of their own clan. And the truth is that we are less and less shocked by the mass death-happenings in the world of Islam. Yes, that's the bitter truth. Frankly, even I--cynic that I am--was shocked in the beginning by the sectarian bloodshed in Iraq. But I am no longer surprised. And neither are you.

Fisher goes on to spell out the reaction of fellow journalists to this "overt racism."

And no one resigned — including me, while I was an intern at the magazine for four months. Though I was unpaid, I eagerly accepted the resume-boosting prestige that came from working there. And, like the rest of the staff, I did it knowing it meant turning a blind eye to Peretz's frequent screeds on the magazine's website, fully aware that they were not just the crazy rants of an old racist but were in fact palpably damaging to the minority families who had to live in a society that was that much more intolerant because Peretz enjoyed a platform that legitimized his views.

I am thinking about this today as I watch senior editors and contributing editors resign en-masse from the magazine, in response to the firings of Foer and Wieseltier. Many of them are friends, and many never worked under Peretz at all.

But a number of the journalists who are resigning their positions as "contributing editor," typically an honorific title granted to former staffers who are no longer actually contributing or paid, did work under Peretz, or did accept this same honorific title from him.

Some of these resigning editors chose to tolerate and lend tacit support to Peretz; I am in no position to critique them for this. But the fact that many of them found Peretz's promulgation of racism to be tolerable, whereas Chris Hughes' firing of two beloved colleagues was not, speaks to a larger problem of how we think about racism in American society and particularly in the elite media institutions that have badly lagged in employing people of color.

Mars One -- libertarian ideology, ddulite fantasies and the decline in journalistic standards

[Update: Before posting, I try to follow up on all relevant links. This time I missed at least one. My apologies to Ms. Keep.]

There is a lot to complain about in the coverage of science and technology and, God knows, I do my share of bitching about the way the NYT et al. report on topics like driverless cars. Just to be clear, though, my complaints are generally meant to be focused on specific problems that tech journalists tend to overlook, usually involving issues like implementation, compatibility, scalability and infrastructure. For example, Google's autonomous car is a tremendous piece of engineering, but it currently requires road-data that cannot be gathered cheaply on a large scale. Google appears to have gotten stuck on this and a handful of other problems that effectively keep the technology from being commercially viable.

Most tech stories play out like that. They start with interesting, even promising ideas from smart, serious people, then the journalists covering them either choose to ignore or don't understand the subtleties and caveats. The researchers aren't always completely innocent here -- there's often a temptation to feed the hype -- but in their primary role they are doing respectable work.

Not all of these stories are cases of good research badly reported. Sometimes the rot goes all of the way down with lazy writers uncritically reporting bad technology and questionable science. Elmo Keep is neither lazy nor credulous. Writing for Medium, she has produced a devastating take-down of one of the most notable of these bullshit stories:

I will have to tell him that from everything I can find, Mars One doesn’t appear to be in any way qualified to carry off the biggest, most complex, most audacious, and most dangerous exploration mission in all of human history. That they don’t have the money to do it. That 200,000 people didn’t actually apply. That, with all the good faith one can muster, I wouldn’t classify it exactly as a scam—but that it seems to be, at best, an amazingly hubristic fantasy: an absolute faith in the free market, in technology, in the media, in money, to be able to somehow, magically, do what thousands of highly qualified people in government agencies have so far not yet been able to do over decades of diligently trying, making slow headway through individually hard-won breakthroughs, working in relative anonymity pursuing their life’s work.

I started to excerpt a few paragraphs of Keep's article but you really need to read the whole thing to grasp just how unlikely it is for this enterprise to go beyond the asking for money stage. Every single aspect collapses under scrutiny, from the unrealistic funding model to the wildly optimistic cost estimates to the nonexistent specs and contracts to the unresolved technical issues.

There is no excuse for a respectable news organization to treat this as a serious and yet we still get articles like this from Vibeke Venema and the BBC:

Could you leave everyone you love for the chance to settle on Mars? Sonia Van Meter describes herself as an "aspiring Martian" - she hopes to be one of the first humans on the planet in 10 years' time. But it would mean never seeing her husband again.

"I don't think you can apply for something like this and not be the tiniest bit insane," says Sonia Van Meter. "But this is the next great adventure, and I'm going to do absolutely anything I can to be a part of this."

The 35-year-old political consultant from Austin, Texas, is one of 705 people in the running to form a 20- to 40-strong human colony on Mars - a group whittled down from 200,000 who sent applications to Dutch not-for-profit organisation Mars One last year.

"I thought: 'Shoot, this sounds like fun!'" she says. "I didn't think there was the slightest chance that I would be selected, I just wanted to be a part of it."

For her husband Jason Stanford, her application - and the fact that she now appears to have a 35-to-one chance of leaving forever - evoked mixed emotions.

"Like any good red-blooded American male, at first I thought this was all about me. I thought: you're leaving me," he says.

Over time he changed his mind. "The more she talked about it, the more I realised she was doing this for the right reasons - she was doing this to show humanity what we can all do if we work together," he says.

There is one quick cover-your-ass 'if' buried deep in the piece ("The mission, if it goes ahead, will be dangerous, some say suicidal."), but even in that single brief sentence, the possibility of it not happening is just an aside. There is no real effort to put this in a realistic context. Instead, we're given figures like that 35-to-one chance; it's almost certainly false but it makes for a good story.

The press likes to maintain the convenient fiction that it is "open to all voices." This is an obviously absurd proposition – – even though the Internet has greatly expanded what news organizations like the BBC can offer, they can still only cover a tiny fraction of the information and opinions out there – – but it serves the purpose of absolving journalists and, more to the point, editors and publishers from taking responsibility for what they present to the public.

When something appears in a major news outlet, particularly when it is presented noncritically, that outlet is implicitly endorsing the story; it is, in effect, saying that this story is something important enough to spend time learning about. I have seen numerous stories on this proposed Mars One mission but Keep's article is the first of those to make any real effort to address the sheer silliness of the proposal.

A very specific definition of 'exclusive'

I spend a lot of time on Netflix, but I'm afraid that I often don't do a very good job focusing on the main point. What's important here is not the strengths and weaknesses of the company -- let the day traders do their own research -- but rather the way that the story illustrates so many of the problems in the way the press covers business, particularly the tech sector.

For example, the coverage of "Netflix Originals" shows how persistent a factual error can be if it fits a popular narrative. In this case, the narrative is that Netflix is the next HBO which has lead many journalists covering the story to assume that Netflix is building a content library similar to HBO's. They aren't. Netflix doesn't own shows like House of Cards. They just license it. Anyone who researches the story should know this, but more often than not, you see something like this from Seeking Alpha:

Reed Hastings can now promote Netflix as the only place to see "House of Cards" and other Netflix original series that are gaining momentum, like "Orange is the New Black." These productions will generate millions of new members. One other major benefit is that Netflix owns ALL rights to the shows, and can easily now start offering some kind of service in new markets like Asia.

I've been banging this drum for quite a while, but I have to admit I was surprised to learn how narrow even the streaming rights are.

Apparently, Netflix's rights to exclusive access only cover unlimited streaming options like Amazon Prime. You can still buy episodes online from other sources if you're willing to cough up a couple of bucks.

Is purchasing very limited rights a smart business strategy on the part of Netflix? That's a question for another post.  For now, though, let's just say that this is yet another story where the narrative sometimes obscures the facts.

False flags

Frances Woolley has a nice post about retirement and women's rights:

Yes, there are older female academics who will enjoy greater financial security as a result being able to work past 65. But let's think not about anecdotes - the stories of particular men and particular women. Overall, how many of the beneficiaries from the end of mandatory retirement are men, and how many are women? Who bears the costs of the transition?

Two thirds of university teachers between 65 and 69 are men (p. 22 here), as are three quarters of those over the age of 70. This is not simply a reflection of an academy that, 20 or 30 or 40 years ago, when these folks were hired, favoured men over women. Let's rewind five years, to when the people who are now 65 to 69 were 60 to 64. This is more or less the same group of people, just at two different points in time.

In 2005-6, just before the standard retirement age ended, 65 percent of academics aged 60 to 64 were male (p. 22 here).

In 2010-11, when that same cohort of people were 65-69, 68 percent of those working as university teachers were male. There is hardly any hiring of individuals into university teaching in that age group. The only plausible explanation of the three percentage point increase in the proportion of men in the academia is that the more women than men retired in that cohort.

In other words, while there might be other reasons to end mandatory retirement, it is pretty clear that it did very little to increase the participation of women in the academy.  Furthermore, since it is very costly (professors at the end of their careers make a lot in Canada), it may well outcompete alternatives like a massive pay equity program. 

You see this sort of principal a lot when people don't want to admit the actual reasons that they are doing something.  Or, even worse, when they are pretending to be on the side of the people who will lose the most from the policy.

My current favorite example is the opposition to gas and congestion taxes under the rubric that they hurt the poor the most.  That can only be true in a very narrow sense.  First of all, the poorest of people don't actually own cars (which are expensive).  Second, subsidizing car commuting makes it more difficult to put in alternative systems like public transit -- as this approach both makes driving easier and starves government of revenue.  Who benefits the most from public transit?  I'll give you a hint -- it's not the people with brand new SUVs. 

Furthermore, the real test of a false flag is when people resist alternative ways to help the populations who are under discussion.  For example, do the people who are against mandatory retirement also want to ensure strict gender equality in pay?  What about paying for long maternity leaves to make it easier for women to retire at 65 with full pensions? 

Similarly, why can't we increase the gas tax and then give money to poor people (who could spend it on gas or something else)?  Heck, to be logically consistent, the tax that would hurt the poor the least would be a wealth tax.  Why not do that instead of a gas tax? 

Now this is not to say that these policies may not be okay on the merits without the false flags.  The policy alternatives that I pointed out may have other good reasons to be rejected.  But the failure to even engage these adjacent arguments is a pretty good evidence that the main priority is not the concern for the group in question but rather worry that the policy argument is weak on the merits.

And we should be less forgiving of that. 

Remembering a couple of conservative college columnists

A quick digression to set up the story. After getting a B.F.A. in creative writing, I did what seemed at the time to be the sensible thing and went off to a master's program in a very big out-of-state school. It didn't go well -- the main thing I learned was that I didn't want to be an English professor -- so I returned to my alma mater to get a teaching certificate. The education requirements didn't fill up my schedule so I decided to take some math courses and get a double certificate (which eventually led to a much more pleasant grad school experience but that's another story).

While I was making that initial run at grad school, a conservative columnist at the university paper (which was big enough to be a multi-section daily) was kicked off the staff for repeatedly lifting large chunks from George Will columns. It wasn't a big story even around the school but there was something slightly funny about the columnist's name that made him lodge in my memory.

A year later, back at the then-small college in Arkansas (it has grown considerably since I left), I noticed something in that school's paper (a far less impressive weekly tabloid of about twelve pages).

The paper's conservative columnist was an odd, bitter fellow, antisocial and prone to bizarre feuds with faculty members and student groups whom he felt were promoting a leftist agenda. His column that week was focused on the ways conservative voices were persecuted in academia and exhibit 1 was the previously mentioned plagiarist. Not that plagiarism figured prominently in this account. The column was written under the assumption that the dismissal had been politically motivated and any charges of journalistic impropriety had been trumped up to silence a someone willing to challenge the liberal establishment.

The slant was not unexpected given the author. What did surprise me was the reference to this obscure story from a school hundreds of miles away. This was in the late Eighties, years before the internet so it's not like they got it from a friend on Facebook. I was fairly certain that I was the only student at the small school who had attended that big university the year before and the only reason I remembered the incident was because of that odd connection I had made with the name. How did the story make that long trip and how did it get transformed from embarrassing lapse to heroic stance?

After I started paying more attention to this columnist in particular and to other conservative writers at other colleges, it started to make more sense. Both the left and the right had channels for distributing useful information and in some cases misinformation, but the channels on the right tended to be more centralized and obviously better funded. When a conservative journalist ran into trouble, there was a national network in place to disseminate his side of the story.

Things may have always been this way with more money and support available on the right, but I suspect that much of what I observed was the result of the rise of the conservative movement and that today's right-wing media owes at least some of its DNA to those information exchanges of the Eighties.

What's wrong with the press part 10^100 -- people who use 'summer' as a verb

One of these days, I want to do some long posts on race and class prejudices. The two topics are so closely intertwined and so complexly related that you can't have an in-depth conversation about one without addressing the other. That's a huge problem because, thought the press might be willing to address its racism, it is in complete denial about its class bigotry and lack of diversity.

This anecdote from the Philadelphia Inquirer says a lot.

Jill Nelson says she had misgivings from the start.

On the day she was interviewed for a writing job at the Washington Post's new magazine in 1986, she recalls, the conversations seemed less about her work and more about her.

Editor Ben Bradlee, who has since retired, warmed up, according to Nelson, only after she told him she'd summered each year at Martha's Vineyard. The privileged background that Nelson had alternately enjoyed and eschewed had given her an "in."

But getting there was one thing, she writes; surviving was another.

Her book, Volunteer Slavery: My Authentic Negro Experience, is a juicy expose of life at one of the nation's most venerable institutions. In this memoir, published by Noble Press, Nelson describes four puzzling, disillusioning and demeaning years at the job and severe family strains that she had to deal with at the time.

Faced with the challenge of keeping her integrity and meeting the expectations of editors portrayed as callous and ignorant about African American sensibilities, Nelson says she knew four months after her arrival that it wasn't going to work. But she hung in, she said in an interview last week, for the money and out of a sense of responsibility. Success, she said, was an expectation of her upper-middle-class upbringing. The subtitle, she said, underscores lifelong feelings that her background had allowed her to elude the experiences of most blacks.

A recent exchange I had with my iPhone

You know those ads where people have those amazing Turing-certified conversations with Siri.








Here is what one of my recent conversations with Siri sounded like.

Me: "Call _____ home."

Siri: "There's no home number for _____. Would you like me to use mobile instead?"

Me: "Call _____ home."

Siri: "Which phone number for _____?"

Me: "Call _____ home."

Siri: "Calling _____ home."

"As God as my witness..." is my second favorite Thanksgiving episode line [Repost]

If you watch this and you could swear you remember Johnny and Mr. Carlson discussing Pink Floyd, you're not imagining things. Hulu uses the DVD edit which cuts out almost all of the copyrighted music. .

As for my favorite line, it comes from the Buffy episode "Pangs" and it requires a bit of a set up (which is a pain because it makes it next to impossible to work into a conversation).

Buffy's luckless friend Xander had accidentally violated a native American grave yard and, in addition to freeing a vengeful spirit, was been cursed with all of the diseases Europeans brought to the Americas.

Spike: I just can't take all this mamby-pamby boo-hooing about the bloody Indians.
Willow: Uh, the preferred term is...
Spike: You won. All right? You came in and you killed them and you took their land. That's what conquering nations do. It's what Caesar did, and he's not goin' around saying, "I came, I conquered, I felt really bad about it." The history of the world is not people making friends. You had better weapons, and you massacred them. End of story.
Buffy: Well, I think the Spaniards actually did a lot of - Not that I don't like Spaniards.
Spike: Listen to you. How you gonna fight anyone with that attitude?
Willow: We don't wanna fight anyone.
Buffy: I just wanna have Thanksgiving.
Spike: Heh heh. Yeah... Good luck.
Willow: Well, if we could talk to him...
Spike: You exterminated his race. What could you possibly say that would make him feel better? It's kill or be killed here. Take your bloody pick.
Xander: Maybe it's the syphilis talking, but, some of that made sense.

It's not a question of being too positive or negative but of being wrong in both directions

Given some recent discussions, I perhaps ought to go back and clarify my position on Google's driverless cars. The Google part is important. Lots of companies, particularly big auto makers like GM and Nissan, are seriously pursuing this research. However, when you read a news account about autonomous vehicles, most of the time it's a story about Google which is troublesome for at least two reasons: first because there are some big concerns that are particularly applicable to Google's approach; and second because Google has a way of playing to the worst tendencies in tech reporters. The result is a standard narrative that manages to get both the pros and the cons wrong.

The official account goes something like this: from a technological standpoint, the Google driverless car is virtually good-to-go. There is every reason to expect you will be able to buy one in a couple of years; the only clouds on this horizon are concerns with safety and, more importantly, regulation. This version is extremely popular. It is regularly reported in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. It also gets both the pros and cons wrong.

Though it's too early to say for certain, safety appears to be the one non-issue for this technology. All transportation carries an element of risk, but based on a pretty good sample of road tests, that risk appears to be considerably smaller for Google's self-driving cars than it is for other ways of getting around.

Regulation is only a slightly greater concern We have had well over a century to work out the problems associated with insuring and regulating a wide variety of high-speed and potentially very dangerous vehicles. The idea that a viable, highly anticipated, and, relatively speaking, very safe technology will be kept off the market due to legal issues not just in the United States but in Europe and Asia is simply not believable.

So, if the concerns are not safety and regulation, what are they?

As previously discussed many times, much of the more gee-whiz reporting has been based on the idea that autonomous cars will quickly reach 100% adoption. As unrealistic as that assumption is, it pales in comparison to another jump tech reporters seem to have made.

Based on this Slate article, it appears that Google's approach to fully autonomous cars requires a specialized and highly expensive data infrastructure, specifically a collection of incredibly detailed maps. In order to compile this level of data, dedicated vehicles with human drivers have to travel the roads in question multiple times. What's more, the process needs to be constantly repeated to keep the data up-to-date. Road construction, new houses, all sorts of things need to be taken into account by the system.

The primary advantage of automobiles over other forms of transportation is their flexibility. A car can go pretty much anywhere you want. You can even decide on a new destination while traveling. In order to be viable, new automotive technology needs to keep that flexibility. Apparently Google's current approach means it would take a prohibitive amount of time and money to map out more than a tiny fraction of the nation's roads. Put bluntly, if this is true, given these infrastructure costs and be wide array of transportation alternatives, the Google's autonomous cars will never be viable in its present form.

Caveats are important here. It is entirely possible that Google is on the verge of a breakthrough that will allow its cars to operate off of existing Google maps. That would come close to making the technology viable. For all I know, the company could be preparing a press release as I write this. If this is the case, I'll pen a sheepish retraction then call friends and family members who don't drive and share the good news.

For now, though, this appears to be a very difficult technical nut to crack and, rather than showing signs of progress, Google seems to be trying to divert attention from the problem. You'll notice that their latest highly touted 'advance' was actually a step down in this respect, going from actual road tests to far less demanding closed tracks.

New side project up at Amazon.

A few years ago, I developed this checkers variant based on non-transitive relationships to help my students get some experience working with the concept. I'll talk more about the game and its development later, but in the meantime, here's a link to the webstore at Amazon.

For another example of non-transitive play, check this out. If nothing else, it will give you something to talk about if you ever meet Warren Buffet.

This isn't about Ferguson, but it may be the most relevant thing you'll read on the subject.

This is an excellent time to go back and reread "Against Law, For Order" by Mike Konczal. Since this essay appeared in April of 2012, we've seen the acquittal of George Zimmerman, the grand jury ruling on Darren Wilson and any number of additional incidents that support Konczal's troubling but convincing argument.

More bad behavior from your friendly neighborhood cable company

There's another flight going on between Viacom and a cable provider. Suddenlink, a major provider for much of the middle of the country, has recently dropped all of by a calms basic cable channels. This includes big names such as MTV, Nickelodeon, TVland, and Comedy Central. In Their place Suddenlink has scheduled some decidedly second-tier alternatives. Fans of Jon Stewart now have to make do with Jon Lovitz.

The story hasn't gotten a lot of attention (as often happens when you're on Central Time), but it's worth digging into if you're trying to keep up with the media landscape. It also ties into our ongoing rabbit ears thread.

Having lost most of the cable channels he regularly watched, a friend of mine recently called up Suddenlink and tried to downgrade his service. If you've been following the news you probably know what's coming next. He was immediately referred to a "specialist" who spent the next half hour badgering him ("why don't you want to get the best deal?").

At one point my friend (who has suffered through many of my tirades on the subject) said he was thinking about going over to an antenna. That was largely a bluff -- between terrain and distance to a broadcast tower, he probably wouldn't get very good reception unless he put up quite an antenna -- but the response was interesting. The specialist told him that going to over-the-air television would mean giving up HD.

Like I said, my friend had heard more on this topic than a reasonable person would care to so he knew this simply was not true -- not only can you get HD over the air; the quality is often better than what you get from cable -- so he challenged the company rep on this point and got him to back down to a "I'm pretty sure you can't get HD." My friend still didn't get them to accept the downgrade but he did get a rate reduction, which counts as victory when dealing with a cable company.

This ties into perhaps the most important point in these terrestrial TV stories. Competition is good but it's not not good enough by itself. When American television joined the rest of the world and went digital,the market should have become more competitive but years after the conversion, cable and satellite companies are still able to act like near-monopolies in large part because of asymmetry of information.

I've argued that digital over-the-air television is a great technology that more people ought to be using, but it may turn out to have the most impact on those stick with cable. Dealing with Comcast et al. will be much easier when the companies start facing more market pressure.

Megan and Mark are in synch

This is Joseph.

As a follow-up to Mark's post, Megan McArdle has this great point:

If the left-wing MSM is indeed biased against you, then your strategy needs to take that into account. Do you have a plan for compelling the left-wing MSM to treat you fairly? If not, then you should not settle upon a course of action that would work, if only this fact were not true. You don't launch your cavalry regiment against a Panzer battalion on the grounds that you could beat the Germans if only they didn't have all those darned tanks.

In other words, at some point an optimal strategy involves accepting the world as it is and not complaining that it isn't the best of all possible worlds.   The ability to develop realistic strategies in the face of the "facts on the ground" is a key skill in many contexts: political, military, and even business. 

Thoughts on the coming storm

From a text exchange I had on election night

The press has gone from
"The Republicans are the responsible party"
To
"Both parties are irresponsible"
To
"The Republicans will start being responsible after they win"
To
Whatever they are going to say after the impeachment.

[voice recognition errors corrected.]

This must be an interesting time to be a political scientist or anyone studying the way institutions form, function and fail.

The  Republican party seems locked into a course that defies conventional political explanation. I don't see any way that this fight over this issue is a winning move for the GOP. I am inclined to agree with Josh Marshall's analysis:

It all adds up to an intense and likely toxic campaign fracas in which a lot of people will have a unique and intense motivation to vote. That will apply to people on both sides of course. But the anti-immigration voters vote consistently almost every cycle. And as intense as your animus is toward undocumented immigrants, it's hard for it to compare to the motivation of voters who directly know someone who will be affected. And that latter group has far more 'drop-off' or occasional voters.

This isn't getting mentioned a lot right now. But behind the headlines I suspect it's one of the key reasons Republican elites are upset that this might happen: because it's an electoral grenade dropped right into the heart of the 2016 campaign.

Of course, the standard line at this point is to say something about the leaders of the party losing control of the base, but I don't buy that -- at least not in the way it is generally framed. For one thing, the underlying political philosophy of the base and the leaders doesn't seem that different, and where there are differences, they seem to mostly come from the base actually believing the message crafted by the party elites.

Keeping in mind that they decisively won the last election, the Republicans still have big problems with information and coordination. That makes it more difficult for the party to make decisive rational moves that promote its self-interest and instead leaves it inclined to seek catharsis. Shut down and impeachment are about emotional release. The challenge for the party leadership is convincing their followers that there's something more important than that.

Other than stem cells...

What are the most notable examples of regulation holding back new technology? There has been a lots of talk recently about encouraging innovation through deregulation zones. The idea being that, for example, having a city with no regulation on drones will spur a great deal of research into the technology. On one level, this does make a certain amount of sense. The easier it is to do research, the more research we expect to see.

That said, other than studies with human subjects (where the rules really can have a dampening effect), I can't think of an area where regulations are clearly having a big negative impact on research. When a technology is promising and well-funded (as with drones), companies don't seem to have that much trouble working with the rules.

I assume I'm missing some obvious example. Any ideas?

"Duct tape and string"

Or as we used say back in the hills, spit and bailing wire.

From James Kwak's recent piece on United Airlines:

There are two lessons to be drawn from these entirely unexceptional examples of air travel gone wrong. One is that United’s computer systems don’t work — for the same reasons that many large companies’ core systems don’t work. The overnight unbooking and rebooking was probably a computer error, and in any case United had no way of rolling back all the automated changes to its reservation system. The automated cancellation of my return flight was either an incompetent customer service representative who didn’t preserve my return reservation when I asked her to, or a computer system that didn’t give her any way of preventing the cancellation. I was downgraded from first class because some marketing genius at United decided to add a new upsell feature to the website — but no one bothered to extend the legacy system they use behind the scenes to capture the new data from the ticket sales process. (This is a common problem with enterprise software these days: companies build new features in their websites but can’t integrate those features properly with their core processing systems.) All of this just reinforces a point I’ve made several times before: the computer systems holding together the world’s largest companies are held together by duct tape and string.

I've got at least a couple of posts I'd like to write on the how bad this side of the business often is. Having seen some of these systems up close, I'm surprised things don't crash and burn more often.

A subtle issue with standardized tests

This is Joseph.

Dean Dad has a nice piece on assessment.  A part of it that jumped out was:

Johnson’s argument is subtle enough that most commenters seemed to miss it.  In a nutshell, he argues that subjecting existing instruction to the assessment cycle will, by design, change the instruction itself.  Much of the faculty resistance to assessment comes from a sense of threatened autonomy.  Johnson addresses political science specifically, noting that it’s particularly difficult to come up with content-neutral measures in a field without much internal consensus, and with factions that barely speak to each other. 

He’s right, though it may be easier to grasp the point when applied to, say, history.  There’s no single “Intro to History” that most would agree on; each class is the history of something.  The ‘something’ could be a country, a region, a technology, an idea, an art form, or any number of other things, but it has to be something specific.  Judging a historian of China on her knowledge of colonial America would be easy enough, but wouldn’t tell you much of value.  If a history department finds itself judged on “scores” based on a test of the history of colonial America, then it can either resign itself to lousy scores or teach to the test.

This means that the design of standardized test is crucially important if students and/or teachers are going to be evaluated on them.  For some subjects, e.g. basic math, this may be less controversial but it still involves making choices about what the emphasis will be.  A perfect test is like a perfect teachers -- neither beast really exists in nature. 

But this is critically important for high stakes tests, because what is taught cannot help but be influenced by the test.  If history questions on the high stakes tests are all focused on colonial America, guess what the history section of classes will look like.  In some sense that is okay, insofar as we have a broad consensus as to what should be taught.  But it does make the content of the tests a matter of public policy and concern as much as any other aspect of school instruction.

James Boyle's devastating take down of Robert Bork

What makes this piece so effective is Boyle's refusal to dismiss Bork as a crank or a charlatan. Boyle instead insists on treating Bork as an important figure in conservative thought. It would have been easy to lapse into mockery, but by starting from the explicit assumption that Bork's ideas are worth taking seriously, Boyle is left with an obligation to examine them in painful detail.

From A Process of Denial: Bork and Post-Modern Conservatism

by James Boyle

With this range of defects it is hardly surprising that Mr. Bork chose to shift his ground somewhat. In The Tempting of America he argues that the understanding of the public at the time the Constitution was ratified, rather than the intent of its original authors, should determine its meaning. There is obviously a price to pay for making this change. The best thing about the intent of the framers was that it appealed to the unreflective idea that a document must always mean exactly what its authors meant it to -- no more and no less. The practitioners of original intent can claim with superficial plausibility that their method is the one "natural" way to read the text. They can even claim that we often (though not always) read other legal documents this way -- trying to determine what Congress, or the judge, or the administrator meant by this word or that phrase. Original understanding has less unreflective appeal. Precisely because it is a more sophisticated notion of interpretation, it sacrifices the idea that this is the only credible way to read a text (what about what the words mean out of context, or what the author meant?) the appeal to everyday practice and perhaps even the claim that this is the way we read other legal documents.

This problem is a particularly acute one for Mr. Bork. Throughout The Tempting Of America he explicitly connects his struggles to those going on within other disciplines. As well he might. Most disciplines seem to have rejected the idea that the text can only be read to mean what the author intended. Literary critics and historians have added other methods of reading. How would the text have been understood by its audience at the moment that it was written? How would an audience today understand it? Can the text be illuminated by evidence of the author's subconscious desires or conflicts? How does the text read if we take it as an a-contextual attempt at philosophical argument?

These other methods are referred to collectively (and a little pretentiously) as "the reader's revolution against the author." They represent everything that Mr. Bork finds most reprehensible in today's scholarship. He quotes approvingly a letter from intellectual historian, Gertrude Himmelfarb attacking this impermissible openness to other methods of interpretation. "Any methodology becomes permissible (except of course, the traditional one), and any reading of the texts becomes legitimate (except, of course, that of the author)." (p. 137) If Mr. Bork was still claiming that constitution meant what its authors intended, this would be all well and good. But the trouble with Mr. Bork's revamped and sophisticated version of originalism is that it can no longer appeal to the romantic idea that the imperial will of the author must govern the text. "The search is not for a subjective intention." (p. 144) Instead, he has handed over interpretive competence to the historically located readers of the constitution. For reasons we can only speculate about, he has shifted ultimate interpretive authority from the Framers of the Constitution to the "public of that time." Mr. Bork has joined the reader's revolution.

As I pointed out before, this switch is a costly one for Mr. Bork. To the initial cost of having been seen to adopt the very same methodology so often criticised by conservatives in other academic disciplines, one also has to add the cost of having been seen to change from one dogmatically asserted position to another. Mr. Bork obviously feels this one particularly strongly because he denies having done it. Though he described himself during the hearings as "a judge with an original intent philosophy"(61) and argued in print that "original intent is the only legitimate basis for constitutional decision-making",(62) he says in The Tempting of America that "[n]o even moderately sophisticated originalist" believes the Constitution should be governed by "the subjective intent of the Framers." (p.218) He suggests that no-one could ever have held such a belief, because it would necessarily mean that the secretly held beliefs of the Framers could change the meaning of the document. Thus all (moderately sophisticated) originalists must have believed in original understanding all along. This seems like a red herring. There are many varieties of intentionalism and many varieties of "reader-controlled" interpretation. But allowing the intention of the author to control interpretation is fairly obviously not the same thing as allowing the understanding of the reader to control. Expanding the definition of intentionalism does not turn it into the philosophy of original understanding. The `intention of the Framers and ratifiers' is not the same as `the understanding of the American people at the time.' Mr. Bork seems to find it hard to admit the change.

The most interesting example of Mr. Bork's scholarly method is the point in The Tempting of America he takes sections from his 1986 article The Constitution, Original Intent, and Economic Rights(63) which, as one might suspect from the title, defends original intent, and uses those sections to defend original understanding. At first glance, it appears that he does this by finding the words "original intent" wherever they appear in the article, and simply replacing them by "original understanding." Chunks of text which had reproved Paul Brest with failing to understand that the original intent determines the meaning of the 14th Amendment, are edited, expanded upon, a new philosophy of interpretation inserted. With a quick change of key words they can become reproofs to Paul Brest for failing to understand that original understanding determines the meaning of the 14th Amendment.(64) Even the same counterarguments can be pressed into service. In 1986 for example, "[t]here is one objection to intentionalism that is particularly tiresome. Whenever I speak on the subject someone invariably asks: "But why should we be ruled by men long dead?"(65) In 1990, Mr. Bork finds that "[q]uite often, when I speak at a law school on the necessity of adhering to the original understanding, a student will ask, "But why should we be ruled by men who are long dead." (170) In the era of the word processor, this kind of "search and replace" jurisprudence has its attractions. Still, both the interpretive criteria and the identity of the `dead men' has changed, and Mr. Bork seems uneasy with that fact.(66)

One of these days I'm going to do a post on genres as fitness landscapes

In the meantime, here's a completely unexpected but surprisingly effective reworking.

What do stock buyback actually do?

Barry Ritholtz passes along an interesting thought from Aswath Damodaran, a professor at New York University.

Before a company calls for a stock buyback, it has risky assets (its operating business) and riskless assets (cash). After the buyback, the company has less of its riskless asset (cash) but also has fewer outstanding shares.

Hence, we end up with a somewhat riskier stock. Damodaran argues, rationally, that a buyback by an all-equity funded company should be a value-neutral transaction. In other cases, the shift should be reflected in by assigning the company a somewhat lower price-earnings ratio.

I don't know enough to comment intelligently on this claim, but it does seem to indicate that, as with so many other stories, the impact of buybacks is considerably more complicated than the experts on CNBC would have you believe,

Fixing Common Core (or at least a small part thereof) over at the teaching blog

With a nod to David Coleman, last week I did a post called "Deconstructing Common Core" focusing on the homework problems going out under the Common Core banner.

[The generally unproductive question of what is and isn't Common Core comes up frequently. Hopefully, having an actual copyright notice will keep us from wasting any more time on the subject.]

I've become increasing concerned about the direction of mathematics education. Here's a big part of the reason:

I volunteer a couple of times a week to help a group that tutors kids from urban schools. My role is designated math guy. I go from table to table helping kids with the more challenging homework problems.

Recently, I have noticed a pattern in helping with Common Core problems. First I explained them to the students, then I explained them to the tutors.

That may be the most noticeable difference between the mathematics of Common Core and the new math of the 60s. In the summer of love, an advanced degree in mathematics or engineering was sufficient to understand an elementary school student's homework. These days, the tutors with math backgrounds often find themselves more confused than their less analytic counterparts since what they know about solving the problem seems to have nothing to do with what the assignment asks for.

To follow a Common Core worksheet, you really need to have a little knowledge of the underlying pedagogical theories. Unfortunately, if you have more than a little knowledge, you'll find these worksheets extraordinarily annoying because, to put it bluntly, much of what you see was produced by people who had a very weak grasp of the underlying concepts.

I thought it might be of interest to walk through the process of 'fixing' these problems, showing how, with a few changes, these confusing and ineffective problems could be greatly improved.

I used an example of a Common Core problem that went viral a while back.

Here is my proposed fix (which was anticipated by at least one of our regulars).

James Kwak does a valuable service...

...and states the obvious.

The value of a company is supposed to be the discounted present value of its expected future cash flows. Actually, the value of a company is the discounted present value of its expected future cash flows. So it follows that a breakup should only create value for shareholders if it increases future cash flows or lowers the discount rate. Most breakups don’t obviously do either.

This may seem to border on tautology -- "of course, that's the value of a company" -- but if you follow the business page regularly you'll routinely run into strategies and initiatives that make no sense given this definition. Sometimes these decisions are justified in terms of stock price. Other times, flavor-of-the-day notions like disruption are invoked. Occasionally, there is no excuse at all;

Unless you've logged some time with a few major corporations, you can't imagine how much time and money is wasted on unadulterated bullshit largely because C-level executives lose sight of the obvious.

Annals of heroic inference

This is Joseph.

Via Andrew Gelman, we get this gem:

One consequence of this is that the number of respondents who report that they are not citizens yet vote or are registered to vote is quite small in absolute terms: in 2010, for example, only 13 respondents — not 13 percent, but 13 out of 55,400 respondents — reported that they were not citizens, yet had voted. Given the ever-present possibility of respondent or coder error, it takes a bit of hubris to draw strong conclusions about the behavior of non-citizens from such small numbers.

Yes, it is very hard to determine characteristics of very rare groups.  For one thing, it's unlikely that you know much about the underlying source population.  So I think the authors are right that it is going to hard to say much about this group, given this instrument.

"The unbookable lesson"

I've got a new post up at the teaching blog about the differences in live presentation and other educational media. Check it out if that sort of thing sounds interesting, but if you do, you might want to watch Flight of the Phoenix first.

"I'm sorry, the card says 'MOOPS'.”

Given that we are on the verge of deciding the fate of major policy initiatives based on typos, this seems sadly appropriate.

Another side to the driverless car discussion

For years now, there have been two basic narratives when it came autonomous cars. The first is what I've called the ddulite version: driverless cars are just around the corner and they are about to change our lives in strange and wonderful ways if we can just keep the regulators out of the way. The second version is more skeptical: while lower levels of autonomy are coming online every day, the truly driverless car still faces daunting technological challenges and, even if those are met, these cars may not not have the often-promised impact. (You can probably guess which side I took.)

If you follow this story through the New York Times or the Economist, you are overwhelmingly likely to get the first version, You may not even know that this bright future is contested. If, on the other hand, you talk to the engineers in the field (and I've talked to or exchanged emails with quite a few recently), you are far more likely to get the second.

This recent Slate article by Lee Gomes is one of the very few to take the second approach.

For starters, the Google car was able to do so much more than its predecessors in large part because the company had the resources to do something no other robotic car research project ever could: develop an ingenious but extremely expensive mapping system. These maps contain the exact three-dimensional location of streetlights, stop signs, crosswalks, lane markings, and every other crucial aspect of a roadway.

That might not seem like such a tough job for the company that gave us Google Earth and Google Maps. But the maps necessary for the Google car are an order of magnitude more complicated. In fact, when I first wrote about the car for MIT Technology Review, Google admitted to me that the process it currently uses to make the maps are too inefficient to work in the country as a whole.

To create them, a dedicated vehicle outfitted with a bank of sensors first makes repeated passes scanning the roadway to be mapped. The data is then downloaded, with every square foot of the landscape pored over by both humans and computers to make sure that all-important real-world objects have been captured. This complete map gets loaded into the car's memory before a journey, and because it knows from the map about the location of many stationary objects, its computer—essentially a generic PC running Ubuntu Linux—can devote more of its energies to tracking moving objects, like other cars.

But the maps have problems, starting with the fact that the car can’t travel a single inch without one. Since maps are one of the engineering foundations of the Google car, before the company's vision for ubiquitous self-driving cars can be realized, all 4 million miles of U.S. public roads will be need to be mapped, plus driveways, off-road trails, and everywhere else you'd ever want to take the car. So far, only a few thousand miles of road have gotten the treatment, most of them around the company's headquarters in Mountain View, California.  The company frequently says that its car has driven more than 700,000 miles safely, but those are the same few thousand mapped miles, driven over and over again.

...

Noting that the Google car might not be able to handle an unmapped traffic light might sound like a cynical game of "gotcha." But MIT roboticist John Leonard says it goes to the heart of why the Google car project is so daunting. "While the probability of a single driver encountering a newly installed traffic light is very low, the probability of at least one driver encountering one on a given day is very high," Leonard says. The list of these "rare" events is practically endless, said Leonard, who does not expect a full self-driving car in his lifetime (he’s 49).

The Google car will need a computer that can deal with anything the world throws at it.
The mapping system isn’t the only problem. The Google car doesn’t know much about parking: It can’t currently find a space in a supermarket lot or multilevel garage. It can't consistently handle coned-off road construction sites, and its video cameras can sometimes be blinded by the sun when trying to detect the color of a traffic signal. Because it can't tell the difference between a big rock and a crumbled-up piece of newspaper, it will try to drive around both if it encounters either sitting in the middle of the road. (Google specifically confirmed these present shortcomings to me for the MIT Technology Review article.) Can the car currently "see" another vehicle's turn signals or brake lights? Can it tell the difference between the flashing lights on top of a tow truck and those on top of an ambulance? If it's driving past a school playground, and a ball rolls out into the street, will it know to be on special alert? (Google declined to respond to these additional questions when I posed them.)
...

Computer scientists have various names for the ability to synthesize and respond to this barrage of unpredictable information: "generalized intelligence,” "situational awareness,” "everyday common sense." It's been the dream of artificial intelligence researchers since the advent of computers. And it remains just that. "None of this reasoning will be inside computers anytime soon," says Raj Rajkumar, director of autonomous driving research at Carnegie-Mellon University, former home of both the current and prior directors of Google's car project. Rajkumar adds that the Detroit carmakers with whom he collaborates on autonomous vehicles believe that the prospect of a fully self-driving car arriving anytime soon is "pure science fiction."

The Good Wife makes some really interesting musical choices

... And, frankly, I just look for an excuse link to any piece of music that gets stuck in my head.

Speed boating

Back when I was in banking, there was a term that got batted around quite a bit called speed-boating. The expression was derived from the way a fast-traveling boat can, for a while, outrun its own wake . As long as a certain speed is maintained, the boat will travel smoothly. However, if the boat suddenly slows down it can be swamped when its wake catches up with it.

Here's how the analogy worked in banking. When you are in the business of lending money, both regulators and investors like to keep track of how well you are doing at getting people to pay their loans back. To do this, they would look at the charge-off rate. At the risk of oversimplifying, this rate was basically the number of loans that went bad divided by the total number of accounts that were open during the period in question.

Obviously, if you booked an account and it went bad, this would add one to both the numerator and the denominator which would push your rate closer to 100%. So you would think that it would always be in the banker's best interest to avoid loans that are going to go bad.

The flaw, or at least the loophole, in this assumption is the fact that the ones are not added at the same time. Even in the extreme cases where the customers never make a payment, the loan is not considered bad for a certain interval, generally 90 days or more. If the customers make a few small payments, this could stretch out for six months or year.

Let's say I book an account that goes delinquent after one year. That was a bad deal for the bank – – it lost money due to that decision – – but for one year, having that account actually lowered the bank's charge-off rate. Eventually, of course, this will catch up with the bank, but the reckoning can be delayed if the bank continues to book these bad accounts at an increasing rate.

As with many of our posts, the moral of the story is that numbers don't always mean what you think they mean. You will often see someone pull out a statistic to settle an argument -- "How can you say the business model is unstable? See how long their charge-off rate is?" -- but without understanding the number and knowing its context, you can't really say anything meaningful with it.

"Deconstructing Common Core."

Starting a new thread on Common Core over at the teaching blog. I'll be cross-posting the highlights but if you want to follow the whole thing, click on the link above.

This may have led to some bias in our sample

Adrian: Once again we've got our friend from military intelligence. Can you tell us what you've found out about the enemy since you've been here?
Adrian as Gomer: We found out that we can't find them. They're out there, and we're having a major difficulty in finding the enemy.
Adrian: Well, what do you use to look for them?
Adrian as Gomer: Well, we ask people, 'Are you the enemy? And whoever says yes, we shoot them.

From Good Morning, Vietnam

Obviously the Onion is releasing news under different names

Because, otherwise, this makes no sense at all:

There is no profession anywhere in the country that has such astonishing rules. Good lord-- even if your manager at McDonalds decides you're not up to snuff, he doesn't blackball you from ever working in any fast food joint ever again! Yes, every profession has means of defrocking people who commit egregious and unpardonable offenses. But-- and I'm going to repeat this because I'm afraid your This Can't Be Real filter is keeping you from seeing the words that I'm typing-- Massachusetts proposes to take your license to teach away if you have a couple of low evaluations.

and

One version of the plan even allows for factoring in student evaluations of teachers; yes, teachers, your entire career can be hanging by a thread that dangles in front of an eight-year-old with scissors.

Wow.  Isn't it a good thing that we are sure that this power will not be abused?   I wish I could get Mark to give a perspective on this one, as I think it would have major implications. 

Obviously this sort of scheme would only be workable for major offenses or where the barriers to entry to the profession are exceptionally low.  Adam Smith pointed out that the less security that you give workers, the more expensive they get (for the same quality of worker).  Now removing teacher tenure might or might not be a huge blow depending on the employment regulations in a state.  There are professions (e.g. hedge fund trader) where people can move around a lot during a career.  Teaching isn't well set up for this, but one can at least imagine making it work.

But losing one's license for bad test scores is a massive penalty.  Heck, is it even the case that you'd lose a teaching license (as opposed to merely being fired) for tampering with the tests?  Think carefully because employees will be able to work this one out . . . 

H/T: Mike

Education reform and rent seeking -- textbook edition

A few months ago, Meredith Broussard ran a great expose of the role of textbook companies in the education reform movement (it's about other things as well, but that will get us started). I plan on discussing it more at length but the queue is getting long and I'd like to get this into the conversation as soon as possible.

The end result is that Philadelphia’s numbers simply don’t add up. Consider the eighth grade at Tilden Middle School in Southwest Philadelphia. According to district records, Tilden uses a reading curriculum called Elements of Literature, published by Houghton Mifflin. In 2012–2013, Tilden had 117 students in its eighth grade, but it only had 42 of these eighth-grade reading textbooks, according to the (admittedly flawed) district inventory system. Tilden’s eighth grade students largely failed the state standardized test: Their average reading score was 29.4 percent, compared with 57.9 percent districtwide.

One problem is that no one is keeping track of what these students need and what they actually have. Another problem is that there’s simply too little money in the education budget. The Elements of Literature textbook costs $114.75. However, in 2012–2013, Tilden (like every other middle school in Philadelphia) was only allocated $30.30 per student to buy books—and that amount, which was barely a quarter the price of one textbook, was supposed to cover every subject, not just one. My own calculations show that the average Philadelphia school had only 27 percent of the books required to teach its curriculum in 2012-2013, and it would have cost $68 million to pay for all the books schools need. Because the school district doesn’t collect comprehensive data on its textbook use, this calculation could be an overestimate—but more likely, it’s a significant underestimate.

If you have a moment, check out the webpage for the book in question and see if you can figure out why it's worth $115 (perhaps the Ernest Lawrence Thayer has upped its rates).

Con(firmation) artists and consistency -- inevitable David Brook edition

David Brooks is deeply concerned with our divided nation:

This mentality also ruins human interaction. There is a tremendous variety of human beings within each political party. To judge human beings on political labels is to deny and ignore what is most important about them. It is to profoundly devalue them. That is the core sin of prejudice, whether it is racism or partyism.

There are some important points (and some questionable ones) made in this column. I'm not sure the 'ism' adds much to the discussion, but it's a topic that deserves more attention (and more pieces like this 2012 episode of This American Life).  It's also a topic for another post.

For now let's stick with the con(firmation) artists thread. That's my somewhat cumbersome term for a school of journalists who get away with cliched, factually-challenged reporting because they appeal to the prejudices of their target audiences and, more importantly, of their peers and superiors. It is a group strongly associated with the New York Times and best exemplified by Brooks.

Much of Brooks' success comes from his ability to craft readable, scholarly sounding pieces that use statistics and anecdotes to reinforce class stereotypes, particularly those held by people on the top have toward people on the bottom. Frequently, when he could not find suitable support for his arguments, Brooks has used facts that aren't actually true. This might simply be the product of sloppiness, but it should be noted that the sloppiness always seems to occur in one direction.

At the risk of oversharpening, if you take the paragraph above and substitute the concept of class in for party, every criticism Brooks makes applies to much if not most of his own work.  He has made a remarkably successful career out of understating the "tremendous variety of human beings" and judging them based on class and other crude demographic labels. What's worse, he continues to resort to statements that simply aren't true (like this claim about vaccines) in order to reinforce various stereotypes.

Does this behavior qualify as "the core sin of prejudice"? I'm not sure, but Brooks' partyism column certainly demonstrates a stunning lack of self-awareness.

A huge conflict of interest -- more from Meredith Broussard's Atlantic piece on textbook companies and standardized tests

[The scheduler sometimes does weird things. This was meant to be the second of two excerpts. Sorry about the confusion.]

You need to read this:

Put simply, any teacher who wants his or her students to pass the tests has to give out books from the Big Three publishers. If you look at a textbook from one of these companies and look at the standardized tests written by the same company, even a third grader can see that many of the questions on the test are similar to the questions in the book. In fact, Pearson came under fire last year for using a passage on a standardized test that was taken verbatim from a Pearson textbook.

The issue often has as much to do with wording as it does with facts or figures. Consider this question from the 2009 PSSA, which asked third-grade students to write down an even number with three digits and then explain how they arrived at their answers. Here’s an example of a correct answer, taken from a testing supplement put out by the Pennsylvania Department of Education:

Here’s an example of a partially correct answer that earned the student just one point instead of two:

This second answer is correct, but the third-grade student lacked the specific conceptual underpinnings to explain why it was correct. TheEveryday Math curriculum happens to cover this rationale in detail, and the third-grade study guide instructs teachers to drill students on it: “What is one of the rules for odd and even factors and their products? How do you know that this rule is true?” A third-grader without a textbook can learn the difference between even and odd numbers, but she will find it hard to guess how the test-maker wants to see that difference explained.

Failures in targeted marketing

One of these days, I need to post a nice long thread on targeted marketing, benefits vs. limitations, promise vs. hype. In the meantime, I'll collect as many examples as I can of targeting done well, targeting done badly and, in this case, of targeting not done at all.

In a comment to Ken Levine's previously mentioned traffic report prank.

In Canada, Closed Captioning is sponsored and announced during the broadcast. Frequently, these sponsors are new album releases - Katy Perry, Rihanna, Coldplay.

Assuming that the language of the captioning is the same as the language of the broadcast and is not used for translation (not an absolute given, I suppose, in Canada), think about the target demographic of captioning.

Measurement

This is Joseph.

Thoreau:

We’re all familiar with the critiques of standardized tests and other common measures used for high-stakes decisions.  Recently, somebody in my circle has started going on about measures of “grit” and their predictive power.  I am willing to believe that “grit” is an excellent predictor of all sorts of things.  But I wonder if much of the predictive power of “grit” comes from the fact that these measures are currently low-stakes, so people have few incentives to game them.

 I really think that this is the heart of the measurement problem.  Insofar as there is a way to do better on a test, in a way that is less work than just be really good at it, then it is probable that much of your signal will be gaming.  Studying the form of the question, for example, is likely to improve performance (by less confusion, if nothing else) but access to these approaches may vary by context.

Even worse, some of the test prep may have nothing to do with the underlying measure.  So the score starts to measure things like "willingness to sacrifice learning time for test prep time". 

This is a very good insight and likely to be eternally problematic in education. 

Old story, new setting

I realize we've hammered this point quite a bit but, for their own good as well as the public's, charter schools have got to come up with an aggressive plan to deal with the self-dealing, price gouging and general looting that is becoming widespread in places like Michigan, Florida and Ohio.



From the Toledo Blade:

The charter school Imagine School for the Arts is paying rent of nearly $1 million a year on a downtown building with the education funding it gets from the state, prompting criticism from a progressive advocacy group that studied charter-school finances around the state.

The complicated financial arrangement also involves a school-affiliated trust company spending more than $7 million last year to buy a building valued at less than $2 million.

The liberal advocacy group ProgressOhio attacked the size of the rent payments at charter schools operated in Toledo and other Ohio cities by Imagine Schools Monday as excessive. Imagine is a national for-profit educational management company.

According to ProgressOhio, Imagine’s subsidiary, Schoolhouse Finance, collected at least $14.4 million in public money last year for the company’s 17 Ohio schools. Of that, $8.9 million covered rent for long-term leases to Schoolhouse Finance. The $5.5 million balance went to pay “indirect costs” to Imagine to provide management services.

Mark says smart stuff

This is Joseph

In the context of a recent post by Mark Palko:

Both the tech and financial sector have embraced the idea that economic rewards are directly correlated to work and worth. It's a strange mixture of efficient market theorem and social Darwinism, often with more than a bit of Randianism.

I found both of these arguments for increased taxation of high income earners interesting.   First:

Because rich people spend their money on useless stuff. Not far from where I live, there is a new house going up. It will be over 10,000 square feet when it is complete. 2,500 of those square feet will be a closet that has two separate floors, one for regular clothes and one for formal wear. If that is what you are spending your money on, then yes, I believe raising your taxes to fund education, infrastructure, and health spending is a net gain for society.

Don’t poor people spend money on stupid stuff? Of course they do. Isn’t the government an inefficient provider of some of these goods, like education? Maybe. But even if both those things are true, public investment and/or transfers to poor people will result in some net investment that I’m not currently getting from the mega-closet family. I’m happy to talk about alternative institutional settings that would ensure a greater proportion of the funds get spent on actual investments.

And,

Because I’m not afraid that some embattled, industrious core of “makers” will decide to “go Galt” and drop out of society, leaving the rest of us poor schleps to fend for ourselves.  Oh, however will we figure out how to feed ourselves without hedge fund managers around to guide us?

I think that this points out that the notion that people deserve the actual income/wealth that they currently have, in some sort of fundamental way, is a true measure of worth/contribution.  It is true that rich people do pay taxes, but consider all of the benefits they get?  We have a whole society of laws devoted to reducing kidnapping, murder of near kin, and robbery, and the wealthy definitely benefit from this. 

So I am not saying that the current level of taxes is too low, too high, or just right (on any specific segment of the market).  I am saying that an open discussion should consider issues like "everybody spends money to satisfy desires and that these desires rarely pass the scrutiny of outside parties".  Or that the whole idea of "going Galt" is often rather silly.  In academics, we have many good people for every position.  The marginal loss of any one person is sad but does not destroy the whole enterprise. 

Similarly, I suspect that there are a number of possible hedge fund managers in the world who could do a relatively comparable job (at least insofar as society as a whole matters -- losing your superstar investor could be a private tragedy).  Otherwise we'd expect the market to collapse when one of these key people dies of old age (and the market has been pretty robust to replacements via death so far). 

So some points to ponder. 

This is the perfect October clip

At least for a snarky epidemiology blog...

Graphs that make me nervous -- UPDATED

[Here's a good link to the full report.]


A couple of quick caveats: I am never entirely comfortable focusing too much on "additional years of learning" -- it's a problematic metric -- and the link to the original report seems to be dead.

The good folks at Vox are very excited by the results of this recent experiment in merit pay. Perhaps I'm missing something obvious, but that jump between 2010 and 2009 seems really big.

Does this look odd to anyone else?

Yes, a Surgeon General would come in handy right about now

For me, one of the most interesting stories in politics these days is the way that information has come to flow in the the conservative movement. And sometimes the most interesting part of that story is the way information fails to flow.

Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) says Ron Klain is "off to a bad start" in his new role as the president's Ebola response coordinator, and that the U.S. Surgeon General should be the one leading the effort. But what Chaffetz doesn't seem to realize is that there hasn't been a surgeon general for more than a year.

“Why not have the surgeon general head this up?" Chaffetz asked in a Wednesday appearance on Fox News. "I think that’s a very legitimate question. At least you have somebody who has a medical background whose been confirmed by the United States Senate.”

“It begs the question, what does the surgeon general do?" he added. "Why aren’t we empowering that person?”

After this broke, Chaffetz tried to moonwalk his way back from the statement but there is simply no way to frame this so that the man comes off as both well-informed and honest. His problem is that he is trying to follow an official party line that makes consistency almost impossible (you can't block relevant nominations and gut relevant funding while plausibly complaining about the government doing too little to address an epidemic).

I suspect the root of the problem is that the leadership of the conservative movement fell in love with the appealing but doubly flawed idea that you can create optimal messaging by controlling the process. Fox News has always been a hothouse for ideas and arguments crafted to appeal to the base. Conflicting data and effective counter-arguments were largely kept out of the environment.

This approach can work for a while but at some point you lose control. The system is too complex to fine-tune. Eventually you find yourself saddled with a bunch of ideas that the base is committed to even though they can't hope to survive in the outside world.