Non-compete agreements

This is Joseph.

Jimmy John's has a noncompete agreement.  Kevin Drum wonders what the point is, given how unlikely it is to be enforced.  Alison Griswold notes that:

That said, an unenforceable clause is still problematic if it's scaring employees who don't know any better into thinking they can't work at another sandwich shop—or another restaurant of any sort with a trade in sandwiches—for the next two years.

I don't even think that "scaring" is the right word.  Imagine the tight budgets somebody who works in fast food preparation likely has.  Yes, there will be exceptions.  But is it obvious that there will be lawsuits, even in a place like California. 

Do you know what no company wants to do with the new sandwich person?  Litigate to keep them.  Nor does an employee want to spend time and money in court to defend themselves if the court should grant an injunction while they hear the case.  Courts are slow, sessions happen during paid workdays, and it's not at all clear that anybody wants to deal with that while no longer making money.

So I think the chilling effect might be more than one realizes. 

Assuming I didn't lose you at "TED Talk"

I need to do more research before I wade into this (or convince Joseph to do it for me), but even with the 10 to 50 year wiggle room, talk of having absolutely total confidence makes me nervous.

[GUY] RAZ: Which they did, an amazing scientific feat. They mapped the code that makes up all human DNA. Now they're still trying to figure out what it means, but they already know what it could mean for the future.

(SOUNDBITE OF TED TALK)

RESNICK: The world has completely changed and none of you know about it.

RAZ: So how is it going to change the world?

RESNICK: In a bunch of ways. The good news is it's going to help us immensely in treating cancer 'cause cancer is nothing more than a disease of the genome. It's a disease where one cell has certain changes, which cause it to get a little bit worse and then it reproduces. And by the time you've got a solid tumor, you've got this really heterogeneous population of cancerous cells. And if you sequence their genomes, they're a mess. And so right now, prior to genome sequencing, we're taking wild guesses at what the molecular basis of one's cancer is. And now going forward, what we're going to do is say, forget all of that, what is happening at the molecular level because this drug can target only those cancers that have the BRAF mutation, as an example.

RAZ: So where is it headed? What can you imagine in 10 or 20 years or beyond?

RESNICK: I think we will cure cancer. Genomics and sequencing at large will ultimately cure cancer. Whether that happens in 10 years or 50 years or more is difficult to say.

RAZ: That's incredible. I mean, you can say that with total confidence?

RESNICK: Absolutely. At some point, we'll snuff it out. I mean, people will still develop cancer, certainly, unless we get into genetic engineering of humans, which is something we ought to talk about, but it will be curable.

Two Quotes

From Salon recently:

“It’s not really about asking for a raise, but knowing and having faith that the system will give you the right raise,” [Microsoft CEO Satya] Nadella said in conversation with Dr. Maria Klawe, a member of the Microsoft Board, Harvey Mudd College president and computer scientist.

“That might be one of the initial ‘super powers,’ that quite frankly, women (who) don’t ask for a raise have,” stated to Klawe. “It’s good karma. It will come back.

And from Marketplace last year:

Sarah Lacy, founder of tech news site Pando Daily* ... said the BART strike exacerbated what she sees as a philosophical divide in the Bay Area. “People in the tech industry feel like life is a meritocracy. You work really hard, you build something and you create something, which is sort of directly opposite to unions.” 

Both the tech and financial sector have embraced the idea that economic rewards are directly correlated to work and worth. It's a strange mixture of efficient market theorem and social Darwinism, often with more than a bit of Randianism. I suspect that Nadella and Lacy have so internalized this worldview that they no longer have any idea how they sound to the general public.




* To those of you following the pension scandals: yeah, that Pando.

Effect sizes: an often overlooked issue

This is a post by Joseph

Brad DeLong makes an argument that fits very well with a long running discussion that Mark and I have had.  Just because there is a known relation, doesn't mean that the effect size of the elements can be ignored.  So, the existence of the Laffer curve is pretty much certain, but the exact inflection point where the curve shift from more revenue to less revenue is very, very important. 

Brad Delong compares current arguments for infrastructure to the Laffer curve:

In a world where the real rate at which the U.S. Treasury can borrow for ten years is 0.3%/year and in which the tax rate t is about 30%, infrastructure investment fails to be self-financing only when the comprehensive rate of return is less than 1%/year.

Now you can make that argument that properly-understood the comprehensive rate of return is less than 1%/year. Indeed, Ludger Schuknecht made such arguments last Saturday. He did so eloquently and thoughtfully in the deep windowless basements of the Marriott Marquis Hotel in Washington DC at a panel I was on.

But Mankiw doesn’t make that argument.

And because he doesn’t, he doesn’t let his readers see that there is a huge and asymmetric difference between:

my argument that tax-rate cuts are not (usually) self financing, which at a tax rate t=30% requires only that α < 2.33; and:

his argument that infrastructure investment is not self-financing, which at a tax rate t=30% requires that ρ < 1%/year.

To argue that α < 2.33 is very easy. To argue that ρ < 1%/year is very hard. So how does Mankiw pretend to his readers that the two arguments are equivalent? By offering his readers no numbers at all.

This principle is broadly applicable to all sorts of arguments that come up on this blog.  For example, getting rid of a marginal bad teacher is probably efficient.  But constantly churning teachers might shift the efficiency function to a different place on the curve. 

So realistic estimates of parameters are critical but also they can also be hard.  How do you really tell the Comprehensive rate of return of infrastructure?  Is it different in Detroit versus San Francisco?  Can it be reliably estimated in advance or only known historically.

But it does lead to better arguments when transparent estimates (that can be discussed or tested) are placed out where they can be evaluated. 

Selection on Spinach*

[I have the nagging feeling that I'm not using the proper terminology with the following but the underlying concepts should be clear enough. At least for a blog post.]

Let's talk about three levels of selection effects :

The first is initial selection. At this level, certain traits of potential subjects influence the likelihood of their being included in the study. If you ask for volunteers in person, you will end up underrepresenting shy people. If you use mail surveys, you will underrepresent the homeless:

The second level comes after a study starts. You will frequently lose subjects over time. This type of selection is particularly dangerous because you cannot assume that the likelihood of dropping out is independent of the target variable. The isue comes up all the time in medical studies. For serious conditions, a turn for the worse can make it extremely difficult to continue treatment. The result is that the people who stick around till the end of the study are far more likely to be those who were getting better;

(Up until now, the types of selection bias we have discussed, though potentially serious, are generally not deliberate. Their consequences are unpredictable and they happen to even the best and most conscientious of researchers. That is no longer the case with level three.)

The third level concerns attempts to manipulate attrition so as to affect the results of a study. In these cases, researchers will attempt to get rid of those subjects who are likely to drag down the average. This is blatant data cooking and it can be remarkably effective. In school administration, the term of art is "counseling out." It is shockingly widespread, particularly among the "no excuses" charter schools.

The effect of this practice on kids can be brutal but that is a topic for another post. What interests us here are the statistical concerns; what are the analytic implications of this policy? In terms of direction, the answer is simple: schools that engage in these policies will see their test scores artificially inflated. In terms of magnitude, there is really no telling. The potential for distortion here is huge, particularly when you take into account the possibility of peer effects.

Put bluntly, in cases like this, "The first Success graduating class, for example, had just 32 students. When they started first grade in August 2006, those pupils were among 73 enrolled at the school," data showing above-average results are almost meaningless.

[A few weeks ago, I put out a collection of our early posts on education (Things I Saw at the Counter-Reformation).  The impact of attrition is one of the big running themes.]

*Spinach being, in this case, a substance that greatly increases the power of a given effect.

XKCD -- write your own damned post

I've got at least two pieces I'd like write around this: one discussing the way we approach AI research (and the innate limitations in that favored approach); the other a rant about how ddulite journalists fail to catch the important subtleties in technology.

I'm sure there are more angles here so I'll throw this one out to the room. What are the examples of a slight change taking a problem from easy to nearly impossible?

Checking in with Cracked.com -- the website that's better than it has an right to be

Even more than Mental Floss, Cracked.com has taken the worst genre in journalism (the unfortunately named listicle) and made it something entertaining, informative and intelligent. I don't drop by that often because it's such a time sink, but when I do I always come away with something worth sharing.

For instance, 5 Dirty Tricks Apple Uses to Get You to Buy a New iPhone opens with this nice example of a deceptive graphic:

The problem is that the old version (on the left) is misleadingly shot in a different light: it doesn't have any shadowed black edge and is a completely silver shade, whereas the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus are cleverly shaded at the sides to make them appear skinnier than they actually are. Here's a handy GIF to show what we mean:

I'm not crazy about the animation, but still.

The article goes where so few technology writers dare and actually discusses the functionality from a common sense perspective.

Think about what you do with your phone -- send texts, make calls, check social media, play terrible games, and send immediately regrettable photographs to people you just met. Unless you're a professional photographer, you're not going to care about how much the camera has improved on the iPhone 6 (and if you are a professional photographer, you probably take pictures on something better than a goddamn iPhone). And for those of you who game -- nothing playable on the iPhone really needs a huge upgrade in power. Just look what happened when they tried to sell Angry Birds on actual gaming systems. So what do we need the better specs for? To have more apps? Not according to the hard numbers.

In 6 BS News Stories That Went Viral: The Girl With Three Boobs, they gleefully point out how gullible journalists can be when there's a deadline.

That's Telegraph, The Hollywood Reporter, E! Online, Huffington Post, and International Business Times reminding us that, like the ocean, the Internet is a vast chilly abyss that cradles unspeakable wonder as well as waking nightmares. We'll leave you to decide which category triple boobs fall under, because we honestly have no idea.

For those of you wondering if this means Martian mind-vacations are just around the corner, it shockingly turns out there are a few things off about this story. Like the fact that the woman has refused to name any of the doctors involved, won't show her new gift to the world for more than a quick few seconds up close, or that she once filed a missing baggage claim listing "3 breast prosthesis" as one of the stolen items. Also relevant? She once apparently described herself as a "provider of Internet hoaxes since 2014."

4 Reasons Movie Special FX Are Actually Getting Worse has an excellent discussion of the paradoxical economics of CGI,

It turns out that making the most visually spectacular images that the human brain can comprehend requires a good bit of scratch. That's why huge-budget blockbusters have been becoming the norm (33 of the 50 most expensive movies of all time have been made in the last four years); studios are so preoccupied pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into CGI for schlock like Battleship because they could, that they didn't bother to stop to think if they should.

And, as CGI continues to improve, movies only become more reliant on it. We've mentioned before how Rhythm & Hues, the visual effects company most famous for bringing to life all the Oscar-winning, pants-shitting fear of sharing a Tunnel of Love rowboat with a 400-pound marvel of evisceration and death in Life of Pi, went bankrupt because they did their job too well.

Meanwhile, the studios are pumping more and more money into already-bloated special effects budgets (it sure as shit isn't going toward better screenplays). For Transformers: Thing of Whatever, Industrial Light & Magic spent about 15 weeks per Transformer just getting the basic model ready, and each model has about 10,000 parts -- that's not a joke, that's seriously how many individual pieces there are in Michael Bay's idea of a talking truck. The company had to start making models six months before filming even started, just to meet the production schedule. And remember, ILM is like the GE of special effects studios, so if they're balls-to-the-wall to make their effects look good in a profitable fashion, what chance does a scrappy, upstart VFX company have?

Finally, 3 Artists Who Got Screwed for Creating Iconic Characters is a perfect complement to the Kirby thread, reminding us that, like many industries based on creativity, little of the money from comics goes to those who do the actual creating.

Step-back SAT/GRE problems -- trying something new at "You Do the Math"

I've been thinking about the problem of adapting lessons for different media in general and for video in particular. There is a popular but wildly misguided impression that you can create an effective video by just sticking a camera in front of a live presentation. Teaching live is an interactive process. Even when the students don't say a word, the good teacher is alert to the class's reactions. You speed up, slow down, offer words of encouragement, come up with new examples and occasionally stop what you're doing and go back and reteach a previous section.

With a video lesson you set the course then you leave the room. What's worse, it's a really big room and many if not most of the kids are there because the standard methods of instruction have not served them well.

One idea I'm playing with is thinking of the problems in terms of a graph (as in graph theory, not data visualization) where the path is determined by how well the student is doing. As a start in that direction I'm playing around with paired problems -- if you are confused by the first (more difficult) problem there an easier one to try -- and I've got the first couple up at the teaching blog.

Here's the medium problem:

Circle 1

The radius of circle 1 is 5. Both line segments pass through the center of the circle. Find the area of the shaded region.


You can find the answer and explanation at You Do the Math. Feedback is always appreciated.

The New York Times' regularly scheduled sackcloth and ashes show

From Talking Points Memo:

When New York Times columnist David Brooks revealed last month that his son is serving in the Israeli military, plenty of questions followed: Should Brooks have been more open about that fact? Should it preclude him from writing about Israel? Is it any different from a columnist with a child serving in the U.S. military?

We learned Wednesday that the revelation has even brought about a minor disagreement between two Times editors.

The paper's public editor Margaret Sullivan wrote Wednesday that while she "strongly" disagrees with the suggestion that Brooks "should no longer write about Israel," she also believes that "a one-time acknowledgement of this situation in print (not in an interview with another publication) is completely reasonable."

"This information is germane; and readers deserve to learn about it in the same place that his columns appear," Sullivan wrote.

That's not how Times editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal sees it though. Rosenthal told Sullivan that the columnist shouldn't have been required to note that his 23-year-old son enlisted in the Israel Defense Forces.

"I do not think he ever had an obligation to say that his son made this choice, any more than if his son had joined the U.S. Air Force (although I recognize that Israel is more controversial in some people’s minds)," Rosenthal said.

Just to be clear, we're talking about David Brooks. You know the guy, quotes discredited studies, makes stuff up. Over the years, he has given critics a steady stream of material, truly unambiguous examples of factual mistakes and substantial omissions in service of the narrative of the moment. His editors have been remarkably quiet on these errors (which is about par for the NYT course)

The New York Times does frequently engage in very public displays of repentance and self-examination. They admit to professional and ethical lapses. They debate in very serious tones the finer points of journalistic conduct.  Almost invariably, however, they pick the most minor of lapses to focus on. It is almost as if they wanted to appear conscientious about their profession without actually doing the hard work or accepting the consequences.

XKCD Marriage

Lots of interesting implications here, but they'll have to wait till later.

“I can no longer accept cash in bags in a Pizza Hut parking lot” -- time to add Pennsylvania to the list

In an article entitled READING, WRITING, RANSACKING, Charles P. Pierce makes me think that I haven't been spending nearly enough time looking at education reform in the Keystone State. The quote from the title comes Pierce's account of the federal investigation of former Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School leader Nick Trombetta:

The bags of cash, a private plane bough by Avanti but used mostly by Trombetta, a Florida vacation home and a home in Mingo Junction, Ohio, for Trombetta’s former girlfriend all were described as perks enjoyed by Trombetta as part of a scheme to siphon money from taxpayers’ funds sent to PA Cyber for more than four years.

The case is actually small time compared to the other scandals going on in the state, but you have to admit it's a great quote.

A bigger and much more familiar scandal is the lack of accountability:

For reasons that aren't clear, millions of dollars have moved between the network of charter schools, their parent nonprofit and two property-management entities. The School District is charged with overseeing city charters, but "does not have the power or access to the financial records of the parent organization," according to District spokesperson Fernando Gallard. "We cannot conduct even limited financial audits of the parent organization." That's despite the fact that charters account for 30 percent of the District's 2013-'14 budget. Aspira declined to comment. The $3.3 million that the four brick-and-mortar charters apparently have loaned to Aspira are in addition to $1.5 million in lease payments to Aspira and Aspira-controlled property-management entities ACE and ACE/Dougherty, and $6.3 million in administrative fees paid to Aspira in 2012. 

Add to that some extraordinarily nasty state politics involving approval-challenged Pennsylvania governor Tom Corbett, the state-run Philadelphia School Reform Commission (which has a history of making teachers' lives difficult basically for the fun of it) and a rather suspicious poll:

"With Governor Corbett's weak job approval, re-elect and ballot support numbers, the current Philadelphia school crisis presents an opportunity for the Governor to wedge the electorate on an issue that is favorable to him," the poll concludes. "Staging this battle presents Corbett with an opportunity to coalesce his base, focus on a key emerging issue in the state, and campaign against an 'enemy' that's going to aggressively oppose him in '14 in any case."

I don't know enough about Pennsylvania politics to competently summarize this, let alone intelligently comment on it but it's difficult to imagine an interpretation that makes things looks good.

Now they've got me defending the efficient market theorem...

I know it's trivial, but this one has always annoyed me.

There are cases where the conventional wisdom is so screwed up that the market reads bad news as good news and rewards stupidity, but otherwise, in a reasonably efficient market, stocks only go up when bad news beats expectations if they had already gone down as the expectations had rolled in. They are, in other words, making up some of the lost ground. Financial reporters love the "went up on bad news" story but they almost invariably fail to mention how the stock had been doing before.

Don't get me wrong. I'm still not a fan of the EMT, but on this one, at least, I'm willing to give them a pass.

I'm going to let someone else bitch about the New York Times for a while

Besides, when itt comes to take-downs of bad financial journalism, there's no one sharper than Felix Salmon.

In "Annals of NYT innumeracy, Bank Rossiya edition," Salmon takes apart a recent article entitled “It Pays to be Putin’s Friend.” No doubt the basic premise is true, but the examples described by the NYT don't support the point at all. Salmon points out lots of sloppiness in the piece but this is arguably the money shot.

So [Sergei P.] Roldugin took out a loan, of unknown size, to buy a stake of 3.2% in Bank Rossiya. How on earth does that make him worth anywhere near $350 million?

And here the light slowly dawns — the NYT has taken the sum total of Bank Rossiya’s assets, and used that number as the the value of the bank itself. ($350 million, you see, is 3.2% of $11 billion.)

Of course you can’t value a bank by just looking at its assets, you first need to subtract its liabilities. The NYT story leads with “State corporations, local governments and even the Black Sea Fleet in Crimea” moving their bank accounts to Bank Rossiya — all of those deposits are liabilities of the bank, which need to be subtracted from its assets before you can even begin to arrive at an overall valuation for the bank itself. Just looking at the assets, without looking at the liabilities, is a bit like scoring a sports game by looking only at the points scored by one team.

Probably, most of the value in Bank Rossiya is to be found in the commodity and media assets which it seems to have been able to acquire on the cheap. (The bank itself, qua bank, might well be worth nothing at all.) And no one’s going to find out the true value of those assets by looking at the official size of Bank Rossiya’s balance sheet. It seems to me, indeed, that Bank Rossiya is in large part being used as a holding company, a reasonably safe place where Vladimir Putin’s billionaire friends can keep some of the valuable assets they’ve managed to acquire over the years. I’m just guessing here, but I doubt they have any particular desire to share 3.2% of those assets with some random cellist [Roldugin]. To simply take the official size of Rossiya’s balance sheet, and declare it to be the value of the bank: that’s just bonkers.

Examining the rope – – Rotten Tomatoes edition

[You can find the origin of the metaphor here]

Our last Rotten Tomatoes post may have come out a little harsher than I intended. I probably focused too much on the specific glitch and not enough on the larger point, namely that metrics almost never entirely capture what they claim to. Identifying and fixing problems is important, but we also have to acknowledge our imitations.

If we are stuck with imperfections then we will just have to learn to live with them. A big part of that is trying to figure out when our metrics can be relied upon and when they are likely to blowup in our faces.

Let's take Rotten Tomatoes for example. In many ways, the website provides an excellent tool for quantitatively measuring the critical reaction to a movie. It is broad-based, consistent, and as objective as we can reasonably hope for.

But is it the best possible measure in all conceivable circumstances? If not, when does it break down?

When you see a 60% fresh rating that means that 60% of the reviews examined were considered positive. You will notice that is a binary variable. The most enthusiastic of reviews is put in the same category as the mildly favorable. The inevitable result is that sometimes a film will rank lower on this binary average then it would have on a straight average of star rankings.

Just to be clear, there are some definite advantages to this yes/no approach. As anyone who has dealt with satisfaction scales knows, you can get into all sorts of trouble making interval assumptions about that one through five.

 Can knowing their binary foundation help us make better use of the Rotten Tomatoes scores?

If we can make certain assumptions about the distribution of scores, we can tell a lot about which films are likely to be favored. Keep in mind that a good review counts the same as a great one. Therefore a film that is liked by everybody will do better than a film that is loved by most but leaves a few indifferent or hostile.

Without getting into relative merits (all are great films), consider Philadelphia Story and the big three from  Martin Scorsese, Taxi Driver/Raging Bull/Goodfellas. By many measures, such as the influential Sight & Sound poll (according to Ebert "by far the most respected of the countless polls of great movies--the only one most serious movie people take seriously."), all three Scorsese pictures are among the most critically hailed movies ever. All three have very good scores on the "Tomatometer" but none have a perfect score. The same goes for films like Bonnie and Clyde, The Magnificent Ambersons, and Bicycle Thieves.

Philadelphia Story, on the other hand, is much less likely to get nominated as greatest film ever, but it is a movie that virtually everyone likes. It's an excellent film, skillfully directed, starring three of the most charming actors ever to come out of Hollywood. Not surprisingly, it has a perfect score on Rotten Tomatoes.

This is not to say that Sight & Sound is better than Rotten Tomatoes. Every scoring system is arbitrary, sometimes plays favorites and never exactly captures what we expect it to measure.  The lesson here is that, if you want to use a metric in an argument, you need to know how that metric was derived and what its strengths and weaknesses. You can't find a perfect metric but you can have a pretty good idea where the imperfections are.

Understanding Common Core-aligned math homework

I volunteer a couple of times a week with a group that does after school tutoring for urban students in LA. My role is "math floater." I walk around the room and help the kids, and sometimes the tutors, with math problems. When the kids ask for help, it's usually just your basic math question, but when the tutors ask for help it's often less about the math and more about the unfamiliar approach the assignment takes to solving a familiar problem.

This is perhaps most exasperating for those tutors with math backgrounds. You can imagine what it must be like to have a degree in engineering and yet be stumped by an eighth-grader's pre-algebra homework. Of course, it's not the math that's throwing them; it's all the weird and arbitrary steps that have been layered onto the math.

After struggling a bit myself, I realized that the key was to approach these problems as bad translations of unknown texts. If I looked hard enough, I could usually find an antecedent, a good lesson (something I had read in Pólya or seen demonstrated by a master teacher or used with success in one of my classes) that had somehow devolved into the misshapen thing sitting in front of the student.

Recently, I ducked into the tutoring center when I wasn't scheduled to work. I just stepped in to use the bathroom but before I got across the room, I heard a couple of tutors calling my name. They were struggling with a third or fourth grade problem where the student had to perform a number of steps including filling out a three by three grid in order to find the product of two three-digit numbers. The answer kept coming out wrong and none of the tutors could figure out why since none of them were sure how the process was supposed to go.

The point of the question was to illustrate the distributive property. Handled properly, the general format could have made for a pretty good problem. As was it was a disaster. Developmentally inappropriate, badly explained, overly long (two-digit numbers would have made the point just as well), devoid of relevant context. Like a bad translation of a bad translation of a good problem. That got me wondering if perhaps the process for coming up these problems worked something like this...

Two ways of looking at the achievement gap and how the reform debate often misses them both

The following came out of a phone conversation I had this weekend with Joseph. I'll need to get back to this later but for now here's a thumbnail version just to have something on the record.

When we talk about the achievement gap in education, there are two distinct but valid ways of approaching the question:

The first is in terms of variability. The people in the bottom quartile are, by most measures, getting a much worse education than the remaining three quarters of the population;

The second involves correlation. People in that bottom quartile are disproportionately likely to be poor, to be black or Hispanic, or to speak English as a second language.

You address the first by raising scores for those at the bottom. You address the second by changing the order. Reducing the gap is still desirable regardless of the definition used -- we don't want any of our schools to be bad nor do we want an education system that entrenches the class system -- and there are many things we can do that will improve both, but it is important to remember that we are talking about two distinct objectives.

To further complicate the picture, proposals that are meant to improve educational outcomes in general are often pitched as ways to address the achievement gap.

All three goals (improving overall outcomes, reducing variability and breaking the correlation) are important -- I'd argue the third one is absolutely vital -- but whenever we need to be clear about what we are trying to do.

Limits of Market Forces: a never-ending saga

This is a post by Joseph.

I was reading this article and was struck by this passage:

Poole lamented in his blueprint that the country was still not ready in 1980, and he warned his policymaker readers to expect resistance at the local level if they tried to push through programs transferring the costs for criminal justice (and policing) from general taxpayers to “users.” But one thing that Poole and Reason are very proud of is how they brought ideas from the fringes to the mainstream — and Ferguson is a prime example of how Poole’s neoliberal blueprints on privatizing criminal justice were eventually adopted in cities across the country

In Ferguson’s offender-fee system, city revenues from traffic fines make up 21% of the city budget and continue soaring. Those revenues are squeezed mostly from black drivers — 86% of motorists stopped in Ferguson are African-American, well above their 63% portion of the town’s population.

There are two pieces that I think need to be very carefully thought about.  First, as a matter of history, making criminal charges a means of raising revenue has been associated with the worst excesses of tyranny.  Think of the issues of High Treason and attainder during the War of the Roses and Tudor era in England.  Does anybody think the ability to seize people's property made these excesses better but reducing taxes (for example)?  So this is not an inevitable property of these systems, but it is worth thinking about carefully when implementation is being considered.

Second, market forces work best when the costs are borne by those for whom the service is provided to.  Here we need to be very tricky -- policing and trials are not usually services that criminals want provided to them  -- instead it may be a cost of doing business to them.  Nor do they have much influence in setting costs or process.  Instead, the service is provided to all of the non-criminals, who are made safer by the policing. 

So if we fund the system by charging criminals, we inherently break a key feedback loop of market forces.  Criminals cannot, for example, pick their judge or arresting officer.  Nor due we seek to compensate "users" who are incarcerated by mistake, but in other venues billing errors are routinely addressed. 

Instead, I would argue a fair justice system has market value.  A predictable legal environment and a good set of laws makes it easier for business to function efficiently and to invest in the future.  That is a public good, as much as clean air or automobile capable roads are. 

The Thirty Million Words Initiative

This is interesting [if you get a chance, listen to the audio at the link]

“By the end of the age of three, children who are born into poverty will have heard 30 million fewer words than their more affluent peers,” says Dr. Dana Suskind [A pediatric otolaryngologist at University of Chicago -- MP].

Dr. Dana Suskind is the director of the Thirty Million Words initiative – an education and research program out of Chicago.

...

The moment a baby is born their brain is already beginning to develop. That is why these early language interactions are so crucial. Scientists can actually measure the word gap or the number of words spoken at home. They use a little device called the LENA which stands for language environment analysis.

The LENA is about the size of a credit card. Babies wear it at chest level. Not only does it count or record words, it can also analyze what it records. The LENA is able to differentiate all the different kinds of sounds that are heard in a baby’s environment. One way to think of the LENA is that it’s like a language pedometer.

“So just like a regular pedometer counts the number of steps you take in a day the LENA counts the number of words a child is exposed to and how many conversations they have with their caregiver or parent,” Suskind says.

It’s not just the number of words spoken to babies but the quality of words spoken. Dr. Adriana Weisleder, a developmental psychologist who is an associate project director and co-investigator at the BELLE project says that, “in some families a lot of the speech to children is what they called business talk. The function of the speech is to get the child to do something right so they’re commands or imperatives. That happens in all families. It has to happen, right? Parents have to get their kids to do things. But when a high proportion of the speech that children hear is composed of those kinds of business talk or imperatives then that means they’re not getting a lot of the other rich talk and conversation.”

Still a device like the LENA can’t close the word gap all by itself.

“Just like a pedometer will not change the obesity and health crisis in the country, we can’t put everything on a piece of technology,” Suskind says.

One way Dr. Suskind’s Thirty Million Words initiative tries to close to gap is by actually going into homes. On top of going over the results from lena recordings – Thirty Million Words has created a curriculum for parents. It includes videos modeling ways caregivers should talk to their baby.

Families that speak more than one language at home can face a special challenge: what language should they speak to their kids in?

“It’s not just a moral and right thing, but the science is clear that parents and caregivers should be talking and interacting with their children in their native language. It does no good to be speaking in a language you don’t feel comfortable with,” Suskind says.

“Having a higher vocabulary even if it’s in Spanish still makes kids be more prepared for school.” Weisleder says.

Why is that? talking a lot to your child is about more than just teaching them words – it’s helping them understand basic concepts.

”If you know in spanish the words for horse and dog and house and barn. You know those words in spanish but you also know a lot of relationships between those things. You know that dogs and horses are animals and that a lot of dogs live in houses and horses might live in barns, lots of the different things.”

Bridging the word gap is not about getting babies ready to read Don Quixote by the age of four – it’s about setting up the building blocks so that children can be ready learn more easily once they get to school.

Why a predictably breakable rope is better than an unbreakable rope

Short answer: there is no such thing as an unbreakable rope.


There's an old story about an isolated monastery located high on the side of an unclimbable cliff. The only access to the monastery was by way of a basket that was hold up the side of the cliff on a single rope. One day a pilgrim who was climbing into the basket noticed that the rope looked old and parade. He asked the monk "when do you replace the rope?"

The monk replied "when it breaks."

If we generalize a bit, this becomes a useful analogy. We have a case where there is great cost associated with avoidable failure, but where there are also nontrivial costs associated with caution.

One common but probably misguided response to the situation is to buy a better rope i.e. come up with a system that is less likely to fail. If you have a shoddy system with lots of room for cheap and easy improvement, this approach makes a great deal of sense. If, on the other hand, you have already made all of the obvious and inexpensive upgrades, it probably makes more sense from a cost benefit perspective to start focusing on the question of when you replace the rope.

You frequently see this question coming up in connection to proxy variables. Particularly in the social sciences, researchers are constantly required to substitute an easily measured variable for the actual factor of interest. If we start with a "good rope" (a well-chosen proxy) then it will, under most circumstances, correlate strongly with the thing we are actually interested in.

There are plenty of "bad ropes" out there, proxies that have only weak relationships with the variables of interest even under the best circumstances, but that is a topic for another post. The disagreement here is with the otherwise responsible statisticians who make an effort to find the best possible proxy but who then do not spend enough time thinking about what happens when the rope breaks.

A few years ago, while I was doing risk models for a large bank, I found myself caught in a heated debate. We had a very good direct measure of how close people were to maxing out their line of credit. Unfortunately, this was also an expensive variable, so it was proposed that we substitute another, less direct measure. The argument for the substitution was that there was an extremely high correlation between the two variables. The counter argument put forward by most of the more experienced statisticians was that while this was true, that correlation tended to break down in extreme cases, particularly those where a person was about to go bad on all of their debts . Since the purpose of the model was to predict when people were about to default on their loans, this was a really unfortunate time for the relationship to fall apart.

The great buried lede of the Common Core debate

Lee Fang has another solid piece of investigative journalism at the Nation. It covers a lot of important ground (I'd recommend reading it for yourself), but I did want to single out a  couple of paragraphs that hit on a previously mentioned point.

The Department of Education under Obama has seen a flow of revolving door hires from the education investment community. In May of this year, the Senate confirmed Ted Mitchell, the chief executive of the NewSchools Venture Fund, as the Under Secretary for the US Department of Education. Prior to his government position, Mitchell, a personal investor in an array of education start-ups, forged a partnership last year with the creators of Facebook app FarmVille to create new education game products. James Shelton, the Deputy Secretary, is a longtime education investor and the former co-founder of LearnNow, a charter chain that was sold to Edison Learning, a for-profit charter management company.

In an interview with EdSurge, a trade outlet, Shelton explained that the Common Core standards will allow education companies to produce products that “can scale across many markets,” overcoming the “fragmented procurement market” that has plagued investors seeking to enter the K-12 sector. Moreover, Shelton and his team manage an education innovation budget, awarding grants to charter schools and research centers to advance the next breakthrough in education technology. Increased research and development in education innovation, Shelton wrote in testimony to Congress, will spark the next “equivalent of Google or Microsoft to lead the global learning technology market.” He added, “I want it to be a US company.”

For all the controversy, there are some details on the Common Core story that we should all be able to agree on: it has been produced and implemented with remarkable speed; some of the major stakeholders (particularly teachers) feel they were left out of much of the process; the initiative has become one of the most hotly debated aspects of education reform; a great deal of money is at stake here.

Intentionally or not, the speed of the implementation greatly increases the costs. In terms of both materials and training, a more gradual phase in would save a lot of money (it would also allow for field testing and fine tuning but that's a topic for another post). We should and will have a discussion about the pedagogical issues with the Common Core (you can get a head start on the debate here and here), but when we are talking about public policy proposals, proponents always need to show that their plans are cost effective.

"Marvel, Jack Kirby Heirs Settle Dispute Over Superhero Rights"

From Variety

“Marvel and the family of Jack Kirby have amicably resolved their legal disputes, and are looking forward to advancing their shared goal of honoring Mr. Kirby’s significant role in Marvel’s history,” the litigants announced in a joint statement on Friday.

I suspect Disney pretty much had to settle this and hopefully the Kirby heirs negotiated with this in mind. As mentioned before (Do copyright extensions drive innovation? -- Hollywood blockbuster edition), the entertainment industry's current model is based on accumulating huge content libraries then lobbying for an endless series of copyright extensions. Even with a corporate-friendly court, I can't imagine the major players would want to risk disturbing the status quo.

You can find the rest of the thread here:


Intellectual property and Marvel

An IP post for the Fourth of July

A bit more background on the Jack Kirby IP case

More on the Jack Kirby copyright case

Lots of red flags on this one

This is another one of those education stories where it's difficult to figure out what's actually going on but easy to see that the standard narrative has some pretty big plot holes.

I came across this narrative in an article by Ben Wieder that opens with the following:

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan were both on hand Monday morning to crown the school districts in Gwinnett County, Georgia, and Orange County, Florida, as the first dual winners of the Broad Prize for Urban Education. They will split the $1 million prize, which comes in the form of scholarships worth up to $20,000 for graduating seniors.

The prize, described variously as the Nobel or the Oscar or the Pulitzer of the education reform movement and sponsored by billionaire Eli Broad and his wife, Edythe, aims to “regain the American public’s confidence in public schools by spotlighting districts making significant gains in student achievement.” Both districts were cited for above-average academic performance for low-income and minority students relative to other districts in their states.

Lots of things here to make a fellow cautious -- impressive claims about a fuzzy target coming from a well-financed advocacy group -- and if there's a field that demands heightened caution, it's education reform. Perhaps even more than Bill Gates, Broad is the money man most associated with the Taylorist agenda in the education reform movement. Wieder does mention this concern, but he doesn't dig.

Skeptics question whether the foundation’s choice is influenced more by districts’ alignment with its policy goals than by student performance. “The Broad operation is so inherently ideological,” said Gary Orfield a professor in the graduate school of education at UCLA.

But Nancy Que, director of the prize, says a “purposeful wall” is maintained between the foundation’s “reform” agenda and the prize selection. Each year, a review board looks at academic markers for the 75 largest urban school districts, including performance on state tests, graduation rates, and participation and performance on the SAT, ACT and Advanced Placement exams to determine finalists. The winner is selected after site visits to all of the finalist districts, taking into account their leadership and governance policies.

That "purposeful wall" quote is really troubling, particularly when you follow the link Wieder provides. As best I can make the process out, while the finalists appear to be selected through fairly standard academic metrics, getting the big prize seems to depend on meeting a set of standards that very closely line up with the foundation's reform movement agenda.

A team of experienced researchers and practitioners led by RMC Research Corporation, an education consulting company, then conducts site visits to each finalist district to gather additional quantitative and qualitative data. District policies and practices affecting teaching and learning are qualitatively analyzed according to a rubric for evaluating the quality of district-wide policies and practices. The criteria are grounded in research-based school and district practices found to be effective in three key areas: teaching and learning, district leadership, and operations and support systems. 

The framework consists largely of reform dog-whistles like standards-based curriculum and rigorous evidence-based instruction (because we all know the importance of rigor). Other parts are arbitrary and raise some interesting questions.

Consider the section on Financial Resources.

INDICATOR FR-1. The district is financially sound, implements prudent financial planning processes, and displays strong fiscal accountability.
• The district is financially sound, having adequate fiscal reserves to meet current obligations and state-required minimums for reserves.
• The district budgeting process includes prudent financial planning and forecasting to anticipate fluctuations in funding sources and balance budgets without sacrificing educational quality.
• The district displays strong fiscal accountability, promoting cost effectiveness, employing effective internal controls over expenditures, and forecasting so there is little need to reconcile differences between anticipated and actual expenditures during the fiscal year.

The first obvious question, how exactly this relates to the stated goals of improving student performance and closing the achievement gap, pales next to the question of what the Broad Foundation considers "fiscal accountability." Looking at the rather short list of previous winners, a couple of familiar names pop out, names associated with spending most of us would consider extravagant and wasteful. Gwinnett County Public Schools (already an odd choice for the award given its relatively upscale demographics, particularly compared to nearby Fulton) compensates its superintendent at the rate of nearly 400K. Even worse,  Miami-Dade County Public Schools is in the midst of an ongoing scandal, as are most Florida  school districts, due to a state policy of handing large checks to any con artist with a charter school application.

This is hardly surprising. The Broad Foundation comes out of a culture that embraces both the power of privatization and the great-man theory of executive leadership. It is difficult to shock them with spending in areas they like (you can add technology to that list, John Deasy of the billion dollar iPad fiasco is another product of Broad). When the framework talks about financial soundness, the authors are more likely thinking about reductions in class sizes and pay raises for teachers who earn graduate degrees (Broad appears to be more comfortable with the idea of paying administrators for questionable degrees).

Both in what they look for and in what they overlook, it appears that the people at the Broad Foundation are using this prize to reward politicians and administrators who conform to their agenda. There is nothing wrong with this -- it is, after all, their money -- but journalists covering this story have a professional obligation to go beyond the press releases.

Checking back in on "Netflix and the big swinging check syndrome"

Whenever possible it's good to follow-up.

A few weeks ago, the news broke that:

Netflix Acquires ‘The Blacklist’ For $2 Million An Episode

Except, of course, they didn't. As I noted in a post (with a title I should be a little less proud of):

For starters, you will notice that the headline is somewhat misleading. Netflix did not "acquire" the Black List in the sense that, say ABC would have. The show will still be running on NBC next year. Nor did it acquire the rights to stream the episodes during the regular season; those will presumably stay with Hulu. What Netflix did acquire was the right to stream the previous year's episodes.

I was in the middle of a thread on how Netflix was yet another example of business journalists taking an appealing narrative -- visionary CEO using big data to transform his industry and make his company the next HBO -- and selectively ignoring the facts that contradicted it while more or less inventing others to support it.

But the "presumably stay with Hulu" part bothered me quite a bit. The point was left fairly vague in the news story I linked to and, if Netflix actually had managed to block Hulu from streaming the show, that would change the picture considerably.

So the day after the debut I checked the show's status.

The Con(firmation) Artists of the New York Times

I was gathering notes for yet another post on the sad state of fact-checking at the New York Times, this time concerning Alessandra Stanley when I came across this from then executive editor Bill Keller:

Q: The NYT is taking considerable criticism for Ms. Stanley's piece, with many folks learning about the error via the Public Editor's column.

A: Just to be clear (and I'm sure you know this) we published a fulsome correction* on July 22. Many folks may have learned about this episode from Clark's column, but many (including Clark) learned about it because we published a correction, which is also appended in perpetuity to the archived article. The evidence for what I'm about to say is purely anecdotal, but I think a lot of readers check the Corrections column with the same avidity they apply to the obits. On a good day they will come across something like our March 11 correction of a 1906 article that inaccurately cited the text of an inscription inside Abraham Lincoln's pocket watch. On a REALLY good day they may come across something like this one, from October, 2000: "An article in The Times Magazine last Sunday about Ivana Trump and her spending habits misstated the number of bras she buys. It is two dozen black, two dozen beige and two dozen white, not two thousand of each."

But I digress.

While I'm telling you what you obviously already know: One thing that sets a serious newspaper apart from most other institutions in our society is that we own up to our mistakes with corrections, editor's notes and other accountability devices, including the public editor's column. We hate getting stuff wrong and we work hard to avoid mistakes. But when we make them, we try to set the record straight.
...

Q: Specifically, some people inside the paper believe that Alessandra has been allowed to continue as a critic, without sufficient punishment, because she is close with Jill Abramson. Your response?

A: We love a conspiracy theory, but the truth is simple: Alessandra has been allowed to continue as a critic because she is -- in my opinion, among others -- a brilliant critic.

It was an almost perfect example of why I have such problems with the New York Times, arrogant, dismissive of critics. Perhaps more importantly, it demonstrated the Keller's terrible journalistic taste and judgment. I went back and looked over the Shonda Rhimes piece again to confirm my first impression of Stanley's talents. It was, if anything, worse on second reading. It read like Stanley doing a bad job impersonating Maureen Dowd doing a bad job impersonating Pauline Kael. (I am a huge fan of Kael. However, as with Bob Dylan, there are things she can do brilliantly which you probably shouldn't try.)

I also read the Cronkite piece that prompted Keller to describe Stanley as brilliant. It too was awful, consisting almost entirely of threadbare cliches ("that his outsize tenure bracketed a bygone era when America was, if not a more confident nation, certainly a more trusting one").

Thinking about the Dowd analogy as I went through the tired and badly thought-out memes of Stanley's essays, it struck me that, like David Brooks, David Carr, and her friend Dowd, Stanley was yet another of the New York Times' con(firmation) artists.

What makes a con(firmation) artist? First and foremost, of course, is the desire to confirm the beliefs and narratives held by their colleagues. All of these journalists have poor track records when it comes to factual accuracy but they largely escape the consequences of these lapses because they are saying things that other journalist believe to be true (or perhaps more accurately want to be true).

Con(firmation) artists also rely on a veneer of "new journalism" to conceal the cracks in their work. When you read the flashy prose , the big analogies, the constant editorial sides, you can almost imagine them saying "it worked in the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test."

There are at least two major problems with this use of new journalism. The first is that the original generation of new journalists were extraordinarily hard working and were held to demanding standards by editors like Clay Felker. The second, and more important, is the fact that the original new journalists and the con(firmation) artists had opposite objectives . The goal then was to be original and unexpected. When Tom Wolfe discussed the fashions of the radical left, he came to new and surprising conclusions. When David Brooks talks about Home Shopping Network or David Carr talks about Netflix, they get their facts wrong but they reach conclusions that agree with the conventional wisdom of their peers.

This combination of pretension and pandering has given these writers extraordinary standing in their communities. It has also allowed them to do considerable damage to their professions.


* With the caveat that Keller may not know what the word 'fulsome' means, here is the correction in all of its epic glory:

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: July 22, 2009
An appraisal on Saturday about Walter Cronkite’s career included a number of errors. In some copies, it misstated the date that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed and referred incorrectly to Mr. Cronkite’s coverage of D-Day. Dr. King was killed on April 4, 1968, not April 30. Mr. Cronkite covered the D-Day landing from a warplane; he did not storm the beaches. In addition, Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon on July 20, 1969, not July 26. “The CBS Evening News” overtook “The Huntley-Brinkley Report” on NBC in the ratings during the 1967-68 television season, not after Chet Huntley retired in 1970. A communications satellite used to relay correspondents’ reports from around the world was Telstar, not Telestar. Howard K. Smith was not one of the CBS correspondents Mr. Cronkite would turn to for reports from the field after he became anchor of “The CBS Evening News” in 1962; he left CBS before Mr. Cronkite was the anchor. Because of an editing error, the appraisal also misstated the name of the news agency for which Mr. Cronkite was Moscow bureau chief after World War II. At that time it was United Press, not United Press International.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 1, 2009
An appraisal on July 18 about Walter Cronkite’s career misstated the name of the ABC evening news broadcast. While the program was called “World News Tonight” when Charles Gibson became anchor in May 2006, it is now “World News With Charles Gibson,” not “World News Tonight With Charles Gibson.”

If that's not enough, Gawker and CJR have more.

What's so bad about working together?

This post by Tom Paulson is more than a year out of date but it raises some still relevant questions.

I wasn’t actually allowed behind the scenes at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s recent meeting in Seattle entitled “Strategic Media Partnerships.”

The Gates Foundation funds a lot of media – more than $25 million in media grants for 2012 (but still less than 1% of the budget).

I’m media but I wasn’t invited. I asked if I could come and report on it, but was told the meeting was off the record. Those attending included representatives from the New York Times, NPR, the Guardian, NBC, Seattle Times and a number of other news organizations, non-profit groups and foundations. Not all were grant recipients, or partners. Some just came to consult.

...

Outside of the Gates media confab last week, I talked to a number of participants – usually ‘off the record’ – to learn that it was mostly a discussion about the sorry state of the media and how to improve coverage of neglected issues that concern the philanthropy in areas like global health, foreign aid, development and education. Media folks presented case studies, ideas and mulled over measuring impact – because that’s what Bill and Melinda want, measurable impacts.

...

Dan Green, a highly respected journalist and now director of media partnerships for the Gates Foundation, has by all accounts built a sturdy firewall at the philanthropy between grants to news organizations and anything to do with the foundation’s advocacy projects.

Even if we're talking about something like polio where not only the objectives but the sub-objectives and the methods are relatively noncontroversial, this kind of collaborative relationship between journalists and the organizations they cover should make people uncomfortable. As admirable as these goals may be, supporting them is not the job of journalists.

The ethical problems grow by orders of magnitude when we wander into advocacy. Just to pin down our terms, advocacy (at least the kind we're concerned with here) is trying to convince governments to take certain actions. For example, rather than building a hospital, advocacy projects try to get taxpayers to build it.

By its very nature, advocacy groups try to influence journalists. That is not, in and of itself, a bad thing -- advocates can perform a vital role -- but advocates are essentially salesmen, and journalists should treat their information and proposals with the same skepticism that consumers should treat claims in TV commercials.

All this talk of firewalls sounds impressive, but it is problematic under even the best of circumstances and in certain areas is all but impossible. When it comes to education, for all intents and purposes the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is an advocacy group. The stated purpose of pretty much all of their major initiatives is to promote a collection of policy positions. They provide lobbying and massive PR funding and resources to promote the policies they support. They fund and propagate favorable research. They find and back like-minded public officials such as John Deasy. We can argue about the wisdom of those proposals, the validity of that research and the confidence of those officials, but we cannot reasonably say that this does not constitute advocacy, nor can we argue that cozy relationships between advocates and and journalists are a good thing.

More shifting alliances -- TPM edition

As mentioned before, when it came to the politics of the education reform movement, the big story four or five years ago was liberal support for what would normally be seen as conservative principles like privatization, deregulation and the need to limit the power of unions (discussed at great length here). Today, the big political story is the increasing number of prominent liberals who are breaking with the reform movement. Given that context, this exchange at Talking Points Memo takes on special significance.

For a while now, Conor P. Williams has been the de facto education guy for TPM. His schtick is to attack critics of the movement, usually by misrepresenting their positions or just make broad attacks on their character. This is often followed by an extended lament over how negative the reform debate has gotten due to all those mean people on the other side. Williams represents a sizable chunk in my to-write pile but I keep putting it off because it's just so much work correcting one of his columns.

The picture that went with Williams' essay on Common Core critics.

As far as I could tell, Williams was the voice of TPM when it came to education, which is one of the things that made this recent piece by Sabrina Joy Stevens so surprising. The tone is polite but the effect is devastating. Not only does Stevens point out the essential hypocrisy of Williams' calls for a more elevated tone, she gets at perhaps his greatest journalist offense, his habit of omitting relevant but inconvenient facts and context (for example, check out how he covers the D.C. cheating scandal when discussing the fall of Michelle Rhee).

This past Tuesday, Senior Researcher at New America’s “Early Education Initiative” Conor P. Williams, wrote an essay in this space to express his dismay that Campbell Brown's opponents are using "ugly rhetoric" against Brown, as they had against Michelle Rhee before her. To Williams, this is part of "a troubling pattern for reform opponents ... prone to shooting any reform messenger." In this case, as part of a larger effort to challenge the Vergara v. California-style lawsuit she’s bringing to New York.

Yet, both the more strident vitriol aimed at Brown, as well as Williams’ critique of these attacks, miss the real issues that we should discuss when considering the dangerous movement Brown leads.

As someone who has been subjected to sexist and racist attacks from “both” sides of the education debate, I agree there’s no room for oppressive behavior in this conversation — regardless of the feeble denials and/or justifications the offenders and their protectors try to offer. But it’s also important not to overlook the many substantive reasons why people object to how figures like Rhee (now Johnson) and Brown choose to participate in this debate. The ignorance that animates any sexist or racist insults directed at both women doesn’t erase the rhetorical and material harm both have caused in the course of their advocacy.

Michelle Rhee Johnson was primarily disliked because of the actual things she did — some of which were overtly and personally cruel, such as the humiliating decision to fire someone on camera. We’re talking about a person who chose to launch her media career as D.C. schools chancellor with an direct attack on teachers, posing for the cover of Time Magazine with a broom — strongly insinuating that many of her employees were not people, but trash she intended to sweep away.

Similarly, Brown began her new incarnation as an education “reformer” two years ago by launching an emotionally-charged smear campaign against organized teachers. Since kicking off her latest effort, she has reportedly bullied and undermined the ability of a grassroots parents organization to carry out an independent legal effort on behalf of their own children — allegedly interfering with their ability to retain desired counsel in order to strengthen her own position at the forefront of the legal assault on teachers’ due process rights in New York state. (It’s worth noting that these attacks constitute a very serious, material abuse of her class and racial privilege that has real consequences for its targets. That should concern Williams and others at least as much as the sexist jibes aimed at Brown on Twitter and elsewhere.)

If TPM continues running voices like Stevens, Williams' approach will no longer be viable. His is not a style that stands up well to knowledgeable dissent.

More self-defeating comment spam

I understand that a great deal of spam is generated by bots and translation software. I can even believe that for some products the bad grammar and stilted language is not that much of an impediment. There are, however, products and services where this can't be a good approach.

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Mrs. Johnson's class is doing well. Let's call that a school

If you are following the data side of the ed reform story, you really need to check out Gary Rubinstein's account of

Frayser 9GA, the miracle school of the Achievement School District

And you have a problem with Joe Camel?

Mental Floss (one of the internet's best time killers) has a very cool article called 10 Lifehacks from 100 Years Ago.

In the late 1880s, cigarette manufacturers began inserting stiffening cards into their paper packs of cigarettes to strengthen the containers. It wasn't long before they got the idea to put artwork, trivia, famous people, and pretty girls onto those cards, grouped into collectible series. The cards, which continued into the 1940s, are highly valuable now, with the most expensive (bearing the face of stringent anti-smoking baseball player Honus Wagner) selling for $2.8 million in 2007.

In the 1910s, Gallaher Ltd of Belfast & London and Ogden's Branch of the Imperial Tobacco Co printed "How-To" series, with clever hints for both everyday and emergency situations. From steaming out a splinter to stopping a mad dog, these cigarette cards told you the smart way to handle many of life's problems.

It's a fun list but I noticed something strange. Perhaps it's just a coincidence, but the target audience for many of these cards seems to have been boy scouts. Even in 1910, that had to be a bit odd.

Artificial intelligence, natural stupidity

This started out as one of my standard ddulite rants, another round of complaints about how the press goes all gee-whiz over high tech and stops thinking critically, but I think this might be something more basic, something where the editors were being less ddulites and more dullards.

I was checking out the news stories on Yahoo when I came across this ominous headline linking to a Business Insider story:

By 2045 'The Top Species Will No Longer Be Humans,' And That Could Be A Problem

I say 'ominous' not because I was worried about the future of humanity but because I was steeling myself for some bad journalism. I was not, however, prepared for this:

"It won't be the 'Terminator' scenario, not a war," said [Louis] Del Monte. "In the early part of the post-singularity world, one scenario is that the machines will seek to turn humans into cyborgs. This is nearly happening now, replacing faulty limbs with artificial parts. We'll see the machines as a useful tool. Productivity in business based on automation will be increased dramatically in various countries. In China it doubled, just based on GDP per employee due to use of machines."

"By the end of this century," he continued, "most of the human race will have become cyborgs [part human, part tech or machine]. The allure will be immortality. Machines will make breakthroughs in medical technology, most of the human race will have more leisure time, and we'll think we've never had it better. The concern I'm raising is that the machines will view us as an unpredictable and dangerous species."

Del Monte believes machines will become self-conscious and have the capabilities to protect themselves. They "might view us the same way we view harmful insects." Humans are a species that "is unstable, creates wars, has weapons to wipe out the world twice over, and makes computer viruses." Hardly an appealing roommate.

If a stranger started saying this sort of thing to you on the street, you would probably start backing away while avoiding eye contact, but it's not like Business Insider and Yahoo Finance would put their names behind some flake. This guy (described in the article as  'physicist, entrepreneur, and author of "The Artificial Intelligence Revolution."') obviously had something in his resume that merited a little extra indulgence when his theories got a little out there.

Well, maybe not. As far as I can tell, Del Monte never worked as a physicist, at least not the theoretical kind. He has a master's in physics from Fordham and he appears to have had a very successful run as an engineer (particularly for Honeywell). Some time after that he started self-publishing general interest science books and making some fairly bold claims about new theories.

I don't want to dismiss someone for a lack of qualifications (Martin Gardner had a bachelor's in philosophy) or for self-publishing (I'm a blogger for crying out loud), but credentials do imply a certain level of vetting, which means that if someone uncredentialed is about to be published by a major media brand, the editors need to do their own vetting, perhaps by Googling that someone and checking out reactions to previous work. For example, the people at Business Insider might have taken a look at this review of an earlier Del Monte book.

“Unraveling the Universe’s Mysteries” is Louis A. Del Monte’s contribution to the world of science writing. If you haven’t heard of him, don’t be surprised. He’s not a prolific author or researcher, but worked in the development of microelectronics for the US companies IBM and Honeywell before forming a high-tech e-marketing agency.

The book lives up to its title and long subtitle: “Explore sciences’ most baffling mysteries, including the Big Bang’s origin, time travel, dark energy, humankind’s fate, and more.” It covers string theory, the Big Bang, dark matter, dark energy, time travel, the existence of God, and other mysterious aspects of our Universe. Del Monte also discusses artificial intelligence, the end of the Universe, and the mysterious nature of light. These subjects have all been covered in great detail by other authors in other books. How does Del Monte’s treatment of these subjects stand up in comparison?

Not great, in my opinion. The writing is somehow uninviting. The book reads more like a textbook or a lecture than it does a science book for an interested audience. It’s somewhat dry, and the writing is kind of heavy. After looking into Del Monte’s background, it becomes clear why. He’s an engineer, and his background is in writing technical papers.

This book is a bit of a puzzle, as is the author himself. I’ve mentioned the problems with the writing, but there are other issues. In one instance Del Monte references a study from the Journal of Cosmology. If you haven’t heard of that journal, it’s come under heavy criticism for its peer-review process, and isn’t highly regarded in science circles. The Journal of Cosmology seems to be a journal for people with an axe to grind around certain issues more than a healthy part of the science journal community. To be quoting studies from it is a bit of a black mark, in my opinion.

In another instance, he opens the chapter on Advanced Aliens with a quote from “Chariot of the Gods”, that old book/documentary from the 1970’s that just won’t seem to die, no matter how discredited it is. The main thrust of “Chariot of the Gods” is that human civilisation got a technological boost from visitations by advanced aliens. Readers can judge for themselves the wisdom of quoting “Chariot of the Gods” in a science book.

If anything, the reviewer goes a bit easy on the Journal of Cosmology -- Wikipedia has a very good rundown -- but it's the Chariot quote that really pushes things over the top.  This is the sort of information that a reader might have found useful when evaluating the threat of machines seeking to turn humans into cyborgs.

At least we can all agree that ad hominem and overly general attacks are bad

I keep meaning to write something substantial about Conor P. Williams who is, among other things, the voice of Talking Points Memo in the field of education. Williams is a particularly good source of material for the emerging thread about the way the reform movement has recently started dealing with the emergence of prominent critics.

Here's a brief but representative example.

I’m far from convinced by everything that gets done today in the name of education reform. But [Michelle] Rhee’s and [Campbell] Brown’s examples are indicative of a troubling pattern for reform opponents: anti-reformers are prone to shooting any reform messenger. Anti-reform has an ad hominem problem. In part this is because the anti-reform crowd is obsessed with who has standing to participate in education debates. Non-teachers don't count (unless they're Diane Ravitch). Parents’ voices are only permitted so long as they avoid direct challenges to failing schools.

Williams doesn't address the exceptions to those awfully sweeping statements. Instead he follows with this:

I write about American education for a living, so I get a front row seat on this. Sometimes I write things like “Some charter schools, under some circumstances, are performing especially well.” When I write these sorts of things, my inbox, my Twitter mentions, and (occasionally) my phone spontaneously, simultaneously ignite. I get accused of hating teachers, teachers unions, and (a few times) white people. I get told that I’m a secret agent for Pearson, Bill Gates, the United Nations, and sometimes even the Muslim Brotherhood (really. No—REALLY). This isn’t occasional. It happens every time I write anything vaguely favorable about reform efforts, even when it’s mixed with criticism.

Just to sum things up, Williams complains that critics of the reform movement have "an ad hominem problem." He then goes on to describe their criticisms in terms of racism, paranoia and religious bigotry.

Further comment would be superfluous.

Yes, it's bear-in-the-pool hot

Recently, the hottest times of the year in LA are spring and fall.

The September Southern California heat wave has sent at least one bear into a backyard swimming pool. Sunday afternoon, some Sierra Madre homeowners spied a sizable black bear lounging on the steps of their in-ground pool. The bear swam and rested for about 15 minutes before leaving like an unwanted party guest. It's hard to blame the wildlife. Temperatures in Sierra Madre hit 103 on Sunday and 100 on Monday, according to AccuWeather.

Southern Californians are accustomed to bears in pools and hot tubs. (This reporter once watched a bobcat visit her pool.)

The state's black bear population has been on the rise in the last 25 years and is now at about 30,000.

Wondering where the numbers come from -- Rotten Tomatoes

A while back I was taking one of my random walks through Wikipedia and I came across the movie Postal. For some forgotten reason (possibly to see what the critics had to say about Dave Foley, J.K. Simmons or Zack Ward, all interesting actors), I clicked on the link for Rotten Tomatoes.

The movie had a perfect 0% among top critics, but I noticed Peter Hartlaub of the San Francisco Chronicle had a rather kind blurb.

If this movie had been made by an unknown young director, a lot of critics would still be panning the movie for its inconsistencies -- but many others would be praising his courage.

This got me curious so I took a look at the actual review:

Movie review: 'Postal' delivers funny madness
Peter Hartlaub, Chronicle Pop Culture Critic

So what to do with "Postal," which is not only less than horrible, but actually occasionally enjoyable? The much-delayed low-budget movie may be completely beyond the bounds of mainstream taste, but it's also funny, and criticizes our government's hypocrisy and political correctness in a way that's refreshingly pointed. If this movie had been made by an unknown young director, a lot of critics would still be panning the movie for its inconsistencies - but many others would be praising his courage.

...

It's an unfocused movie, with much lower production values than more generously budgeted Boll productions such as "BloodRayne." (For years, Boll movies had been augmented by healthy tax breaks provided by the German government, which no longer offers the perks.) Much of the humor is cliched, and Boll's seething anger at his real-life tormenters often gives his script a bitterness that is more awkward than funny.

But there's still a catharsis that comes from watching the madness unfold onscreen, making the film a potential future double-bill partner with "Team America World Police." Boll's greatest asset is the underrated [Zack] Ward, a longtime character actor who is best known for playing the red-haired bully Scut Farkus in "A Christmas Story," and tends to show up these days in small roles in big projects - including "The Transformers" and "Lost." Clearly grateful to be the leading man (and apparently unfazed by the more unsavory parts of the script), he throws himself into the role. Ward is likable and wry, but still looks right as an action hero when it comes time to start blowing stuff up.

And blow stuff up he does, but this time the low-budget look that Boll embraces seems to be on purpose.

It didn't sound like Hartlaub was going to list Postal in his top ten but overall the review sounded fairly positive. I also noticed this icon at the top of the review.

This figure indicates a "Good" rating. How does that translate to "Rotten"? Apparently it's because the Chronicle scores on a scale of zero to four with two being 'good.' I assume that Rotten Tomatoes is used to dealing with either one to four or one to five scales, both of which would designate two as below average. I don't have an opinion on Postal or on the director Uwe Boll having never seen any of his movies, but this does seem a bit unfair, both to this movie and to others the Chronicle  rated "Good."

What is interesting is the fact that this is pretty clearly a glitch and it's a glitch in the easy part of review aggregation. Rotten Tomatoes also attempts to assign binary ratings to reviews without specified ranking (Pauline Kael called John Huston's The Bible "A sprawling, flawed epic, but with some breathtaking conceptions and moments of beauty." -- is that a thumbs up or a thumbs down?). Metacritic takes things to the next level with a hundred point scale.

This brings up one of my problems with data-driven journalism. Reporters and bloggers are constantly barraging us with graphs and analyses and of course, narratives looking at things like Rotten Tomatoes rankings. All to often, though, their process starts with the data as given. They spend remarkably little time asking where the data came from or whether it's worth bothering with.