mathbabe

This is a guest post by P.J. Karafiol. P.J. has been in high school education for 20 years, the last fifteen in Chicago Public Schools as a math teacher and department chair, curriculum coordinator, and, this year, Assistant Principal/Head of High School. P.J. is the head author for the ARML competition, the founder of Math Circles of Chicago, and until last year a dedicated math team coach. He lives with his wife, three children, and two dogs in Chicago, about a half-mile from the public high school he attended.

Dear Cathy,

I loved your post asking how we can make math enrichment less elitist, and I wanted to let you (and your readers) know about what we’re doing about that here in Chicago. In 2010, inspired in part by your post about why math contests kind of suck, my department (at Walter Payton College Prep) and I decided to start a math circle in Chicago. We rounded up some of our friends from the city and suburbs, used part of an award from the Intel Foundation as seed money, and launched the Payton Citywide Math Circle. We had three major tenets: that students should be solving challenging problems, not listening to lectures; that the courses should be open to anyone who wanted to join; and that the program should be 100% free.

We’ve grown tremendously in the five years since our first Saturday afternoon session. Renamed Math Circles of Chicago, we now run math enrichment programs after school and on Saturdays at five locations around the city, including some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. In 2011 we partnered with the University of Illinois at Chicago, and we’ve been excited to welcome professors from all five of Chicago’s major universities as teachers and partners. We currently serve 500 students in grades 5-12 (the vast majority in grades 5-8), and we provide them with opportunities they don’t get anywhere else: above all, the opportunity to do challenging mathematics in an environment of collaborative exploration. And, since 2013, we’ve sponsored Chicago’s only (and, to my knowledge, the nation’s second) youth math research symposium, QED. This year, over 150 students in grades 5-12 brought original math research projects to the symposium, and we’ve trained teachers across the city in how to support math research in their own classes.

You’re absolutely right that we need to make opportunities like this available to all students. When I was in fifth grade, I told my father I “hated math”. He responded by taking  me to a local (university) bookstore to let me peruse the wall of yellow Springer books. After I opened and closed my third incomprehensible tome, he explained that mathematics was what was in those books; the subject I hated in school was arithmetic. But I was an only child; many of our students tell us that what they do at math circle–graph theory, number theory, geometry explorations, etc.–is nothing like what is taught in their math classes. Frankly, I wouldn’t call what we do math “enrichment” at all: for many of the kids we serve, math circle is the only exposure they get to what I (or my father) would call real mathematics.

Researchers such as Mary Kay Stein would agree with our assessment.  Stein divides math tasks into four levels of complexity, from “memorization” (level 1) to following procedures (levels 2 and 3, depending on whether the procedures are connected to genuine mathematical content). She reserves the term “doing mathematics” for the highest level of her framework, when students are solving problems for which they haven’t yet learned a procedure. (You can find a summary of her framework here.) One area where we’re growing is that we’re trying to engage even more teachers from Chicago Public Schools–not just our founders–in teaching problem-based sessions, in the expectation that those experiences will change what they do in the classroom for their “regular” students, as those experiences did for us.

Although we’ve grown and evolved, we’ve never strayed from our initial tenets. The Intel money ran out long ago, but we’re entirely donor-supported; our families donate the majority of our annual operating costs on an entirely voluntary basis. (We call it the “NPR Model”: if you like what you hear and think it’s valuable, please contribute what you can.) Students still come from all over the city and still spend their time solving and discussing mathematics, generating questions as well as answering them–not listening to lectures or doing practice worksheets. And our only admission requirement is the same as it was in 2010: students have to write, by hand (no typing allowed!), a one-page essay about why they want to do math on Saturdays (or after school). We have a waiting list in the dozens for each of our three largest sites.

If your readers want to learn more, or to help out, I’d encourage them to visit our website at mathcirclesofchicago.org, or to email our executive director, Doug O’Roark, at doug (at) mathcirclesofchicago (dot) org. We can always use donations; the program costs us about $20 per student per Saturday, and many of our families can’t afford to give nearly that much. We also support other noncompetitive math opportunities for our students: in addition to telling them about programs like the University of Chicago’s Young Scholars Program (now as of 2015 our official partner), HCSSiM, MITES, and PROMYS, we subsidize travel and other expenses for students whose financial aid awards are insufficient.

We’re really excited about the work we’re doing in Chicago. We’ve shown that math circles can exist (and thrive) outside of traditional university environments, and that placing circles in schools and community centers–and partnering with local community organizations–brings more students, and a more diverse group of students. Our programs are currently growing faster than our fundraising–which is a great problem to have–so we really could use any support your readers want to give. We’d also welcome visitors; we’re excited to help people see real kids do real math.

After I left the bookstore that afternoon 34 years ago, I did come to love math–a love supported not just by math contests, but by wonderful opportunities to learn and do mathematics at Dr. Ross’s program at OSU and at HCSSiM, where you and I met in 1987. Without those programs, I would be a different person today. So thank you for drawing attention to this critical issue.

Sincerely,

P.J. Karafiol
Founder and President
Math Circles of Chicago

I’m sure many of you have heard the story that a tenured professor, as well as a non-tenured professor, were fired recently by the president, Simon Newman, of Mount St. Mary’s school in Maryland.

The short version: Newman, a private equity asshole, got confused as to where he was working and decided to fire anyone who disagreed with him, referring to disloyalty as the cause.

The specific “act of disloyalty” one of the professors made was to allow a student newspaper to report a (true) comment the president didn’t want made public, namely:

“This is hard for you because you think of the students as cuddly bunnies, but you can’t,” Mr. Newman is quoted as saying. “You just have to drown the bunnies.” He added, “Put a Glock to their heads.”

OK, gross and shocking.

But personally, I was even more disgusted by the story behind this story, namely his underlying plan to get rid of students for the sake of improving the college’s “retention rate” and thus its ranking on the US News & World Reports College rankings, that scourge of higher education.

The original article from the student newspaper explains Newman’s unfuckingbelievable plan. From the article:

Mount St. Mary’s University, like all colleges and universities in the U.S., is required by the federal government to submit the number of students enrolled each semester. The Mount’s cutoff date for the Fall 2015 semester was Sept. 25, and the number of students enrolled as of that date would be the number used to compute the Mount’s student retention.

Newman was obsessed with getting rid of students and revealed this in an email:

Newman’s email continued: “My short term goal is to have 20-25 people leave by the 25th [of Sep.]. This one thing will boost our retention 4-5%. A larger committee or group needs to work on the details but I think you get the objective.”

How was he going to achieve this number?

The president’s plan to “cull the class” involved using a student survey that was developed in the president’s office and administered during freshman orientation.

The survey was going to be given to students and started out by describing itself as “based on some of the leading thinking in the area of personal motivation and key factors that determine motivation, success, and happiness. We will ask you some questions about yourself that we would like you to answer as honestly as possible. There are no wrong answers.”

The actual plan for the results of the survey were a bit different – they would be used to help compile a list of students to get rid of before the deadline. Just so gross, and a wonderful example of how an algorithm can be used for good or evil. Please read the rest of the article, it’s amazing journalism.

Holy crap, people, this gaming of the US News & World Reports model has got to stop, this shit is nuts. And it makes me wonder how many other places are doing stuff like this and not getting caught. I mean, at least at this university the president was stupid enough to tell the professors the plan, right?

There’s a great article in the Atlantic that’s making waves on my Facebook page (granted, my Facebook feed has more than its share of math nerds).

Called The Math Revolution and written by Peg Tyre, the piece describes the recent proliferation of math education programs for young people, which include the old-fashioned things I grew up with like math team and HCSSiM, but also include new stuff I’ve heard about (Russian math circles, Art of Problem Solving) as well as stuff I’ve never heard of (MathPath, AwesomeMath, MathILy, Idea Math, sparc, Math Zoom, and Epsilon Camp).

What I like about this piece is it directly addresses something that has bothered me for years and has, frankly, kept me from devoting myself to creating or running one of these programs. Namely, the extreme elitism involved. From the article:

And since many of the programs are private, they are well out of reach for the poor. (A semester in a math circle can cost about $300, a year at a Russian School up to $3,000, and four weeks in a residential math program perhaps twice that.) National achievement data reflect this access gap in math instruction all too clearly. The ratio of rich math whizzes to poor ones is 3 to 1 in South Korea and 3.7 to 1 in Canada, to take two representative developed countries. In the U.S., it is 8 to 1. And while the proportion of American students scoring at advanced levels in math is rising, those gains are almost entirely limited to the children of the highly educated, and largely exclude the children of the poor. By the end of high school, the percentage of low-income advanced-math learners rounds to zero.

So my question today, dear readers, is how to address this problem, which I assume starts before kindergarten. Do we just expand math enrichment programs so much that they eventually become accessible to more people?

And beyond access, how could we possibly keep costs down, considering that the people who are competent to teach this stuff have other lucrative offers?

It’s clearly a transitioning problem to some extent, since once we have enough people who speak “fun math,” there will be enough people to train the next generation. And the beauty of math is that you really only need a stick in the sand (and time, and a devoted teacher and ready students) to make it happen.

Thoughts appreciated.

Hey if you haven’t read it yet take a look at this new blog, called Time for One More.

Gorgeous writing, and an inspiration for my new project on thinking about the elderly and technology.

Yesterday Slate published a piece I wrote for them entitled The Ethical Data Scientist. Take a look and tell me what you think, I enjoyed writing it.

One thing I call for in the essay is the teaching of ethics to aspiring data scientists, and yesterday some very cool professors from the Berkeley School of Information wrote to me and told me about their two classes on data science and ethics, one for undergrads and the other for graduate students. I seriously wish I could enroll in them!

Please tell me of other efforts in this direction if you know of them.

People who make their living writing and deploying algorithms like to boast that they are fair and objective simply because they are algorithmic and mathematical. That’s bullshit, of course.

For example, there’s this recent Washington Post story about an algorithm trained to detect “resting bitch face,” or RBF, which contains the following line (hat tip Simon Rose):

FaceReader, being a piece of software and therefore immune to gender bias, proved to be the great equalizer: It detected RBF in male and female faces in equal measure. Which means that the idea of RBF as a predominantly female phenomenon has little to do with facial physiology and more to do with social norms.

While I agree that social norms have created the questions RBF phenomenon, no algorithm is going to prove that without further inquiry. For that matter, I don’t even understand how the algorithm can claim to understand neutrality of faces at all; what is their ground truth if some people look non-neutral when they are, by definition, neutral? The answer entirely depends on how the modeler creates the model, and those choices could easily contain gender bias.

So, algorithms are not by their nature fair. But sometimes their specific brand of unfairness might still be an improvement, because it’s at least measurable. Let me explain.

Take, for example, this recent Bloomberg piece on the wildly random nature of bankruptcy courts (hat tip Tom Adams). The story centers on Heritage, a Texas LLC, which bought up defaulted mortgages and sued 210 homeowners in court, winning about half. Basically that was their business plan, a bet that they’d be able to get lucky with some judges and the litigation courts because they knew how to work the system, even though in at least one case it was decided they didn’t even have standing. Here’s the breakdown:

Now imagine that this entire process was embedded in an algorithm. I’m not saying it would be automatically fair, but it would be much more auditable than what we currently have. It would be a black box that we could play with. We could push through a case and see what happens, and if we did that we might create a system that made more sense, or at least became more consistent. If we found that one case didn’t have standing, we might be able to dismiss all similar cases.

I’m not claiming we want everything to become an algorithm; we already have algorithmized too many things too quickly, and it’s brought us into a world where “big data blacklisting” is a thing (one big reason: the current generation of algorithms often work for people in power).

Algorithms represent decision processes that are vulnerable to inspection more than most human-led processes are. And although we are not taking advantage of this yet, we could and should do so soon. We need to start auditing our algorithms, at least the ones that are widespread and high impact.

I’m excited to be traveling to Harvard next Monday to give a talk at the Data Privacy Lab. The projects going on at the Data Privacy Lab are privacy-related: re-identification, discrimination in online ads, privacy-enhanced linking, fingerprint capture, genomic privacy, and complex-care patients.

My talk will not be entirely focused on privacy – it will basically be a somewhat technical version of my book followed by my proposals for technological tools that could address the problems associated with opaque, widespread, and destructive algorithms (my definition of a “Weapon of Math Destruction”. Specifically, I want to examine the question of how we understand a black-box algorithm in terms of measuring its outputs (as opposed to scrutinizing the source code).

The Data Privacy Lab is run by Latanya Sweeney, a hero of mine who did great work in detecting online discrimination in Google ads among other things. I’m hoping to meet her first because it’s always nice to meet your hero but also because, as the chief technologist at the Federal Trade Commission, she can give me perspective on the kind of technological tools that regulators such as the FTC and the CFPB might actually adopt (or develop).

In other words, I don’t want to spend 4 years developing tools that nobody would use. On the other hand, I have the impression that they generally speaking don’t know what kind of tools are possible.

I’ve been unimpressed with the recent coverage of the Flint water crisis. The overall message is that there’s been a “run of bad luck” but that certain generous people and corporations are coming to the rescue. If you believe the reports, we should be grateful for all the water bottles being flown in from Nestle and Walmart, and we should rest assured that water filters are being handed out and installed, even though they are inadequate.

In many of the articles on Flint, the switch from Detroit to the Flint River is mentioned, as is the concept of water as a human right, but not much more is explained. Specifically, there are two important questions left unanswered. First, how did this happen? And second, where else is it going to happen?

When you think about how Flint residents got into this situation, it’s critical to remember it was directly caused by a suspension in democracy. It was an emergency manager appointed by Michigan Governor Rick Snyder that made the switch to the Flint River as a water source. I’ve talked a bit about which municipalities get their democratic powers taken away; turns out that process often involves poor people of color. The entire point of emergency management is to remove accountability from the actors who put people’s lives in danger under the guise of saving money. Rick Snyder is, unbelievably, still in office.

Speaking of money, what’s the larger story here? It’s that, as a country, we can’t seem to pony up the resources to keep up our infrastructure, especially when it comes to water. A 2012 report by USA Today found that water prices had doubled in a quarter of the cities surveyed since 2000. This is because federal funding for water and waste systems have been reduced by 80% since 1977. And that would make sense if our water infrastructure were robust, but it’s not. In fact it’s in crisis, and we’d need $1 trillion to update it. The result is widespread crappy water, expensive water, and privatized water system disasters. We just let it rot at the local level, in other words, and deal with it – or not – in the most expensive ways, when it’s already an urgent situation.

Guess where the pipes are the oldest and most decrepit? You guessed it, where poor people live. When we ignore infrastructure we are inviting yet another punitive tax on the poor, and as it happens, a life-long debilitating level of lead poisoning.

So, let’s answer the second question: where else is this going to happen? The answer is pretty much everywhere unless we get our priorities straight. And I’m not talking about water bottles.

Hey there’s finally been a New York Times column that agrees with me about how to raise kids, so I’m totally going to blog about it.

Seriously, I know that I’m 100% biased, as is anyone who tells you how to raise your kids, but I think Adam Grant has hit upon the perfect explanation of how I think about things in his recent column, How to Raise a Creative Child. Step One: Back Off.

The dumbed down version goes like this: yes, we all know it take a huge amount of practice to get good at the violin. But that doesn’t mean you should force your kids to practice all the time so they’ll become musicians. That’s confusing causation with correlation, the most common of all parental crimes. Instead, ask your kids to be ethical and trust them to find their passion.

The idea is if you give them a strong education in ethics, and then set them free within that framework, they might just decide they love the violin. If they do, then as long as you support their passion, they might just practice all the time and become musicians.

I’ve written a bunch about this exact issue over the years, because although I played the piano as a child, I don’t encourage my kids to play instruments. Because they aren’t begging for it like I did.

To be fair, this isn’t because I’m nervously trying to construct creative kids and want the conditions to be perfect. Mostly it’s common sense. Said plainly, why would I pay for expensive lessons that they don’t want? Why would I set myself up to remind them to practice when they could care less? It sounds like torture for everyone involved, and I honestly don’t understand parents who do it.

I grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts, a hotbed of striving upperly-mobile parenthood, and I was absolutely surrounded by kids – especially second-generation Asian kids – who were being forced to display precocity in all kinds of ways. These kids were miserable, and they hated their violins and cellos. Not all the time, and not in every way, but let me say it like this: very few of them still play music. (Whereas I do, and by the way my bluegrass band has a gig, stay tuned.)

I know, it’s not a lot of evidence, but I still think I’m right, because it’s parenting and people are totally irrational when it comes to this kind of thing, so bear with me, and read the references in Adam Grant’s piece as well, maybe they’re scientific-y.

Of course, it all depends on the definition of creative, which is of course not obvious and I could easily imagine the result changing depending on how you do it. Not to mention that “creativity” isn’t the only thing you’d want from your children. In fact, it’s not my personal goal for my kids to be creative. If I had to choose, I’d say I want my kids to be generous and ethical.

Here’s a bit more background on this very question. a Harvard Education School report called THE CHILDREN WE MEAN TO RAISE: The Real Messages Adults Are Sending About Values that found the following:

About 80% of the youth in our survey report that their parents are more concerned about achievement or happiness than caring for others. A similar percentage of youth perceive teachers as prioritizing students’ achievements over their caring. Youth were also 3 times more likely to agree than disagree with this statement: “My parents are prouder if I get good grades in my classes than if I’m a caring community member in class and school.” Our conversations with and observations of parents also suggest that the power and frequency of parents’ daily messages about achievement and happiness are drowning out their messages about concern for others.

When I read this report I performed an exceptionally biased poll in my own household and made sure my kids knew what’s up. And they all do, most probably because I am not forcing them to practice the piano.

Brussels is a pretty nice place for a hellhole (according to Trump). I got here early yesterday and walked around; obviously I bought a bunch (technically an asston) of chocolate and took pictures of impudent statues.

I know this sounds entirely unhistorical and arrogant, but I can’t help thinking that Brussels was created out of some indulgent American fantasy of Europe that confused Paris and Amsterdam and added a bunch of chocolate stores, beer, and waffles. Oh, and gold leaf.

It’s a great city; possibly it’s replaced Amsterdam as the place I’d like to live if I moved away from New York (which will never happen). It’s pedestrian dominated, there are plenty of sex shops, and the recycling bins are covered with graffiti. In other words, it’s got the right values and it’s not overly sanitized. Trump’s got it wrong once again.

I’m here for an annual conference called CPDP, which stands for Computers, Privacy, and Data Protection. This morning I attended a super interesting panel on privacy and the world’s poor. In that panel I learned about an algorithm being used to sort unemployed people in Poland. As is typical of many of the algorithms I’m interested, it’s both entirely opaque and high impact; the open information laws also don’t apply for inscrutable reasons.

Later today I’ll be on a panel in which we’ll discuss software tools that investigate privacy and data protection in the real world. Besides me, the people on the panel are working within the context of European privacy and protection laws, which are both very different and much more protective than we have in the states (although the UK is an exception). I will surely learn a lot, both about how people think about data and privacy over here and what the obstacles are to enforcing the strong laws.

There’s a new data-driven app out there called Kinvolved, featured this morning in the New York Times, and it’s exactly my worst fear. It tracks Harlem school children’s whereabouts, sending text messages to parents when they are tardy or absent from school.

When you look at the user agreement, it seems to say that the data is relatively safe and presumably not available for resale to marketers, but they also say they are allowed to change the agreement at any time.

Here’s my specific fear: what about when they go out of business? I’m thinking the data might be valuable at that point, and their investors might want some money back. And there’s a market, too: data brokers would love to get their grubby little hands on such data to add a layer to their profiles of poor black and brown kids.

This is a situation where FERPA, which is the federal child privacy law, is clearly not strong enough. Right now FERPA allows Kinvolved to be designated as “school officials” who have a “legitimate interest” in using and accessing any education records. And once they have that data, I don’t think there are real constraints to its use.

I’m not singling out Kinvolved for bad intentions; for all I know they mean well and they might even help some kids and families. But I don’t think the data the app is generating is being adequately protected, and it is yet again data concerning the nation’s most vulnerable population.

Bloomberg has a pretty amazing article today with two fantastic graphs. Here’s the article, but the graphs pretty much say it all.

Last night I had the pleasure of going to a Meetup given by Todd Schneider, who wrote this informative and fun blogpost about analyzing taxi and Uber data.

You should read his post; among other things it will tell you how long it takes to get to the airport from any NYC neighborhood by the time of day (on weekdays). This corroborates my fear of the dreader post-3pm flight.

His Meetup was also cool, and in particular he posted a bunch of his code on github, and explained what he’d done as well.

For example, the raw data was more than half the size of his personal computer’s storage, so he used an external hard drive to hold the raw data and convert it to a SQL database on his personal computer for later use (he used PostgreSQL).

Also, in order to load various types of data into R, (which he uses instead of python but I forgive him because he’s so smart about it), he reduced the granularity of the geocoded events, and worked with them via the database as weights on square blocks of NYC (I think about 10 meters by 10 meters) before turning them into graphics. So if he wanted to map “taxicab pickups”, he first split the goegraphic area into little boxes, then counted how many pickups were in each box, then graphed that result instead. It reduced the number of rows of data by a factor larger than 10.

Todd calls this “medium data” because, after some amount of work, you can do it on a personal computer. I dig it.

Todd also gave a bunch of advice for people to follow if they want to do neat data analysis that gets lots of attention (his taxicab/ Uber post got a million hits from Reddit I believe). It was really useful and good advice, the most important of which was, if you’re not interested in this topic, nobody else will be either.

One interesting piece of analysis Todd showed us, which I can’t seem to find on his blog, was a picture of overall rides in taxis and Ubers, which seemed to indicate that Uber is taking over market share from taxis. That’s not so surprising, but it actually seemed to imply that the overall number of rides hasn’t changed much; it’s been a zero-sum game.

The reason this is interesting is that de Blasio’s contention has been that Uber is increasing traffic. But the above seems to imply that Uber doesn’t increase traffic (if “the number of rides” is a good proxy for traffic); rather, it’s taking business away from medallion cabs. Not a final analysis by any stretch but intriguing.

Finally, Todd more recently analyzed Citibike rides, take a look!

There was a New York Times article yesterday entitled A Push for Gender Equality at the Davos World Economic Forum, and Beyond. It was about how only 18% of the attendees of the yearly dick-measuring contest called the World Economic Forum – or Davos for the initiated – are women, and how they are planning to force companies to bring more women to improve this embarrassing attendance statistic.

One thing the article didn’t consider is the question of whether it’s actually a good thing that women aren’t at Davos. I think it is; I’m proud that women have better things to do than spend their time in high-security luxury to disingenuously discuss the world’s poor.

Davos is a force of inequality. It brings together dealmakers in finance and technology, and also the TED-talkish Big Idea promoters and “thought leaders,” and it encourages them to mingle and make deals. And while they might discuss the world’s big problems – like increasing inequality itself – I’m pretty sure they try much harder to help themselves than to solve those problems. In any case, I have little faith in their proposed solutions, especially after talking to Bill Easterly on Slate Money last week.

Let’s just cancel Davos altogether, shall we? That will do the world more good than getting more women to attend.

There are two reasons to own a house. The first one is to live in it. The second is to sell it later at a profit.

These two reasons have led to two different housing markets in New York City. The first one what we might call the affordable housing market, and it simply refers to normal people who need to live somewhere but don’t have extra millions of dollars to spend. The second one is the luxury real estate market of New York, which is exactly for people who have large pots of investment money.

Those two housing markets compete with each other, and lately the luxury market is entirely dominating. This is partly due to the large amount of foreign money being laundered and funneled into real estate. (Update: the U.S. Treasury has said it will look into this, but some people are already claiming it won’t be enough.) It’s also partly due to general global inequality, which produces quite a few millionaires.

Finally, it’s partly due to the bizarre constellation of tax breaks we give new developments, even if only temporarily. It makes holding on to apartments relatively frictionless, even if they are empty, which many of them are. On a permanent basis owners of luxury apartments pay a tiny fraction of the real estate tax that other New Yorkers do relative to the sale price of their apartment (h/t Nathan Newman).

And that’s where we come to the problem. The people who want to live in New York are being shut out by the people who want to own apartment-shaped assets.

If you were a developer, looking for your next building project, you might succumb. Given the expense of land, it makes sense to maximize your profits and build 3- or 4-bedroom apartments that will be snatched up by Russian oligarchs rather than a large number of studios that will actually be lived in. It just makes you more money.

What should we do? Well, we could do nothing. In the long run we might have a city that consists of mostly empty apartments.

Or, we could decide that people should actually live here. In that case we should increase real estate taxes until things change.

Right now we create the exact wrong incentives. First, because non-residents don’t pay city income taxes, and second because we often delay taxes on new apartments and make taxes too low overall. If you think about that, we are actually setting up incentives for the situation we have: empty luxury apartments.

Instead we should make sure that luxury apartments pay more than their fair share of taxes, instead of less, and especially when they’re empty. Don’t worry, the billionaire owners can afford it, and if they can’t, then they can sell it to a mere millionaire who lives in Park Slope.

You see, if an apartment – especially an empty apartment – actually costs the owner a lot of money, they’d sell it, and they’d sell it to a person that would actually live there. That would bring prices down on those assets, because the rich people could simply shift their interest to the fine art market or some other place where holding assets doesn’t cost as much.

Finally, if real estate taxes went up, people might worry that their rent would go up too. But if the market as a whole became a market for normal people, instead of just for rich foreigners, the overall costs would become more reasonable, not less.

My 13-year-old took the SHSAT in November, but we haven’t heard the results yet. In fact we’re expecting to wait two more months before we do.

What gives? Is it really that complicated to match kids to test schools?

A bit of background. In New York City, kids write down a list of their preferred public high schools that are not “SHSAT” schools. Separately, if they decide to take the SHSAT, they rank their preferences for those, which fall into a separate category and which include Stuyvesant and Bronx Science. They are promised that they will get into the first school on the list that their SHSAT score allows them to.

I often hear people say that the algorithm to figure out what SHSAT school a given kid gets into is super complicated and that’s why it takes 4 months to find out the results. But yesterday at lunch, my husband and I proved that theory incorrect by coming up with a really dumb way of doing it.

1. First, score all the tests. This is the time-consuming part of the process, but I assume it’s automatically done by a machine somewhere in a huge DOE building in Brooklyn that I’ve heard about.
2. Next, rank the kids according to score, highest first. Think of it as kids waiting in line at a supermarket check-out line, but in this scenario they just get their school assignment.
3. Next, repeat the following step until all the schools are filled: take the first kid in line and give them their highest pick. Before moving on to the next kid, check to see if you just gave away the last possible slot to that particular school. If so, label that school with the score of that kid (it will be the cutoff score) and make everyone still in line erase that school from their list because it’s full and no longer available.
4. By construction, every kid gets the top school that their score warranted, so you’re done.

A few notes and one caveat to this:

1. Any kid with no schools in their list, either because they didn’t score high enough for the cutoffs or because the schools all filled up before they got to the head of the line, won’t get into an SHSAT school.
2. The above algorithm would take very little time to actually run. As in, 5 minutes of computer time once the tests are scored.
3. One caveat: I’m pretty sure they need to make sure that two kids with the same exact score and the same preference would both either get in or get out (because think of the lawsuit if not). So the actual way you’d implement the algorithm is when you ask for the next kid in line, you’d also ask for any other kid with the same score and the same top choice to step forward. Then you’d decide whether there’s room for the whole group or not.

So, why the long wait? I’m pretty sure it’s because the other public schools, the ones where there’s no SHSAT exam to get in (but there are myriad other requirements and processes involved, see e.g. page 4 of this document) don’t want people to be notified of their SHSAT placement 4 months before they get their say. It would foster too much unfair competition between the systems.

Finally, I’m guessing the algorithm for matching non-SHSAT schools is actually pretty complicated, which is I think why people keep talking about a “super complex algorithm.” It’s just not associated to the SHSAT.

I’m working through final edits today, and it’s terribly stressful, so I’m glad I spent last night with my three sons listening to their favorite music.

The most important songs to share with you come from Rob Cantor, who just happens to be incredibly talented. I want to see him live with my kids but so far I haven’t found out about any concerts he’s planning. Here’s my fave Cantor tune (obviously, because I’m an emo):

Next, my 7-year-old’s favorite Cantor tune, Shia LaBeouf:

And my 13-year-old’s favorite, Old Bike:

Just in case you think we only listen to this guy, I wanted to share with you the song that all of us sing regularly, for whatever reason. We make up reasons to sing this song, and it can fairly be called the O’Neil/de Jong family anthem. It’s called First Kiss Today, and made – or constructed anyway – by Songify This. Bonus footage from Biden:

This morning I heard some news from the Cuomo administration (hat tip Maxine Rockoff).

Namely, we’re set to get mobile tickets in the NYC subways:

In addition, they’re saying we will have wi-fi in the stations, as well as surveillance cameras on all the subways and buses. Oh, and charging stations for USB chargers.

My guess: the surveillance cameras will continue to function long after the USB chargers get filled with gum.

Yesterday at my Occupy meeting we watched a recent Rachel Maddow piece on the suspension of democracy in Michigan:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=V21PdoZEyzE%3Fstart%3D52%26autoplay%3D1

If it’s too long, the short version is that instead of having elected officials, some specially chosen towns have instead ‘Emergency Managers,’ who do things like save money by pumping in poisonous water.

So, as usual, my group had a bunch of questions, among them: what is the racial make-up of the towns who are in receivership?

Well first, here’s a list of towns currently under receivership, which I mapped on Google Maps:

You can interact with my map here.

And next I looked at a census map of where black people live in Michigan:

Taken from this website which displays 2010 census data

I also wanted to zoom into the Detroit area:

Taken from the Washington Post website

and compared that to the municipalities under receivership in the area:

Take a closer look here.

Just in case you’re wondering, that teal spot on the left is exactly where the Inkster is. And Wayne County’s government is also in receivership, but it’s a county, not a town.

Tomorrow’s recording of Slate Money will concern New Year’s resolutions. We’re talking about gym memberships and health classes, Fitbits and other “quantified self” devices, and the economics of Weight Watchers and other weight loss industry companies.

I’m in charge of researching the weight loss industry, which was estimated at $64 billion in 2014. That’s huge, but actually it’s dwindling, as people formally diet less often and instead try to informally “eat healthy.”

In fact, Weight Watchers is an old person’s company; the average age is 48, and Oprah’s recent help notwithstanding, younger people are more likely to be interested in quantified self devices which can track calories burned and so on than they are in getting together in person and talking with people about the struggle.

Also, Obamacare doesn’t cover weight programs outside of a doctor’s office, so that has dried up funds as well.

This is good news, because there’s really no evidence that weight loss programs work long-term, but they are expensive. They keep doing studies but they never come out with any positive results beyond 12 months. That’s because they don’t have any evidence.

For example, if I joined Weight Watchers, I’d pay $44.95 per month, although I get refunded if I lost 10 pounds quickly enough. I’d be able to go to meetings two blocks away from my house every Wednesday. The plan will auto-renew and charge my credit card unless I cancel it, which is tantamount to admitting defeat. I’m wondering what the statistics are on people who are paying monthly but no longer attending meetings.

If you want an extreme example of the current dysfunction around dieting, look no further than the show The Biggest Loser, which the Guardian featured recently with the tag line, “It’s a miracle no one has died yet.”

So, given how much money people put into this stuff even now, why are they doing it? After all, if we were expected to pay a doctor to set the bones of our broken leg, but it only worked for a few months before our leg started breaking again, we’d call the doctor a quack and demand our money back. But somehow with diets it’s different. Why?

I have a complicated theory.

The first level is the “I’m an exception” law of human nature, whereby everyone thinks they somehow will prove to be an exception to statistical rules. It’s the same magical reasoning that makes people buy lottery tickets when they know their chances of winning are slim, and they even know their expected value is negative.

The second level is entertainment. This is also taken directly from the lottery mindset; even if you know you’re not winning the lottery, the momentary fantasy of possibly winning is delicious, and you relish it. The cost of that fantasy is a small price to pay for the freedom to believe in this future for one day.

I think the same kind of thing happens when people join diets. They get to fantasize about how great their lives will be once they’re finally thin. And of course the prevalent fat shaming helps this myth, as does the advertising from the diet industry. It’s all about imagining a “new you,” as if you also get a personality transplant along with losing weight.

But there’s something even more seductive about weight loss regimens that lotteries don’t have, namely public support. When someone announces that they’re on a diet, which happens pretty often, everyone around them has been trained to “be supportive” in their endeavor. At the same time, people rarely announce they’ve gone off their diet. So you’ve got asymmetrical dieting attention.

That attention also has a moral flavor to it. Since people are expected to have control over their weight, they are given moral standing when they announce their diet; it is a sign they are finally “taking control.” Never mind that their chances of long-term success are minimal.

The third and final phase, which is the saddest, is guilt. Because we’ve bought in to the idea that people have direct control over their weight, when people end up giving up, they feel personally guilty and end up paying extra money for basically nothing in return.

Of course, no part of this story is all that different from the story of gym memberships or even Fitbit-like device acquisition. Seen together, it’s just a question of what quasi-moralistic self-help fad happens to be popular at any given moment. And there’s tons of money in all of it.