Megan and Mark are in synch

This is Joseph.

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

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

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

Thoughts on the coming storm

From a text exchange I had on election night

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

[voice recognition errors corrected.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other than stem cells...

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

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

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

"Duct tape and string"

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

From James Kwak's recent piece on United Airlines:

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

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

A subtle issue with standardized tests

This is Joseph.

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

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

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

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

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

James Boyle's devastating take down of Robert Bork

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

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

by James Boyle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What do stock buyback actually do?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

James Kwak does a valuable service...

...and states the obvious.

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

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

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

Annals of heroic inference

This is Joseph.

Via Andrew Gelman, we get this gem:

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

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

"The unbookable lesson"

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

"I'm sorry, the card says 'MOOPS'.”

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

Another side to the driverless car discussion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

The Good Wife makes some really interesting musical choices

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

Speed boating

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Deconstructing Common Core."

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

This may have led to some bias in our sample

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

From Good Morning, Vietnam

Obviously the Onion is releasing news under different names

Because, otherwise, this makes no sense at all:

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

and

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

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

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

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

H/T: Mike

Education reform and rent seeking -- textbook edition

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

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

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

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

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

David Brooks is deeply concerned with our divided nation:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You need to read this:

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

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

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

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

Failures in targeted marketing

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

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

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

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

Measurement

This is Joseph.

Thoreau:

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

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

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

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

Old story, new setting

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



From the Toledo Blade:

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

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

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

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

Mark says smart stuff

This is Joseph

In the context of a recent post by Mark Palko:

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

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

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

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

And,

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

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

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

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

So some points to ponder. 

This is the perfect October clip

At least for a snarky epidemiology blog...

Graphs that make me nervous -- UPDATED

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


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

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

Does this look odd to anyone else?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"—We Also Walk Dogs"

I've been going through some old posts on incentive pay and they got me thinking about how education reformers, fresh water economists and libertarians often fall back on a strongly linear model. That, in turn, got me thinking about a Heinlein story I read years ago.

From Wikipedia:

"—We Also Walk Dogs" is a science fiction short story by Robert A. Heinlein. One of his Future History stories, it was first published in Astounding Science Fiction (July 1941 as by Anson MacDonald)....

'General Services', a very successful company that provides various personal services ... is asked to ... enable an interplanetary conference to be held on Earth, whose strong gravity is inhospitable to many of the native races of other planets in the solar system.

Much of the action of the story is ... about how to persuade the world’s leading physicist to undertake the job.

As memory serves, that really is the gist of the story. Find the right person, offer him or her sufficient incentive, get what you want. Add to that an entrepreneur hero...

Optimization and college enrollments

This is Joseph.

Dean Dad had a great post a while back on trying to improve classroom scheduling.  In it, he had a great example of the perils of overfitting.  The context is that the Gates Foundation had suggested that a more efficient algorithm for classroom management could improve costs.  The problem is that they aren't testing this in prospective environments -- leading to some issues:

Finally, and I can’t stress this enough, enrollment is a moving target.  Patterns change unevenly, so in any given year you’ll get a fresh new crop of anomalies.  When enrollment continues until just before classes start, as is typical at community colleges, you’re left making predictions based on partial information.  And you have to make those predictions early enough for alternate plans to be realistic.  That’s never a perfect science -- every year, someone complains that his course would have filled if we had just given it more time, which is unprovable either way -- but it’s inherent in being “responsive.”  If we locked down enrollments months in advance, we would have time to squeeze out some efficiencies.  With numbers changing until the last minute, it’s harder.  You’ll never capture that if you only look at “snapshots.”

It's also worth noting that the staffing side is also an issue.  Paying for "Just in time" staffing for a community college would almost certainly reduce the qualifications of the instructors, do strange things to the workload of permanent staff, or increase prices.  After all, if you do not know if you are going to be taking a class until the first day of classes (when enrollments are likely close enough to know) then you will likely charge more or look for another job.  Landlords are notoriously unsympathetic to "most of the time this works and I can pay rent" pleas.

So the report might be interesting as an estimate of the maximum possible benefit.  But in the real world you never get 100% efficiency in any process, especially one that has ebbs and flows.  Even McDonalds, good as they are (and they are really good at this) cannot completely eliminate wait times due to the lunch rush. 

Mark Evanier points out the fundamental contradiction in conservative complaints about Hollywood's "political correctness"

Mark Evanier is one of LA's leading pop culture experts (and in this town that's a high bar). He's been writing for television and comics for around forty years now and probably writing about them for even longer so when it comes to things like the process of creating cartoons for television, he speaks from a position of authority.

Something that can't really be said for Tucker Carlson,

Nothing is scarier to a modern liberal than tobacco. If Popeye were driving around giving the morning after pill to fourth graders that would be totally fine. But smoking a pipe, a symbol of freedom and masculinity in America itself, the reason this country exists, tobacco, that's like, "Oh, that's outrageous. That's a major sin."

As you probably guessed, Carlson was ranting about a clip from a proposed Popeye cartoon (from the gifted Genndy Tartakovsky). He was also misrepresenting the way cartoons get made. Evanier sets him straight.

The other thing Mr. Carlson doesn't get about it is that this is not a political decision. It's a marketing concern. Most of the time when someone decides to launder animation — tone down sex or violence — it's because they want to make sure they can sell reruns of the product to the widest audience for the longest time.

About ten years ago, I was approached about writing a Popeye animated project. It never happened but we had a meeting or two and it was made pretty clear to me that merchandising and marketing were driving this particular venture; that any decision about Popeye having a pipe or Popeye punching out Bluto would be decided on that basis. They were going to make some assessment based on an estimate of how many parents wouldn't buy a toy if the character had a pipe…or how many countries or networks wouldn't buy and air the show.

A principle Tucker Carlson has voiced as long as I've followed him on TV is that companies should be free from regulation and outside pressures that might minimize their profit margins. And now here he is, arguing that the people who are marketing Popeye need to give Popeye his pipe. Someone needs to ask Carlson, "Even if they think they'll make less money if they do?" Because if they don't give Popeye a pipe, that'll be the reason.

... That's all that's involved here. No politics. No hidden agenda. Just someone's idea of how to exploit a property.

There has always been a significant enemy-of-my-enemy quality to the alliance of social and pro-business conservatives. The small town pastor and the big city banker never really trusted each other but their interests often aligned.

What has changed is the nature and scope of right-wing media. A list of the causes would probably be the stuff of a Ph.D. thesis, but it would certainly include the explosion of cable channels and the death of the Fairness Doctrine. Whatever the reason, there is now a major industry built around supplying hundreds of hours a week of a very specific kind of news and commentary.

Fox News is targeted mass media. What's more, it's targeting people who feel abandoned, even disenfranchised by the media at large (yes, I realize we're talking about sixty-year-old, upper and upper-middle class white guys, but we're also talking about perceptions). Rants about Popeye's pipe play well with that audience, as do most complaints about Hollywood liberals.

The argument of media liberal bias has always had a problem reconciling the position with the cost factor ("Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one." -- A.J. Liebling), but fifty or one hundred years ago when moguls acted more independently, there were examples of rich liberal moguls who were willing to sometimes put principle and even whim above profits (Turn of the Century Hearst comes to mind). In the Twenty-first Century, the vast majority of media is controlled by a handful of huge corporations. The suggestion that these companies are putting a progressive agenda ahead of profits strains credulity.

Three films

Sometimes, in the course of researching a post, a link leads to a completely unexpected corner of the internet. In this case, a post on Mark Evanier lead here.

The first is a cameraless film with hand-drawn sound from before the war, the second explains the technique and the third stands alone.


Norman McLaren - Dots (1940)

Have you had your flu shot yet?

This is Joseph

I was reading Mike the Mad Biologist's web page and I noted this article on Ebola and the flu.  Ebola has been in the news a lot but influenza remains a bigger killer than Ebola:

Ebola has claimed fewer than 4,000 lives globally to date, none in the United States. Flu claims between 250,000 and 500,000 lives every year, including over 20,000 in the United States—far more American lives than Ebola will ever claim.

Notice just how terrible the Spanish flu was:

It infected 500 million people across the world, including remote Pacific islands and the Arctic, and killed 50 to 100 million of them—three to five percent of the world's population

Today, that would be a disease that killed between nine and fifteen million Americans.  And the easiest option to reduce risk is to vaccinate against the infection. 

Have you had your flu vaccine?  [I get mine annually, usually on the first day it is permitted]

When journalists have an ethical obligation to roll their eyes...

...or at least ask a follow-up question.

Maybe it's just me, but don't journalists have an obligation to object when sources say something blatantly, laughably untrue? If the subject of an interview has just insulted the intelligence of your readers, should you at least attempt to get a more truthful response?

Andrew Cuomo has a new book out. To promote it he has a brief interview with Amy Chozick in the New York Times. I realize that this isn't a setting where you expect hard-hitting journalism, but this still stands out.

You also write that there are ultimately more negatives than positives to being a famous politician’s son. Why? I wouldn’t trade my father or our experiences for anything. But politically, it’s a negative, because you get all your father’s enemies — and not all his friends.

As Scott Lemieux observes, "It’s amazing how many public officials in this land have managed to get beyond this handicap anyway." Everyone knows that Cuomo's background gave him an enormous advantage. He knows it. Chozick knows it. Her editor knows it. We know it.

However, Cuomo also knows that no no one at the NYT is going to rock this particular boat. It's possible that Chozick asked some kind of follow-up -- the article includes the rather troubling disclaimer "INTERVIEW HAS BEEN CONDENSED AND EDITED".-- but the piece that I saw just moves on.

David Brooks, con(firmation) artist

[picking up where we left off here]

David Brooks has one of the most desirable jobs in journalism; it is also one of the most difficult. He has to present a mainstream conservative perspective in a way that appeals to his center-left target audience (which includes but is somewhat larger than the target audience of the New York Times). His job is greatly complicated by shifts in the Republican Party and the conservative movement. On a growing number of issues there is less and less common ground to focus on.

Fortunately for Brooks, there is a (hopefully unwritten) loophole in the professional standards of the NYT and many other publications which allows writers to break all sorts of rules -- up to and including the one against making things up -- as long as these lapses serve to reinforce the readers' (or at least the editors' and publishers') preconceptions.

The target audience for the NYT is mainly in the top half (possibly top quartile) in terms of wealth and education. They may not be Randian but they still tend to look at the bottom quartile with an attitude that is by turns suspicious and patronizing. Check out how Brooks plays to those prejudices in this recent column (via Charles Pierce).

In the first place, we’re living in a segmented society. Over the past few decades we’ve seen a pervasive increase in the gaps between different social classes. People are much less likely to marry across social class, or to join a club and befriend people across social class.

That means there are many more people who feel completely alienated from the leadership class of this country, whether it’s the political, cultural or scientific leadership. They don’t know people in authority. They perceive a vast status gap between themselves and people in authority. They may harbor feelings of intellectual inferiority toward people in authority. It becomes easy to wave away the whole lot of them, and that distrust isolates them further. “What loneliness is more lonely than distrust,” George Eliot writes in “Middlemarch.”

So you get the rise of the anti-vaccine parents, who simply distrust the cloud of experts telling them that vaccines are safe for their children. You get the rise of the anti-science folks, who distrust the realm of far-off studies and prefer anecdotes from friends to data about populations. You get more and more people who simply do not believe what the establishment is telling them about the Ebola virus, especially since the establishment doesn’t seem particularly competent anyway.

This is brilliantly Brooksian. The first paragraph is accurate and well-grounded. The second is where things start getting subtle. The transition from fact to inference is so smooth and the conclusions he draws are so reasonable that few readers will realize how skillfully they've been set up.

Note the patronizing, more-to-be-pitied-than-censured tone. In his detached, scholarly, Middlemarch-quoting way, Brooks sympathizes with those in the lower class. He understands how conditions have made them angry, resentful and suspicious and how those emotions have made them gullible and prone to hysteria.

Having framed the question in such reasonable terms and having masterfully played on the prejudices of his readers, Brooks feels free to start making things up. Pretty much all the statements in the third paragraph are lies of varying degree, but Brooks knows they are lies most of his readers were predisposed to believe.

Working backwards (which allows us to save the best for last), let's start Ebola. Brooks is basically talking about the sort of thing we've been hearing from this guy (to get the full effect, go back and read the second paragraph).

How about the broader anti-science question? Brooks credits it to the great unwashed sharing misinformation but he offers no data to back it up, but if we look at the most obvious example (denial  of global warming), there is an alternative explanation that does have considerable evidence to support it.  George Will also figures prominently in this one.

And finally, how about the resentful and suspicious lower classes driving the anti-vaccination movement?

Not so much:

Exemption rates vary greatly by area and school. Los Angeles Unified kindergartens, for example, had an overall exemption rate of just 1.6%, although there are several in the district where more than 8% of students have belief exemptions. At Santa Monica-Malibu Unified, the overall exemption rate was 14.8% and at Capistrano Unified in south Orange County, it was 9.5%. At nearby Santa Ana Unified only 0.2% of kindergartners had exemptions on file.

In Los Angeles County, the rise in personal belief exemptions is most prominent in wealthy coastal and mountain communities, The Times analysis shows. The more than 150 schools with exemption rates of 8% or higher for at least one vaccine were located in census tracts where the incomes averaged $94,500 — nearly 60% higher than the county median.

Brooks has been doing this sort of thing for a long time now, long enough for the NYT to know what's going on..

Another one for the West Coast Stat View Lexicon -- Farpotshket

I'm just a good ol' Arkansas boy (and a lapsed Presbyterian to boot) so I don't know from Yiddish, but for anyone discussing education reform, this one is indispensable.

From the inexplicably good Cracked.com:

#8. "Farpotshket" (Yiddish) 

What It Means: 

Something that was a little bit broken ... until you tried to fix it. Now it's totally screwed.
To demonstrate the usefulness of "farpotshket," look no further than that nightstand you picked up at your friendly neighborhood IKEA. You know, the one that sits completely cockeyed but, goddammit, still does its job so long as you don't hit the snooze on your alarm clock too hard and send everything sliding off onto the floor. Then one day you finally get ambitious and think, "Hell, all I need to do is shorten the other three legs and make it level again! I can do that!" Six hours and a pile of sawdust later, you now have an unusable 12-inch-tall table that, by the way, still wobbles. In Yiddish, you have a farpotshket on your hands.

"The skeptics are wrong all the time"

Marc Andreessen has a new interview up and it is characteristically packed with silliness. If things had gone better for ViolaWWW, do you think Pei-Yuan Wei would have gotten this annoying?

What did you do?

I just went to college. I did my thing. I came out here in ’94, and Silicon Valley was in hibernation. In high school, I actually thought I was going to have to learn Japanese to work in technology. My big feeling was I just missed it, I missed the whole thing. It had happened in the ’80s, and I got here too late. But then, I’m maybe the most optimistic person I know. I mean, I’m incredibly optimistic. I’m optimistic arguably to a fault, especially in terms of new ideas. My presumptive tendency, when I’m presented with a new idea, is not to ask, “Is it going to work?” It’s, “Well, what if it does work?”
...

But clearly you don’t think everything’s going to work.

No. But there are people who are wired to be skeptics and there are people who are wired to be optimists. And I can tell you, at least from the last 20 years, if you bet on the side of the optimists, generally you’re right.

On the other hand, if there’d been a few more skeptics in 1999, people might have kept their retirement money. Isn’t there a role for skepticism in the tech industry?

I don’t know what it buys you. Let me put it this way. If you could point to periods of time in the last hundred years when everything just stabilized and didn’t change, then maybe yes. But that never seems to actually happen. The skeptics are wrong all the time.

There is a huge survivor bias in the way Andreessen and other creative disruptors compile their case studies. They only remember the lottery tickets that paid off and this leads them to dispense some very bad advice.

When it comes to investing in innovation, skeptics are right a lot -- quite possibly most -- of the time. We've been at this for well over a century, at least since Edisonades started showing up next to the dime Westerns. If you couldn't be a Bell or a Wright, you could at least be the investor who got in on the ground floor.

The trouble was, then and now, that there tend to be more Paige Compositors than light bulbs. Uncritical blanket optimism is a bad way to approach investments. I'd also argue that, if you're setting your sights higher than Snapchat, it's also a bad way to promote innovation but that's a topic for another post.

This is why I think nobody cares about the debt

Over in Canada, Frances Woolley takes on the question of should the elimination of the deficit lead to immediate tax cuts.  Seriously.  Read and marvel at these quick facts:

From 2008–09 through 2013–14, the Government has delivered tax reductions totalling more than $60 billion to job-creating businesses.

According to KPMG, total business tax costs in Canada are now the lowest in the Group of Seven (G-7) and 46% lower than those in the United States.

Personal income taxes are now 10% lower with the tax relief provided by the Government since 2006. For an average family of four, taxes have been cut by close to $3,400. 

Once the federal budget is balanced, the Government’s first priority will be to provide further tax relief to hard-working Canadian families

So, after a ton of tax cuts (look at points 2 and 3), the clear priority is more tax cuts.  Under this rubric the debt will never, ever be paid down.  After all, I am not a financial genius, but paying down debt requires at least some period of running a surplus.

Now there may be all sorts of reasons that running a long term debt is a sane and responsible thing to do.  After all, governments are not households and many of my household intuitions are incorrect (governments can print money, for example, so being unable to pay the debt at all is unlikely unless it is denominated in a foreign currency).  But if this is the strategy of the debt scolds -- cut services so we can run a surplus and then give out tax cuts -- then they don't care about the debt at all.  They just want to redistribute money in a different way across the economy. 

EDIT: Forgot to mention this is Joseph and not the regularly scheduled Mark content

Discipline then and now

[Originally posted at You Do the Math]

A few years ago I taught at a small rural school in the Mississippi Delta. The old timers would talk at great length about how much better the school had been before I got there. They attributed the decline to the closing of the alternative school. In the "good old days," any student who caused trouble would be pulled out of class and sent to a special, highly structured school -- basically a glorified study hall -- run by an honest-to-God former Marine drill sergeant.

According to the version I was told, the program worked exceptionally well but was shut down in a discrimination suit because a disproportionate number of African-American students were being sent to there. This was a very conservative community (I doubt that there was a unionized teacher in the county let alone in the school), so it is not surprising that this was seen as another instance of the federal government interfering.

As you might guess, I saw things a bit differently. The government has not only the right but the obligation to step in in cases of racial discrimination. Furthermore, even if there had not been a civil rights issue here, I still have very mixed feelings about policies that potentially denied certain kids a quality education simply because they were difficult to deal with.

There is, of course, another side to the debate. In a world of fixed resources, educators frequently have to weigh the needs of the many against the needs of the few. If a small group of students is undermining the quality of education for the student body as a whole, there is a case to be made for removing the students. Just as importantly, sometimes that particular disciplinary action is the best thing for the kid being disciplined. For some, the structure and discipline of a boot camp environment really is the best educational setting. For others, there is a scared-straight effect. For these kids, a brief stay in the alternative school is enough to convince them to improve their behavior and work habits.

There are a lot of lessons to be learned here, but for me, the big one is that education is filled with tough choices and difficult trade offs. We need to acknowledge this difficulty. We need to have honest, well thought out discussions about the consequences of discipline and expulsion (both nominal and de facto). In particular, if we decide to sacrifice one student for the good of the many, we need to own up to that decision.

Today, in many schools, we have covert policies in place (particularly in the popular "no excuses" schools) that effectively mimic the alternative school approach of that small Delta town, including having a disproportionate impact on African-American males (often taking it to the next degree). But as much as that troubles me, what bothers me even more is the fact that we don't face up to what we're doing.

Robert Heinlein's house of the future

I was doing some research on Heinlein for a post in the compensation thread and I happened on this article on the house he and his wife (an engineer) designed and built in the early Fifties. For Heinlein fans it's a chance to see another side of the man. For the rest of us, it's an interesting glimpse into the way futuristic used to look.

You can find the rest of the article here.

The myth of a data-driven Netflix

There's been a lot of talk about Netflix stock this week (usually with words like "plummet"), but a big part of the story has largely gone unnoticed, probably in part because it involves statistics.

As mentioned before, some aspects of the Netflix narrative such as the company building and HBO type content library, are simply, factually incorrect. Others, while not blatantly wrong, are difficult to reconcile with the facts.

One of the accepted truths of the Netflix narrative is that CEO Reed Hastings is obsessed with data and everything the company does is data driven (for example "What little Netflix has also shared about its programming strategy is that its every decision is guided by data."). The evidence in support of this belief is largely limited to a model that Netflix crowd sourced a few years ago and to endless assertions from executives at the company that they do know what they are doing despite evidence to the contrary.

Of course, all 21st century corporations are relatively data-driven. The fact that Netflix has large data sets on customer behavior does not set it apart, nor does the fact that it has occasionally made use of that data. Furthermore, we have extensive evidence that the company often makes less use of certain data then do most other competitors.

On pertinent case in point, particularly for the SEC, is churn rates.

But Netflix disagrees. “With respect to various operational metrics, management has evolved its use of these metrics as the business has evolved,” it wrote the SEC in response. Because it is so easy to quit and then restart a Netflix subscription, it said, “the churn metric is a less reliable measure of business performance, specifically consumer acceptance of the service.”

This is problematic on any number of levels. In terms of marketing, pricing and long-term corporate strategy, having a complete picture of how long people stay and why they leave is huge. The only excuse for not reporting churn would be if you had such a detailed picture of who was leaving and why that this additional metric was redundant.

In other words, Hasting should have a good, data-supported explanation for a recent sudden loss of subscribers.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings blamed the subscriber drop-off on a $1 price increase the company instituted back this spring.

"Our best sense is it's an effect of our price increase back in May," Hastings said Wednesday night in an interview with CNBC. "With a little bit higher prices, you get a little bit fewer subscribers. So that's our sense of it. But we can't be 100% sure. We had so much benefit from Orange in Q2 and the early Q3, but that's what we think."

Phrases you don't want to hear in these circumstances include "our best sense" and "that's what we think." They convey the impression of a CEO who was blindsided by a bad day at the NASDAQ.

When contemplating a price increase, well-run companies look at the impact on retention and on acquisition. When Netflix management said

[M]anagement believes that in a largely fixed-cost streaming world with ease of cancellation and subsequent rejoin, net additions provides the most meaningful insight into our business performance and consumer acceptance of our service. The churn metric is a less relevant and reliable measure of business performance, and does not accurately reflect consumer acceptance of our service.

They were basically saying that losing one customer and gaining another is the same as keeping the same customer. That's a dangerous approach under the best of circumstances but it can be deadly when trying to gauge the impact of a pricing change.

Just to be clear, for years analysts and the SEC have been asking for more data, or at least more detailed statistics and Netflix has been saying "trust us, the aggregate number are good enough." Now the company appears to have screwed up badly, and they've done it in pretty much exactly the way you would expect a company to screw up when it doesn't drill down into the data.

p.s. I'm considering putting out a collection of business posts (something similar to the education reform e-book Things I Saw at the Counter-Reformation). Any thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated.

Hexagonal Reversi

Over at You Do the Math, I've got a post on a Reversi variant played on a 6x6x6 hexboard.

If you're feeling particularly nerdy, check it out.

Dick Cavett from 2013

I've been catching up on Cavett's NYT column. I have no idea how he pulls it off but he manages to constantly talk about his encounters with the iconic and yet he avoids being boastful or sycophantic. Here are some favorites:

Burton being Burton.

Laurel not being Stan.

and John Wayne being... hell, you wouldn't believe me anyway.

But it was a section near the end of this piece on Carson's rough start on the Tonight Show (Cavett got his start as a writer for the show) that caught my eye.

From Tonight, Tonight, Its World Is Full of Blight
By DICK CAVETT  MARCH 29, 2013 9:00 PM

If my friend Dave Letterman should decide next contract time that he’s sat through one too many starlet guests who come on to plug their movies, exhibit seemingly a yard of bare gam, pepper their speech with “likes” and “I’m like” and “awesome” and “oh, wow” and “amazing,” and list at least seven things they are “excited” about despite the evidence, from who knows what cause, of their half-mast eyelids, I’ll regret his going.

And speaking of Dave’s presumably stepping aside some sad day, if CBS is smart, there is in full view a self-evident successor to The Big L. of Indiana.

The man I’m thinking of has pulled off a miraculous, sustained feat, against all predictions — descendants of those same wise heads who foresaw a truncated run for the Carson boy — of making a smashing success while conducting his show for years with a dual personality. And I don’t mean Rush Limbaugh (success without personality).

I can testify, as can anyone who’s met him and seen him as himself, how much more there is to Stephen Colbert than the genius job he does in his “role” on “The Colbert Report.” Everything about him — as himself — qualifies him for that chair at the Ed Sullivan Theater that Letterman has so deftly and expertly warmed for so long. Colbert is, among other virtues, endowed with a first-rate mind, a great ad-lib wit, skilled comic movement and gesture, fine education, seemingly unlimited knowledge of affairs and events and, from delightful occasional evidence, those things called The Liberal Arts — I’ll bet you he could name the author of “Peregrine Pickle.” And on top of that largess of qualities (and I hope he won’t take me the wrong way here), good looks.

Should such a day come, don’t blow it, CBS.

"Velocitas Eradico," Nazi mad scientists and other cool things a little research would have uncovered

I know I'm being picky...

This article by Sam Biddle on the testing of a new weaponized railgun isn't bad. It does a good job explaining the physics and keeping the gee-whiz factor in check while acknowledging the genuinely exciting potential of the technology.





But I do have a complaint and it's one of the few times I'd actually favor a bit more gee-whiz. My problem with the article is that it is very much the story of one specific development -- albeit a cool and possibly important one -- and it doesn't show much interest in the history of the technology or its larger potential.

Here are some of the highlights from the Wikipedia entry:

[The Navy] gave the project the Latin motto "Velocitas Eradico", Latin for "I, [who am] speed, eradicate".

...

In 1944, during World War II, Joachim Hänsler of Germany's Ordnance Office built the first working railgun, and an electric anti-aircraft gun was proposed. By late 1944 enough theory had been worked out to allow the Luftwaffe's Flak Command to issue a specification, which demanded a muzzle velocity of 2,000 m/s (6,600 ft/s) and a projectile containing 0.5 kg (1.1 lb) of explosive. The guns were to be mounted in batteries of six firing twelve rounds per minute, and it was to fit existing 12.8 cm FlaK 40 mounts. It was never built. When details were discovered after the war it aroused much interest and a more detailed study was done, culminating with a 1947 report which concluded that it was theoretically feasible, but that each gun would need enough power to illuminate half of Chicago.

...

In 2003, Ian McNab outlined a plan to turn this idea into a realized technology. The accelerations involved are significantly stronger than human beings can handle. This system would be used only to launch sturdy materials, such as food, water, and fuel. Note that escape velocity under ideal circumstances (equator, mountain, heading east) is 10.735 km/s. The system would cost $528/kg, compared with $20,000/kg on the space shuttle.

I realize I complain about tech reporters getting carried away, but when something's this cool, it's OK to get a little more excited.

Sneetch class

James Kwak has a sharp and funny post on the economics and branding of first-class air travel.

Ultimately, what Suites Class is selling, along with every other “luxury” first-class cabin in the air, is a feeling of distinction. Air travel is a miserable experience for everyone involved, mitigated only by the immense convenience of being able to show up in another part of the world in a matter of hours. The glamour of high-end air travel, as with any other luxury good, is a function of exclusivity. Now that, thanks to Southwest Airlines, most people can afford to get on a plane, there have to be ways to pay more and more to get on the same plane. To get people to pay more, you have to give them something: an emotion, a brand, a story, something. And that’s why we have Suites Class.

Education reform thoughts

This is Joseph.

I sent this article to Mark, but thought the blog might appreciate a few comments on it as well.  In particular, I was struck by the following passage:

We could double teachers' salaries. I'm not joking about that. The standard way that you make a profession a prestigious, desirable profession, is you pay people enough to make it attractive. The fact that that doesn't even enter the conversation tells you something about what's wrong with the conversation around these topics. I could see an argument that says it's just not worth it, that it would cost too much. The fact that nobody even asks the question tells me that people are only willing to consider cheap solutions. They're looking for easy answers, not hard answers.

In a really important way, this is the most compelling counter-point to the cries of urgency that accompany reform.  It's not that salary doubling is necessarily the solution, but that reformers appear to want cost-neutral or cost-saving improvements in quality. 

Now it is possible that such options exist.  It seems difficult to imagine extremely large effect sizes, as international comparisons don't seem to find obvious (cost neutral) options.  Do note that a longer school day without increasing salaries is an effective pay cut. 

Now, if there really is a crisis, why isn't the "pay more" option next to ideas like remove tenure?  Was that not the way we often respond to crises (think of the World Wars)?  Would increasing taxes to double salaries make it easier to remove (for example) tenure? 

Who knows.  But the Overton window here is pretty revealing.