Weekend blogging -- Geoffrey Lewis

It's always cool to discover unexpected talents in familiar figures, like the actor you've seen playing a hundred "blank-faced hicks" who turns out to know more about dialect than perhaps anyone in Hollywood.

Along similar lines, I'd always liked Geoffrey Lewis's amiable sidekicks, but it turns out he was just as well known in acting circles as an Oscar nominated monologuist.

The even more indefensible Michelle Rhee

USA Today's Greg Toppo drives what should be the final nail into the coffin of Michelle Rhee's reputation (via Esquire's Charles Pierce):

District of Columbia Public Schools officials have long maintained that a 2011 test-cheating scandal that generated two government probes was limited to one elementary school. But a newly uncovered confidential memo warns as far back as January 2009 that educator cheating on 2008 standardized tests could have been widespread, with 191 teachers in 70 schools "implicated in possible testing infractions."

The 2009 memo was written by an outside analyst, Fay "Sandy" Sanford, who had been invited by then-chancellor Michelle Rhee to examine students' irregular math and reading score gains. It was sent to Rhee's top deputy for accountability.

The memo notes that nearly all of the teachers at one Washington elementary school had students whose test papers showed high numbers of wrong-to-right erasures and asks, "Could a separate person have been responsible?"

It recommends that DCPS contact its legal department "as soon as you think it advisable" and ask them to determine "what possible actions can be taken against identified offenders."

DCPS officials have said they take all cheating allegations seriously, but it's not immediately clear how they responded to Sanford's warnings. Only one educator lost his job because of cheating, according to DCPS. Meanwhile, Rhee fired more than 600 teachers for low test scores — 241 of them in one day in 2010.

...

In a statement, Rhee said she didn't recall getting Sanford's memo: "As chancellor I received countless reports, memoranda and presentations. I don't recall receiving a report by Sandy Sanford regarding erasure data from the (DC Comprehensive Assessment System), but I'm pleased, as has been previously reported, that both inspectors general (DOE and DCPS) reviewed the memo and confirmed my belief that there was no widespread cheating."

If any of this seems surprising, you either haven't been following Rhee's career or... Well, that 'or' is a bit complicated. Rhee has always done things that seemed questionable (abuse of power, suspect claims, relentless self-promotion) but these disturbing points were largely omitted from coverage that often verged on hagiography. It was only after giving her full support to the country's most reactionary governors that her reputation started to fade.

Even with that a surprising number of otherwise intelligent journalists who have covered Rhee for years still manage to deny the undeniable.

S&W appreciation day

A message from the makers of Swords and Wizardry in celebration of S&W appreciation day (April 17th):

We would like to ask you each to announce to all your readers that we will be offering a 1 day only 25% off Swords & Wizardry sale. The coupon and information is optional to post on your blog of course: Frog God Games (http://www.talesofthefroggod.com/) and d20pfsrd.com Store will be offering a 25% off Swords & Wizardry products.  We will be sending out a coupon code before the event.

No member of this blog is affiliated with this company nor do we have any financial interest.  But if you were planning to check this this system anyway, it is not a bad time. 

Note that a lot of the game system material can be downloaded for free, in a handy word document for house rules development.

When I say my to-blog list is ever-growing...

Good ones from Dean Dad and Adam Kotsko.

Felix Salmon is one of those rare business journalists who actually understands business.

Ebert was an odd Paulette.

WSJ is waaaaay behind the LA Weekly. (and when you can't keep up with those guys you really need to think about a career change).

"Fox threatens to become cable channel amid Aereo dispute" -- lots to say on this one.

An interesting story (via The Story) about a reporter who visited the markers the census department uses to commemorate the spot of the population centroid. I wonder what the centroids of population subgroups (demographic, economic, political) look like and how they've shifted over the years.

Another case of economists seeing a paradox when the rest of us don't?

Climate change comes with bumpy rides.

And finally, the film Paul Krugman doesn't want you to see.

Free TV blogging -- suspicion confirmed

This was an AV club day. A musician friend needed some help digitizing various videos in various formats so we picked up an adapter at Fry's (after being told by four different salespeople that they didn't have it) and spent the rest of the afternoon cannibalizing cables and rearranging equipment. (Worked great, by the way.)

The adapter came with a very small antenna that allowed you to watch broadcast television on your PC (I tried it my laptop and got almost 100 channels). After we'd captured the video clips he needed, we decided to hook up the antenna to his new big screen TV and check out the results. There was a dedicated connection for over the air so you could switch back and forth two versions of the same network feed, one coming over the antenna, the other coming through the Time Warner digital cable box.

I had expected the picture quality to be indistinguishable but we both immediately noticed the difference. The broadcast signal, picked up through a small, cheap antenna that basically came as a extra with a hybrid TV stick, was clearly better than the picture Time Warner charged hundreds of dollars a year for.

This anecdote would be a good stepping-off point if you wanted to address some big questions like media consolidation, bundling (both of services and content), the hard lot of orphan technologies or the wretched state consumer reporting. For now though, I'm just going to leave it as an experiment for our viewers at home: if you have a television set made in the last five years and a set of rabbit ears made in the last fifty, plug the antenna coaxial into the jack marked AIR and see what you get. It takes very little time and it might end up saving you a few hundred dollars a year.

I'll be coming back to this...

From John Hechinger:

From 1993 to 2009, U.S. universities added bureaucrats 10 times faster than they added tenured faculty.

Stupid, horrible people are not interesting; intelligent, decent people doing stupid, horrible things are.

Some recent activity here at Stat Views has got me thinking about a fairly obvious distinction that still somehow has a way of getting lost

Most bloggers (myself included) spend a lot of time singling out someone for the idiotic or offensive. These posts are fun and the targets often have it coming but there are two things to remember (and God knows this applies to me as much as anyone):

1. It's not that difficult to find an idiot or jerk if you're really looking;

2. There is nothing particularly notable about an idiot acting stupid or a jerk acting obnoxious.

What's interesting and potentially important is when someone who's not at idiot acts like one (analogous arguments hold for jerks and scoundrels for the rest of this post). This isn't just a case of hating the sin and not the sinner; it's more a question of causal reasoning. When a stupid person does something stupid it requires no explanation but when an intelligent person does something stupid (or better yet, engages in a pattern of stupidity), it suggests that something happened to cause a deviation from the expected. That deviation begs a cause.

For example in the 2000 election coverage, the journalistic lapses mentioned previously are interesting because the journalists involved were both professional and highly respected and had risen to the top of a very competitive profession. If a group of high school reporters had propagated errors in a school election and had biased their coverage because of social cliques and because one candidate had given them small gifts and compliments that would not be of any real interest.

What made this interesting and, to use an often misused phrase, significant was the fact that given the initial assumptions we would normally make about these respected and experienced journalists, what we saw was extremely unlikely. So unlikely it demanded an explanation

In this case various social psych phenomena did fit what we observed. Authority figures within the journalistic click were strongly opposed to Gore. Reciprocation meant that Bush's special treatment of the press corps would be returned. Bush's likability relative to Gore meant that he was likely to receive preferential treatment. Social norming meant that these behaviors would be internalized and repeated

Just to spell things out, what's interesting here is the way that one hypothesis (the Washington press corps was professional and impartial) fit the data badly while another (social dynamics were influencing journalists) fit the data well.

Sometimes what's interesting is neither the person or the act but the reaction to it. For example there was nothing that out of the ordinary about Timothy Noah complaining about the boss who fired him, there was however something strange about the way Politico reacted to Noah's complaint

By the same token there's nothing particularly interesting about a high school student writing a sarcastic essay about the schools that rejected her application. What is interesting is the way that essay illustrates an anticipated reaction among people of a certain social class to changes in the way students are admitted to prestigious schools.

It's easy for the reader (and too often the writer) to lose sight of what's going on. If they rise above the look-at-the-moron humor, posts about stupidity generally need to be a kind of significance test. Start with the assumption that "complete idiots are rare" and seldom make it through demanding selection processes, then, if you are faced with extreme stupidity, ask yourself how likely it is that someone that dim would have reached his or her position. At a p value of around 0.01, it's time to start looking for alternative explanations.

[note: I tried something new with this post, dictating the first draft to my I-phone. I found if I spoke very slowly and enunciated every syllable, the results were acceptable though I did get a couple of odd errors like cherlist for journalist (and, yes, 'cherlist' is a new one on me). I believe I caught all of the Siri-isms but if you see a complete non sequitur, it was probably supposed to be something else.]

Why I remain skeptical about fully private health care

Austin Frakt:

But the problem here is far worse than that. A shockingly large proportion of hospitals could not even report a price when asked. That’s not true of very many other industries. Typically, when someone is ready to buy, someone else is prepared to offer a quote. Not being able to produce one is a very unusual market feature.
 

So not only do you have the problems of trying to comparison shop when the seller has an incentive to make the price hard to find.  You actually have to take a leap of faith and hope that the final price is reasonable -- a gamble that it is hard to imagine doing with other goods and services of the same price point as a hip replacement (the example Frakt was talking about above).

Would you drive a car off the lot in hopes that it was cheaper than expected? 

And how do you apply market pressure when you can't actually use competition to select prices? 

The ever growing to-blog list

Something on the optimal partitioning of time based on this from Neal Stephenson and John D. Cook.

Mental Floss lists sometimes look a bit too good to be true but this list of scientific accidents would be a nice starting place for a post on the importance of open-ended research.

It's just possible that video gamers are over-represented in online polls.

The final chapter the JCP saga? We've already covered this as a fitness landscape problem, now we can talk about the dubious record of the great man theory of business management.

A whole thread on this excellent piece by E.O. Wilson on how much math a scientist really needs and this follow-up by Paul Krugman on the role of intuition.

Swords and Wizardry

Long term readers may know that I am interested in Table top RPGs and Mark is actually a published game designer (Kruzno).  It has been a while since I did a gaming post but there is a fun movement afoot to honor a small publisher that has been putting out some high quality books.

Erik Tenkar, of Tenkar's Tavern blog seems to be the nexus of an appreciation day that has been gathering steam.  So if you want to see something different, drop by and say hi. 

Cohort effects

Kevin Drum has a nice piece about recent increases in social security disability. 
His main hypothesis should be quite familiar to epidemiologists: that the increase is benefits is largely driven by cohort effects (due to the aging of a large demographic bulge in the United States population). Given how closely current payouts match 1996 projections, that isn't an unreasonable stance.

There are some small upticks recently, but these could be due to marginal workers in the face of a lengthy recession. Workers who would normally be border-line might prefer to work (given that working has a very positive halo on self-image in American culture) but lose their jobs due to the general economic downturn.

Is this a problem?

Well, only if you have a plan to employ 57-year olds with degenerative disk disease, or similar mobility restricting conditions. Otherwise, what really is the point of targeting this group at this time?

Obesity, genes and environment

Via Thomas Lumley:

In fact, just about the only completely uncontroversial fact about the increase in obesity is that it is entirely due to environmental changes of some sort. There’s disagreement on precisely which environmental changes, and on the likely public health impact, but not on the general principle. The reason is very simple: the genes of this generation’s children came from their parents, with almost no changes. There simply hasn’t been enough time for genetic differences to contribute.
 

This is absolutely correct.  Now it is possible that some genes make particular individuals more susceptible to particular environment insults.  But then it is unclear what the "cause" of the epidemic is: the susceptibility or the actual exposure.  In infectious diseases we are quite clear that some people are immune to some infectious diseases.  But if a particular individual becomes sick with a disease, it makes a lot more sense to blame the pathogen and not the genetic vulnerability of the person.

So when we see such a huge change in the prevalence of a chronic disease (like obesity) it makes a lot more sense to ask what is the underlying exposure.  In the same sense, I am unimpressed with arguments from things like self-discipline.  It is more probable that the current generation is more dissolute than the preceding one, but it seems unlikely that you are uniquely dissolute from a historical perspective. 

Quote(s) of the day

[See update]

High school senior Suzy Lee Weiss has a piece in the Wall Street Journal (Gawker does a good job summarizing. If you're a true glutton for punishment, you can follow their link to the original). The tone is jokey in an unconvincing way (mock bitterness coming off as all too real). The primary targets are people who have it easy because they're, you know, different (girls who wear headscarves, for instance). Those who do charitable work also get a good going over.

It was, however, this bit that really caught my eye.

Like me, millions of high-school seniors with sour grapes are asking themselves this week how they failed to get into the colleges of their dreams. It's simple: For years, they—we—were lied to.

Colleges tell you, "Just be yourself." That is great advice, as long as yourself has nine extracurriculars, six leadership positions, three varsity sports, killer SAT scores and two moms. Then by all means, be yourself!

Putting aside the apparent confusion over necessary and sufficient conditions, what's striking is item four on the list, buried between athletics and lesbian mothers. The humor in this piece is not subtle. I'm pretty that Weiss really does feel that a lack of academic achievement shouldn't count against her (yes, I realize that there are serious people who argue that we should use things other than test scores to assess a student, but Weiss spends the rest of the essay mocking most of these alternate measures).

...

I was going to stop there -- that's why there's a '(s)' in the title -- but as I was giving Weiss' op-ed one more read-through to make sure I wasn't being too harsh, I came across this:

Or at least hop to an internship. Get a precocious-sounding title to put on your resume. "Assistant Director of Mail Services." "Chairwoman of Coffee Logistics." I could have been a gopher in the office of someone I was related to. Work experience!

While on the subject of family connections, here's an interesting coincidence: this ordinary high school student who gets an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal happens to be the sister of a former Wall Street Journal features editor.

What are the odds?

UPDATE: Via a comment at Monkey Cage, this San Francisco Chronicle story puts Weiss' SATs at a respectable 2120. Not "killer" but high enough to make a Harvard application worth a shot. She was also a Senate page from a politically well connected family which makes the gopher comment a bit odd as well.

Still, for the record, Weiss was a strong candidate. I can understand her disappointment.

Arthur Godfrey, Marshall McLuhan and the educational topic of the day

There's a great quote from Arthur Godfrey which, unfortunately I'll have to paraphrase from memory. Godfrey, who was, by some standards, the most successful broadcaster ever, said his informal, intimate style came from the realization that radio personalities in the early Thirties talked as though they were addressing a roomful of people but most of the people who were actually listening to the radio (rather than talking to each other) were by themselves.

Godfrey was perhaps the first major broadcaster to think about broadcast media in the modern medium-is-the-message sense. This understanding extended to television as well. In the late Forties and early Fifties, Godfrey was the dominant personality of that medium as well.

Of course, in 1931, all recorded and broadcast media were fairly new. Now we've had about a century to think most of this through. Even Understanding Media is almost fifty years old. We have fully internalized the idea that different media are... different. No one but the hopelessly naive would suggest that what works in a play would work in a movie or that what works in a movie would work on TV or that what works on TV would work on the internet.

Except in education. Pick up the New York Times and you'll find not one but two Op-ed columnists whose writings about MOOCs aren't just pre-McLuhan, they're pre-Godfrey, and Friedman and Brooks are no worse than most people covering the topic.

We have decades of experience in educational media and distance learning. If we build on that we have the opportunity to revolutionize education. If we ignore it, all we're likely to do is enrich hucksters and waste students' time.

Just two more on journalistic tribalism and I'll change the subject

I was planning to give the topic a break for a while after these harsh (though I hope justified) posts on Timothy Noah and Jack Shafer, but these two recent stories (both via TPM) are simply too apt to leave out of a discussion of the increasingly unhealthy culture and social dynamics of journalism.

The first involves a topic hit briefly in the second post, Michael Kelly's handling of the Stephen Glass scandal, discussed here by Tom Scocca as part of a larger piece on Kelly and Iraq.

Remembering Kelly in 2004, the editor of his posthumous collected works, Things Worth Fighting For, wrote about the mystery of “the two Michaels”—the subtle reporter and the hectoring columnist. There were more like three Kellys: the loving and loyal personal Kelly; the impish, incisive, and sometimes courageous observer; and the nasty, often petty polemicist, who wrote things for effect that he knew were untrue. But they blended into each other, and not to his benefit.

It was Kelly’s notion of collegial devotion that led him to brutally defend his New Republic protege Stephen Glass, past the bitter end, refusing to concede to Buzz Bissinger that a smear Glass had written about the healthy-eating activist Michael Jacobson, in a story admitted to have been fabricated, was inaccurate.

When interviewed, Kelly said that he would gladly apologize to Jacobson for the opening anecdote—as long as he was given definitive proof of its embellishment.

So he shared with Sullivan, who had originally hired Glass, the distinction of an active role in two of the worst failures of journalism in a generation. Perhaps, like Sullivan, he would have changed his position on Iraq, had he lived to see our military might losing control, the easy liberation collapsing into hell, Saddam’s torture prisons reopening with American torturers. What might he have written, if he’d had the chance to engage with the terrible truths of this past decade? What might a hundred thousand other people have done, if they’d lived too?

The notion of loyalty comes up a lot when people remember Kelly. It's a word with highly positive connotations but a somewhat spotty record. You'll hear it used to describe people sticking with down and out friends but also to explain why clean cops cover up for dirty ones. As a general rule, when loyalty means always siding with the insider in an inter-group conflict, it's a bad and potentially dangerous thing.

If you look at this in terms of the interests of subjects, journalists and readers, Kelly's loyalty expressed itself almost solely as putting journalists' interest above those of  their subjects and readers. Both in the Glass affair and in his own writings, Kelly placed a low value on seeing a subject treated fairly or a reader informed truthfully. Despite this, even after the Glass scandal, Kelly remained a tremendously well respected member of the journalistic establishment.

The second involves a favorite Kelly target, Al Gore and the ultimate DC insider, Bob Woodward:

He also told an unflattering, but amusing story about sitting next to former Vice President Al Gore at a dinner, saying being with him was “taxing,” and added, “To be really honest, it’s unpleasant.”

Woodward said Gore pressed him on why the journalist didn’t go after Bush, who beat Gore in the 2000 presidential election, over the war in Iraq.

Gore was a former reporter before becoming a politician, and “he thinks he invented [reporting] also,” Woodward joked in reference to an often misquoted statement that the ex-vice president claimed he invented the Internet.

I don't want to dig through the whole sordid history again but here's a quick recap. Al Gore was strongly disliked by much of the DC press (most notably by the highly influential Kelly). Probably not coincidentally, the coverage of Gore's campaign was marked by the creation and propagation of various misquotes and factual errors.

What's interesting here is Woodward's ability to tune out more than a decade of revelations about the 2000 election. When faced with professional criticism, he responds by dismissing the critic with a widely debunked claim that originated from a string of professional lapses by his immediate colleagues.

These are all signs of a profession in trouble.