When I get some bandwidth I want to do something on codes in the K through 12 classroom. You start with simple table-based codes to have some fun with numbers and letters (and to get some practice using tables), then you build on the concept over the years, introducing problem solving, probability, even number theory (public key codes) and programming.
With that in mind I Googled cryptogram maker and got this. I didn't look at the rest of the site so I can't vouch for it but the cryptogram maker did most of what I wanted it to.
Thursday, June 28, 2012
Wednesday, June 27, 2012
Dude, I'll have you know that was a bitchin' surf shop...
This Fresh Air interview with aviation journalist William McGee fits in nicely with our ongoing discussion of air travel. The whole thing's worth a listen but the part about maintenance is fascinating.
DAVIES: I was shocked to read in the book that the FAA doesn't require the major carriers to even list their subcontractors?
MCGEE: You know, when I started investigating this issue, I can't tell you how naive I was. I thought this would be something where, you know, if I spent a little time looking at the record, that I could, you know, piece this together. And one of the first things I did was say, well, OK, where are U.S. airlines outsourcing their work, and who are they outsourcing it to?
And as an investigative reporter, I thought, well, that's a pretty simple thing. I was absolutely shocked to find out that not only could I not find that out, the FAA itself has been unable to find this out, and this has been documented and documented in congressional hearings, where independent government organizations, including the Government Accountability Office and the Department of Transportation Inspector General's Office, have gone to the airlines and said: OK, where is the work being done and who's doing it?
And the airlines, amazingly, have responded that they're not clear, in some cases. They're not sure who's doing the work. Now, to me, this is just mind-boggling because to think that in the 21st century it would be a simple matter of, you know, contacting the accounts payable department and saying where are you cutting checks, you know, somebody must have a handle on this. And yet congressional testimony has shown that the FAA does not even have a full sense of where the work is being done.
And in many cases - this is where it's, you know, the bizarre gets even more bizarre, the outsourced facilities outsource themselves. So in some cases you have two and even three degrees of separation from the outsource company. In one case that I looked at, critical work on an aircraft was being done by a surfboard repair shop in California, and the FAA immediately sort of stepped in and stopped that.
DAVIES: Critical work?
MCGEE: Yes. That was that basically a body panel on an aircraft was made from a material that was similar to surfboard, was, you know, was given to an outsourced shop, and they in turn contacted a surfboard shop. Unfortunately, the gentleman running the surfboard shop had no FAA certification and had never worked on an aircraft before.
Tuesday, June 26, 2012
Jonathan Chait on Bush v. Gore and journalistic cowardice
On the heels of an exceptionally clear-eyed take on the health care debate, Jonathan Chait follows up with an exceptional piece of journalistic criticism:
Over the past quarter century or so, journalists have managed to fashion an ethical code so self-serving and cowardly that they can justify going to any length to avoid covering a difficult story, revealing uncomfortable facts about the profession or challenging powerful people. It's the same code that allows James Stewart to defend a press favorite like Paul Ryan by lying about Ryan's positions.
We still have some good, independent-minded journalists and pundits out there, but they're doing good work despite, not because of their profession's value system.
The myth that Bush would have won had the recount proceeded dates back to a recount conducted by a consortium of newspapers that examined the ballots. The consortium found that “If all the ballots had been reviewed under any of seven single standards, and combined with the results of an examination of overvotes, Mr. Gore would have won, by a very narrow margin.” But the newspapers decided that this was not how the counties would have actually tabulated the votes. By the variable standards they would have used, the papers reported, Bush would have prevailed. Thus the national news reported a slew of headlines asserting that Bush would have prevailed.
The conclusion was erroneous. The newspapers assumed that the counties would only have looked at “undervotes” — ballots that did not register any votes for president — and ignored “overvotes” — ballots that registered more than one vote for president. An overvote would be a ballot in which the machine mistakenly picked up a second vote for president, or in which a voter both marked a box and wrote in the name of the same candidate. A hand recount in which an examiner is judging the “intent of the voter” would turn those ballots that were originally discarded into countable votes.
Counting overvotes in which the intent of the voter was clear would have resulted in Gore winning the recount. And subsequent reporting by the Orlando Sentinel and Michael Isikoff found that the recount, had it proceeded, almost certainly would have examined overvotes. (Most of the links have been lost over time, but you can find references here and here.)
The newspapers’ error has to be understood in the context of the time. After Bush prevailed in the recount, there was massive pressure to retroactively justify the processes that led to his victory, in the general spirit of restoring confidence in the system. In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, that pressure intensified to the point where it was commonly opined that the newspapers ought to entirely cancel the recount (scheduled to come out in November 2001, at the height of the rally-around-Bush moment). In that atmosphere, the newspapers grasped for an interpretation that would both reassure most Americans of what they wanted to believe and avoid placing themselves in opposition to a powerful and bipartisan rallying around Bush that was then at its apogee.
Over the past quarter century or so, journalists have managed to fashion an ethical code so self-serving and cowardly that they can justify going to any length to avoid covering a difficult story, revealing uncomfortable facts about the profession or challenging powerful people. It's the same code that allows James Stewart to defend a press favorite like Paul Ryan by lying about Ryan's positions.
We still have some good, independent-minded journalists and pundits out there, but they're doing good work despite, not because of their profession's value system.
Sunday, June 24, 2012
off-beat data for off-beat research
Or maybe on-beat. A huge trove (50 years worth) of daily police bulletins turned up recently in LA and are going to be scanned and posted for the public. I could imagine some researchers having some fun digging through these.
Saturday, June 23, 2012
Always click the link
Andrew Gelman has a really weird post on modern art that somehow manages to tie in Warhol, Karl Popper and Al Qaeda. It is built around a bizarre op-ed by some art history professor but, though Gelman quotes her at length, he doesn't bother to rebut statements like "Art has also failed miserably at its secondary goal of protecting us from terrorism."
I don't know how Gelman could let something this get past him, particularly given his background as an art historian.
p.s. Before commenting on this or on Gelman's piece, give some thought to the title of this post.
I don't know how Gelman could let something this get past him, particularly given his background as an art historian.
p.s. Before commenting on this or on Gelman's piece, give some thought to the title of this post.
Yglesias on the Apple Store
I wish that I was able to quote the entire by Matt Yglesias, but this portion makes the most important point of the article:
One thing that this article really does is answer the question of why do I care so much about inequality. I write a lot about topics like CEO pay; the truth is that I would stop caring about these issues in a world in which this really was the case. My issues with wealth redistribution are based on the dire poverty which people find themselves rather than class envy. If people who worked hard and played by the rules could obtain these types of jobs with ease then I would care a lot less about the wealth of the upper classes.
The other thing that I like about this is that it represents a constructive social vision as to what we could do to actually improve the lives of working class Americans. It may or may not be the best possible idea, but it at least gives a specific target to aim for. And that is worth a lot.
More precisely, the Times says the average hourly base pay is $11.91 an hour, which if you work 40 hours a week for 50 weeks a year comes out to the slightly lower figure of $23,800 per year. That's not very much. But it's a lot more than many people make right now. Currently 15 percent of the population is living below the Federal Poverty Line including a shocking 22 percent of American children. And yet a single mom raising three kids working full time at the Apple Store at an average wage would be above the Federal Poverty Line.
That should tell us something about how dire the conditions facing poor Americans are. But, again, those are the circumstances in which 15 percent of the population and 22 percent of kids find themselves.
And yet at the Apple Store workers get "very good benefits for a retailer, including health care, 401(k) contributions and the chance to buy company stock, as well as Apple products, at a discount." So think about a world in which these kind of jobs were the absolute worst jobs around. You're thinking about a world in which everyone has health insurance, and essentially no full-time workers or children of full-time workers are living in poverty. That would hardly be a world with no problems, but it would be a tremendous achievement. And it seems to me to point to the fact that the really urgent question isn't why aren't Apple Store jobs better, but why are so many jobs worse than this? Why can't we live in that world where people who work hard and play by the rules aren't poor?
One thing that this article really does is answer the question of why do I care so much about inequality. I write a lot about topics like CEO pay; the truth is that I would stop caring about these issues in a world in which this really was the case. My issues with wealth redistribution are based on the dire poverty which people find themselves rather than class envy. If people who worked hard and played by the rules could obtain these types of jobs with ease then I would care a lot less about the wealth of the upper classes.
The other thing that I like about this is that it represents a constructive social vision as to what we could do to actually improve the lives of working class Americans. It may or may not be the best possible idea, but it at least gives a specific target to aim for. And that is worth a lot.
Great post by Kaiser Fung
Okay, sometimes you miss a great article and feel really stupid when you do find it. In this case the author is Kaiser Fung and he provides a fantastic example of how modeling decisions can completely undermine a research article's conclusions. In this case the authors manage to completely reverse conventional wisdom with their analysis.
The only thing I disagreed with Kaiser on was using income as a proxy for the value of one additional year of life. I worry that could end up in bad places if we were not careful.
Definitely worth a complete read.
The only thing I disagreed with Kaiser on was using income as a proxy for the value of one additional year of life. I worry that could end up in bad places if we were not careful.
Definitely worth a complete read.
Friday, June 22, 2012
The magic of markets
Paul Krugman has a very interesting piece about the privatization of prisons:
But if you think about it even for a minute, you realize that the one thing the companies that make up the prison-industrial complex — companies like Community Education or the private-prison giant Corrections Corporation of America — are definitely not doing is competing in a free market. They are, instead, living off government contracts. There isn't any market here, and there is, therefore, no reason to expect any magical gains in efficiency.The whole piece is worth pondering.
Class stratification
Marketplace has a good story on (increasingly rare) marriages across class divides. The whole thing is worth a listen but this part in particular caught my ear.
People.born after the war had almost the opposite experience. They grew up in a period of great economic security and growth. The notion of "there but for the grace of God go I" was almost entirely foreign to them. Under these circumstances it would be difficult to imagine empathy for the poor not dropping.
What amazes me though is how far we've gone and how completely we've internalized these somewhat Randian class attitudes. Mass incarceration is seen as a way of maintaining social order. The same journalists who rail against overpaid teachers will be genuinely moved by the hardships of people scraping by on 300K. A political party in an election year loudly complains that the majority of Americans should pay more taxes so we can make the system less progressive.
Of course, all these examples involve a fairly rarefied group of leaders and opinion makers. Perhaps there's some hope for the rest of us.
p.s. Should have worked in a link to this previous post on the subject.
That doesn’t come as a surprise to Susan Fiske, a professor of psychology and public policy at Princeton. She looks at how social class shapes our daily interactions. “It’s rude to talk about somebody being more privileged than somebody else,” Fiske says. “Social class is such a taboo topic in American society.”
Fiske’s research sounds like a warning label for couples like Rider and Heavener. Consider the experiment where Fiske put volunteers in MRIs, and showed them pictures of people from different classes. When they got to the photos of really poor people, the part of the brain that normally lights up when we see another human being just didn’t light up. “What we find is that people say it’s hard to think about this person as a three-dimensional human being,” Fiske says.I've been becoming more and more convinced that class identification has been growing more powerful for the past four decades (with the caveat that the identification is asymmetric; it extends up but not down). The experience of the Great depression and the war had, I suspect, greatly reduced group identification in economic classes. The war had entailed remarkable shared sacrifice and collective action while the Depression had deeply impressed on most Americans the possibility that they too could be among destitute someday. When LBJ was pushing through the Great Society, all of the electorate were born before 1945 (the 26th amendment was still years away)
People.born after the war had almost the opposite experience. They grew up in a period of great economic security and growth. The notion of "there but for the grace of God go I" was almost entirely foreign to them. Under these circumstances it would be difficult to imagine empathy for the poor not dropping.
What amazes me though is how far we've gone and how completely we've internalized these somewhat Randian class attitudes. Mass incarceration is seen as a way of maintaining social order. The same journalists who rail against overpaid teachers will be genuinely moved by the hardships of people scraping by on 300K. A political party in an election year loudly complains that the majority of Americans should pay more taxes so we can make the system less progressive.
Of course, all these examples involve a fairly rarefied group of leaders and opinion makers. Perhaps there's some hope for the rest of us.
p.s. Should have worked in a link to this previous post on the subject.
Improving work-life balance
Dana Goldstein:
The question that I have is what is the relative priority of each item on this list? What are the trade-offs? And what else could you do to reach these goals indirectly? For example, something like the Canadian "baby bonus" program could indirectly address the concerns in point 3, without increasing wages for an entire class of workers. We already do this indirectly, via tax policy, so why not be explicit?
What do others think
1. Universal early childcare and pre-KI found this list interesting because it seemed to really focus on three elements. One is a stronger social saftey net (points 1 and 2). Two is less income inequality ( point 3, and to some extent 4). Three is the culture of the people involved (point 5), which seems to be a hard point to attack as a matter of government policy.
2. Extended learning time at school, not just for more test-prep, but for art, music, sports, and other enrichment and supervision affluent kids get as a matter of course. This would help the school day better conform to parents' work day, which helps women (and men) work and parent (Slaughter also points this out)
3. A higher minimum wage and workplace representation in the service sector (especially helpful for single moms)
4. Paid family leave
5. More enlightened men - men who do chores! According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' latest time-use study, men still do only about 25 percent of housework, 29 percent of food preparation and clean-up, and 33 percent of childcare.*
The question that I have is what is the relative priority of each item on this list? What are the trade-offs? And what else could you do to reach these goals indirectly? For example, something like the Canadian "baby bonus" program could indirectly address the concerns in point 3, without increasing wages for an entire class of workers. We already do this indirectly, via tax policy, so why not be explicit?
What do others think
A good story on structural unemployment and an excuse to bring up intra/inter-group dynamics again
From Marketplace:
You can make the case that much of the training given to executives is of limited value. By comparison a strong and unambiguous case can be made for training that, for example, increases workers' relevant computer skills. If we're spending more on the first than on the second, there's something wrong. My theory is intra/inter-group dynamics. Any other suggestions?
Basically, [Management professor Peter Cappelli at the Wharton School] thinks employers are just being cheap. He says this is something they learned from the downsizing of the 1980s. It was so easy to snap up laid-off workers somebody else had already trained. So then companies downsized their own training programs to save money.
Meanwhile, they’ve steadily raised the bar on job applicants -- demanding ever-more credentials and work experience -- then complain they can’t find good help.For a variety of reasons (demographic, economic, political, educational), I suspect that the group cohesion in management and the associated social classes has gotten stronger over the past few decades. If this is true, we would expect executives to hold an increasingly high perceived value for executive work while seeing non-executive work as less valuable and more interchangeable.
...
And which employees do companies provide with the most skills-enhancement? According to the training organization’s data, it’s not production workers, or customer service reps or new employees. It’s supervisors, managers and executives.
You can make the case that much of the training given to executives is of limited value. By comparison a strong and unambiguous case can be made for training that, for example, increases workers' relevant computer skills. If we're spending more on the first than on the second, there's something wrong. My theory is intra/inter-group dynamics. Any other suggestions?
Thursday, June 21, 2012
Thought provoking idea of the day
Maybe meritocracy is more complicated than I assumed:
But I would be delighted to be proven wrong.
What this means paradoxically, is that to encourage an honest “meritocracy”, one may have to discard equality of opportunity. To come from a dishonored or disgraced family would be a hurdle to overcome. To come from a family with an unblemished record for integrity, would be boost. Not because this is fair to the child. It is demonstrably unfair. But, because it may be the only enforcement mechanism that will work against ambitious parents.The context for this post is Karl Smith thinking about why cheaters will rise to the top of a meritocracy and the implications that this will have. I often disagree with Karl Smith but, on this point, I think that he might be on to something that is hard to deal with in a social context like that of the United States.
But I would be delighted to be proven wrong.
Wednesday, June 20, 2012
One more point about that "On the Media" story
There's something I should have spelled
out explicitly in my previous rant. "Sociopathic, genocidal
dictators plant propaganda in respected news outlets through think
tanks and paid experts" is bad enough. These commissioned op-eds
can do real damage, muddying the debate and preventing or delaying
sanctions and other actions against these regimes, but the more
frightening headline is "Even sociopathic, genocidal dictators
can plant propaganda in respected news outlets through think tanks
and paid experts."
We are literally talking about some of the worst people in the world arguing some of the most indefensible positions imaginable. If they can, with enough money, buy not only a platform but also a veneer of journalistic respectability then there really is no standard. No speaker or message is too repugnant or dishonest to be whitewashed by the press.
If editors and publishers won't bother to vet proxies for Assad and Charles Taylor, what kind of scrutiny can we expect for a political party or a Fortune 500 company? When we read an editorial about global warming or see a study on tax increases cited, can we assume that the journalistic standards are any higher?
We are literally talking about some of the worst people in the world arguing some of the most indefensible positions imaginable. If they can, with enough money, buy not only a platform but also a veneer of journalistic respectability then there really is no standard. No speaker or message is too repugnant or dishonest to be whitewashed by the press.
If editors and publishers won't bother to vet proxies for Assad and Charles Taylor, what kind of scrutiny can we expect for a political party or a Fortune 500 company? When we read an editorial about global warming or see a study on tax increases cited, can we assume that the journalistic standards are any higher?
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