I'll be getting back to this when I'm less disgusted

Diane Ravitch shares a telling passage from a post-trial brief in the Vergara case:

Plaintiffs Monterroza and Martinez both attend charter schools that are not subject to the challenged statutes at all. Beatriz and Elizabeth Vergara both attend a “Pilot School” in LAUSD that is free to let teachers go at the end of the school year for any reason, including ineffectiveness.

Just to be clear, none of the nine plaintiffs could show that they had been assigned teachers who would have been fired if not for the challenged statutes. Four of them weren't even in schools where the statutes applied.

If that weren't enough, here's an example of one of the plaintiffs' "grossly ineffective" teachers.

p.s. I'm still looking for a transcript but in the meantime check out the brief and the original complaint.

I don't think Tyler Cowen is right here, but I hope he is

Elon Musk made a big announcement last Thursday:

Yesterday, there was a wall of Tesla patents in the lobby of our Palo Alto headquarters. That is no longer the case. They have been removed, in the spirit of the open source movement, for the advancement of electric vehicle technology.

Tesla Motors was created to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport. If we clear a path to the creation of compelling electric vehicles, but then lay intellectual property landmines behind us to inhibit others, we are acting in a manner contrary to that goal. Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology.

When I started out with my first company, Zip2, I thought patents were a good thing and worked hard to obtain them. And maybe they were good long ago, but too often these days they serve merely to stifle progress, entrench the positions of giant corporations and enrich those in the legal profession, rather than the actual inventors. After Zip2, when I realized that receiving a patent really just meant that you bought a lottery ticket to a lawsuit, I avoided them whenever possible.

At Tesla, however, we felt compelled to create patents out of concern that the big car companies would copy our technology and then use their massive manufacturing, sales and marketing power to overwhelm Tesla. We couldn’t have been more wrong. The unfortunate reality is the opposite: electric car programs (or programs for any vehicle that doesn’t burn hydrocarbons) at the major manufacturers are small to non-existent, constituting an average of far less than 1% of their total vehicle sales.

At best, the large automakers are producing electric cars with limited range in limited volume. Some produce no zero emission cars at all.

Given that annual new vehicle production is approaching 100 million per year and the global fleet is approximately 2 billion cars, it is impossible for Tesla to build electric cars fast enough to address the carbon crisis. By the same token, it means the market is enormous. Our true competition is not the small trickle of non-Tesla electric cars being produced, but rather the enormous flood of gasoline cars pouring out of the world’s factories every day.

We believe that Tesla, other companies making electric cars, and the world would all benefit from a common, rapidly-evolving technology platform.

Technology leadership is not defined by patents, which history has repeatedly shown to be small protection indeed against a determined competitor, but rather by the ability of a company to attract and motivate the world’s most talented engineers. We believe that applying the open source philosophy to our patents will strengthen rather than diminish Tesla’s position in this regard.

Tyler Cowen thinks that "this announcement will be discussed in business schools for years to come much like Henry Ford’s announcement of the $5 a day wage." I don't.

My co-blogger Joseph and I have consistently taken the position that, on the intellectual property spectrum with too little protection failing to encourage creation and innovation and too much stifling competition, our laws have long ago abandoned the sweet spot in the middle  and become far too excessive. That puts us in general agreement with Cowen.

Where I, at least, disagree is with the likely outcome. Musk deserves a huge amount of credit for this but given Tesla's size compared with the magnitude of this problem, I don't see it making much of a difference.

For what it's worth, though, I hope I'm wrong.

More on the California decision

A good question:

Rather than gutting hard-won protections for teachers, the next legal case should go after economic segregation itself. Instead of invoking Brown in a broad metaphorical sense, why not bring a state-level suit against actual segregation by class and race? If it is a violation of the California state constitution to have tenure laws that make it hard to fire bad teachers in poor and minority communities, why isn’t it a violation when the state and districts draw school boundary lines in a way that promotes deeply unequal, economically segregated schools that many strong educators won’t teach in?

I am also interested in why the new policy has to be a complete loss of job security.  After all, if the issue is: 

Los Angeles School Superintendent John Deasy testified it can take over two years on average — and sometimes as long as 10 — to fire an incompetent tenured teacher. The cost, he said, can run from $250,000 to $450,000.

Then why not make a new plan where firing a teacher comes with one years salary as a good-bye present?  Or have fast pension vesting as well (say 5 years).  It would bring excessive firing under scrutiny (as it would increase costs), but would save enormous amounts of money compared to the costs above and be cheap compared to the estimates people are making as to harm.  Of course, this presumes that there really is an effective teacher waiting to be pulled into a classroom, which isn't impossible but seems to be less likely in the poorest school districts. 

What this suggests is that the real issue isn't unequal student outcomes but rather these types of measures are aimed at degrading the working conditions of teachers.  Are we sure that this will end well? 

Understanding McKinsey

In style, rhetoric, preferred approaches, and general worldview, it is difficult to overstate how much David Coleman is a product of McKinsey & Company, the extraordinarily successful management firm that launched him. This is nowhere better illustrated than in this Washington Post account of the origins of the Common Core standards.

How Bill Gates pulled off the swift Common Core revolution

The pair of education advocates had a big idea, a new approach to transform every public-school classroom in America. By early 2008, many of the nation’s top politicians and education leaders had lined up in support.

But that wasn’t enough. The duo needed money — tens of millions of dollars, at least — and they needed a champion who could overcome the politics that had thwarted every previous attempt to institute national standards.

So they turned to the richest man in the world.

On a summer day in 2008, Gene Wilhoit, director of a national group of state school chiefs, and David Coleman, an emerging evangelist for the standards movement, spent hours in Bill Gates’s sleek headquarters near Seattle, trying to persuade him and his wife, Melinda, to turn their idea into reality.

As Barry Ritholtz noted in a memorable post, McKinsey & Company has walked away from some of the most notorious corporate fiascoes of the past 50 years while somehow managing to keep their reputation and hourly rates intact.

This is, by no means, a matter of luck. Rather it reflects just how good McKinsey is at their core mission: winning over high-level executives and spinning compelling narratives for the press. As long as the C level executives like the consultants and the consultants make them look good, the executives will happily hand out shocking sums of money.

One of the challenges that management consultants often face is trying to sell a very expensive product or service to a company that is capable of providing something similar internally at a much lower cost. For this reason, firms like McKinsey are very good at driving a wedge between top level management and the rest of the company. If you can convince high level executives that the people two or three tiers below them are incompetent and/or untrustworthy, you can justify charging exorbitant fees for things could that which can be done cheaply and quickly in-house.

At the risk of putting too fine a point on it, Coleman approach to Common Core follow this template exactly. He had a set of radical (and by some standards rather flaky) changes he wanted to make in American education. Instead of building support through research or grassroots lobbying, he approached one of the world's richest and most powerful former CEOs and, having secured his support, mounted a tremendously effective charm offensive on the press.

An essential part of Coleman's pitch has been to undercut the standing and authority of the education rank and file, from partnering with Michelle Rhee to patronizing the statisticians in his own organization, the College Board, to being openly dismissive of teachers who questioned some of his more extreme pedagogical ideas. This last point led a fawning NYT reporter to talk about Coleman's unwillingness to suffer fools (I'm trying to maintain an elevated tone in this post. You can see me addressing the article in a less refined mood here).

None of this means that Coleman is wrong or that his ideas should be dismissed, but if you want to understand what's going on in the education reform movement, you have to understand the culture that produced David Coleman.

An excellent take on Vergara v. California

Dana has a characteristically thoughtful and balanced take on the controversial ruling. It's that balance that makes the final paragraph quoted all the more striking.

Is the premise of Treu’s ruling correct? Will axing tenure and seniority lead directly to better test scores and higher lifetime earnings for poor kids?

Here’s where the judge is right: It is difficult—actually, close to impossible—to argue that California’s teacher-tenure system makes sense. Research shows that most first-year teachers are mediocre at best. But good teachers tend to make huge jumps in effectiveness by the end of their second year on the job, and those improvements are often visible through classroom observation and students’ rising test scores. Yet California evaluates teachers for tenure in March of their second year of work, before two full years of student-teacher data are available.

This means that under current California law, principals are forced to make high-stakes decisions about teachers without enough evidence. This disadvantages students, who might get stuck with sub-par instructors, but it also hurts teachers, who aren’t given enough time to prove their skill. Once a teacher earns tenure, it can cost tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars—and countless administrative and legal man-hours—for a district to permanently remove him from his job. And in the event of budget cuts or school closings, California law mandates that the least experienced teachers be laid off first, even if they are more effective than their older colleagues, a policy known as “LIFO,” or “Last In, First Out.”

[I have a couple of questions about the metrics that determine the effectiveness of those teachers but that can wait for another post -- MP]

California is an outlier. Only 12 states have formal laws on the books mandating LIFO. Nationally, teachers work an average of 3.1 years before they become eligible for tenure. Not even teachers support the idea of tenure after less than two years on the job. A 2012 survey of 10,000 teachers found that, on average, they believed it was reasonable to work 5.4 years before being evaluated for tenure. As Treu noted in his ruling, the arguments in Vergara revealed remarkable consensus between the prosecution and defense on the fact that California’s tenure policies are far from best practices.

But here’s where Judge Reulf’s theory is faulty: Getting rid of these bad laws may do little to systemically raise student achievement. For high-poverty schools, hiring is at least as big of a challenge as firing, and the Vergara decision does nothing to make it easier for the most struggling schools to attract or retain the best teacher candidates.

From 2009 to 2011, the federal government offered 1,500 effective teachers in 10 major cities—including Los Angeles—a $20,000 bonus to transfer to an open job at a higher poverty school with lower test scores. In the world of public education, $20,000 is a major financial incentive. All these teachers were already employed by urban districts with diverse student populations; they weren’t scared of working with poor, non-white children. Yet less than a quarter of the eligible teachers chose to apply for the bonuses. Most did not want to teach in the schools that were the most deeply segregated by race and class and faced major pressure to raise test scores.

Principals have known about this problem for ages. In Chicago, economist Brian Jacob found that when the city’s school district made it easier for principals to fire teachers, nearly 40 percent of principals, including many at the worst performing, poorest schools, fired no teachers at all. Why? For one thing, firing a coworker is unpleasant. It takes more than a policy change to overturn the culture of public education, which values collegiality and continuous improvement over swift accountability. That culture is not a wholly bad thing—with so many teachers avoiding the poorest schools, principals have little choice but to work with their existing staffs to help them get better at their jobs.

I'm not a lawyer...

[It has become a bit of a running joke that when Republican lawmakers say "I'm not a scientist,"  they mean "I'm not a scientist but you should listen to me anyway." When I say "I'm not a lawyer," I mean go out and find someone who knows something about the law and ask him or her about the broader potential ramifications of the topic at hand. The following has no expertise behind it and should be treated strictly as a starting point for a discussion.]

Let's crudely sum up the ruling of Vergara v. California as follows: if there is a reasonable possibility that an incompetent member of a given profession can cause serious and disproportionate economic or personal damage to certain disadvantaged groups, then any law making it more difficult to fire a member of that profession is unconstitutional.

Yes, I realize that's grossly oversimplified and I'm almost certainly missing some important nuances, but for the sake of the discussion, take a minute and think about the logical implications of such a precedent. Can you think of any fields other than education where the broad outlines of this ruling might apply? The police come to mind immediately. All of the major arguments used to argue for reducing/eliminating tenure (the importance of the work, the potential for damage, the likelihood of discrimination) could be used to argue for making all police officers at-will employees. Nor is there any immediately obvious reason this should stop there.

I'm not saying that the lawyers who argued against California's tenure policy, or the judge who ruled against it or the people who support the ruling want to see things go that far. I suspect that pretty much all of them would prefer that this decision is applied narrowly and applied to this specific context, but that's not how precedents work.

One of the many reasons why legislating from the bench is a bad idea is because legislatures have the freedom to be irrational and inconsistent. They can invent nonsensical justifications for their laws and they can change their standards from day to day with little real harm. In court rulings, the reasons are the most important part. When a judge is sloppy or, worse yet, reasons backwards (starting with a desired conclusion and inventing arguments for it), the result is bad law.

 I don't know if that's what we have here. I do know it's something we should be talking about.

Two quotes presented without comment

Far too much of school districts' money and administrators' time has been spent trying to dismiss ineffective teachers — funds and time that could have been spent far more productively on improving education.

LAUSD superintendent John Deasy on tenure (previously discussed here)

Los Angeles schools chief John Deasy has offered to resign in February, according to a proposed settlement obtained by The Times and other media outlets Tuesday.

Under the proposed agreement, which was presented last Friday to Board of Education President Richard Vladovic, Deasy would resign Feb. 1, 2014. He would then continue to be available as a consultant through June 30, 2015. That arrangement would have allowed Deasy to receive his $330,000 annual salary for the balance of his contract.

From a 2013 news story. Deasy, of course, ended up staying.

Accountability is for little people

I'll have more to say about the Vergara trial later but for now I'd like to point out one particularly egregious bit of hypocrisy from LAUSD superintendent John Deasy.

Once tenure was granted, dismissing a bad teacher became burdensomely difficult. And in times of budget cutbacks, the law required that the last teachers hired were the first fired, which robbed administrators of the ability to make layoff decisions on the basis of which teachers were most effective.

As a consequence of these laws, which were challenged in the Vergara lawsuit, too many students throughout the state have been saddled with grossly ineffective teachers, and administrators have had little power to remove them. Far too much of school districts' money and administrators' time has been spent trying to dismiss ineffective teachers — funds and time that could have been spent far more productively on improving education.

It is worth taking a moment to dwell on the sheer chutzpah of this editorial. Deasy is channeling the man who killed both of his parents then threw himself on the mercy of the court because he was an orphan. He complains about budget cuts but omits to mention that one of the reasons that the LAUSD's finances look so bleak is because its superintendent was...

so stunningly arrogant as to propose $1 billion purchase of tablet computers for largely unproven educational approaches, while pushing brutal cuts in the schools...

so ethically challenged that, rather than seeking out competitive offers, he grossly overpaid and awarded contracts to companies with which he and members of his administration had inappropriately close relationships...

And finally, so freaking incompetent that he didn't bother to check the specs for the project before committing the schools to a billion-dollar purchase.

Deasy was a mediocre administrator before this fiasco hit, but even if he had been God's gift to education, there's no way he should have kept his job. Fortunately for him, though, he managed to luck out in at least three important ways: he came in with the right connections (particularly Eli Broad and Bill Gates); most major media outlets (especially, in this case, the LA Times) remain highly sympathetic to the education reform movement; and sadly, we live in a time when holding people at the top of an organization responsible for their failures has gone strangely out of style.

Does this make sense?

Rules on non-compete agreements accept the sanctity of contracts, even when it hurts future income for workers who are unable to find new jobs:

Daniel McKinnon, who had been a hairstylist in Norwell, Mass., lost a court battle with his former employer who claimed that Mr. McKinnon had violated the terms of his agreement when he went to work at a nearby salon. Mr. McKinnon said that he did not think the original restriction — to wait at least 12 months before working at any salon in nearby towns — still applied because he had been fired after years of friction with the manager there. Shortly after being fired, he went to work at a nearby salon.

But a judge issued an injunction ordering him to stop working at his new employer.

“It was pretty lousy that you would take away someone’s livelihood like that,” said Mr. McKinnon, who for the following year lived off jobless benefits of $300 a week. “I almost lost my truck. I almost lost my apartment. Almost everything came sweeping out from under me.”

But now talk about teacher tenure and suddenly the potential for future economic losses is a compelling reason to break existing agreements:

In striking down several laws regarding tenure, seniority and other protections, the judge said there was compelling evidence of the harm inflicted on students by incompetent teachers.

"Indeed, it shocks the conscience," Treu said.

He cited an expert's finding that a single year with a grossly ineffective teacher costs a student $50,000 in potential lifetime earnings. 

No data is given on how many teachers are "grossly ineffective", how confounding by school neighborhood was handled, or whether the replacement of these teachers with somebody else would necessarily improve matters.  Notice how we don't show the same level of heightened concern over actual lost wages for real workers as we do about potential losses. 

Interesting to ponder. 

Charter vs. Charter?

Specifically big vs. little.

For a number of years now, there's been a growing but little discussed tension between the big chains of charter schools like KIPP and the individual neighborhood charters. It was often the small schools with close ties to parents that the industry pointed to, but their political clout was generally negligible.

So it was pretty much inevitable that, at some point, the big players would start aggressively acquiring market share held by other charters just as they had been acquiring that held by vulnerable public schools. All of this brings us, perhaps unsurprisingly, to New Jersey:

The Christie administration quietly told two charter schools over the last month that they must close, one of them among the most established in Newark and the other a brand-new school in Camden.

The first to be signed by acting commissioner David Hespe, the decisions were not publicly announced, but came in letters to each of the schools as they were finishing up the year. The schools must close by the end of June.

In both cases, the shutdown orders were largely due to student test scores below those in the host district, even if for just one year, and the lack of necessary steps to improve them, according to the letters sent by Hespe.

For the Greater Newark Charter School, opened in 2000 and in its 14th year, it may not have been wholly unexpected as the school had been on probation and a decision on its charter’s five-year renewal was delayed since March.

The leader of the City Invincible Charter School in Camden said it came as more of a surprise, as the school was only in its second year.

If that 'second year' part seems odd, just wait...  It gets better. As the Vice President on the Board of Trustees for City Invincible Charter School.points out:

First, we must not overlook the simple fact that this decision came two days before the 2014 NJASK testing began. The State did not even bother to see if our students’ scores have improved. This decision is entirely based off of a single set of data that comes from a test administered seven months into our first year of operation.
...
I just think it reeks of politics that they have suddenly decided to close our school in the very same year KIPP, Mastery, and Uncommon schools are set to open. Because there’s a dearth of facilities in the city that can serve as schools, you shouldn’t be surprised to see one of their banners hanging over our doors come September.

I haven't run across Mastery that often, but KIPP and Uncommon have been on my radar for a while, particularly their share practice of pumping up their metrics by brutally dumping their most vulnerable students. From Nashville:

One of the first things a visitor sees when stepping into Kipp Academy is a graph that shows how Kipp is outperforming Metro schools in every subject.

However, Kipp Academy is also one of the leaders in another stat that is not something to crow about.

When it comes to the net loss of students this year, charter schools are the top eight losers of students.

In fact, the only schools that have net losses of 10 to 33 percent are charter schools.

"We look at that attrition. We keep an eye on it, and we actually think about how we can bring that back in line with where we've been historically," said Kipp Principal Randy Dowell.

Dowell said Kipp's 18 percent attrition is unacceptable.

As I pointed out earlier, Dowell is being stunningly dishonest here. You simply don't get this level of attrition unless the administration wants it. Uncommon has been caught using similar strategies:

Tops on the list: Roxbury Preparatory Charter, a college prep academy for 5th-8th graders that is part of the Uncommon Schools network and sent home an Uncommonly high 56% of its students in 2012.

As I've said before, there are some very good independent charters out there with innovative programs and strong neighborhood ties. I wish them the best, but I advise them to watch their backs.

Pranks as natural experiments

Ken Levine, as previously mentioned, is an enormously accomplished writer and director of sitcoms going all the way back to MASH, but he started out in radio and still keeps a hand in. A few years ago he was co-hosting Dodger Talk with Josh Suchon on KABC, Los Angeles where part of his job was to deliver local traffic reports...

But I always wondered – was anybody actually listening to these traffic reports? One evening, late in the season, the Dodgers were in San Francisco and I was at the station preparing for my big minute. I was hanging out with Howard Hoffman, the production director, and I suggested a way to see if listeners paid any attention. He laughed and said, “you wouldn’t dare.” (This is where that paragraph on pranks pays off.) I gave him a sly smile and headed for my booth.

I opened the report by saying, “If you’re going to the Dodger game tonight, there’s a fifteen minute delay on the Golden Gate Bridge, the 880-Nimitz in the east bay reports slow and go from Concord…”

I just gave the San Francisco traffic report. Super straight, as if this were a San Francisco station. And I tagged it with the Sprint commercial.

Howard came into the booth hysterical. Now we waited to see how many phone calls we got. This was 6:45 in the evening, during the peak afternoon commute.

So how many did we get? I bet you’re ahead of me. That’s right. None. Not a single one. Zero. The big goose egg. No one from the station ever called me. No one from the Dodgers. Nothing. 

The following year there was no traffic. I hope [the sponsor] Sprint took that money and used it to buy another repeater tower.

Perhaps it would have been different with a home game, but these results do look conclusive. This got me wondering. I can imagine situations where a prank might lead to useful data. I wonder if anyone knows of any actual examples other than this one.

Weekend blogging -- famous but underrated

I had originally planned this post as a Twilight Zone Memorial Day marathon, then something more topical came along. Of course, in the blogosphere nothing ever really goes away. Here are a few of the episodes that rank high on my personal list but which don't seem to get a lot of press.

"When the Sky Was Opened" creeped me out in a way that's hard to explain. It also, like many of the episodes included here,  features a remarkable performance from a wonderful but under-recognized actor (in this case Charles Aidman).

"Two" is a nearly perfect, fantastically economical love story. Up until 1970 or so, Charles Bronson could do no wrong. From the Magnificent Seven to Once Upon a Time in the West, he was, for my money the most interesting star of the decade. Add in Elizabeth Montgomery's amazing smile and that wonderful final shot from writer/director Montgomery Pittman...

"Once Upon a Time" has Buster. Nothing more needs to be said.

 "The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank," and "Jess-Belle" feature another actor who needs to be better remembered, or at least remembered for better things, James Best.

"Miniature" and "Nothing in the Dark" are fine episodes featuring excellent turns by future stars (particularly Duvall). "The Bard" is a weaker entry on the whole but a must for Burt Reynolds fans.

"Occurrence" won a well-deserved Oscar.

"The Hunt" What can I say? Us Arkansas folk have always been real proud of Arthur.

Finally, "The Grave" featuring, get this, Lee Marvin, James Best,Lee Van Cleef, and Strother Martin. Another outstanding episode from writer/director Montgomery Pittman.














































The Grave

It never rains but pours

I have been silent lately.  My leg now has two open ulcers plus an infected surgical wound mid-way up the calf.  Antibiotics held things in check, but things went poorly when they stopped. 

So I have been quite under the weather and posting will likely stay light for a while. 

Mark has been doing amazing content in the interim

Agricultural round-up

These are bigger stories than their coverage indicates and when I get some time, I plan on tying them in with some ongoing threads (there's definitely a ddulite angle here).

Scientists Crack Sheep Genome, Shining Spotlight On Rumen Evolution And Lipid Metabolism

Shenzhen, June 5, 2014--- The latest study, led by scientists from Kunming Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, BGI and other institutes, presents a high-quality sheep genome and reveals genomic and transcriptomic events that may be associated with rumen evolution and lipid metabolism that have relevance to both diet and wool. The work was published online today in Science.

Sheep are ruminants with a complex, 4-compartmented "stomach", the largest compartment is the rumen, which is thought to have evolved around 35-40 million years ago, and has the ability of converting the ligno-cellulose rich plant materials into animal protein. Wool is the most economic feature of the sheep, while the synthesis of wool is supposed to be linked to fatty acid metabolism. The genome data yielded in this study will lead to a better understanding of all those unusual evolution traits of sheep.

3,000 rice genome sequences made publicly available on World Hunger Day

The open-access, open-data journal GigaScience (published by BGI and Biomed Central), announces today the publication of an article on the genome sequencing of 3000 rice strains along with the release of this entire dataset in a citable format in journal's affiliated open-access database, GigaDB. The publication and release of this enormous data set (which quadruples the current amount of publicly available rice sequence data) coincides with World Hunger Day to highlight one of the primary goals of this project— to develop resources that will aid in improving global food security, especially in the poorest areas of the world. This work is the completion of stage one of the 3000 Rice Genomes Project, a collaborative effort made up of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS), the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), and BGI, and is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology.

With more than 1/8th of the world's population living in extreme hunger and poverty, and an every-increasing world population (estimated to reach 9.6 billion by 2050), there is a huge need to create new resources to improve crop yield, reduce the impact of agricultural practices on the environment, and develop food crops that are of high yield and nutrition and can grow successfully in environments stressed by drought, pests, diseases, or poor soil quality. While rice research has greatly advanced since the completion of the first high-quality rice genome sequence in 2005, there has been limited change in breeding practices that are important for producing improved and better adapted rice strains.

The 3000 Rice Genomes Project provides a major step forward for addressing these challenges by creating and releasing an extensive amount of genetic information that can ultimately be applied to intelligent breeding practices, which take advantage of the natural variation between different plant strains and information on the genetic mechanisms that underlie these traits to select strains for breeding that will be more successful in producing hybrid strains with characteristics that are highly suited for growing successfully in different environments.

For a bit of context, here are some relevant previous posts.

First on the way media covers agricultural research:

Really not that damned funny (Insert Dowd joke here)

Earmarks and Agricultural Research

Sure it saved us twenty billion, but it sounds funny


and on agriculture in general

Back on the subject of agricultural research

How are genetically engineered crops like AAA rated structured bonds?

And one I still need to get to

Seed saving: An alternative to industrial agriculture in India

The near miss effect -- what compulsive gamblers and tech reporters have in common

A few days ago I posted a bit of a rant about how excited tech reporters got over a Google press release about the company's driverless car. The problem was that, based on the details available in the reports, there didn't seem to be any significant indications of increased functionality.

Of course, reporters have a strong incentive to see signs of progress -- "just around the corner" sells better than "don't get your hopes up" -- but I think this eagerness has more than one cause (most things do) and I wonder if one of those factors might have something to do with the near-miss effect as described in this memorable story from This American Life:

Sarah Koenig

Habib and especially Dixon have spent a long time studying what's called the near-miss effect. In slot machines, a near miss is just what it sounds like. It's when, say, two cherries line up on the payoff line, and then the third is about to come but stops just short or just past the payoff line.

...

Sarah Koenig

In 2006, Dixon teamed up with Habib to see if they could figure out what was happening to people neurologically when they saw near misses. They scanned the brains of 22 gamblers-- 11 addicted, or what they called pathological gamblers, and 11 non-pathological gamblers-- as all these people watch near misses on slot machine displays.

The results surprised them. Because while both addicted and non-addicted gamblers said the near misses felt more like wins, their brains said something different. Here's Reza Habib.

Reza Habib

What you see in the non-pathological gamblers is that the regions that are activated for losses, those same regions tend to be also activated for near misses. And so the brain, at least, processes these near misses in the same way that it processes losses in the non-pathological gamblers. In pathological gamblers, the same regions that are activated for wins are also activated for near misses.

And so these include regions such as the amygdala, which is a region involved in emotional processing, as well as parts of the brain stem which are involved in reward and dopamine function, which is part of the reward system. So the pathological gamblers, their brains, at least, are responding to these near misses in the same way that they respond to wins.

Mark Dixon

This is Mark again. And one of the effects of this, or the implications of these data, are that a pathological gambler going into the casino who's actually losing, his brain is firing like he's winning. Disturbing, isn't it.

Sarah Koenig

Yeah. It's crazy.

Mark Dixon

Oh, it's way crazy. And so you are experiencing those same sensations as a win when you're not winning.

Just as casinos are very good at eliciting the reactions associated with winning even when very little winning is going on, companies like Apple and Google have become very good at eliciting the reactions associated with technological progress even when the technology is advancing little and sometimes not at all. In this case, Google assumed correctly that, by showing journalists a prototype that looked different but apparently did nothing new, the reporters would react as if they had seen an advance in the technology. They respond to these meaningless press conferences in much the same way as a pathological gambler responds to two cherries out of three.

If anything, the shift to custom-made, low-speed cars would seem to be a sign of trouble. Google's stated goal is to release this technology to manufacturers in 2018. Whenever you're designing complex systems that have to work with complex systems designed by others, compatibility is usually more than half the battle. I would therefore expect some of the most daunting engineering challenges to come from getting Google's technology to work smoothly with a wide range of makes and models. The decision to go from road testing Toyota Priuses ('Prii' believe it or not) and Audi TTs to track testing what are basically go-carts does not make the four year goal look more likely.

What happens if that deadline isn't met? I suspect it will still be business as usual. Google has proven that merely symbolic progress or, failing even that, just bringing the subject up is enough to create the desired effect of public perception. My guess is that the only real deadline is beating GM, Mercedes-Benz, or Nissan or any of the other companies that have equally gifted engineers working on these problems (but with less gifted PR departments to promote them).