One more radio story then I'll call it a night

More extraordinary journalism from This American Life about how a small drug-related offense at the wrong place and the wrong time can have truly horrifying consequences.

Ira reports from Glynn County Georgia on Superior Court Judge Amanda Williams and how she runs the drug courts in Glynn, Camden and Wayne counties. We hear the story of Lindsey Dills, who forges two checks on her parents' checking account when she's 17, one for $40 and one for $60, and ends up in drug court for five and a half years, including 14 months behind bars, and then she serves another five years after that—six months of it in Arrendale State Prison, the other four and a half on probation. The average drug court program in the U.S. lasts 15 months. But one main way that Judge Williams' drug court is different from most is how punitive it is. Such long jail sentences are contrary to the philosophy of drug court, as well as the guidelines of the National Association of Drug Court Professionals. For violating drug court rules, Lindsey not only does jail terms of 51 days, 90 days and 104 days, Judge Williams sends her on what she calls an "indefinite sentence," where she did not specify when Lindsey would get out.

As the story notes, Williams' court is also unusually ineffective.

Harsh, cold moments of self-realization

I write for a blog called Observational Epidemiology.

I actually look forward to listening to podcasts on math history.

It's a wonder I date at all.

Why we need NPR

Here's All Things Considered covering the Japanese nuclear crisis with a calm tone and meaningful context.

And then there's this...

Just pay the 99 cents, you cheapskate!

A while back, This American Life did a piece on college partying. It's a fantastic piece of journalism and it's highly relevant to the debate over the impact, positive and negative, of colleges on the areas that host them.

And while we're on the subject, our friend at Metaphor Hacker sends us another relevant radio piece (this time on the BBC).

"The best report ever on media piracy"

You probably don't have time to read the entire 440 page report (I didn't), but you should at least clear out a few minutes for Salmon's sharp and insightful summary.

Student Assessment

From Dana Goldstein:

The good news is that Campbell’s Law does not mean we should give up on assessing students and holding school systems accountable for their academic success. Research shows that certain kinds of exams—those that require essay writing on broad themes, for example—enhance student learning of key concepts. We can also assess students by requiring them to give oral presentations, or by looking for growth in portfolios of their work over the course of a year. Effective teachers produce students who excel when held to these more sophisticated standards, which are difficult to fudge or cheat.

This actually matches my experience with teaching quote well. Standardized tests are the only feasible way to handle large classes (how else do you assess 400 students?). But my best results come from asking essay questions (in free hand) and requiring many, many class presentations. Not only is the assessment a lot more complete but I gain a very good idea of what concepts and ideas that I failed to communicate well.

This type of assessment is a valuable tool in making next years class better than the one before it (a process I hope never stops). Sadly, it is not well suited for mass comparisons between schools. But then complex phenomena rarely summarize well (just consider confounding by indication for how hard it is to use summarized data to capture complex processes).

"We had a reason..."

A few years ago, I was working on the roll out of a big project (think lots of zeros) for a company which will remain nameless for obvious reasons. Though impressive in many ways, the initial launch was set up in a way that seemed to preclude us from using most of the data that we had spent a tremendous amount of time and money acquiring.

One day, toward the end of the project, I was having a few beers with one of the chief architects and I asked him point blank why they chose to set things up this way. His answer was (and I'm giving you this verbatim) "I remember we had a reason but I don't remember what it was."

I've been flashing back on that conversation quite a bit recently as the details of the NYT paywall emerge. Of course, the resemblance could be the result of incomplete information. If I had access to all of the data and analyses, I might be loading up on their stock instead of mocking their corporate strategy (I would continue to mock Maureen Dowd regardless), but being limited to an outsider's view, I have to wonder what would happen if you downed a couple of beers with Sulzberger then asked him about this post from Philip Greenspun:

...how the NY Times spent a reported $40-50 million writing the code (Bloomberg; other sources are consistent). Google was financed with $25 million. The New York Times already had a credit card processing system for selling home delivery. It already had a database management system for keeping track of Web site registrants. What did they spend the $40-50 million on? A monster database server to keep track of which readers downloaded how many articles? They should already have been tracking some of that for ad targeting. In any case, a rack of database servers shouldn’t cost $40 million.

What am I missing?

[I built a pay wall back in 1995 for the MIT Press, restricting access to some of their journals, e.g., Cell, to individual subscribers and people whose IP addresses indicated that they were at institutions with site-wide subscriptions. I can't remember exactly what I charged the Press, but it was only a few days of work and I think the invoice worked out to approximately $40 million less than $40 million.]

What exactly are the localized benefits of a university?

I grew up in a small university town and I can say definitively it was a great environment. There were plays and concerts and speakers. When I started writing fiction as a high school sophomore, I got to sit in on a class taught by a well-established novelist. When I was a senior there was a program where I could take my remaining high school requirements in the morning and take college classes in the afternoon.

I am, as you might imagine, a great supporter of colleges and college towns as is Joseph, my co-blogger. This puts us in an odd position. We are always looking for an excuse to promote higher education but the current line of argument about the economic benefits of universities at the local level is so weak and ignores so many counter-examples that it may do more harm than good.

The focus on local benefits is almost fatally flawed from the beginning by the fact that most of the benefits accrue at the state or more often national level. Both innovations and people tend to flow with the market. When we fund research and produce skilled workers, the chances of a big long-term pay-off are very good but predicting the exact form and location of that pay-off is all but impossible.

Keeping in mind that we are leaving out the majority of the return we expect on our investment, what benefits do we expect a university to provide to its host?

First there are the soft benefits such as enriching an area's intellectual and cultural life, providing role models, enhancing reputation. Viewed from a high enough level, the soft benefits may turn out to be the far most important, but they are difficult to measure and plan around. For now let's focus on the hard benefits.

University as employer

Universities are often seen as an almost ideal industry -- pollution-free, creating a number of stable, middle-class jobs and generating charming, highly liveable neighborhoods.

The problem here is that, if the suburban model takes hold and the town doesn't have a lot to recommend it outside of the school, the results can be really ugly, leaving the area with no tax base, an economy based on delivering pizzas and thousands of poor, badly-behaved students who get loud and drunk on Thursday night then head back to their parents' houses on Friday.

How do you avoid this fate?

One way is simply to stay small enough to maintain that Mayberry quality where it is possible for a professor to afford a decent little house within three or four miles from the school. I could give you some examples but while they may be charming, they aren't relevant to this discussion.

Another solution is to have a university in a large, economically diverse town where the economy and quality of life won't be completely overwhelmed by the ebb and flow of the academic calendar. Unfortunately, even very large universities only have twenty or thirty thousand employees (academic and administrative). College Station can build an economy around a university. Seattle really can't.


University as incubator

Call this the SAS model. Entrepreneurs who began as students and faculty decide to start some innovative new business just down the street. It's great when these things happen, but they don't seem to happen frequently enough, particularly not on the scale we'll need if we want to count on them to revitalize a stagnating city.

To further complicate matters, this desire to start a business in the vicinity of a school is directly related to the appeal of the area (students who hate to leave a town are more likely to find a way to stay). The vibrant urban areas that are likely to attract these small businesses are the very areas that don't need them.


University as labor supplier

This is probably the most commonly cited effect and it's certainly true that many of the more attractive industries require highly educated workers. It is not, however, so clear that these workers have to be in the area before the jobs are there or that the advantages of being able to recruit from an area college are that great. With only one very small nationally ranked school, Houston can't hope to supply itself with the first string academic talent it needs but that hasn't stopped its phenomenal growth (plenty of Ivy League grads are willing to move south), nor have the advantages of a local school caused Microsoft to focus its attention on UW instead of Waterloo.

Universities are vitally important to our intellectual, cultural and economic future and they have paid for themselves many times over. They do not, however, have that great a record of revitalizing urban areas. It would appear that you need more than a "build it and they will come" attitude, that certain conditions have to be in place and, even with those conditions, the short-term magnitude of the effects may be less than we hope.

Things it's too late to blog about

Felix explains how the NYT paywall is like baseball.

"Like it's 1999..."

A good James Kwak column with a Joe Nocera link that might be worth using one of your twenty on.

A worthwhile Worthwhile Canadian Initiative post.

An sad story that would have been tragic if not for the amazing restraint and professionalism of the cops on the scene.

Off to bed.

Weekend Gaming -- Escape the orthogonal

Personally and pedagogically, I'm a big believer in finding new spots to drop the marble,* finding a different way of approaching old problems. This is particularly valuable when plateaus (defined here as periods of at best negligible improvement) are a concern.

Variants are a good way to get new insights into old familiar games and keep things from getting stale. Some of the most interesting variants are based on replacing the square tiles of a standard chess board with hexagons.

Most games played on an eight by eight rectangular board have been adapted to a six by six by six hex board (such as the one used for Agon). You can find game sets with these boards at many game stores (including mine) or you can create them yourself with pretty much any computer graphics program.

The following list is by no mean exhaustive but it should be a good introduction. You can find complete rules for each game by following the links.

Hexagonal Checkers

I don't know that there's really a standard version of hexagonal checkers so I decided to play around with this one and borrowed the border restriction from Kruzno (you can find a number of others online). There's no reason you can't do some experimenting on your own. (let me know if you come up with something interesting.)


Hexagonal Chess

As previously mentioned, Władysław Gliński's chess variant is hugely popular in Europe (more than 100,000 sets have been sold). I've played this one quite a bit and had a good time with it.




You can probably figure most of the moves out for yourself. The only pieces that might give you trouble are the bishops and,to a lesser extent, the knights.


Bishops come in three colors, which points out an interesting topological feature of a hexagonal grid which I'm betting you can spot for yourself.

TacTex

I believe Piet Hein himself may have come up with this variation on his game TacTix.


Hexagonal Reversi

There's a rather complicated intellectual property background to the game Reversi/Othello, but the game itself couldn't be simpler. Here's one configuration for playing it on a hexagonal board.



I wasn't able to find a standard version of hexagonal reversi. This version seems to work well but there may be room for improvement.

* Always remember to flip your fitness landscape upside-down before dropping your marble. Energy landscapes should be good to go.

For a more on this, take a look at "Fitness Landscapes, Ozark Style."

Another New Haven thought

Matt Yglesias wonders if looking at just New Haven alone is the wrong unit of analysis as the surrounding county is quite prosperous. I think that this quote nicely summarizes the problem with this analysis:

But even the strongest cities can't -- and shouldn't have to -- handle the costs of urban poverty by themselves/ In the 1960s and 1970s, rich and middle-class city dwellers fled to the suburbs in part to escape having to pay the costs of addressing urban inequality. Rich enclaves have often formed right outside of urban political boundaries, where the prosperous can be close to the city without having to pay its taxes or attend its schools. A level playing field mans that people should be choosing where to live based on their desires for neighborhood or opportunity, not based on where they can avoid paying for the poor.

-- Edward Glaeser, Triumph of the City, page 258.

The difference between Seattle and New Haven is that the core of Seattle had managed to capture at least part of the prosperity that comes from institutions like the University of Washington and Microsoft. This suggests to me that there is at least a two stage process to using a university to enhance urban prosperity.

It also suggests we might want to be leery about things like significant budget cuts as it would be foolish to risk disrupting these types of success stories.

"Academic Intimidation"

One of the reasons we have tenure is to protect the intellectual independence of academicians. If you think they no longer require that protection, you haven't been paying attention.

From Paul Krugman:

Regular readers may recall my praise for William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, a great book that had a big influence on my work in economic geography. Cronon has inspired many other people; Josh Marshall was deeply influenced by his environmental history of New England. Cronon, who teaches at the University of Wisconsin, is, quite simply, a great historian.

He also feels some duty as a citizen, in particular a citizen of his state. So earlier this week he published an op-ed in the Times condemning the power grab by the state’s governor.

And what happened next? Wisconsin Republicans have demanded access to his personal email records.

Yes, personal. Cronon has a wisconsin.edu email address — but nobody, and I mean nobody, considers such academic email addresses something specially reserved for university business. Actually, according to Cronon he has been especially careful, maintaining a separate personal account — but nobody would have considered it out of the ordinary if he mingled personal correspondence with official business on the dot edu address. And no, the fact that he’s at a public university doesn’t change that: when my students take jobs at Berkeley or SUNY, they don’t imagine that they’re entering into a special fishbowl environment that they wouldn’t encounter at Georgetown or Haverford.

But then, we know perfectly well what’s going on here. Republicans aren’t looking for some abuse of Cronon’s position; they’re hoping to find some statement that can be quoted out of context to discredit him. At the very least, they hope that other academics will henceforth feel intimidated...

Universities and prosperity -- another data point

Re our ongoing discussion of universities and economic growth, when we think of universities supplying skilled labor to specific companies, we generally expect the relationships to form primarily between businesses and nearby universities. That's often, but not always the case.

From Wikipedia:

During his visit to Waterloo in October 2005, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates stated, "Most years, we hire more students out of Waterloo than any university in the world, typically 50 or even more."*

This raises some additional questions about the University of Washington's role in Seattle's success.

*For a somewhat different take on this relationship, take a look at this.

Cancer survival rates

An important point (and a nice piece of statistics writing for the general public) by Paul Krugman:

Beyond that, there’s a well-known problem with survival-rate comparisons, acknowledged in the Lancet Oncology study:

Cancer survival is a valuable indicator for international comparison of progress in cancer control,despite the fact that part of the variation in cancer survival identified in this study could be attributable to differences in the intensity of diagnostic activity (case-finding) in participating populations.

Here’s how I understand the over-diagnosis issue, in terms of an extreme example: suppose that there’s a form of cancer that kills people 7 years after it starts, and that there is in fact nothing you can do about it. Suppose that country A screens for cancer very aggressively, and always catches this cancer in year 1, while country B chooses to invest its medical resources differently, and never catches the cancer until year 4. In that case, country A will have a 100% 5-year survival rate, while country B will have a 0% 5-year survival rate — because survival is measured from the time the cancer is diagnosed. Yet treatment in country B is no worse than in country A.

Credit where credit is due

I have resumed reading Edward Glaeser's book Triumph of the City. I am not always a fan of Dr. Glaeser's arguments but his discussion of urban sprawl is interesting, perceptive, and (I suspect) correct. The section is worth it for the discussion of Paris and alternative models of urban density alone.

I am not convinced that he has modeled the predictors of urban prosperity well but I find his arguments for the drivers of sprawl to be compelling. I would be skeptical of any attempt to seriously engage the problem that did not consider these points. For example he references a fixed time cost to public transportation (waiting for the bus, traveling between destinations and stops) that puts the focus on car use in a whole different light.

I was back to being impressed with his work in this section.