Comments, observations and thoughts from two bloggers on applied statistics, higher education and epidemiology. Joseph is an associate professor. Mark is a professional statistician and former math teacher.
One very important shift in modern thinking has been the notional of private property as an absolute and natural right, as opposed to a social convention. I very much like David Hume's take on this issue:
Thus, “the rules of equity or justice [regarding property] depend entirely on the particular state and condition in which men are placed, and owe their origin and existence to that utility, which results to the public from their strict and regular observance” (Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, 3).
In other words, property rights arise because they are useful and are an imposed social construct by a polity. It is a measure of how incredibly successful that the modern state has been at protecting property rights that we see property rights as an innate right.
So why do I bring this up?
Mark has been talking about how to live on extremely small amounts of money. But it is not necessary that resources be allocated in the way that they are. In fact, it may well be the case that the wealthiest members of society benefit the most from the conventions and constructions of society. I don't think attacking people for being selfish is ever productive,
But I do think it might be worth considering whether a new social contract can be developed that is not anti-statist. Perhaps, instead, we could focus on efficient and effective government. Or am I an idealist?
Charles Pierce continues to track the movements of Politico's Dylan Byers who continues not to get it.
Distressed at being outmaneuvered in this way, I wandered on over to the joint hosted by Dylan Byers, Tiger Beat On The Potomac's media "reporter." There, I found him where I'd left him back in 2012, lashed to the side of the white whale, andbeckoning for the Pequod's remaining whaleboats to continue the pursuit.
"[T]here are lots of reasons to worry about the state of the polling industry," Silver concluded, citing a range of factors. "There may be more difficult times ahead for the polling industry." This is quite a notable statement. The former New York Times statistician gained national fame for correctly anticipating the outcome of the 2008, 2010 and 2012 U.S. elections. He did this largely by understanding how to read the polls, and by knowing which polls were worth reading. (Never mind that he wasn't the only one. In fact, in 2012, the Daily Kos blogger Markos Moulitsas was more accurate than Silver in predicting the outcome of the 2012 electoral college. Needless to say, Moulitsas was not offered a high-paying job at ESPN.) If Silver is declaring that the world has a polling problem, and that there may be more difficult times ahead for the polling industry, what is Silver's added value in an election cycle? His ability to forecast elections is largely dependent on the accuracy of polling. Without that, what is his raison d'etre -- other than to point out how bad polling caused him to make inaccurate forecasts?
Oooooh, Nate. Burn'ch-ya! Can ya feeeeeel it?
Recall that Silver spent the end of the 2012 election cycle helping Byers look stupid in print. Byers, as is his custom, was the last one to get the joke. That Byers embarked on this doomed crusade as part of his other job as the sidewalk shill for MSNBC's ratings-challenged Morning Zoo Crew only made the whole thing more hilarious.
As Silver readily admits, the results in the UK elections on Thursday confounded his predictions -- andthose of everyone else, truth be told. His musings on the state of the polling industry are worth reading and considering as the election cycle over here grinds on. But there is one thing on which most polls agree -- having Dylan Byers question anyone else's professional raison d'etre is like subscribing to the classical music criticism of a puck goat.
Putting aside the childishness of his feud with Silver, this is yet another reminder that Byers still can't or won't face the central point.
All political journalists play the horse-race game. I personally don't see a great deal of value in this -- reporters telling voters who the reporters think the voters will vote for -- but Byers, the consummate establishment apologist, wouldn't go there at gunpoint. What Silver and company showed was that the kind of horse-race journalism Byers constantly defends is so devoid of value that labeling it 'news' borders on the fraudulent.
The Markos Moulitsas link is particularly rich. Here's what you see if you follow the link:
Math-based prognostication is superior to the old-school way of talking about gut feelings, or vibrations, or outright dishonest hackery.
Remember that Byers has emphatically thrown his support behind the old-school approach. Even those that Byers links to for support appear to think he's full of crap.
We been down this road before, but this time it's going to be a bit bumpier.
A couple of years ago I criticized Panera Bread CEO Ron Shaich for the way he handled what we now call the "food stamp challenge." The intention with these efforts is always good – – bringing attention to the issue of food insecurity – – but almost invariably the people taking the challenge are so far removed from below-the-poverty-line conditions and so lacking in the necessary life skills that they make a complete hash of the attempt and end up misrepresenting the problem.
Shaich made errors largely of omission. Among other things, he skimped on high-protein foods that would've helped him stave off hunger. I am starting to feel a little bad about being so harsh in that case because I now see how much worse it could have been.
This Business Insider entry by Kathleen Elkins manages to demonstrate virtually every mistake you could make when trying to feed yourself on a tight budget, starting with where not to shop.
On Monday night I headed to the most affordable grocery store I could think of: Trader Joe's.
I was super conscious of sales as I wove through TJs, and the steals of the night included: sweet potatoes ($0.49 each), bananas ($0.19 each), and a 16-ounce bag of bowtie pasta ($0.99).
As mentioned before, Trader Joe's is not a bargain grocery. The target demographic might be best described as budget-conscious foodie. If you're looking for imported, organic and (most importantly) prepared food, you will find some very reasonable options.
For the severely price-constrained, though, Trader Joe's shouldn't be your first or even second choice. Dried rice is only available in pricey varieties. Dried beans aren't available at all. Even the supposed "steals" of the night are available elsewhere at comparable or better prices.
But, even within the confines of this third-best choice, Many of Elkins' decisions were disastrous.
Red split lentils ($1.69)
Bowtie pasta ($0.99)
Can of garbanzo beans ($0.89)
Can of black beans ($0.89)
Butternut squash soup ($2.79)
Chunky peanut butter ($2.49)
8 corn tortillas ($1.99)
Half-gallon of almond milk ($2.99)
Dozen organic eggs, since the only remaining non-organic eggs were cracked ($3.99)
8-pack of maple and brown sugar oatmeal ($2.99)
7 bananas ($1.33)
Bag of spinach ($1.99)
1 yellow onion ($0.79)
3 sweet potatoes ($1.47)
Sea salt ($0.99)
One of the biggest mistakes I made was not buying butter or oil, essential cooking ingredients that I take for granted and therefore completely overlooked.
You'll also notice there is no coffee, a staple in my normal diet but one that would blow the budget.
There are a few reasonable choices here -- the beans, the pasta, the bananas, the sweet potatoes -- but after that it gets ugly quickly. By my calculations and based on a couple of trips to Trader Joe's for research (with the caveat that some foods are cheaper in LA), more than half of Elkins' money went to purchases that were either bad or which could be replaced by much cheaper alternatives.
Elkins bought prepared food.
(You can make your own soup much cheaper and with less sodium)
She passed over frozen produce which was a fraction of the price of fresh.
She paid extra to make questionable nutritional choices. Keeping in mind that protein is our first priority and that a half gallon of milk costs $1.99 rather than $2.99, take a look at this:
Elkins would probably have been better off going for coffee instead of almond milk (she complained bitterly about caffeine withdrawal) and she would have had a dollar left over.
Then there's $2.99 for an 8-pack of oatmeal. Here's how much oatmeal $2.50 gets me at the grocery store down the street.
Oatmeal is remarkably nutritious and a big bowl does an excellent job staving off hunger. At less than ten cents a serving, this is one of the places we want to indulge.
Even at Trader Joe's, Elkins could have done much better.
Like the oatmeal, the eggs Elkins bought are a good food at a very bad price. Non-organic are $1.99 at my Trader Joe's. That's a pretty good price per gram of protein but it's far from the best the store has to offer.
We're shooting for 50g a day. $4.00 worth of chicken goes a long way toward hitting that target. With a few other smarter choices (including more beans, more pasta, and, of course, no almond milk), she probably could have avoided the hunger pangs altogether.
Elkins' heart is in the right place and I appreciate her willingness to suffer for a story, but this is still bad and dangerous journalism. It misses the reality of poverty, it understates the effectiveness of an excellent program, and it can be more than a little insulting to those facing these challenges for real. Mary Elizabeth Williams put it best when writing about Gwyneth Paltrow’s SNAP Challenge for Salon:
And I’ve had an awful lot of conversations with people who think they’re being insightful when they declare that it turns out it’s really hard to get a job or to stretch a dollar. That it just can’t be done. Actually, guys, it’s hard for you to be poor. Lots of us are great at it. Lots of us do it every goddamn day.
A few days ago, I linked to reports of an astroturf anti-marriage equality rally in Russellville that was countered by a couple of genuine grassroots pro-equality demonstrations. I mentioned that this was an important story that the national media was largely missing.
The press did, however, pick up on this superficially similar but utterly meaningless story about Eureka Springs.
I have lots of fond memories of Eureka Springs but, as anyone familiar with the state can tell you, it is literally the least representative spot you could find.
In addition to being very small and isolated, the town has been home to countless fringe movements, religious, political, and medical, since at least the early 20th century. It is associated as much with hippies and UFO enthusiasts as with religious fundamentalist, and all of these groups have long since made their peace and united behind the common goal of getting money from tourists. There are numerous highly convincing indications that places like Arkansas are moving dramatically toward acceptance of marriage equality, but using Eureka Springs as an example of changing attitudes is like using Knott's Berry Farm as an example of modern agricultural practices.
I'm going to spend quite a bit of time over the next couple of weeks talking about the price of food and about what it means to live on a food budget of less than thirty dollars a week. Before we can get very far with that discussion, however, we need to spend some time thinking about the metrics we want to track, the conditions we want to meet, and the properties we want to optimize some of the properties we need to see.
Here are the big four I would like to start with:
Protein – – extremely important and also the only completely objective item on the list. Any proposed diet must satisfy the heart condition of 50 g of protein a week.
Taste – – trying to save money by telling people to eat unappealing food is a false economy. This will lead to problems, particularly when asking people to budget their resources over the course of the week. Obviously, there's a big subjective component here but restaurants and food companies like Kraft have shown that it is a manageable problem, especially if we do a good job with the next item on the list...
Versatility – – we are interested here in variety not on the individual but on the aggregate level. For example, eggs make a good staple because, in addition to being a good source of low-cost protein, they can also be prepared in any number of ways. This is important not because an individual will necessarily want to have all of these different dishes, but because this variety increases the likelihood of our finding one or two dishes that the individual will like.
Satiation – – meals need to be filling and to alleviate hunger. This is largely a function of fiber and protein which is yet another reason why hitting that 50 g target is so important.
Clearly this is oversimplified but it does give us some kind of a framework to proceed. Now we need to address the central question, under what conditions is it possible to have a protein-rich, appealing, varied and filling diet for $28 a week?
We've previously talked about bloggers trying to live on a food stamp budget for a week (yeah, that's a thing). One of the many odd recurring elements of these post is a litany of complaints about life without caffeine because...
I had already understood that coffee, pistachios and granola, staples in my normal diet, would easily blow the weekly budget.
Which is really weird because coffee isn't all that expensive..
That comes out to a nickel a cup. This might be underestimating the amount of coffee you'll need. Six ounces is a fairly small cup and I find the recommended dosages a bit weak. Let's make it eight to ten ounces and double the amount of coffee we use. That takes us to a dime.
Just to check our assumptions, this is very much a mid-range estimate. There are, of course, more expensive options but there are also cheaper choices. You get substantial savings by going to a large economy size or by going with a store brand or both.
On the other end, if you go to $0.15 or $0.20 a cup and you know how to shop, you can move up into some surprisingly high-quality whole bean coffee (which should not taste like they came from Starbucks, but that's a topic for another post). Eventually, of course, you will reach the point where this gets too expensive to justify on a limited budget -- this stuff can get appallingly expensive -- but you can do better than the typical cup of diner coffee for a dime and better than what you'd get from most coffee houses for a quarter.
To be clear, I'm not recommending that everyone rush out to Wal-Mart for a big ol' barrel of Great Value Classic Roast. If your weekly food budget is more than fifty dollars a week, bargain coffee should be near the bottom of your concerns.
What we're interested in here are perceptions. The people we discussed earlier suffered through a week of headaches and other caffeine-withdrawal pains, not because they couldn't afford it but because the belief that they couldn't afford it was so strong that it trumped the evidence before them.
Though it's not a big part of our thread, there is a potentially insensitive aspect to the live-on-food-stamps challenge. Sometimes the line between empathizing and patronizing can be rather thin. That got me thinking about class tourism which led immediately to the song "Common People."
In a 2012 question and answer session on BBC Radio 5 Live [Jarvis] Cocker said that he was having a conversation with the girl at the bar at college because he was attracted to her, although he found some aspects of her personality unpleasant. He remembered that at one point she had told him she "wanted to move to Hackney and live like 'the common people'".
I'm not crazy about the video but the tune is catchy and the lyrics...
I took her to a supermarket,
I don't know why,
But I had to start it somewhere,
So it started there.
I said pretend you've got no money,
She just laughed and said,
"Oh you're so funny."
I said "Yeah?
Well I can't see anyone else smiling in here.
...
But she didn't understand,
She just smiled and held my hand.
Rent a flat above a shop,
Cut your hair and get a job.
Smoke some fags and play some pool,
Pretend you never went to school.
But still you'll never get it right,
'Cause when you're laid in bed at night,
Watching roaches climb the wall,
If you called your Dad he could stop it all.
...
Sing along with the common people,
Sing along and it might just get you through.
Laugh along with the common people,
Laugh along even though they're laughing at you,
And the stupid things that you do.
Because you think that poor is cool.
...
'Cause everybody hates a tourist,
Especially one who thinks it's all such a laugh,
There is a big and largely untold story here about cultural and political shifts south of the Mason Dixon Line. They don't get much coverage but I've been noticing items like this.
RUSSELLVILLE, AR -- Hundreds of people marched down Main Street in Russellville for the definition of marriage in Arkansas just three days before the U.S. Supreme Court considers the fundamental question of whether same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry.
The rallies were on the same street at the same time, but were on opposite sides of the street because of people's opposing views on same-sex marriage.
The march started off calm. Nearly 80 people walked on Main Street to the Pope County Courthouse holding signs that read, "One man + one woman = marriage and family" and other signs that supported heterosexual marriage and disagreed with homosexual marriage. The group, which included members of the Tri County Tea Party, headed its own march with a separate march trailing behind.
...
All while hundreds of people rallying at the other march chanted "marriage equality" across the street.
...
That was the message speakers at the original rally tried to get out, but struggled because of the loud chants across the street.
Even though March for Marriage was the first march formally announced, supporters were outnumbered by the crowd across the street.
Because I've heard conflicting numbers regarding the folks on both sides of the two rallies in Russellville this weekend, I asked Travis Simpson, a reporter at the Russellville Courier, who was there on the scene on Saturday.
He said the crowd supporting marriage equality was the larger of the two, "no contest." Simpson said he estimated there were perhaps 30 rallying against same-sex marriage, but around 200 on the pro-equality side.
On Saturday, a group called Pope County for Equality organized a rally in Russellville to show support for marriage equality and LGBTQ civil rights in Arkansas. More than 300 people showed up — quite a significant turnout for a community of under 30,000. Klay Rutherford, an organizer of the event and an undergrad at Arkansas Tech University, sent this report to the Arkansas Times. All pictures are courtesy of Pope County for Equality's Facebook page.
Residents of Pope County gathered in Russellville at 3 p.m. on Saturday, May 2 for a march and rally for marriage equality. Over 300 attendees marched through downtown and congregated at a stage near the historic Missouri-Pacific train depot.
The event was sponsored by Pope County for Equality, an online organization that advocates for the equal treatment of all individuals, regardless of race, religion, sexual orientation or gender identity. Speakers included Dr. MarTeze Hammonds, Associate Dean for Diversity and Inclusion at Arkansas Tech University; Jeannie Fowler Stone, a proud Christian and an accepting mother of a transgender son; and, James Bittle, a retired sergeant in the U.S. Army who is gay and recently married. Hammonds, Stone and Bittle are all residents of Russellville.
Event organizers said, “Our goal is to be an overwhelming presence of love and acceptance. We aim to lift people up, start discussions, and show our community that we are more than a stereotype. We simply want to bring our community closer together in a setting of love and peace.”
The rally was held in part as a response to an event the previous weekend (Saturday, April 25) organized by an Arkansas River Valley Tea Party group in support of defining marriage as between one man and one woman. Protests that weekend were organized by pro-equality individuals not affiliated with Pope County for Equality. While many media outlets downplayed the presence and role of the protesters at the April 25 event, we estimate that there were at least 250 pro-equality protesters and no more than 50 participants among the the anti-equality crowd.
Pope County for Equality would like to thank the Russellville Police Department for their unbiased approach in handling both marches. Despite the surprising turnout at both events, they occurred without incident or injury.
In the fairly near future, I'm planning a deep dive into how the culture and politics of the South are shifting in ways that our standard metrics tend to miss. For now though, just remember that Russellville is in the most Republican part of the state.
As mentioned before, there are a couple of food-related megathreads in the queue, one on living on SNAP and one on the drought. Between those and the various posts we’ve run over the years, that’s a pretty big word count, so I decided to try a pop-up blog.
One of the disadvantages of eclectic blogging is that your target audience has to have compatibly eclectic tastes. By pulling all of the posts on one broadly appealing subject, I might just attract some readers who are interested in food and agriculture but aren’t interested in epidemiology, pedagogy, math puzzles, space travel, marketing statistics, bad business models, silly economic theories, education policy, games, negligent journalists, ddulites, old television shows, fitness landscapes, driverless cars...
A Statistician Walks into a Grocery Store will mainly consist of posts that have appeared or will appear here, so regular readers don’t have to add another link to their blog lists unless they have enough of a special interest in the topic to seek out the pieces too trivial to cross-post...
(I have a really tasteless joke on this one, though some of you will see it coming.)
I've been meaning to do a deep dive into how the language of the reform movement reflects its close connection with management consulting. If you've ever heard one of these consultants making a pitch to a high level executive, you may have noticed that while the words always have the connotation of precision and scientific rigor, the statements tend to be vague and inconsistent.
Diagnostic data needs to be specific and (to borrow a term from the business lexicon) actionable. It should also generally be multidimensional. On the individual student level, the tests being discussed here are not diagnostic data -- the results are neither timely nor specific enough to be actionable -- but Tisch suggests they are there to provide that level of information.("It is natural for parents to want to know how their kids are doing").
HAYES: OK. But there’s a whole — let’s sort of bracket the sociology of poverty for a moment… there’s lot of things I could contest about in what direct the causation of that link flows, right? But here’s the question to you, Miss Ravitch…I had someone who works in education who I respect compare testing opt out to people opting out of immunization, because basically it was like, look, yeah, your kid is probably not going to get measles and, like, if you think there’s some downside you can opt out, but then you’re just a free rider because the policy as a whole is a necessary means of figuring out where people are, assessing, right? You need this data.
If you start allowing people to opt out, you’ve just destroyed the entire dataset. Like, what are they going to do in West Seneca to judge anything year over year when one year they have data and the next they don’t have any data?
DIANE RAVITCH: It’s totally inappropriate to compare opting out of testing to opting out of immunization. One has a scientific basis, the other has none. The tests that kids take today have nothing to do with the tests that we took when we were kids. When we were kids, we took an hour test to see how we did in reading, an hour test to so how we did in math. Children today in third grade are taking eight hours of testing. They’re spending more time taking tests than people taking the bar exam.
Now, when we talk about the results of the test, they come back four to six months later. The kids already have a different teacher. And all they get is a score and a ranking. The teachers can’t see the item analysis. They can’t see what the kids got wrong. They can’t — they’re getting no instructional gain, no possibility of improvement for the kids, because there’s no value to the test. They have no diagnostic value.
If you go to a doctor and you say, ‘I have a pain,’ and the doctor says, ‘I’ll get back to you in six months,’ and he gets back to you and tells you how you compare to everyone else in the state, but he doesn’t have any medicine for you.
HAYES: Respond to that.
TISCH: Well, I would say that the tests are really a diagnostic tool that is used to inform instruction and curriculum development throughout the state. New York State spends $54 billion a year on educating 3.2 million schoolchildren. For $54 billion a year I think New Yorkers deserve a snapshot of how our kids are doing, how our schools are doing, how our systems are doing. There is a really important data point…
HAYES: Wait. … I just want to point out something. That was interestingly nonresponsive to what she said, right? She’s saying this does not work as diagnostic tool for the child or for the teacher, you’re saying this is a diagnostic tool for the taxpayer who is funding the system to see if the system is working, right? Those are distinct.
TISCH: No, let me finish because we’re talking about what happens when parents opt out and what the system can then report back to parents and to the state. The point of the matter is, you know, two weeks ago I was with my grandson at a pediatric visit. There was a new mother sitting next to me and she was comparing growth charts for her 4-month-old son. She wanted to know how he was doing on a continuum.
It is natural for parents to want to know how their kids are doing. And as for the diagnostic nature of these tests and the amount of
information that is gleaned from them, school districts report to us all the time that they design curriculum around the results of these tests.
I agree with Diane. There is no such thing as a perfect test, absolutely not. But the ability to glean information from these tests and
use them in very direct ways to inform instruction and curriculum in classrooms is actually really important.
If these tests aren't diagnostic, what are they? Mike the Mad Biologist has a suggestion:
What Ravitch touches on, but I wish had made more clearly, is that these tests are not about assessing individual students. The rhetoric Tisch uses is disingenuous, as the tests can not–as a matter of education policy and contractual obligations with test providers–to tell individual students (and their teachers and parents) where they need to improve.
The tests exist solely to grade teachers. These are not educational tools, as Ravitch notes, but managerial ones. They are used to hire and fire teachers. That is why the NY Department of Education is panicked by the opt-out movement. It’s not the potential inability to assess state-wide or even school level student performance (certainly for the former, there are enough students in the state of New York taking the exams for the statistics to work).
No, it’s the possibility that the state won’t be able to evaluate individual teachers with the exams. I’ve discussed many times before how sample size issues make teacher evaluations incredibly imprecise and are inappropriate in hiring and firing decisions. Imagine if a significant number of teachers can’t be evaluated because too few of their students decide to take the tests (there aren’t a whole lot of strong conclusions that can be reached if only eight students per class take the tests). It certainly would give grounds for teachers to challenge the conclusions drawn from the tests.
What Tisch doesn’t want to say out loud, what she politically can’t say out loud, is that she, along with many other reformers, believe if only we could fire the bad teachers–and she believes there are a lot of them–then our educational problems would vanish. But many reformers, having realized the majority of parents* don’t believe this, understand they can’t explicitly make that claim. So they lie about why we supposedly need annual high-stakes* testing.
A good brief overview of the main criticisms of standardized tests. Very entertaining and yet more balanced and thoughtful than what you would normally see in more "serious" formats.
Pay close attention to the opening segments. We'll be coming back to the analytic importance of keeping not just the content but the conditions and the incentives of these tests standardized. (Remind me to use the blood pressure analogy.)
I had actually forgotten how on-topic this video was.
As mentioned before, there's a thread coming up on hunger in this country prompted by yet another journalist who would apparently drop dead of malnutrition if she had to live on a budget for an extended period.
A big part of this story is the way different classes perceive budgets and shopping and the way most journalists have internalized upper and upper-middle class perceptions. It's telling that when a journalist had to find the cheapest place to buy food, she thought of Trader Joe's rather than a warehouse grocery like Food-4-Less or Aldi (which actually owns Trader Joe's but it's a very different brand).
Don't get me wrong. I shop at Trader Joe's all the time -- It's convenient, it's reasonable and the store brands are excellent.-- but if I were trying to feed myself on less than thirty dollars a week, I would shop there less.
A big part of the secret to the chain's success lies in its ability to offer pretty good bargains while maintaining its foodie street cred. The stores tend to cater to upscale, urban singles and couples whose cooking often consists of throwing frozen dinners in a microwave. Trader Joe's has discovered that, if you make these dinners seem a bit fancier or more exotic, your customers will feel more like urban sophisticates and less like pathetic losers.
I'm about to start another thread on how clueless most journalists are about living on a tight budget, so to do some research and because I was out of tamarind bars...
(mainly because of the tamarind bars), I dropped by the 99 Cent Only Store.
Much if not most of the food you'll find here is junk or junk adjacent, but there are healthy options. You can prepare some tasty, nutritious, filling and very cheap meals if:
You have access to one of these stores (preferably with a car so you don't have to haul groceries on a bus);
You're flexible about your menu (inventories are driven by odd lots and approaching expiration dates so you don't know what you'll find);
You have time to shop and to cook;
You have the facilities to cook and store lots of food;
You like beans.
And potatoes (rice works too)
,
Hot sauce is your friend.
It's not obvious from the picture but this is a pretty big can.
I don't want to oversell the virtues of these stores or understate the challenges of maintaining a healthy diet near the poverty line, but too many of the people driving the hunger debate are coming from a Whole Foods sensibility and they inevitably screw up the discussion no matter how good their intentions may be.
I don't have time to delve into this as deeply as I would like, but there's an interesting labor story developing here in LA. It pits union management against people who are normally very pro-labor.
Here's a slightly edited rant on the subject by Ken Levine.
What’s the point of having a union if it goes against the overwhelming wishes of its members? That’s exactly what happened last week when Los Angeles Actors Equity members voted over 2-1 to keep things status quo in the small theater (99 seats or fewer) LA scene; to not demand they be paid minimum wage per hour for all performances and rehearsals – and the New York board completely dismissed their vote and implemented it anyway. ... Why even conduct a vote if you completely ignore the results? Jesus! Elections in Iran are more legitimate.
My hope is that the LA branch breaks off from Actors Equity. Or files such a blizzard of lawsuits against the union that it completely strangles its ability to govern.
Here’s the issue: Small theaters make no money. For the most part they lose money. Everyone concerned does it for the love of theater. No one really gets paid – not actors, playwrights, directors, crews. The Whitefire Theatre in Studio City will be doing a one act play in June my partner, David Isaacs and I wrote. I’m also directing it. We’re making nothing. Not $9.00 an hour. Not $.09 an hour. But we’re thrilled to have the opportunity to see our work performed. We’re also employing eight actors. That means eight actors get to work on their craft, have a nice showcase, and perhaps get discovered.
And the evening will feature three one acts. Both the others also have casts of about eight. So do the math. Twenty-four actors, all the hours of rehearsal and performances – even at $9.00 an hour that adds up pretty quickly. Especially for a production where we have to buy our own props. If this ruling had already been in effect we simply would not do the production.
And this is what’s going to happen all over town. Producers will stop staging shows, small theaters will close, actors won’t work, and everybody loses (but Actors Equity).
LA actors understand this. They make their living in TV or films or commercials. And again, they voted 2-1 to not implement new restrictions. That's a mandate, folks.
...
But your union clearly doesn’t care. So what if they destroy the LA theater scene? As long as they maintain their control.
At your expense.
And by the way, I’m very pro-union. I’m a proud member of the WGA, DGA, AFTRA-SAG. I totally understand that without unions the studios and networks would pay us all less than a janitor makes in Cuba while raking in billions on the wings of our work. But no one is making money in small theaters.
So now it’s time for actors to take action. Your union is supposed to represent YOU. Actors Equity most definitely does NOT. Are you going to stand for that? Are you going to let a board with its own agenda dictate your career path? Send the message. Your vote COUNTS.
It’s bad enough actors face rejection every day, but to be rejected by its own union is, to me, intolerable.
This is consistent with something I've noticed about bicoastal musicians I've gotten a chance to talk with over the past few years. At least for small venues, everyone makes much more money back east, particularly in NYC. Audiences just seem to be willing to pay more.
In LA, performers tend to make their money in recorded media. Live performance plays more of a supporting role, developing craft, making connections, workshopping material. The proposed rule changes probably make sense from a New York vantage point, but most LA actors don't think they make sense here.
The Mars One habitat will be covered by a necessary layer of soil that provides shielding even against galactic cosmic rays. Sixteen feet (5 meters) of Martian soil provides the same protection as the Earth's atmosphere — equivalent to 1,000 grams per square cm(227.6 ounces per square inch) of shielding. The Mars One habitat can support a soil layer 36 feet (11 m) thick. If the settlers spend, on average, two hours per day outside the habitat, their individual exposure adds up to 22 mSv per year.
As mentioned before, two of the major issues in the Mars One involve the definition of "existing" technology and the way the project fails to account for technological unknowns and development costs. Case in point, the proposed Mars rover, which will have to greatly exceed any of its predecessors in functionality while remaining small enough to be lowered by sky crane (assuming that Mars One isn't planning on developing entirely new EDL [entry, descent and landing] technology).
Here are some relevant passages from the Mars One website [emphasis added].
Mars Landing Module: Mars One will secure the landing modules from one of the experienced suppliers in the world, for example Lockheed Martin. Similar landers will be equipped to perform different functions.
Carrying Life Support Units that generate energy, water and breathable air for the settlement.
Carrying Supply Unit with food, solar panels, spare parts and other components.
Carrying Living Units that are outfitted with deployable inflatable habitats.
Carrying Humans to the surface of Mars
Carrying Rovers to the surface of Mars
Rovers: Two rovers will be sent to Mars to set up the outpost before the humans arrive. One of them will explore the surface of Mars in search of the most suitable location for the settlement, transport of large hardware components, and the general assembly. Mars One’s rover supplier will determine the exact rover strategy; it is possible that instead of one large rover, multiple smaller rovers will be sent. For example, a main rover accompanied by a trailer system used for transporting the landing capsules.
You often encounter this kind of nonchalance about details in statements from Mars One, along with absolute confidence in the budget estimates that were based on those vague details.
The Mars One roadmap gives an idea of just how versatile the rover will have to be. Keep in mind, all of this has to be done autonomously before the first crew arrives.
One intelligent rover and one trailer will be launched. The rover can use the trailer to transport the landers to the outpost location. On Mars, the rover drives around the chosen region to find the best location for the settlement. An ideal location for the settlement needs to be far enough North for the soil to contain enough water, equatorial enough for maximum solar power, and flat enough to facilitate the construction of the settlement.
When the settlement location is determined, the rover will prepare the surface for the arrival of the cargo missions. It will also clear large areas where the solar panels will lie.
...
The six cargo units will land up to 10 km away from the outpost on Mars. The rover will pick up the first life support unit using the trailer, place the life support unit in the right place, and deploy the thin film solar panel of the life support unit. The rover will then be able to connect to the life support unit to recharge its batteries much faster than using only its own panels, which will allow it work much more efficiently.
The rover will pick up all the other cargo units and deploy the thin film solar panel of the second life support unit and the inflatable sections of the living units.
...
The rover will also deposit Martian soil on top of the inflatable sections of the habitat for radiation shielding.
We are talking about a lot of soil here (think five meters) and a lot of heavy lifting and a lot of precise work. Add to that concerns like dust and the need to be absolutely maintenance-free (if the rover breaks down, future launches can't proceed). To accomplish all of this will require a tremendous amount of engineering talent. Mars One claims this can be done quickly at bargain-basement prices.
NASA called for proposals for the rover's scientific instruments in April 2004,[80] and eight proposals were selected on December 14 of that year.[80] Testing and design of components also began in late 2004, including Aerojet's designing of a monopropellant engine with the ability to throttle from 15–100 percent thrust with a fixed propellant inlet pressure.[80]
By November 2008 most hardware and software development was complete, and testing continued.[81] At this point, cost overruns were approximately $400 million. In the attempts to meet the launch date, several instruments and a cache for samples were removed and other instruments and cameras were simplified to simplify testing and integration of the rover.[82][83] The next month, NASA delayed the launch to late 2011 because of inadequate testing time.[84][85][86] Eventually the costs for developing the rover did reach $2.47 billion, that for a rover that initially had been classified as a medium-cost mission with a maximum budget of $650 million, yet NASA still had to ask for an additional $82 million to meet the planned November launch.
In case you were wondering what a sky crane looked like.
This is one of the many reasons why aerospace people roll their eyes when Mars One CEO Bas Lansdorp starts talking about being able to carry out the project just using existing technology.
There’s no comfort in the statistics for missions to Mars. To date over 60% of the missions have failed. The scientists and engineers of these undertakings use phrases like “Six Minutes of Terror,” and “The Great Galactic Ghoul” to illustrate their experiences, evidence of the anxiety that’s evoked by sending a robotic spacecraft to Mars — even among those who have devoted their careers to the task. But mention sending a human mission to land on the Red Planet, with payloads several factors larger than an unmanned spacecraft and the trepidation among that same group grows even larger. Why?
Nobody knows how to do it.
Surprised? Most people are, says Rob Manning the Chief Engineer for the Mars Exploration Directorate and presently the only person who has led teams to land three robotic spacecraft successfully on the surface of Mars.
“It turns out that most people aren’t aware of this problem and very few have worried about the details of how you get something very heavy safely to the surface of Mars,” said Manning.
He believes many people immediately come to the conclusion that landing humans on Mars should be easy. After all, humans have landed successfully on the Moon and we can land our human-carrying vehicles from space to Earth. And since Mars falls between the Earth and the Moon in size, and also in the amount of atmosphere it has then the middle ground of Mars should be easy. “There’s the mindset that we should just be able to connect the dots in between,” said Manning.
But as of now, the dots will need to connect across a large abyss.
“We know what the problems are. I like to blame the god of war,” quipped Manning. “This planet is not friendly or conducive for landing.”
The real problem is the combination of Mars’ atmosphere and the size of spacecraft needed for human missions. So far, our robotic spacecraft have been small enough to enable at least some success in reaching the surface safely. But while the Apollo lunar lander weighed approximately 10 metric tons, a human mission to Mars will require three to six times that mass, given the restraints of staying on the planet for a year. Landing a payload that heavy on Mars is currently impossible, using our existing capabilities. “There’s too much atmosphere on Mars to land heavy vehicles like we do on the moon, using propulsive technology completely,” said Manning, “and there’s too little atmosphere to land like we do on Earth. So, it’s in this ugly, grey zone.”
But what about airbags, parachutes, or thrusters that have been used on the previous successful robotic Mars missions, or a lifting body vehicle similar to the space shuttle?
None of those will work, either on their own or in combination, to land payloads of one metric ton and beyond on Mars. This problem affects not only human missions to the Red Planet, but also larger robotic missions such as a sample return. “Unfortunately, that’s where we are,” said Manning. “Until we come up with a whole new trick, a whole new system, landing humans on Mars will be an ugly and scary proposition.”
If you're interested in aerospace, I'd recommend reading the entire article. It walks through all of the not-very-good options in detail.
Although the ethical and legal challenges facing Mars One are considerable, this venture will ultimately rise or fall on the technical and engineering elements. The stated aim of Mars One, according to their website, is to use “existing technologies available from proven suppliers.”1 This statement provides the first crucial difficulty. At each crucial phase of the mission—travel to Mars, landing, and establishing a permanent colony—the claim that of utilizing existing technology is unsustainable.
For example, at present the only existing operational human spaceflight vehicle is the Russian Soyuz capsule. Mars One states that the existing technology that will be used to traverse millions of kilometers from the Earth to Mars will instead be a variant of SpaceX’s Dragon capsule. To call the considerable research and development that this would require as “existing technology” is, at best, grossly oversimplifying the issue.
The Mars One project also provides no detail in respect of the development of reliable and effective life support systems and the problematic subject of dealing with human waste disposal. These are issues that will ultimately need to be solved for a successful mission to Mars, and there is significant research and development activity ongoing in this area.2 Such technology is, however, by no means “existing” without a significant amount of investment in research and development.
The picture is very much the same when considering the critical issue of landing the Mars One colonists on the Martian surface. Considered one of the most problematic aspects of human exploration, it is this aspect of the Mars One project where the notion of using existing technology is exposed as being dangerously misleading. The existing technology that has landed rovers on Mars is inadequate for landing humans.3 The Martian atmosphere poses considerable and serious challenges for landing a heavy payload onto the surface. The atmosphere varies considerably, making it extremely difficult to scale up existing technology used to land small rovers. Supersonic retropropulsion, which at present seems the most promising method of overcoming the obstacles posed by the variable Martian atmosphere, still requires expensive research and development.4 Again, this is not a problem unique to the Mars One project. It is, however, a fundamental obstacle to a 2023 mission with a projected budget of $6 billion.
Assuming, however, that the Mars One crew successfully makes it to the Martian surface, one aspect of space technology that remains untested, and makes the Mars One project fundamentally different from any previous space activity, is the technology required for the permanent settlement of Mars. Much has been made of in situ resource utilization (ISRU) technologies that will enable the colonists to live off the land. The much-publicized MIT feasibility study of Mars One casts significant doubt on the readiness of this technology, none of which has been deployed in practice.5 When challenged on this, the Mars One team responded by maintaining that the MIT study was based on ISS operations and therefore the study does not provide a valid comparison.6
Such assertions are, however, inconsistent with the stated aim of using existing technology. Either Mars One will utilize existing technology that has been tested in space on the ISS (in which case the MIT study is valid), or they will be looking to extrapolate new, untested methods of ISRU, which raises questions of reliability and cost in terms of money and time. In any event, the MIT study did not consider issues such as establishing a reliable power system and communications network, as well as the costly issue of spacesuit and habitat development. All these issues raise further questions about the technical feasibility of the entire venture.
I was checking my mail the other day and I saw this.
I don't want to wast too much time on the marketing ethics of people who pitch house-flipping seminars. They are both too easy to criticize and largely immune to criticism.
Still, this one phrase struck me as too perfect to let pass.
The implication is that success is solely a function of effort and (implicitly) belief. I suppose this has always been associated with get-rich-quick schemes, but the underlying idea has become disturbingly common in a number of places including many corporations where aspirational language has become the official newspeak.
For a case study of how this works in real life, I refer you to Duke Fightmaster.
I broke down and posted this College Humor video at the teaching site. Obviously, you can see the gag coming, but it's well sustained and besides, how often does math humor close in one a million hits?
When people try to argue for funding private space exploration through television revenues, the remarkable viewership of Apollo 11 is often mentioned, but since it's difficult to monetize a spike, we should probably consider the performance of all of the missions.
The spectacle of lunar conquest would have a short-lived hold on the attention of the American public. Aside from a spike during the imperiled Apollo 13 mission, viewership waned throughout the remainder of the lunar program. The networks responded accordingly by allotting less and less time to space coverage. Each network devoted fifty-plus hours of airtime to Apollo 11; NBCs thirty-five hours of coverage of Apollo 12 far outdistanced that provided by its two competitors. And by the time Apollo 17 made the country’s final moon voyage in December 1972, only one television station in the country – Houston’s public television outlet -- showed the entire twenty-plus hours worth of lunar surface excursions.
The public, it seems, had made up its mind about the space program long before Armstrong’s boot had hit lunar dust. A national survey on the eve of Apollo 11 indicated that Americans backed the moon landing by a 51-to-41 percent margin, essentially reversing the results of a similar survey months earlier. Beneath the surface though, the same poll showed that the country hadn't changed at all: More than half of the citizenry still thought the annual 4 billion price tag for the space program wasn't worth it, a percentage that had varied little since the mid-1960s. Given the amount of time and money they had invested toward the lunar conquest though, Americans made the decision to enjoy the resulting blockbuster when it was released over the country’s airwaves. Most had little interest in the sequels.
This is a post about a fluff piece about a 25-year-old bubblegum movie. Suffice it to say, the point of diminishing returns is fairly close, but still this "All Things Considered" piece on the anniversary of Back to the Future provides a too-good-to-ignore example of some of the issues we've talked about involving journalism and technology.
Specifically the issues are treating weak indications of progress the same as strong indications, rearranging chronology and not doing background research.
When we talk about the march of technology, how exactly do we know when something has arrived? We could make the case for various standards ranging all the way from the very strict (the technology is in wide use and has stood the test of time) to be very lax (people are talking about maybe doing it someday). Whatever the standard, we need to be self-aware and consistent.
This exchange from a recent All Things Considered story about flying cars and hoverboards illustrated the questionable way journalists often treat prototypes.
[LOURDES] GARCIA-NAVARRO: Not quite standard issue as predicted, but the idea may not be so far off. A company called AeroMobile [sic*] successfully tested a two-seater car-airplane hybrid last year.
[ROBERT] SIEGEL: And speaking of flying, yes, we do have hoverboards. They cost $10,000, but the Hendo hoverboard company has created a working model that looks surprisingly similar to the one in the movie, minus the bright pink paint.
I've covered the Hendo previously. You can see the full rundown here, but to sum up: cool, potentially viable, but not at all what most journalists seem to think it is.
For now, let's focus on the first part. Somehow flying cars have become the go-to example of either just-around-the-corner or unfulfilled technology depending on the writer's angle. It's a curious choice, partly because the roadblocks (if you'll pardon the metaphor) probably have more to do with non-technical issues and partly because so few writers bother to spend the ten or fifteen minutes needed to check some facts on Wikipedia.
In 1926, Henry Ford displayed an experimental single-seat aeroplane that he called the "sky flivver". The project was abandoned two years later when a distance-record attempt flight crashed, killing the pilot. The Flivver was not a flying car at all, but it did get press attention at the time, exciting the public that they would have a mass-produced affordable airplane product that would be made, marketed, sold, and maintained just like an automobile. The airplane was to be as commonplace in the future as the Model T of the time.
In 1940, Henry Ford famously predicted: "Mark my word: a combination airplane and motorcar is coming. You may smile, but it will come.”
In 1956, Ford's Advanced Design studio built the Volante Tri-Athodyne, a 3/8 scale concept car model. It was designed to have three ducted fans, each with their own motor, that would lift it off the ground and move it through the air. In public relation release, Ford noted that "the day where there will be an aero-car in every garage is still some time off", but added that "the Volante indicates one direction that the styling of such a vehicle would take".
In 1957, Popular Mechanics reported that Hiller Helicopters is developing a ducted-fan aircraft that would be easier to fly than helicopters, and should cost a lot less. Some estimated that in 10 years a four-place fan would cost like a good car. Hiller engineers expected that this type of an aircraft would become the basis for a whole family of special-purpose aircraft.
In 1956, the US Army's Transportation Research Command began an investigation into "flying jeeps", ducted-fan-based aircraft that were envisioned to be smaller and easier to fly than helicopters. In 1957, Chrysler, Curtiss-Wright, and Piasecki were assigned contracts for building and delivery of prototypes. They all delivered their prototypes, however Piasecki's VZ-8 was the most successful of the three. While it would normally operate close to the ground, it was capable of flying to several thousand feet, proving to be stable in flight. Nonetheless, the Army decided that the "Flying Jeep concept [was] unsuitable for the modern battlefield", and concentrated on the development of conventional helicopters. In addition to the army contract, Piasecki was developing the Sky Car, a modified verision of its VZ-8 for civilian use.
In the mid-1980s, former Boeing engineer, Fred Barker, founded Flight Innovations Inc and began the development of the Sky Commuter, a small duct fans-based VTOL aircraft. It was a compact, 14-foot-long two-passenger and was made primarily of composite materials. In 2008, the remaining prototype was sold for £86k on eBay.
This is not an exhaustive list. Among others, it notably omits Moulton Taylor's Aerocar which made its first flight in 1949.
As a general rule, it is dangerous to read too much into any prototype demonstration. Even if that preliminary model can actually do what it appears to (and there is a long history of staged demonstrations), all that prototype really gives you is proof of concept. You still have to find a way to manufacture the product cheaply and reliably and to find a market for it (history is full of failed products that everyone assumed everyone would want).
You could make a case for the 1917 Curtiss Autoplane being the first working model of a flying car (assuming you are willing to be fairly broad with your definition of 'flying.).
At the risk of putting too fine a point on all this, after fifty to one hundred years of announcements of prototypes of flying cars, another announcement, almost by definition, does not constitute "progress."
I am not saying that this latest model doesn't represent a real advance – – it probably does – – nor am I implying that the makers will not be able to overcome the various technical and commercial road blocks – – they very well may. It is entirely possible that this will usher in a new age of personal aviation (though a side-by-side comparison of the Taylor Aerocar and the AeroMobil 3.0 does not suggest a huge breakthrough, particularly given the sixty-six year age difference).
What I am saying is that journalists need to be better at discussing technology. They need to stop confusing vague promises with working prototypes and working prototypes with commercially viable technology. They need to start thinking critically about what they hear. And finally, they need to learn how to find Wikipedia on their computers.
If you follow all the links in this post from the redoubtable James Kwak, you'll find a fascinating discussion on the speculator-driven bubble. I was going to comment on this at length but I don't have time so here's the thumbnail:
Kwak and Felix Salmon both have smart things to say on the subject while James Stewart continues to show his skill at saying what a large segment of his audience wants to hear.
