Is there a natural tendency (some more than others) to stick it to the man, whomever this might be? This week/month, ‘the man’ happens to be Google, and for all its transgressions in the past and all it plans to commit in the future I’ve decided to switch my home page from Google to Bing. Ironically, 10 years ago I probably would have designated Microsoft to be ‘the man’.
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
There are a few grains of truth to these
In order to make many we have to lose money
In order to win big, we have to be willing to lose big
In order to create jobs, we have to destroy jobs
In order to build you up, we first have to tear you down
I'm just not sure how much.
In order to win big, we have to be willing to lose big
In order to create jobs, we have to destroy jobs
In order to build you up, we first have to tear you down
I'm just not sure how much.
All triggered by this MR post.
Monday, January 30, 2012
Stolen phones
With the increase in crime and along with it - stolen phones, I am puzzled that even with built-in GPS, the police can’t track the phones - like, er, well, on the TV shows, where the perp is tracked down by cell phone pings. Apparently this only works on TV for the most part and even Snopes themselves are confused over what can and cannot be done with built in GPS. The phone companies seem to hold the key and they are unwilling to make cell phone thefts unprofitable by making the phones traceable or simply locking out the device.
Along with this, what I would like Siri to be able to do - or what I would like to be able to say to her if my iPhone were stolen (if I had an iPhone, that is): “Active self destruct sequence.”
Just one day after an 11-year old was robbed of her smart phone right outside Alice Deal Middle School in Northwest DC, it has happened again.
On Wednesday, another young student had her phone taken while she walked through Fort Reno, right by her school. In both cases, police say a young man ran past the victims, snatched the smart phone and took off running. Investigators say the two incidents could be related. Police say this is part of a larger trend where crooks of all ages are stealing smart phones and selling them on the black market.
DC Police Chief Cathy Lanier said smart phone thefts are up across the District, and she isn't getting any help from the phone companies in battling the problem.
Lanier spoke to a group of citizens this week where she said, "I spoke to the head of security at Apple and said, can't you disable these phones permanently when they are stolen to take the profit out of the market for the bad guy? They said, well we can but we're about customer service, and we like to give customer service when they call."
On Wednesday, another young student had her phone taken while she walked through Fort Reno, right by her school. In both cases, police say a young man ran past the victims, snatched the smart phone and took off running. Investigators say the two incidents could be related. Police say this is part of a larger trend where crooks of all ages are stealing smart phones and selling them on the black market.
DC Police Chief Cathy Lanier said smart phone thefts are up across the District, and she isn't getting any help from the phone companies in battling the problem.
Lanier spoke to a group of citizens this week where she said, "I spoke to the head of security at Apple and said, can't you disable these phones permanently when they are stolen to take the profit out of the market for the bad guy? They said, well we can but we're about customer service, and we like to give customer service when they call."
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Intermediate outcomes
Andrew Gelman’s post on the “fight” between Martin Lindquist and Michael Sobel on one side and Judea Pearl and Clark Glymour on the other is strictly for those who are familiar with directed graphical models (DGMs) which also include certain types of structural equation models (SEMs). But this is the second post he has made of late on intermediate outcomes. (Here’s his other post.)
I have nothing to add really except that the phrase intermediate outcomes reminded me of the book Because A Little Bug Went Ka-choo which is full of intermediate outcomes.
I have nothing to add really except that the phrase intermediate outcomes reminded me of the book Because A Little Bug Went Ka-choo which is full of intermediate outcomes.
Teaching and STEM
One of MR’s top post touts the payoff from majoring in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, mathematics). Yet as this NYT article states, majoring in STEM is just too damn hard. Moreover, Catherine Rampell notes it is less work to just to pick a non-STEM major - by about 4 hours a week. (From someone who has spent about that much time a week in Organic Chem lab for one semester, I can attest to that. Not only that, I came out smelling of chemicals which hot showers didn’t always seem to be able clean out. Needless to say, OChem wasn’t for me.)
The highlight of the NYT article however was the following (emphasis mine):
“We’re losing an alarming proportion of our nation’s science talent once the students get to college,” says Mitchell J. Chang, an education professor at U.C.L.A. who has studied the matter. “It’s not just a K-12 preparation issue.”
…
Professor Chang says that rather than losing mainly students from disadvantaged backgrounds or with lackluster records, the attrition rate can be higher at the most selective schools, where he believes the competition overwhelms even well-qualified students.
“You’d like to think that since these institutions are getting the best students, the students who go there would have the best chances to succeed,” he says. “But if you take two students who have the same high school grade-point average and SAT scores, and you put one in a highly selective school like Berkeley and the other in a school with lower average scores like Cal State, that Berkeley student is at least 13 percent less likely than the one at Cal State to finish a STEM degree.”
Several thoughts come to mind:
1. If majors are a way to signal ability and I think that this is partially true, do we want to turn major choice into policy? My knee-jerk reaction is no because if it is a signal of ability and we subsidize entry into STEM then the average quality of STEM majors would fall.
2. Peer effects of being in a selective school seems to indicate that the two people with the same GPA and SAT score are not really the same people. One is higher ability than the other if the one in the selective school succeeds. I use ability in a very general sense to encompass resilience, persistence, grit, motivation or whatever quality that allows them to succeed.
3. The article also notes that it is possible that the problem lies in the way selective schools teach STEM (among other reasons). I’d say yes, and not just in terms of STEM but college teaching in general.
This last point is made by Larry Summers (HT:MR) though he does not address STEM specifically. The value of group rather than individual effort could perhaps stem (pun not intended) the outflow from STEM.
… collaboration is a much greater part of what workers do, what businesses do and what governments do. Yet the great preponderance of work a student does is done alone at every level in the educational system. Indeed, excessive collaboration with others goes by the name of cheating.
One approach that has not been getting much press of late is the concept of peer teaching. Ironically, as the article notes, the leading pioneers of this method of teaching are STEM professors. But the hardest thing to change is:
... getting ... other professors to stop lecturing will be a hard sell. Change is slow in the academy, and professors tend to be rewarded for focusing on their research, often at the expense of their teaching.
The highlight of the NYT article however was the following (emphasis mine):
“We’re losing an alarming proportion of our nation’s science talent once the students get to college,” says Mitchell J. Chang, an education professor at U.C.L.A. who has studied the matter. “It’s not just a K-12 preparation issue.”
…
Professor Chang says that rather than losing mainly students from disadvantaged backgrounds or with lackluster records, the attrition rate can be higher at the most selective schools, where he believes the competition overwhelms even well-qualified students.
“You’d like to think that since these institutions are getting the best students, the students who go there would have the best chances to succeed,” he says. “But if you take two students who have the same high school grade-point average and SAT scores, and you put one in a highly selective school like Berkeley and the other in a school with lower average scores like Cal State, that Berkeley student is at least 13 percent less likely than the one at Cal State to finish a STEM degree.”
Several thoughts come to mind:
1. If majors are a way to signal ability and I think that this is partially true, do we want to turn major choice into policy? My knee-jerk reaction is no because if it is a signal of ability and we subsidize entry into STEM then the average quality of STEM majors would fall.
2. Peer effects of being in a selective school seems to indicate that the two people with the same GPA and SAT score are not really the same people. One is higher ability than the other if the one in the selective school succeeds. I use ability in a very general sense to encompass resilience, persistence, grit, motivation or whatever quality that allows them to succeed.
3. The article also notes that it is possible that the problem lies in the way selective schools teach STEM (among other reasons). I’d say yes, and not just in terms of STEM but college teaching in general.
This last point is made by Larry Summers (HT:MR) though he does not address STEM specifically. The value of group rather than individual effort could perhaps stem (pun not intended) the outflow from STEM.
… collaboration is a much greater part of what workers do, what businesses do and what governments do. Yet the great preponderance of work a student does is done alone at every level in the educational system. Indeed, excessive collaboration with others goes by the name of cheating.
One approach that has not been getting much press of late is the concept of peer teaching. Ironically, as the article notes, the leading pioneers of this method of teaching are STEM professors. But the hardest thing to change is:
... getting ... other professors to stop lecturing will be a hard sell. Change is slow in the academy, and professors tend to be rewarded for focusing on their research, often at the expense of their teaching.
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Social disorder
The recent crime wave in the usually staid and wealthy upper NW neighborhoods of DC (see one of several stories in WaPo here) has a feeling that the stakes have just been upped. What started as a series of thefts from vehicles and breaking and entering have entered into a phase of armed robberies and home invasions. The police say that the criminals who commit these crimes are very different in the sense that someone who does a smash and grab is different from someone who would commit a home invasion. In the parlance of economists criminals specialize based on their comparative advantage.
While there may be an element of truth, it seems that one crime is just a hop, skip and a jump to another - it is easy for breaking and entering to become home invasion, armed robbery and murder. After all it is straightforward to acquire the tools and skills. It is whether they have the nerve or the guts to grab a gun and start pointing it at people and perhaps even using the weapon. It is whether they have the audacity to simply invade people’s homes by getting together a group to just smash windows and barge in shooting and for lack of a better word, pillaging the homes.
After all, social order is very much voluntary. We all pay our taxes - voluntarily. If we suddenly woke up and decided not to do so there is very little that the IRS can do. They simply do not have the manpower to to enforce tax laws on everyone. Sure as they say, you may get a few of us but you won’t get us all.
In a similar vein if a proportion of the population decided to start committing crimes, there is very little that the police can do. Sure, they may get a few of them but in the end as there are more of those who decide that it is profitable to commit crimes enter the market so to speak, they can overwhelm a civil society. In a sense there is point at which everyone starts to rebel and there is little that can be done. Think of how riots can erupt, for instance.
Yet like riots, the madness for lack of a better word dies down - somehow. So hopefully, this crime wave is what it is - just a wave.
While there may be an element of truth, it seems that one crime is just a hop, skip and a jump to another - it is easy for breaking and entering to become home invasion, armed robbery and murder. After all it is straightforward to acquire the tools and skills. It is whether they have the nerve or the guts to grab a gun and start pointing it at people and perhaps even using the weapon. It is whether they have the audacity to simply invade people’s homes by getting together a group to just smash windows and barge in shooting and for lack of a better word, pillaging the homes.
After all, social order is very much voluntary. We all pay our taxes - voluntarily. If we suddenly woke up and decided not to do so there is very little that the IRS can do. They simply do not have the manpower to to enforce tax laws on everyone. Sure as they say, you may get a few of us but you won’t get us all.
In a similar vein if a proportion of the population decided to start committing crimes, there is very little that the police can do. Sure, they may get a few of them but in the end as there are more of those who decide that it is profitable to commit crimes enter the market so to speak, they can overwhelm a civil society. In a sense there is point at which everyone starts to rebel and there is little that can be done. Think of how riots can erupt, for instance.
Yet like riots, the madness for lack of a better word dies down - somehow. So hopefully, this crime wave is what it is - just a wave.
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Reinventing yourself
Over the course of three weeks in July, the Manchester International Festival presented newly commissioned works by 28 artists known more for challenging audiences than for pleasing them... The whole program was intended to be, according to festival director Alex Poots, a celebration of “risk-taking, the pioneering spirit, and valiant attempts.”
Dickson Despommier ’64PH, a Columbia scientist best known as the progenitor of a concept he calls “vertical farming,” fit right in. He had been invited to announce that the nonprofit organization that runs the biennial festival will soon create a towering multilevel greenhouse inspired by his vision: Alpha Farm, to be located in an abandoned eight-story office building in Manchester, will hold several floors of broccoli, lettuce, tomatoes, onions, carrots, and strawberries, all cultivated beneath huge banks of lights.
…
A microbiologist by training, Dickson Despommier spent the first 30 years of his career holed up in a Columbia laboratory studying a tiny parasitic worm called Trichinella spiralis. His major contribution was to describe how this worm, which thousands of people ingest every year by eating undercooked meat but which rarely causes serious illness, can survive in our bodies for long periods by burrowing into muscle tissue.
In 1999, the National Institutes of Health decided that his research had run its course. “I lost my grant support,” Despommier says. “At age 60, I was faced with reinventing myself.”
But at least he still had a job from which he could reinvent himself. Most would have just gone through the motions of tenure - teach as little as possible and hold out until retirement.
He then began studying how infectious diseases take advantage of certain environmental conditions. ... He also created a new graduate course at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health exploring how the use of chemical pesticides and other ecologically disruptive farming practices affects human health in subtle ways, such as by altering the relationships between parasites and their hosts at various levels of the food chain.
Halfway through the semester, the students rebelled against what they considered their teacher’s relentless negativity. “They said, ‘Okay, we get it. Farming is bad for the environment. So why don’t we figure out how to improve it?’” Despommier recalls. “Their idea was to grow crops right in Manhattan, on rooftops.”
Despommier indulged his students, assigning them a group research project in which they were to calculate how much food could be grown if every available rooftop in Manhattan were made into a garden. “It was a purely theoretical hypothesis, really, to imagine that every property owner could be enticed to plant crops on his or her roof,” says Despommier. “But it would test the limits of their idea.”
The students, after poring over maps at the New York Public Library, became discouraged. Even if every square foot of flat, undeveloped rooftop space in Manhattan were devoted to growing rice — an unusually nutritious and calorie-dense grain — the resulting harvest, they estimated, could feed only a tiny portion of the borough’s residents. “This told us that rooftop gardening, for all its benefits in absorbing carbon dioxide and stormwater,” Despommier says, “wasn’t going to be much of a solution.”
The idea of urbanites growing their own food had captivated Despommier’s imagination, ...
Dickson Despommier ’64PH, a Columbia scientist best known as the progenitor of a concept he calls “vertical farming,” fit right in. He had been invited to announce that the nonprofit organization that runs the biennial festival will soon create a towering multilevel greenhouse inspired by his vision: Alpha Farm, to be located in an abandoned eight-story office building in Manchester, will hold several floors of broccoli, lettuce, tomatoes, onions, carrots, and strawberries, all cultivated beneath huge banks of lights.
…
A microbiologist by training, Dickson Despommier spent the first 30 years of his career holed up in a Columbia laboratory studying a tiny parasitic worm called Trichinella spiralis. His major contribution was to describe how this worm, which thousands of people ingest every year by eating undercooked meat but which rarely causes serious illness, can survive in our bodies for long periods by burrowing into muscle tissue.
In 1999, the National Institutes of Health decided that his research had run its course. “I lost my grant support,” Despommier says. “At age 60, I was faced with reinventing myself.”
But at least he still had a job from which he could reinvent himself. Most would have just gone through the motions of tenure - teach as little as possible and hold out until retirement.
He then began studying how infectious diseases take advantage of certain environmental conditions. ... He also created a new graduate course at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health exploring how the use of chemical pesticides and other ecologically disruptive farming practices affects human health in subtle ways, such as by altering the relationships between parasites and their hosts at various levels of the food chain.
Halfway through the semester, the students rebelled against what they considered their teacher’s relentless negativity. “They said, ‘Okay, we get it. Farming is bad for the environment. So why don’t we figure out how to improve it?’” Despommier recalls. “Their idea was to grow crops right in Manhattan, on rooftops.”
Despommier indulged his students, assigning them a group research project in which they were to calculate how much food could be grown if every available rooftop in Manhattan were made into a garden. “It was a purely theoretical hypothesis, really, to imagine that every property owner could be enticed to plant crops on his or her roof,” says Despommier. “But it would test the limits of their idea.”
The students, after poring over maps at the New York Public Library, became discouraged. Even if every square foot of flat, undeveloped rooftop space in Manhattan were devoted to growing rice — an unusually nutritious and calorie-dense grain — the resulting harvest, they estimated, could feed only a tiny portion of the borough’s residents. “This told us that rooftop gardening, for all its benefits in absorbing carbon dioxide and stormwater,” Despommier says, “wasn’t going to be much of a solution.”
The idea of urbanites growing their own food had captivated Despommier’s imagination, ...
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