Double bonus false-equivalence points at the New York Times

Reading this David Leonhardt piece (Letter From the Editor: Marriage, and When Liberals Are Wrong) is like watching the Three Stooges working in a hardware store -- Here's where he steps on the rake. Here's where he drops the anvil on his foot. Here's where he walks into the buzz saw -- but with the crucial difference that the Stooges at least had some glimmer of awareness after the injury (even Curly would get up off of the stove when his pants started to smoke). Leonhardt doesn't seem to realize there's anything wrong.


The rake --  "[H]appiness research is a mess"

The safe thing for a journalist to say about these dueling views is that they’re both partly correct. And they are! Yet that’s also an incomplete statement. To be blunter, I’d say that family structure is an area where many liberals are putting more weight on their preconceptions (inequality is bad for society) than on the evidence (changes in family structure are both an effect and a cause of inequality).

My colleague Claire Cain Miller’s widely read piece this week on a new study of marriage is another reminder of this fact, I think. The researchers who wrote the paper set out to figure out whether marriage actually promotes happiness or whether married people are happier simply because happier people tend to get and stay married. The data point to the first conclusion: Marriage (or long-term partnership) causes a noticeable and lasting increase in life satisfaction, especially among people who consider their spouse to be their best friend.

There may be no single word in social science research that makes the statistically literate more cautious than "happiness."

It has no standard definition, let alone an operational one. It is difficult to measure, subject to all sorts of selection effects, and colored by expectations. The metrics are vulnerable to framing and other extraneous factors. The data are always confounded. Virtually all attempts at causal inference have to be buried in countless caveats and conditions.

(Dean Baker spells out some of these concerns here, particularly involving survivorship bias)

Even if everything that followed in the piece went well, any conclusions drawn from this data would still be suspect, and as mentioned earlier, what follows doesn't go well at all.


The Anvils (one for each foot)

Having started out with this questionable foundation and made some big causal leaps, Leonhardt then finds himself arguing that "liberals are wrong" on a position that no actual liberal seems to hold, at least none that the author can find. The best he can do is to argue that liberals blame many social problems on inequality and "Life satisfaction isn’t the same thing as inequality, but they’re related." Throw marriage equality into the discussion and the argument for liberals taking the marriage-does-not-lead-to-happiness position is even weaker.

Having smashed one toe, Leonhardt then goes looking for another anvil to knock over.

We should also be willing to say when we think liberals don’t have a claim on the evidence — such as when they argue that education is overrated (but still send their own children to expensive colleges)... 

Just to be clear, the links indicate that Leonhardt is talking about college education. Liberal attitudes toward the role of K through 12 education are complex and you might be able to make at least an interesting argument for some of them underrating that part of the process but with college he runs into the same problem of not being able to come up with any liberals who hold what he suggests is the typical liberal position.

To appreciate fully the journalistic slapstick here, you need to follow the links. The first goes to a piece by EPI research associate Richard Rothstein, the second to another post by Leonhardt.
There are a couple of problems here: first, with no disrespect intended for Mr. Rothstein, if you are going to argue for a liberal consensus on an issue and you are only providing one example, it needs to be someone quite a bit more prominent; second, and more serious, Rothstein's position in no way contradicts Leonhardt's.

Here's the key paragraph from the Rothstein article:

Colleges and other educational institutions can influence which students get the more highly-skilled jobs that are available. But colleges and other educational institutions cannot, to a significant extent, affect the number of jobs that are available – highly skilled or otherwise.

And here are a couple of passages from Leonhardt's article.

A new set of income statistics answers those questions quite clearly: Yes, college is worth it, and it’s not even close. For all the struggles that many young college graduates face, a four-year degree has probably never been more valuable.

The pay gap between college graduates and everyone else reached a record high last year, according to the new data, which is based on an analysis of Labor Department statistics by the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. Americans with four-year college degrees made 98 percent more an hour on average in 2013 than people without a degree. That’s up from 89 percent five years earlier, 85 percent a decade earlier and 64 percent in the early 1980s. 

... 

I find the data from the Economic Policy Institute especially telling because the institute — a left-leaning research group — makes a point of arguing that education is not the solution to all of the economy’s problems. That is important, too. College graduates, like almost everyone else, are suffering from the economy’s weak growth and from the disproportionate share of this growth flowing to the very richest households.

Keep in mind, these aren't just some articles pulled from the archives; these are what Leonhardt himself links to as support for his contention that liberals claim that education is overrated despite the evidence.

And it gets worse. To find someone who actually espouses this "liberal" position, you need to follow through the links in Leonhardt's earlier article. Those will bring you to this:

"For an increasing number of kids, the extra time and money spent pursuing a college diploma will leave them worse off than they were before they set foot on campus," Megan McArdle concluded in a Newsweek cover story last fall. Peter Thiel, the billionaire PayPal co-founder, has been paying smart undergraduates to drop out and start working on something, anything, other than college.

At the risk of belaboring the obvious, in this chain of articles, the two people who come closest to taking the "liberal" position are McArdle and Silicon Valley's favorite pro-monopoly, anti-suffrage Galt-wannabe.


The buzz saw -- offsetting penalties

There is no better way of setting up a gag been combining smug self-congratulation and utter cluelessness.

When we started The Upshot last year, we said that one of our goals would be to avoid false equivalence. When we thought one side of a debate had more claim on the evidence — even when that side didn’t have a complete claim on the evidence — we would say so. In recent years, there have been more than a few policy debates in which liberals have had this greater claim on the evidence — climate change, tax increases on the affluent, Federal Reserve policy or health care. As journalists, we should be willing to say so. We should also be willing to say when we think liberals don’t have a claim on the evidence — such as when they argue that education is overrated (but still send their own children to expensive colleges) or when they argue that marriage isn’t very important.

You have to wonder what definition Leonhardt is using here. For most of us, the expression "false equivalency" refers to the practice of falsely equating things that are dissimilar, particularly in magnitude. The most common form of this is the offsetting penalty. This occurs when journalists weasel out of blowback from a story that is critical of one side by finding something bad to say about the other. This allows the journalist to maintain an air of moral superiority and a reputation for taking tough stances while allowing the wrongdoers to almost completely evade any responsibility for their actions.

Leonhardt's whole piece is an exercise in false equivalence. The fact that he doesn't see that indicates that a level of arrogance and obliviousness that is remarkable even for the New York Times.

And that is a high bar to clear.

“Epidemiology and Biostatistics: competitive or complementary?”

From Andrew Gelman:

To return to epidemiology vs. biostatistics: it’s my impression that there’s a lot of forward causal inference and a lot of reverse causal inference in both fields. That is, researchers spend a lot of time trying to estimate particular causal effects (“forward causal inference”) and a lot of time trying to uncover the causes of phenomena (“reverse causal questioning”).

And, from my perspective (as elaborated in that paper with Guido), these two tasks are fundamentally different and are approached differently: forward causal inference is done via estimation within a model, whereas reverse causal questioning is an elaboration of model checking, exploring aspects of data that are not explained by existing theories.

It is an interesting question.  I have a very different opinion here (perhaps unsurprisingly) that what we really have is an emphasis on two different pieces of a hard problem.  Both disciplines are looking at the difficult problem of disease (or health) in humans -- where experiments are expensive, awkward, and often infeasible.  It is a very hard problem!

Usually, the practical difference I see is where the researchers starts with the questions.  As a generality, an epidemiologists seems to start by thinking about the disease while a biostatistician tries to think about how to do valid measures in a complex system.  Obviously, if you are ever going to solve these problems you are going to need both approaches.  The day of the very simple epidemiological intervention (John Snow) are likely long past. 

It's also the case that simple attempts to measure  interventions often fail.  Clinical trials use a placebo arm because selection into the trial makes the trial group non-comparable in exceedingly difficult to measure ways.  So you generally have to be good at both tasks for an observational study to be useful. 

But there is also a huge amount of epidemiology that is utterly non-causal.  Why?  Because you cannot come up with testable hypotheses without understanding how different elements relate to one another.  This is what we are doing with the classic case-control study, or at least where I see it as being the most useful.  If you have no idea what causes a rare cancer, looking at what makes the people with cancer different is where you start finding ideas. 

However, these descriptive analyses are not going to give great insight into the cause of the outcome.  For example, mortality has a u-shaped curve with body mass index (many wonderful papers on this phenomenon).  But it is utterly unclear that interventions would help.  Maybe the mortality with low BMI is due to wasting disease, so adding weight if you are thin (and not dying of a disease already) may have no benefit.  Similarly, we don't know what changing a BMI from 45 to 25 would do for a 35 year old.  But if we don't understand the patterns, we can't really target interventions and develop testable hypotheses that are likely to yield important answers. 

So I am often quite serious about looking for "associations" in a lot of contexts.  When we look at the correlated with cardiovascular disease (inflammation or coronary plaques), we are looking for things that you could use to develop a causal hypothesis.  In other contexts, I am interested in using the association as a proxy for a causal effect (unintended drug side effects fall in this category -- when I say warfarin is associated with bleeding, I am really thinking that warfarin causes bleeding). 

And people wonder why epidemiologists are often happy to be confused as "skin doctors".  :-) 

When a guy from College Humor does a TED talk... no, really

As far as I can tell, this is an actual TEDx Talk. I can understand why the compulsively trendy crowd behind these events would want to associate themselves with a hot website that's producing a steady flow of viral videos.  I can even see why they might be willing to risk being the target of the satire.

What I can't imagine is how anyone had the nerve to get up and deliver an actual TED Talk after this.

The War on Data Continues

Andrew Gelman and I wrote a piece for the ASA a while back called "The War on Data." It discussed what appears to be a disturbing trend of powerful interest groups trying to discredit and/or defund major sources of important, high-quality data, ranging from the Census Bureau to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Now we can add the CBO to the list. Jonathan Chait spells out the ugly details. You should read the whole thing but here are a few key paragraphs.

The Congressional Budget Office is a 40-year-old institution that has acquired enormous clout within Washington by virtue of its reputation for ideological neutrality. It furnishes Congress and the public with budgetary estimates that, if necessarily imperfect (as all predictions must be), are arrived at fairly. It is also a perfect modern expression of an old Progressive Era–ideal: that policymakers should be informed by the work of impartial experts. That the conservative majority has set out to corrupt this institution as one of its first major acts is, therefore, perfectly fitting.

The old methods CBO used to measure legislation would account for changes in behavior that a new law might create. (Say, higher cigarette taxes would lead to less smoking.) They did not attempt to measure legislation’s impact on the economy as a whole. This is because the two parties disagree completely over what policies make the economy grow faster. Democrats, for instance, believe that tax rates on the rich have little effect on economic growth, but that investing in public infrastructure or education has a lot. Republicans believe the opposite. Congress voted yesterday to require the CBO’s measurement of the budgetary cost of legislation to incorporate assumptions about how it will affect economic growth. Specifically, the GOP's assumptions.
...
The whole reason the Republican Congress is instituting dynamic scoring comes as a response to its attempt to write a tax reform bill last year. The idea was to lower tax rates while eliminating loopholes and preferences. But Republicans discovered that, while lowering rates is easy, eliminating preferences is hard. After Representative Dave Camp produced a tax reform bill that failed to cut tax rates for high-income taxpayers enough for their liking, Republicans abandoned it en masse. Paul Ryan openly declared his plan to change the forecasting rules so that Republicans could cut tax rates without having to pay for every dollar by ending preferences. The first step was kicking out Douglas Elmendorf, the CBO director widely respected by both sides. The second step was yesterday’s vote.
...
The new, “dynamic” CBO will be systematically biased to make conservative proposals appear misleadingly cheap and liberal proposals misleadingly costly to the public fisc. This would be true even if the Republicans were soliciting a fair range of forecasting perspectives. By its design, the dynamic scoring rule allows the party in power to game its effects. It applies “dynamic scoring” only to legislation affecting 0.25 percent of Gross Domestic Product. As Chye-Ching Huang and Paul Van de Water point out, congressional leaders can manipulate this requirement easily: They can break up large pieces of legislation into smaller bills to avoid dynamic scoring, or combine smaller pieces into a major bill, if needed to make their agenda appear more affordable. Dynamic scoring is subject to abuse by its very design.

“History of the memo”

I've been arguing for a while now that the shiny-object school of technology reporting isn't just annoying; it does real damage. We waste a tremendous amount of time talking about technology that will have a trivial impact or will probably never come to fruition at all. At the same time, genuinely important tech stories go all but unnoticed.

Shininess is a poor indicator of importance. Standardized shipping containers aren't glamorous, but you can make the case that the economic impact of containerization is greater than that of the combined output of Silicon Valley over the last decade.  

Paul Krugman has always been good at separating the real impact of technology from the gee-whiz aspect (I think he slightly overrates Paul David, but that's a small complaint and a topic for another post). Here's an excellent example.

Vox has a nice article about the origins of the business cubicle, which includes a discussion of filing cabinets – which is fine as far as it goes. But there is actually quite a lot more to say, as you’d know if you’d read a wonderful book (with a rather drab title), Control Through Communication, written by my friend JoAnne Yates of MIT’s Sloan School.

JoAnne’s book – which her husband calls “history of the memo” – is about the coevolution of information technology and the business world before the digital age. Of course, back then people didn’t talk about information technology – but IT did exist, indeed developed in fundamental ways, and changed everything. And filing cabinets are a window into those changes.
...
Organizations have always needed a record of their communications. No doubt ancient Roman merchants had slaves making copies of letters, the way Tom Standage (in another great book) tells us aristocrats did, turning senatorial correspondence into a form of proto-Facebook. Much later, JoAnne tells us, some businesses used a pretty amazing system: outgoing letters would be dampened, placed between the pages of a big book, and squeezed with a screw press to create a sort of reprint.

Then came a revolution: carbon paper! Or actually carbon paper plus typewriters. Suddenly, everything was in triplicate, and keeping a record of all correspondence became easy.

The next question, however, was how to find the relevant correspondence. When damp letters and screw presses were the limits of technology, there was no choice: a chronological record, to flip through when needed, was it. Carbons offered new possibilities: copies could be filed by subject instead or as well. But how should they be filed?

Boxes or drawers were one possibility, but they still involved a lot of shuffling, and relevant letters could easily be overlooked. The answer? The vertical file, with a tab indicating the contents of each folder.

To complete the revolution, however, you needed a behavioral change. Previously, businessmen wrote letters, narratives that might touch on multiple subjects. With the coming of the filing cabinet, however, they had to be disciplined to write each individual document on one and only one subject, so that it could be filed properly. The memo was born.

I love this story on multiple levels. For one thing, I always love reminders that many of the technologies that made the modern world were humble and inconspicuous – one of the great things about Daniel Boorstin’s The Americans vol. 3 is its account of things like the invention of the flat-bottomed paper bag. 

The Road to Bakersfield

A few weeks ago I drove up to Bakersfield for the day. I'd been meaning to make the trip for a while, but the immediate impetus was a series of post I'm working on about Elon Musk's less-than-credible proposal for an almost supersonic train. One of the issues that has not gotten much coverage is the terrain of the proposed route.

Press releases tend to show a the elevated track passing over small, gently rolling hills.

While the actual route often looks more like this.

Snow closures are not unusual on this stretch of I-5, nor are high winds, fires and earthquakes. With more than three-hundred miles of proposed elevated high-tech track that needs to be built to extremely tight tolerances, these factors add up.

It might be helpful if the California-based reporters covering this story would drive some of the road for themselves just to get a feel for what's being proposed. It is also a good excuse to visit Bakersfield, which, as Jonathan Gold explains, is a good way to spend an afternoon.

When I worked at the L.A. Times in the 1990s, my fondest desire was to get Bakersfield on the cover of the travel section, for just one week to replace the Rhine castles and Parisian cityscapes with a picture of the Bakersfield sign that then arched over Union Avenue, and it was a proud day when I succeeded, although I think the editors at the Bakersfield Californian thought I was making fun of them. (The unfortunate headline was "Achy Breaky Bakersfield.") I wasn't.

Bakersfield, a scant two hours away, offers the not-inconsiderable pleasure of being in a place that is neither Los Angeles nor part of greater Los Angeles, a town that is thoroughly Californian but can also feel a lot like the good parts of Oklahoma. It's the home of the Bakersfield Sound, the Merle Haggard/Buck Owen/Rose Maddox thing that brought a bit of grit back to country music, and without it the radio now would probably sound even more like Taylor Swift.

But mostly, at least for me, there is the old-fashioned cooking at one of the city's Basque dining halls, huge, multicourse feasts originally intended for the Basque shepherds staying at the local boardinghouses. They have become so popular that the few sheep men who show up are treated like local celebrities.

If you are sitting down at a long, oilcloth-covered table and there is a tin bowl of beans in front of you, a tureen of thin vegetable soup and a bowl of mild tomato salsa, you know you're at a Basque restaurant even without looking at the maps, the paintings of sheep-protecting dogs and the reservation books in which Echeverria is a more common name than Smith.

The perils of being overly tax aggressive

Wow.  

Just wow.

Josh Marshall:

Which brings us back to Roger Ver, variously known as a "Bitcoin entrepreneur" or the "Bitcoin Jesus." Ver is now a citizen of Federation of Saint Kitts and Nevis. He was so excited about avoiding taxes that as soon as he became a Nevisian he set up yet another start up that would allow you to use bitcoins to buy a Saint Kitts and Nevis passport so you too could avoid US taxes. Alas, it folded after a few months, apparently because the St Kitts government disavowed it.

Unlike Facebook billionaire Eduardo Saverin who renounced his citizenship to avoid US taxes back in 2012, I don't get the impression that Ver is remotely that rich. He may be worth a few or even many millions of dollars. But he does not seem remotely in the category of 100s of millions, let alone billions. In any case, now he wants a visa to return to the US to speak at a Bitcoin conference this weekend in Miami. But the US has repeatedly denied his requests. And he's extremely upset at "the tyrants [who] won't allow me to attend #CES2015, #TNABC or anything in the US."

 This is actually a limitation of trying to become an island unto yourself.  When you cut the cords with everyone else, it isn't shocking that they might actually reciprocate the feeling and cut cords with you.

Visualizing a different kind of data

I particularly liked the way he handled the dynamics. Definitely one for the Monday videos.


First Arabesque, by Claude Debussy, performed and animated by Stephen Malinowski.

This could almost get me to start listening to the TED radio hour

Another sharp and well-observed clip from College Humor.

Plagiarism -- repeat offendees

Alex Toth was perhaps the artist's artist in the field of comics and animation. For decades, if you asked people in the industry to name their favorite, Toth would show up with (and sometimes above) names like Will Eisner, Jack Kirby, and Neal Adams. Jules Feiffer famously said that Eisner was the artist other artists stole from. According to this 2006 piece by comics writer and historian Mark Evanier (who worked for most of the major animation houses and comics publishers), Toth was the artist other artists traced.

After a show was sold and they began making episodes, Alex would usually do model sheets to design the characters — both the regulars and the "incidentals." Incidentals are new characters that appear in only one episode…and there would also be model sheets for vehicles, major props, key pieces of scenery, etc. He produced hundreds of these, perhaps thousands, and they are avidly collected by appreciators of fine comic-style illustration. They were a bit more controversial within the studio where some felt that Toth was the wrong guy to have setting the parameters of what everyone else would then have to draw. Everyone admired his drawing ability but there were those who argued that he was either too good or too special.

In most cases, the artists who would have to then draw the characters based on Alex's models had nowhere near his skills, or at least nowhere near the skills for that kind of illustration. H-B did adventure shows but they also continued to produce shows in what one might call the Yogi Bear style. Depending on what kinds of shows were sold each year and how many, it sometimes happened that a "Yogi Bear" artist would get assigned to an adventure show and many of these otherwise skilled artists struggled to replicate the kind of thing Toth was doing on the model sheets. Even a few artists who were solid in adventure-style art found his work too angular at times. Some Toth model sheets were worked over by others — traced and simplified (some would say, "watered-down") — before they went into production. But many artists were also stimulated by the challenge they presented and found that the designs were solid and, as is necessary with animation, designed with an absolute economy of line.

As I mentioned, animators still hoard and trade copies of them. It is not uncommon that an artist assigned to do up a model sheet of a policeman for some new show will haul out a Toth model sheet of a policeman and trace it, making just enough changes to pass it off as new…or not. I have seen Toth-designed characters appear without modification in shows he had nothing to do with, and I expect we always will. It's just part of the grand legacy that the man leaves us.

I'm a bit nervous about posting this at the teaching blog

As previously mentioned, I've been putting together short STEM videos for this weekly feature at You Do the Math. I've also been wasting quite a bit of time at the decidedly not-safe-for-work College Humor site. You might not expect much of an overlap between those two but this clip proved to be the exception.

I'd love to post this on the math education site, but I can't help worrying about the teacher who plays this for his or her class then after it finishes accidentally clicks on the link for... well, pretty much anything else from the site.

Crowdfunding research and the threshold of reportability

Marketplace recently ran this story

"As funding drops, scientists turn to the crowd"

Here's an excerpt:

Susan Nagel from the University of Missouri studies the health impacts of chemicals used in fracking. Last year, Nagel found remnants of fracking chemicals in Colorado streams near locations of previous fracking spills.

“This was an initial study, and we found this kind of strong association,” Nagel says. But she wanted to go farther and confirm her results with more testing.

Her grant application with the National Institutes of Health, however, sat in limbo for months, so she turned to crowdfunding. Nagel set up a project page on the site experiment.com.

“We spent a lot of time on the actual site, developing a video, developing the content to be short but explicit, to be understandable to a broad audience,” Nagel says.

It worked.

Nagel raised $25,000 for a follow-up study. Research like hers is the latest destination for online donors looking to back projects they like. Brian Meece of the crowdfunder RocketHub says science that strikes an emotional chord does better on his site. “Research for animals, research for the environment ... things that are curious, things that are quirky, things that are fun” all do well, Meece says.

There is nothing howlingly bad about this story -- no mangled explanations, no obvious factual errors -- but it's troubling nonetheless because, simply by virtue of occupying a chunk of prime journalistic real estate, it leaves readers with the impression that crowdfunding is playing a substantial part in driving research.

We are talking about a tiny number of people and, in the grand scheme, a trivial amount of money. If you are looking for a philanthropic outlet, experiment.com might be a worthwhile place to send a few dollars, but it doesn't have a place in a serious discussion of how we fund science.

There's a certain natural tension between the desire to cover the unusual and unexpected versus the desire to talk about things that are important and have a large impact (the very fact that something doesn't happen that often tends to limit the number of people it affects ). We therefore cannot expect most stories to be unusual and important, but all too often we see stories that are neither.

Crowdfunding is one of these topics that should often fall in the uninteresting middle. It has been around for years and people use it to raise money for all sorts of things. The fact that someone is using something like Kickstarter to fund a project is no longer, in and of itself, newsworthy.

Crowdfunding also fails the newsworthiness test when we approach it from the other side and look at its impact on society and the economy. With a few niche exceptions (independent filmmaking for example), the role of these sites is almost invariably minor, if not vanishingly small.

We see stories like this partially because they involve what are seen by reporters and, more to the point, editors and publishers as sexy topics that fit nicely with standard narratives. This one involves the internet, the "new economy," and it uses 'crowd' as a prefix. More importantly, it falls squarely in the ever-popular easy-solution genre. No one wants to talk about the tough choice between the nasty political fights and higher taxes needed to fund research adequately on one hand and on the other, the technological and economic stagnation that comes with neglecting the investment. Crowdfunding is a comically inadequate solution but it allows us to put off unpleasant conversations.

Why I am rooting for Netflix (no, really)

Over the past few years, Netflix has become one of this blog's go-to examples for bad business writing. This is partially because there has been a tremendous amount of coverage focused on the company and partially because so much of that coverage has been either logically or factually flawed. After cutting through all of the hype, I find it difficult to be optimistic about Netflix, but I would very much like to be.

Right now, there are three major unlimited streaming services (four if you choose to include Google's YouTube). In addition to Netflix, we have Amazon and Hulu . Amazon has what strikes me as the best business model; unfortunately they also already have a dangerous level of economic power and a history of abusing it (if we include YouTube, the same comments apply to Google). Hulu is a walking antitrust violation in an industry that is already plagued by media consolidation. With competition like this, it is difficult not to root for Netflix.

My suspicion is that CEO Reed Hastings is playing a short-term game, trying to keep all of the balls in the air until he can either find a buyer or make a sufficient killing on the stock. A number of the company's policies feed this impression: the big one is the decision not to build a content library; then there is the tremendously expensive marketing that often seems more focused on building the company's brand among journalists and investors than among  potential consumers; there is the apparent disinterest in controlling costs, something that a company without a deep-pocketed parent cannot manage for long; and there are the disturbingly opaque metrics and bookkeeping practices. These things, along with the general conditions of the market, make me fear that we will not have an independent Netflix for that many years to come.

I do hope I'm wrong though.

Patent Law and Progress

This is Joseph.

This post on Google+ got me thinking about the relation between patent law and technological progress.  Consider:

But 3D printing is an extremely simple concept. Why was 2014 the year it rose to prominence? 

The short answer is that patents are expiring. Many major patents on 3D printing, especially laser-sintering, an inexpensive yet accurate method, expired last year, leaving the concept open to development by any willful person. 

So I can't necessarily vouch for the full accuracy of the statement, but it creates an intriguing explanation for why this technology languished for so long.  Ironically, instead of spurring innovation, patents seemed to completely stymie it in this case.

Episodes like this definitely weaken the "public good" argument behind patent law.  

There's a flying pig joke here somewhere

One of the many annoying things that tech journalist are prone to do is to start out with a somewhat overexcited but generally reasonable account the new innovation then suddenly jump to a speculation that is technically impractical and in some cases theoretically almost impossible.

Case in point (from the Daily Mail but I've seen similar quotes elsewhere):

Greg Henderson, the creator of the Hendo Hoverboard, has created a working prototype of the device which works by using electromagnets to glide an inch off the floor.

The boards will currently only work over metal surfaces, so Mr Henderson is also designing the world's first hover park - similar to a conventional skate park but with an aluminium floor.

However he has also vowed to develop the technology so that it works over every surface, including water, allowing people to recreate the opening sequence of Back To The Future II where Marty uses a hoverboard to escape his pursuers by skating over a lake.

This is so bad I have to wonder if it's a misquote.

Hopefully I will get the physics right on this one (if this gets confusing Wikipedia has good write-ups of Diamagnetism and Eddy Currents), but the hoverboard demonstrated here represents a clever application of very well-established physics and engineering principles. Specifically, if you pass magnets over a conductor like copper they produce currents which in turn produces magnetic fields. The interaction between these fields can be used, among other things, to levitate the magnets over the conducting surface. This is one of the technologies that is used for maglev trains.

Historically, one of the problems with this technology is that the magnets have to be in motion relative to the conductor. Henderson appears to have gotten around this problem by having the magnets rotate in the hover board so that the board can levitate while stationary. That is a clever piece of engineering and it has certainly produced a cool piece of technology. Furthermore, it is easy to imagine lots of potential applications ranging from recreation (skate parks) to manufacturing (moving loads across a factory floor).

What is difficult to imagine is how this could work "over every surface." It is true that all materials have diamagnetic properties which means that a magnetic field can repel substances that we normally think of as non-magnetic, but the magnitudes are tiny compared to the effects you can get with the conductor and moving magnets arrangement mentioned above. It takes incredibly powerful magnetic fields to do this...

...far more powerful than anyone will manage with a skateboard in the near future.

All of which raises the question, why exaggerate? We see this all the time in the tech world. Developers come up with a fun, exciting, potentially useful innovation, then for no apparent reason, they feel compelled to make outlandish claims about cost and functionality. If I were building actual, honest-to-god levitating skateboards, I don't think I would feel the need to embellish the cool factor.

The real challenge of infrastructure

This is Joseph

Scott Lemieux points out that the city of Seattle is now planning another major tunnel project.  What makes this unfortunate is that Seattle is currently home to a fairly unsuccessful tunnel project at the moment.  But it was not inevitable that the current project would work out so poorly, nor is it unclear that things could not be further improved upon in the current project.  Boston's big dig project had a lot of problems, was way over budget, but ended up providing what look like quite good infrastructure results.

What worries me more is that these sorts of ineffective infrastructure projects undermine public support for doing more of them.  To be a rich and successful country, it seems that infrastructure is a requirement.  Or at least I cannot think of any examples of countries with crumbling and defective infrastructure that are doing especially well.  The Eastern bloc, for example, has these issues and doesn't seem to be a powerhouse of economic dynamism at the moment (I happily solicit  contrary opinions from readers).

What has changed to make infrastructure projects slow, expensive, and subject to a lot of problems in execution?  I could see any two of the three if we had major pay-offs on the third axis (e.g. slow and problem-ridden but cheap could make a lot of sense).

And how do we change this?

Innovative business models

Mark Evanier has an interesting observation about an extended warranty for an external hard disk he bought at Amazon.

A 2-Year Data Recovery Plan for $9.95. This proposition gives me more information. It says, "If your drive stops working, the Rescue data recovery plan will recover the data from the failed drive and return it to you on a new piece of external storage." That sounds interesting until you get to this line: "If your data isn't recovered, you get your money back."
...

Okay, so follow me on this. Let's imagine that I have no technical capability to recover data from a damaged drive. None whatsoever.

I offer this deal. When you buy a new hard disk, you send me ten bucks. If the drive never fails you, I keep the ten bucks.

If the drive does fail, you send it to me and I send it back to you with your ten bucks and say, "Sorry, I couldn't recover your data." I don't even have to send you that new piece of external storage I send you if I do recover your data, which I don't even try to do.

What is my potential loss here? Well, I haven't investigated far enough to know but I suspect when you send me your drive for possible data rescue, you have to pay a postage and handling fee for its return. If you do, I'm out nothing. I might even make a few more bucks off that postage and handling fee. If you don't, then I'm out the cost of sending you your refund and returning your drive.

Charles Pierce shows how journalists should acknowledge a mistake

No excuses. No "if anyone was offended." Just take responsibility and apologize to everybody.










Then compare yourself to a character in a Monty Python sketch.

Push, push, push...

BP: great company or the greatest company?

A example of corporate push polling for your files.

Happy New Year's -- Little Nemo grows up

Season's greetings from Windsor McCay.

For best results, open in another tab and expand.

Some things to keep in mind if you see Annie on New Year's Day

There's a lot of history here.

Most of the regulars probably know, I've got a great fondness for comics and their history, whether we're talking panel, strip, book or animated. The adventure strips of the Thirties are are particular favorites. In an age when graphic novels win Pulitzers and superhero movies break a billion at the box office, it can be difficult to remember that in the Golden Age, newspapers were where the action was. With the qualified exception of Will Eisner (whose groundbreaking title the Spirit was a newspaper supplement), the comic book artists of the late Thirties and Forties were mainly imitating people like Alex Raymond, Roy Crane and Milton Caniff.

At their best, these men created bodies of work that stand up remarkably well to this day both in terms of art and narrative. I have no trouble killing lots of hours with Terry and thePirates or captain easy. Little orphan Annie is more problematic. Annie was a beautifully drawn and inventively written strip, butit is difficult to read more than a few strips without being reminded that politically Gray was a Proto-Randian and personally was something of a creep.

Here's an example from Brian Cronin.

[Harold] Gray felt that this travel was integral to the strip (in fact, speaking of the first legend, years after the fact, Gray tried to give his own origin of how he came up with Little Orphan Annie, and it involved him talking to a young orphan girl – it is a dubious story at best [Cronin pointed out earlier that the original title was little Orphan Otto and that the gender change was suggested by his publisher -- MP]). Well, during World War II, gas was rationed. Gray was already no fan of the federal government (as he viewed Franklin Delano Roosevelt as the enemy to basically all of his ideals of self-reliance for the American people), but when he requested and was denied extra gas ration coupons to effect his travel, he was furious. It was an Office of Price Administration clerk named Flack who turned Gray down, determining that Gray’s cartoons were not vital to the war effort.

Gray, a great supporter of the war (Annie formed a group called the Junior Commandos to help the rationing effort in the United States and it soon grew from the strip into a reality) and he was outraged that what he felt were his great patriotic efforts were being unrecognized. Gray asked for a hearing and he received one, but Flack’s decision stood.

Gray then took to his strip by starting a series of strips where he would berate a “fictional” character named “Fred Flask.”

Editorials piled in denouncing Gray and a couple of papers even dropped the strip. Flack threatened to sue over libel. Gray never apologized, but he did drop the series of strips.

Just to put things in context, unnecessary travel was considered a big deal at the time.

But the Flask strips are far from being Annie's low point.

In a series of strips in 1944, upon Roosevelt receiving the nomination for his historic FOURTH term as President, Gray began a series of strips where Warbucks was slowly dying of a mysterious disease. The disease, clearly, was that of the country itself. The current generation was killing the hero of capitalism, Warbucks…

Gray dragged the death out for some time, with many strips similar to the above.

However, as you all know, Roosevelt died early in 1945. Well, what do you know, Warbucks turned out to have faked his death!!

And then, Gray went even further by explaining how happy Warbucks was about a certain change in the “climate.”

I first came across these strips when I picked up a large collection of Annie strips at a library sale. I knew Gray was conservative (start with the lovable war profiteer...), but I had no idea how intense the feelings were or how open he was about them. I remember reading these and thinking "he didn't just say that, did he?"

In retrospect, it shouldn't have been that surprising. Gray hated a lot of people, particularly those he considered "do-gooders" and that hatred was never far from the surface of the strip. Given the changes the films made to his creation (included an appearance by FDR in the 1982 version, I'm pretty sure that Gray would have added the people behind those movies to his enemies list.

I'll explain why later...

but in the meantime, go download the Wake Up Now segment from This American Life. At least a half dozen threads converge on this one.

Robots, Railguns and Rube Goldberg

I'm starting a weekly video feature over at the teaching blog (part of a bigger educational media project, but more on that later). For now I'm collecting fun little STEM videos that teachers can start off the week with or use as filler or as writing prompts.

The purpose is generally more inspirational than instructional. Unless it fits in with the day's lesson plan, it is difficult to get across a complex scientific concept in a five minute YouTube clip. You can, however, get across quite a bit of cool, particularly with a young audience.

I'm looking for short videos with big visual impact (visual enough that most can be played with or without sound). They should appeal to a broad age range (ideally K through 12) though probably for different reasons -- we'd like a high school physics student to watch at the first video and think about majoring in engineering; we'd like first graders to watch at the video and think "wow, a robot cheetah!" (because the second reaction has a way of leading to the first).

Right now, the candidates are mostly from engineering but I'd like to broaden that later. I've been mainly looking at MIT and IEEE. There is also a TED, which somewhat violates my principles but when you see it, you'll understand. I'm also looking for off-beat Rube Goldberg devices and pre-industrial tech. I'm not crazy about the two historic examples here. I love the tech but the videos leave something to be desired.

Does anyone have any suggestions for filling out this list?





Robotic Cheetah








Magnetic Hair












Squishy Robots








Three Strokes of Upward Lightning







Small cubes that self-assemble




Soft autonomous earthworm robot at MIT







A Swarm of One Thousand Robots





Atlas Human-Powered Helicopter - AHS Sikorsky Prize Flight






Levitating Superconductor on a Möbius strip





















Soft Robot Uses Explosions to Jump







1,000,000,000,000 Frames/Second Photography - Ramesh Raskar







OK GO








Hero's steam engine






World record trebuchet at Warwick Castle

The perils of bell curving

This is Joseph.

As people probably know, I tend to be a bit of a Marissa Mayer fan.  However, this one item from a recent piece is definitely something that I would prefer not to see in a company that I worked for:

Mayer also favored a system of quarterly performance reviews, or Q.P.R.s, that required every Yahoo employee, on every team, be ranked from 1 to 5. The system was meant to encourage hard work and weed out underperformers, but it soon produced the exact opposite. Because only so many 4s and 5s could be allotted, talented people no longer wanted to work together; strategic goals were sacrificed, as employees did not want to change projects and leave themselves open to a lower score.

The problem with this sort of approach is twofold.  One, it makes people reluctant to join elite teams and groups (where they get to be rated as sub-average) instead of letting these teams mentor and nurture up and coming talent.   Two, since any ranking is partially a political process (only so much of the data can be objective, especially since the manager presents the evidence), it encourages political infighting among the managers of closely related teams.

Neither process is ideal.  Furthermore, you have to pay extra to compensate for the fear and uncertainty around a low ranking (base salary gets more important when bonuses can be variable). 

Now I am not saying that this process cannot work effectively under some circumstances, but it has notable downsides that need to be thought carefully about. 

Modern War

This is Joseph.

Paul Krugman:

Angell’s case was simple: Plunder isn’t what it used to be. You can’t treat a modern society the way ancient Rome treated a conquered province without destroying the very wealth you’re trying to seize. And meanwhile, war or the threat of war, by disrupting trade and financial connections, inflicts large costs over and above the direct expense of maintaining and deploying armies. War makes you poorer and weaker, even if you win.

I think that this insight is something we should think about a lot more.  In the modern and interconnected economy, even the peaceful absorption of a state (think East and West Germany) can be fraught with difficulty.

Once imperialism looks cost ineffective, it really does change the best ways to deal with opponents.  It's no longer the case that Alsace-Lorraine is really what we want to be fighting for -- instead it is the human capital where a lot of the value lies and it is hard to loot that.  This is not to say that resources are not a good thing (the resource curse can be over-rated) but that they are no longer the sole thing that drives a states economic power. 

This is likely to be a good development, in the long run. 

Today's Principal Agent Problem

This is Joseph

From Mark Miller:

The fix moving through Congress would revised the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) to grant plan trustees broad powers to cut retired workers' benefits if they can show that would prolong the life of the plan. That would mark a major change from current law, which calls for retirees to be paid full benefits unless plan assets are exhausted; then, the PBGC steps in to pay benefits, albeit at a much lower level. The bill also would increase PBGC premiums paid by sponsors, from $13 to $26 per year.

and

The big problem here is that the plan fails to put retirees at the head of the line for protection. When changes of this type must be made, they should be phased in over a long period of time, giving workers time to adjust their plans before retirement. For example, the Social Security benefit cuts enacted in 1983 were phased in over 20 years and didn't start kicking in until 1990.

My problem with this approach is that it does not appear to give the people who manage the plans (i.e. the corporate entities) any incentives to manage the plans successfully.  The focus on short term performance and the linkage of these metrics to managerial compensation, creates a severe principal agent problem -- the group responsible for managing the plan doesn't bear any of the cost if the plas end up dramatically underfunded.


It is often the case that such schemes do not end well, as it can be very easy to boost profits by underfunding the pension scheme.  Under these rules, the potential long term cost to the business is quite mitigated.  Do we really want incentives aligned like this? 

Movies in the modern age

This is Joseph, trying something new.

I was very interested to read this piece on the focus on sequels:

I believe that what studios see when they look at the bumper-to-bumper barricade of a 2015–20 lineup they’ve built is a sense of security — a feeling that they have gotten their ducks in a row. But these lists, with their tremulous certainty that there is safety in numbers, especially when numbers come at the end of a title, represent something else as well: rigidity and fear. If you asked a bunch of executives without a creative bone in their bodies to craft a movie lineup for which the primary goal is to prevent failure, this is exactly what the defensive result would look like. It’s a bulwark that has been constructed using only those tools with which they feel comfortable — spreadsheets, P&L statements, demographic studies, risk-avoidance principles, and a calendar. There is no evident love of movies in this lineup, or even just joy in creative risk. Only a dread of losing.

I must admit that is interesting that the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit became a six movie extravaganza and that the Marvel/DC comic book movie line-up is . . . daunting.  Sure, some of these movies are surprisingly good (see the latest X-men movie).  But the focus on doing more of the same is exactly what led to a long period where TV was pretty much a dead art form.  Now roles are reversed, and it might well be that movies have a long slump before something new and daring pops up.

Happy Holidays

Since 2009, Mark and I have used this as a forum for a lot of different topics.  From a blog that started about Epidemiology and a little bit of Dungeons and Dragons, we've become instead an eclectic opinion blog, talking about a wide range of fun topics.  Education reform was probably the first deviation, but since then we've seen media criticism, financial advice, and a general willingness to be skeptical about strong claims.

It's been a great ride and we look forward to continuing it in 2015. 

Incentives and proper incentive alignment: a never-ending series

This is Joseph.

Mark has promised a post on this topic, so I thought that I'd start the show by revisiting the issue with Amazon and warehouse workers.  From Megan McArdle:

Should you get paid for standing in line? Workers at an Amazon warehouse thought they should. I kind of agreed. But the Supreme Court disagreed, holding 9-0 that the Amazon contractors could be forced to stand in line to clear security at the end of their workday but did not have to be paid for their time.

The issue here is that the wait could be lengthy.  That added unpredictability to the end of the shift and, if time in line was unpaid, the employer has no incentive to improve matters.  Screening costs and the more efficient it is then the more costly it would be.  Increasing waits to exit protected Amazon profits by reducing shrinkage (which is good) but cost workers (standing in line).

It is legal outcomes like this that check my libertarian streak,  If the law isn't constructed to handle these sorts of external costs on workers (and everyone else) then it makes the preconditions for basing the social contract on contract law to be questionable -- even if this ruling should happen to be correct on the merits.

Sony's hypercube -- they keep finding new sides to cave in on

First they caved in when Rogen and Franco came in with a bad idea for a movie that was certain to be more trouble than it was worth.

Then they caved in due to threats and cyber-attacks from North Korea.

And finally(?) today they caved in to criticism and bad PR and announced a small and largely symbolic theatrical release.

Is this really the end? I can't think of anyone else to whom they could cave, but we do have about thirty-six hours till the theaters open on Christmas Day, I have faith in Sony executives' ability to surprise me.

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

This is an off-topic post by Joseph

I just wanted to point out this review.  I think Howard Taylor hits most of my high points and he is quite astute about the book versus movie piece.  The movie is better if you just pretend it isn't adapting a book and take it on its own merits. 

Accountability is for little people continued -- more thoughts on the Sony hack

I'm not quite sure what to call it, but most business reporting suffers from the journalistic equivalent of regulatory capture. There are exceptions of course – I can think of lots of sharp, independent writers covering this beat – but the vast majority of what you read in the business section reflects the viewpoint and very often the spin of the companies being covered.

This "journalistic capture" becomes particularly apparent when companies have massive screw ups. You get lots of stories about how various disasters were unforeseeable and/or unavoidable. The part about the highly paid C-level executives being grossly incompetent has a way of being buried.

The last post covered an almost comic level of incompetence in Sony's IT department. That is probably the bigger part of the hacking story, but there were other questionable decisions that led up to this fiasco, starting with the decision to greenlight the Interview in the first place.

Mark Evanier, who has been around the industry for decades, has a very good post on the subject. His treatment of the freedom of speech issues is extremely sharp, but it is his discussion of the movie itself that is relevant to this post.

Thursday night at the screening I attended, there was what we call an Industry Crowd, meaning the entertainment industry. I heard much talk about the whole matter and I kept hearing — this is the rumor mill speaking now — that everyone at Sony thought the film was awful and that they were just hoping to get it into theaters and make some bucks before reviews and word of mouth killed it. It's common knowledge the film's release was delayed from last August because Sony demanded changes.

I'm not suggesting that good films deserve to be defended and bad ones don't. But before the hacking and threats, Sony had the right to decide the film was a lox that wasn't worth releasing. Some execs at Sony felt that way; that the film shouldn't be released…or maybe wasn't worth the problems it might cause. (No one in the film business is dense enough to think a movie about assassinating a foreign leader couldn't possibly get anyone upset.) And they had the right to make that decision. I'm suggesting they still have that right.

Evanier is almost certainly correct here, but, from a business standpoint, was making this film a good idea in the first place?

Let's be clear, this decision was never about art or making a statement. We're not talking about Dr. Strangelove; at best we're talking about a Hope and Crosby "Road to" picture with gross-out gags . The only considerations were financial and the only political element was the studio politics involved in telling a couple of big, spoiled stars that they couldn't make a vanity project. From Sony's point of view, the Interview was probably a bad idea for a movie and was likely to create all sorts of problems (keep in mind, this is a Japanese company which makes concern about North Korea a bit more immediate). It appears that the main argument for making the movie was that it kept the stars happy and the studio didn't have to make Green Hornet II.*

As I said before, none of this in any way diminishes the severity of the criminal acts involved, but there's blame enough to cover both malicious and the negligent. In theory, we shouldn't have to worry about the latter because the market for top level executives is supposed to be efficient -- we are told that companies get what they pay for when they pay the big bucks.

With that in mind, take a look at this graph from Fusion.

 (The metric used is “market posture,” which measures each level of employee pay compared to the market median for that level.) According to the chart, SPE pays its level 10 employees 113.1% of the median, but only pays its level 1 employees 92.2% of the median.

Assuming level 10 is the top of the scale, it is difficult to see how that above average pay has translated into above average executive performance.


* The Green Hornet probably did turn a profit (between the massive marketing budget and the peculiarities of Hollywood bookkeeping, it's difficult to say for certain), but the box office was not great and the reaction to the film effectively killed the anticipated franchise.

I'm more comfortable blaming the victim a little when the victim has a market cap of twenty billion

While in no way taking away from the magnitude of the criminal acts involved in the Sony hacks, it is important to remember that upper-level management gets such high salaries in part because they are supposed to anticipate threats and take steps to minimize their potential impact.

At Sony, not so much...

The new trove appears to include a collection of documents the hackers came across on the Sony Pictures network that had “password” in their titles, and includes digital keys for everything from Sony computers and servers to magazine subscriptions and YouTube accounts for Sony movies. (As much as we’d like to log into This is the End’s YouTube page, we haven’t actually tried any of these passwords to see if they work.) It is generally a bad idea to store all your passwords in a document on your computer. It is an even worse idea to title that document something like “My Passwords.”
The hackers leaked a new file that includes a collection of all the documents Sony Pictures employees used to store passwords

Sony Pictures employees and former employees are flipping out about the leak and the unexpected debut of their personal information on screens across the world. But some former employees, who asked to remain anonymous, have told us that they’re disappointed but not surprised by the massive hack given Sony Pictures’ long-running lax attitude toward security. They say that employees highlighted specific vulnerabilities on company websites and systems that were never addressed.

“Sony’s ‘information security’ team is a complete joke,” one former employee tells us. “We’d report security violations to them and our repeated reports were ignored. For example, one of our Central European website managers hired a company to run a contest, put it up on the TV network’s website and was collecting personally identifying information without encrypting it. A hack of our file server about a year ago turned out to be another employee in Europe who left himself logged into the network (and our file server) in a cafe.”

Part of that joke was an org-chart straight out of a Dilbert cartoon.

The information security team is a relatively tiny one. On a company roster in the leaked files that lists nearly 7,000 employees at Sony Pictures Entertainment, there are just 11 people assigned to a top-heavy information security team. Three information security analysts are overseen by three managers, three directors, one executive director and one senior-vice president.

Keep in mind, this is more than three years after Sony suffered "one of the largest data security breaches in history."

Just to be clear, the great majority of the upper-level executives I've encountered (no C-level, but quite a few directors and VPs) have been smart, hard-working and conscientious. I certainly don't want to make a blanket condemnation, but stupid, incompetent people do sometimes make it through, and if they get to a high enough rung, it is amazing how small the consequences are for their screw-ups. Accountability is for little people.

On a completely unrelated topic.

In 2005, Sony Pictures Entertainment was audited to ensure the company was keeping in line with federal regulation regarding information security practices. The auditor found, among other things, that Sony had deliberately engaged in insufficient digital security practices, including allowing employees to use basic proper nouns as passwords instead of requiring them to use a complex system involving random letters, numbers and punctuation marks.

If Sony were a bank, the auditor said, its lackluster security practices would put it out of business.

Sony’s then-executive director of security information Jason Spaltro pushed back: If a bank was a Hollywood film studio, he said, it would already be out of business.

“It’s a valid business decision to accept the risk (of a cyberattack),” Spaltro told CIO Magazine in 2007. “I will not invest $10 million to avoid a possible $1 million loss.”

As mentioned earlier, a few years after that interview hackers would steal  personally identifiable information from 77 million Sony PlayStation accounts. What happened to the executive of security information who gave that embarrassing interview?

By the way, Jason Spaltro — the executive from the beginning of this article who suggested the company not spend $10 million to combat a potential $1 million risk — still works at Sony. He has since been promoted to vice president of information security — one of the top executives tasked with ensuring things like the Sony Pictures hack don’t happen. He makes close to $700,000 a year: $300,000 base salary and a $400,000 initiative-based bonus. We know this because hackers published his employment information last week.

Checking in on the last next big thing

I'm working on a longer piece that involves Uber and I got to thinking about the big discussion we had about Groupon back in 2011. Many of the arguments currently being used to justify Uber's $40 billion valuation (rapid growth, huge potential market, a foundation of new economic and technological paradigms) were also being used to justify faith in Groupon.

I don't want to make too much of the analogy -- they are very different companies with very different business models -- but it is still useful to stop and think about how that bet worked out.

[If you want to get a head start on the Uber thread, check out these exceptionally thorough analyses from Talking Points Memo and NYU Finance Professor Aswath Damodaran.]

A quick note on Kružno, official game of the village of Kružno*

I've got a couple more post I'd like to do on Kružno, the abstract strategy game I developed a few years ago, a post on abstract strategy games and another on trying my hand at small scale manufacturing (and why I ended up using chess pieces in a checkers variant). Unfortunately, I'm a bit pressed for time and I really wanted to get something out today, so this will have to do for now.

You can find the rules here and the game itself here. The game takes about three to five minutes to explain, perhaps a bit longer working from the instructions (some parts are a bit unclear and need to be rewritten).

If you are, or someone you know is, a teacher (particularly at a school where money is tight) who would like to make more use of games in the classroom, let me know and I'll try to set you up with some game sets or at least some extra boards.


* That's also a subject for another post

Perhaps claims that are almost certainly false should be fact-checked more thoroughly

If you read Talking Points Memo or the Washington Post, you've probably heard about this story from New York Magazine by up and coming journalist Jessica Pressler:

Late last year, a rumor began circulating at Stuyvesant that a junior named Mohammed Islam had made a fortune in the stock market. Not a small fortune, either. Seventy-two million.

An unbelievable amount of money for anyone, not least a high-school student, but as far as rumors go, this one seemed legit. Everyone at Stuy knew that Mohammed, the soft-spoken son of Bengali immigrants from Queens and the president of the school’s Investment Club, was basically a genius.

As the news spread, Mo’s stock went up. The school paper profiled him, Business Insider included him on a list of “20 Under 20,” and Mo became “a celebrity,” as his friend Damir Tulemaganbetov put it on a recent Friday night at Mari Vanna near Union Square. “A VIP!”
...
Like [Jordan] Belfort, Mo started with penny stocks. A cousin showed him how to trade. He loved the feeling of risk—the way his hand shook making the trade—but he swore it off after losing a chunk of the money he’d made tutoring. “I didn’t have the balls for it,” he said. He was 9.

It was a while before he was ready to try again. In the meantime, he became a scholar of modern finance, studying up on hedge-fund managers. He was particularly enamored of Paul Tudor Jones. “I had been paralyzed by my loss,” Mo said. “But he was able to go back to it, even after losing thousands of dollars over and over. Paul Tudor Jones says, ‘You learn more from your losses than from your gains.’ ” Mo got into trading oil and gold, and his bank account grew. Though he is shy about the $72 million number, he confirmed his net worth is in the “high eight figures.” More than enough to rent an apartment in Manhattan—though his parents won’t let him live in it until he turns 18—and acquire a BMW, which he can’t drive because he doesn’t yet have a license. Thus, it falls to his father to drive him past Tudor Jones’s Greenwich house for inspiration. “It’s because he is who he is that made me who I am today,” Mo said.

[I emphasized the part about “high eight figures.” It becomes important later.]

Islam fills in some more details on his website:

My interest in finance started at the tender age of 8, but I really started trading when I was 10 years old. I paper traded for a year or so and finally opened a real trading account using my own capital that I saved from entrepreneurial endeavors. 

So we're looking at six or seven years to go from tutoring money to more than fifty million dollars trading part-time. That's a difficult statement to believe but Pressler and her editor at NY Magazine managed to swallow it, as did the New York Post which ran "High school student scores $72M playing the stock market" and CNBC which had Islam and friends scheduled to appear until...

From the New York Observer:

Monday’s edition of New York magazine includes an irresistible story about a Stuyvesant High senior named Mohammed Islam who had made a fortune investing in the stock market. Reporter Jessica Pressler wrote regarding the precise number, “Though he is shy about the $72 million number, he confirmed his net worth is in the ‘high eight figures.’ ” The New York Post followed up with a story of its own, with the fat figure playing a key role in the headline: “High school student scores $72M playing the stock market.”

And now it turns out, the real number is … zero.

In an exclusive interview with Mr. Islam and his friend Damir Tulemaganbetov, who also featured heavily in the New York story, the baby-faced boys who dress in suits with tie clips came clean. Swept up in a tide of media adulation, they made the whole thing up.

The Washington Post picks it up from there:

Then on Monday afternoon, Mo backed out of a spot on CNBC, confessing the $72 million figure was inaccurate. “The attention is not what we expected — we never wanted this hype,” he said. New York, however, stood by the story: “Our story portrays the $72 million figure as a rumor … we did not know the exact figure he has made in trades. However, Mohammed provided bank statements that showed he is worth eight figures, and he confirmed on the record that he’s worth eight figures.”

Just to be clear, the NY editors initially pinned much of their defense on the distinction between $72 million and “high eight figures,” and on the easily faked bank statement provided to the fact checker. Apparently the fact-checker didn't ask to see additional documentation or to speak to the parents (who are, according to the Observer, really pissed).

New York Magazine finally came out with a retraction but even here they don't seem to have learned their lesson:

After the story's publication, people questioned the $72 million figure in the headline, which was written by editors based on the rumored figure. The headline was amended. But in an interview with the New York Observer last night, Islam now says his entire story was made up. A source close to the Islam family told the Washington Post that the statements were falsified. We were duped. Our fact-checking process was obviously inadequate; we take full responsibility and we should have known better. New York apologizes to our readers.

The process would have been inadequate if the claim had been credible; for a story this incredible, it was grossly negligent.

This is not an isolated case. Standards for journalistic accuracy have been dropping for at least a couple of decades, but perhaps more troubling is the disconnect between fact-checking and credibility. Even at the venerable BBC, the most unbelievable of claims is not subjected to any extra scrutiny. Fact-checking has become a CYA process, not something you do because you want to get the story right.

Infrastructure part 2

This is Joseph

In the same vein as some of my recent comments on infrastructure, the latest example of tricky projects is happening on the west coast.  Consider:

Transit advocates are often accused, absurdly, of engaging in a “war on cars”. If we were indeed committed to such a war, I’m not sure we could have come up better with anything than this. The overruns will likely cannibalize WSDOT’s budget, including all manner of road repair and construction projects (some of which are necessary and useful) for the foreseeable future. If, as appears increasingly likely, the viaduct must be shut down before the tunnel is ready, transit will become even more crucial for accessing downtown, and far fewer cars will be able to do so with any efficiency at peak travel times.  Meanwhile, Sound Transit’s tunneling project for light rail, using well established, off the shelf tunneling technology and conservative cost estimates, chugs along ahead of schedule and under budget, and Seattle just voted itself a tax increase to fund more bus service.

I don't like the terms luddite and ddulite (I prefer technophile and technophobe), but it is a classic example of a series of expensive decisions caused by trying to save money through a clever technological solution.  I return to my thoughts in the previous post, that the real point of concern is our inability to use off the shelf technology effectively in terms of infrastructure.

From an economics point of view, we really have a case of misaligned incentives.  How do we make more projects look like Sound Transit and less like the projects that have been encountered in the viaduct replacement?

Our annual Toys-for-Tots post

[Slightly modified from last year.]

A good Christmas can do a lot to take the edge off of a bad year both for children and their parents (and a lot of families are having a bad year). It's the season to pick up a few toys, drop them by the fire station and make some people feel good about themselves during what can be one of the toughest times of the year.

If you're new to the Toys-for-Tots concept, here are the rules I normally use when shopping:

The gifts should be nice enough to sit alone under a tree. The child who gets nothing else should still feel that he or she had a special Christmas. A large stuffed animal, a big metal truck, a large can of Legos with enough pieces to keep up with an active imagination. You can get any of these for around twenty or thirty bucks at Target, Wal-Mart or Costco. Toys-R-Us had some good sales last year;

Shop smart. The better the deals the more toys can go in your cart;

No batteries. (I'm a strong believer in kid power);*

Speaking of kid power, it's impossible to be sedentary while playing with a basketball;

No toys that need lots of accessories;

For games, you're generally better off going with a classic;

No movie or TV show tie-ins. (This one's kind of a personal quirk and I will make some exceptions like Sesame Street);

Look for something durable. These will have to last;

For smaller children, you really can't beat Fisher Price and PlaySkool. Both companies have mastered the art of coming up with cleverly designed toys that children love and that will stand up to generations of energetic and creative play.

* I'd like to soften this position just bit. It's okay for a toy to use batteries, just not to need them. Fisher Price and PlaySkool have both gotten into the habit of adding lights and sounds to classic toys, but when the batteries die, the toys live on, still powered by the energy of children at play.

Heroic bureaucrats and annoying foodies -- one reason so many reforms fail

As promised, here are some more thoughts on West Virginia's promising initiative to improve school lunch programs.

From a transcript of the interview with writer Jane Black:

People in Huntington across the board were very interested and concerned about what he was doing. But the place that the show focused probably the most was in the schools. There he went in and was shocked and horrified that they were eating breakfast pizza and what he called luminescent strawberry milk. He tried to get them to start cooking from scratch. He said it didn't really matter that the food met the guidelines of the USDA as far as nutrients were concerned, but it wasn't fresh.

Of course what people saw on TV were the school lunch ladies being furious about this and feeling like he was stepping on their toes. They also saw the kids taking those lunches, which are paid for by taxpayer dollars, and dumping them in the trash.

What happened in the aftermath was really interesting. After he left, they were audited by the USDA, who came in and said, "These meals may be fresh, but they don't meet our requirements for nutrients." The head of school food, Rhonda McCoy, basically could have gone back to the way she'd always been doing everything. Even though on the show she came across as this cold, aloof bureaucrat, clearly the message had gotten through.

What she did over the next summer was redevelop the recipes, change the flavors a little bit. For example, she took some of the garlic out of his garlicky greens so that the kids liked them better. Within a year they were basically cooking all their meals from scratch.

I went down there. In this kitchen that any New York restaurant would be happy to have, there were 10 cooks making chicken, rolling it in a spice blend, baking it in the oven, taking potatoes, cutting them up, putting them in olive oil and roasting them in the oven. The meal that I ate there included a salad that had lettuce from a student farmer. It was incredible.

What's even more amazing is that since then, Cabell County, the county that Huntington is in, has trained I think 52 of 55 West Virginia counties to do the same. I would say West Virginia, which is not known as a very progressive state, probably has one of the best school lunch programs in the country.

If you follow reform movements, you see this all the time (particularly in education). Outsiders come in with lots of valid criticisms and some good ideas, but they also come in with unacknowledged personal preferences and cultural biases amplified by a subjective viewpoint and a dangerous lack of humility.

Jamie Oliver had some useful things to say about a tremendously important topic, but his initiative was a failure. His creations were, in many ways, less nutritious than the "unhealthy" meals they were supposed to replace. They didn't meet federal guidelines, making the whole enterprise a non-starter. Oliver brought the sensibility of a celebrity chef from a Michelin-starred London restaurant (specializing in Italian cuisine which might explain the level of garlic). He didn't think through the problems of dealing with kids or the other constraints school officials work under.

The difference between success and failure was Rhonda McCoy. We normally think of bureaucrats like McCoy as being, if not out-and-out villains, then at least being part of the problem, but it was McCoy who understood both the kids' tastes and the constraints of the program and who took this dead-in-the-water proposal and made it work. McCoy managed to take the best parts of Oliver's ideas and make meals that were both appealing to the students and manageable from a standpoint of budget, logistics and federal standards.

The press loves stories of the heroic outsider who shows up and fixes everything in a few easy steps. It's a plus if the outsider is a celebrity but an economist is almost as good (for some reason, this is one discipline that is always granted instant expert status). One of the main problems with these stories is that they tend to assume that the people in the field before the outsider showed up were either criminally lazy or dumb as a box of ball-peen hammers.

Finding an entire field full of idiots is rare (finding one with a dysfunctional culture is a bit more common but that's a subject for another post). That means that it is extremely difficult to come up simple ideas that are good and easy to implement but which haven't already occurred to almost everyone already working on the problem. That doesn't mean that people who are new to a field can't make a contribution, but it does mean that these contributions usually need to be collaborative. Fresh perspectives make for good first drafts, but it generally takes experience to fashion them into something usable.

How do you move diagonally in hexagonal chess?

As mentioned before, I've been selling an abstract strategy game called Kruzno. I've got a couple of posts coming up on the game, but in the meantime, I'm doing a thread on a few of the many other games that can be played on a six by six by six hexboard.

One of the most popular hexboard games is Glinski's Chess. I've got the moves posted at the teaching site. Most are fairly straightforward analogs to the game you're all familiar with. The bishops are probably the most counterintuitive, but if you think about it for a minute, you'll see that is a reasonable way of making diagonal moves on hexagonal tiles.

Differential levels of technological progress

This is Joseph

Mark and I often talk about how technology often improve at different rates even in similar areas.  Our go to example is cars (much better now than in 1980) versus airplanes (which have had a more mixed improvement record).  However, the Oatmeal offers up a really good example in terms of computers versus printers.  In a lot of ways, I suspect that this is an even better example than the cars versus planes one, as the modern desktop is massively cheaper and more powerful than what was state of the art twenty years ago

Worth a quick read for a Friday lunch break smile.