mathbabe

You might have heard about “the five love languages.” They come from a ridiculously popular book by Gary Chapman by the same name, and they are purportedly the following:

1. gifts,
2. quality time,
3. words of affirmation,
4. acts of service (devotion), and
5. physical touch.

Chapman’s idea is that, in order to be happier with your loved one, you figure out how they like to receive your love, instead of just doing to them what you’d have done to yourself. So you might like hugs and physical touch the most, but they might need you to say kind things to them. So you say nice things, and then they give you hugs, and everybody’s happy.

I like this list because it really does seem like some people respond more to certain things than others. Personally I’m a touch person, and someone who likes gifts seems almost fake to me, but putting them both on a list makes me realize that maybe we’re just wired differently. It helps me understand other people a bit more and reserve judgment.

I want to do the same thing but for work instead of love. The question changes from “how to you want to receive love” to “what motivates you to work?”. I’ve come up with the following list:

1. money
2. security
3. status
4. social connection
5. making a positive contribution to the world
6. relief from boredom/ organizing framework
7. passion

Ideally an employer would offer to people what they care about. Personally I care about making a positive contribution to the world, but most employers only offer money.

I’m the freak here, I guess. Most people would say they work because they get paid. But really it’s not that simple when you think about it. Some people value money past the point of security, which is why I separated out those two. For that matter, some people care about money as status, but on the other hand academics (generally) care about status beyond money, which is why I made status a separate category too.

The next three are self-explanatory, and I think independent, and for the last category I’m including musicians and artists, people who do stuff in spite of having no reason to think it will ever pay.

Well, my list might be imperfect, but I think it’s good enough to make one point. Namely, that most of those reasons are actually pretty much independent of money after all, so maybe I’m not such a freak.

The work versus money issue matters because of the countless discussions about what might happen if we ever get to the “Star Trek economy” stage of existence, where our basic needs are met and we’re capable of doing other stuff. When we have free time and the resources and security not to worry about food or shelter, what would happen next?

Would we all just play video games 12 hours a day and eat too much? Would we feel useless and dried up and depressed?

I think the answer is, it depends on your personality. If you are the type of person who works out of passion, this new world order wouldn’t slow you down a bit; you’d have even more time to pursue your thing. If you want to contribute to the world, or create meaningful social connections, you’d find a way to do that with likeminded people. If you’re an academic who wants to be the smartest person in the world, you’ll have even more time to do that (but probably way more competition for the title).

My guess is that the only people that would be deeply disappointed are the people who now really really like money for its own sake. I don’t really think there are too many of these people, but they are the very people who might create obstructions to the Star Trek economy’s existence, because they are both powerful and rich in this setup, and potentially have the most to lose.

Dearest Readers,

Oh My God! Holy crap!! I’ve got incredible news for you all. Namely, my best friend, who will be henceforth known as Sister Of My Sister, is here with me today to help dole out incredibly unhelpful, entirely silly, and possibly hurtful advice. Congratulations to all of you for receiving it!!

Before we begin, I need to mention my new hero, the woman who has slept with 3000 men:

Captivating! Is that a pole? What is that pole for?

You can read all about her here, my friends. Tell me in comments how much you love her too. What vim! What vigor! Also high on the my-list-of-favorite-people: this lady.

On with the main event! Readers, remember when I complained last week about running out of questions? Well, you’ve responded, for which I am very grateful. My trust Google Spreadsheet (soon to be the “Alphabet Spreadsheet”) is happily filled in with a dozen or so new questions. But that’s not to say it should stop! Please continue to add to my list, because why? Because it is a real pleasure of my life, which I look forward to all week and I am ever so grateful for it.

So please do a sweet Auntie a good turn and:

ask Aunt Pythia any question at all at the bottom of the page!

By the way, if you don’t know what the hell Aunt Pythia is talking about, go here for past advice columns and here for an explanation of the name Pythia.

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Dear Aunt Pythia,

I’m on the verge of graduating with a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics, and suddenly I’m wondering whether going to grad school is the right thing to do – there are a few subjects (mostly in Complex Analysis) which I really like, and I definitely will keep reading about them in the future. Thing is, I really don’t know if I have what it takes to do research in math. I don’t know whether I should try going to grad school and drop out if it doesn’t work out, or whether I should just be content with my bachelor’s degree and keep reading Ahlfors in my free time.

Thanks for any reply,
E

Dear E,

Here’s the thing. We never know whether we have what it takes for anything. At least we who are not crazy narcissistic don’t. So I’d say, if you love something, and if the signals are good that you are capable (i.e. your profs are encouraging), then follow your instincts. It’s a very good sign that you want to read math in your spare time! Go with that.

Or, in the words of my good friend Jordan Ellenberg, do what you’d do if you weren’t insecure.

Sister of My Sister says: go to culinary school.

Aunt Pythia and SoMS

——

Dear Aunt Pythia,

I find this article disturbing. Here’s an excerpt:

[O]ne of academia’s little-known secrets is that private college admissions are exempt from Title IX’s ban on sex discrimination—a shameful loophole that allows some of the most supposedly progressive campuses in the nation to discriminate against female applicants.

Consider my own alma mater, Brown University. In 2014, 11 percent of men were accepted at Brown versus 7 percent of women, according to U.S. Department of Education data.

Brown is hardly the only, or the worst, offender. At Vassar College, the 34 percent acceptance rate for men was almost twice as high as the 19 percent rate for women. At Columbia University, the acceptance rate was 8 percent for men versus 6 percent for women. At Vanderbilt University, it was 15 percent versus 11 percent. Pomona College: 15 percent versus 10 percent. Williams College: 21 percent versus 18 percent. This bias in private-college admissions is blatant enough that it can’t be long before “gender-blind admissions” becomes the new campus rallying cry.

Colleges won’t say it, but this is happening because elite schools field applications from many more qualified women than men and thus are trying to hold the line against a 60:40 ratio of women to men. Were Brown to accept women and men at the same rate, its undergraduate population would be almost 60 percent women instead of 52 percent—three women for every two men. . . .

Today’s [admissions] officials . . . fear though that if enrollments reach 60 percent women, it will scare off the most sought-after applicants, who generally want gender balance for social reasons. “Once you become decidedly female in enrollment, fewer males and, as it turns out, fewer females find your campus attractive,” Kenyon College’s dean of admissions, Jennifer Delahunty Britz, wrote in The New York Times in 2006.

Any comments?

Smart Guy

Dear SG,

Interesting. So you’re saying there’s a de facto affirmative action policy for men taking place in elite colleges.

The statistician in me needs to make the following caveats: some of these statistics could be explained away if we found out that high-achieving girls tend to apply to more places than high-achieving boys on average. Then you’d see many of the same girls applying to a bunch of places, for example, and the boys might apply to fewer.

As a thought experiment, say girls apply to twice as many colleges as boys. From the perspective of the college, among their best applicants they see twice as many from girls. Their acceptance rates, even if they had consistent standards across genders, would be lower for girls. Does that make sense?

Also, keep in mind that a college’s acceptance rate isn’t the same thing as kids actually showing up at college. It could be – and we know it is likely true, in fact – that the same kids are being accepted at a bunch of places and then saying no to all but one. Again, we have to be smart about this, which is all a crazy and inflated system. And without being on the admission committee myself, I really don’t know what’s going on.

Having said all that, I don’t know of any statistics that would make us think girls do apply to more places. I conclude that the stats from the article definitely warrants more investigation.

Here’s another thing to keep in mind. Girls, statistically speaking, are better students than boys, but boys tend to do better on SAT’s at the high end. Personally I don’t think this is all that meaningful one way or another, because both “grades” and “SAT scores” are somewhat arbitrary systems of judgement, neither of which are particularly convincing to me of inner intrinsic worth. Even so, it might be partly responsible for college admissions; colleges might care more about SAT scores than about grades.

I guess that’s what it comes down to: how do colleges decide who to accept? What are their acceptance guidelines like, and are they gender specific? I mean, we might find them discussing the “too many girls” situation, or, more likely, we might just find them trying out different processes until they come upon one that results in “a satisfactory student body.”

A cynical person would point out that what colleges really care about is future endowment contributions, and in our sexist society men are more likely to be the contributors to that. I’m not saying it’s not a factor, but I’m not sure it could possibly be that explicit; it’s more likely to be embedded in an algorithm or at least a process, as many such assumptions are. In any case I’d love someone with more experience in the admissions process at an elite school to weigh in.

Sister of My Sister says she believes that our worst suspicions about the college admissions process are true.

Aunt Pythia and SoMS

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Dear Aunt Pythia,

Which question that you’ve answered most affected you, and what was the effect?

Curiously Hunting And Obviously Sympathetic

Dear CHAOS,

Thanks for the question, it’s brought me great pleasure in thinking back at all the wonderful questions I’ve had the pleasure to answer. I hope it won’t bother you terribly if I admit that my favorite piece of advice wasn’t actually in an Aunt Pythia column at all, but rather was a mathbabe post called How do I know if I’m good enough to go into math?, which, come to think of it, I should have referred my friend E above to as well. Hey E, go look at that post!

Here’s why that post affected me. I met the wonderful young person who wrote the question to me, afterwards, and she told me quite earnestly how much it helped her. She’s now a thriving and ambitious math major at an elite school. What a pleasant experience, to be able to encourage someone like that!

Moreover, when I went to visit my math camp earlier this summer, I was told that this note had been shared with quite a few of the participants as a way to ward off annoying and competitive behavior; hopefully it helped, but in any case I was super astonished at how much it is needed.

I guess I’m saying that, this is the piece of advice that is closest to that fantasy you have, that you could get in a time machine and go back to your previous self and say something like, hey self! Don’t worry so much, everything’s going to be okay, and you can go ahead and start feeling good now! Because there’s really no time to lose when it comes to just getting on with your life. And that’s really the best feeling that an inveterate advice giver like myself could possibly feel.

Sister of My Sister says that that post and every other is why mathbabe is her hero.

Aunt Pythia and SoMS

——

Dear Aunt Pythia,

My wife of 5 years is a lesbian and I’m not a woman. We’ve known this for about 3 years.

As you might imagine this eliminates the kinds of sex that we find convenient to share with other people in most social settings.

We’ve taken to pretending we’re sexually conventional, even to close friends, because we fear that they’d be really awkward about it if we ever let on. Everyone we have told so far has made a point of avoiding the subject, as if they simply don’t know what to say, understandably I suppose. They’ve been supportive and kind, but awkward.

How can we avoid widespread social awkwardness without feeling like we’re deceiving our friends and families?

Accidentally Asexual Humans

Dear AAH,

Why are you two still married? Are there kids? If I’m a friend of yours, and you tell me this, and you don’t have kids, i’d be anything but quiet. I’d say, get the fuck out!

And that holds for anyone who tells me they aren’t getting regular sex from their partner – unless they have a very good reason, like an illness – and they don’t have kids. If they have kids, then fine, make an arrangement with your spouse to get some outside action while you keep a stable household and until the kids are in college. But for an unromantic atheist such as myself, marriages are not simply friendships, they are sexual arrangements. Moreover, to live a full life you want to at least have the option to get action.

You say you’ve been married for 5 years, and for more than half you’re not having sex. Moreover, it doesn’t seem to be ending soon. I just don’t get it. Your friends are too polite and confused to say what I’m saying now: get out, remain friends, and go find someone who can’t resist your manly self. There are plenty of women looking for a good man that would love to enjoy your company.

Sister of My Sister agrees with me wholeheartedly, but suspects there is some other compelling reason you’ve stayed with your wife and would like you to write back and tell us what that is.

Aunt Pythia and SoMS

——

Readers? Aunt Pythia loves you so much. She wants to hear from you – she needs to hear from you – and then tell you what for in a most indulgent way. Will you help her do that?

Please, pleeeeease ask her a question. She will take it seriously and answer it if she can.

Click here for a form for later or just do it now:

Yesterday I went to a fascinating discussion at the Population Council on child marriage in sub-saharan Africa. Specifically, we heard about the effectiveness of four strategies to delay the age at marriage among girls aged 12–17 in parts of Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Burkina Faso in regions with a high prevalence of child marriage (around 12-18%). The strategies were:

1. holding community conversations about the benefits of delayed marriage,
2. helping pay for school supplies to keep girls in school,
3. giving families with girls aged 12-17 a goat or two chickens in exchange for an agreement that they keep her unmarried for two years, and
4. doing all of the above.

They also had control areas where they did nothing except poll the girls at the beginning and end to see what percentage of them overall were married, had sexual experience, and had been pregnant. There were typically about 2500 girls in each of the three areas.

They also split the girls further, into two age ranges: 12-14, and 15-17. There are, sadly, many girls in that younger group getting married, sometimes without even knowing in advance that they were to marry, and not knowing or even meeting their husband in advance of their marriage day.

The researchers kept track of effectiveness as well as cost for each of the strategies, both per vulnerable girl and per “avoided child marriage”. A few comments:

• A local economic condition in one region – I think it was Tanzania – namely a situation where all the local coffee farmers were swindled out of their pay, resulted in worsening poverty and dramatically increased child marriage in that region.
• While giving a family a goat or two chickens might sound like a bizarre incentive to avoid marrying their daughter, it is common in Burkina Faso (but not in Ethiopia) to offer dowries in the form of livestock.
• In fact, the reasoning is often desperate and economic: I need these cows, I will give up my daughter for them.
• In Ethiopia, if I remember correctly, it’s a social bonding issue, where you are bound to marry your daughter to a neighbor’s son out of a sense of neighborliness. It’s also hard to refuse these requests.
• There’s also fear that parents have that their daughter might become pregnant before they are married, so they marry her off before that can happen.
• They also worry about their girls becoming “old maids” if they’re not married by 18.
• Different strategies to delay marriage seemed to work for the younger girls than for the older girls.
• Often the young girls who are going to be married young are also not going to school, so it makes little sense to focus efforts only on girls in school.
• As the closing speaker pointed out, these girls’ sexuality has been utterly commoditized for the marriage market, and their autonomy is basically nonexistent. In that sense, even delaying marriage from 12 until they are 16 makes a real difference in their negotiating power.
• Not to mention that, the younger they are married and start having babies, the more likely they are to live in poverty for another generation.

It’s refreshing to see scientific experimental design and data collection being used for such a good cause! I was really impressed by their approach and intelligence over at the Population Council, and I just subscribed to be notified of their future events and research announcements here.

Some of you may have seen the recent New York Times article entitled Teacher Shortages Spur a Nationwide Hiring Scramble (Credentials Optional). As the title indicates, it turns out that not too many people are throwing their hat into the school teacher ring recently. And given the enormous turnover, this is bad news for the profession.

I’ve got a general rule about such headlines that I like to follow. Namely, whenever we hear about a “labor shortage” in a given profession, we should think about four things:

1. Wages
2. Conditions on the job
3. Benefits, including retirement
4. Cost/ length of training

So for school teachers, we might break it down like this:

1. Wages – median at around $58K, has been rising a bit ahead of inflation if I’m eyeballing this graph correctly
2. Conditions on the job – much worse in the past decade due to the Value-Added Model, and other Education Reform measures which remove autonomy and force teachers to teach to the test
3. Benefits, including tenure and retirement – under relentless fire from gleeful Republican politicians
4. Cost/ length of training – sizable, which means that it might take the profession quite some time to recover

When you take the above points together, you realize that it’s not a salary thing so much as an environment that has become toxic. A capable person, however earnest, would think twice before entering such an industry. This is particularly true right now, when tenure is on the chopping block but the salary hasn’t risen to compensate for the added risk.

Teachers, as a profession, are not so different from truckers, who I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. We’ve got some skilled workers whose environments have been severely degraded, and whose salaries have not risen in response. Considering the fact that the economy is somewhat better, this means people are unwilling to go get trained and qualify for such jobs. Moreover, there’s a real reason in both industries to avoid lowering the barrier to entry; we don’t want illiterate teachers nor do we want dangerous truckers. The solutions are obvious: either make their lives better or give them more money, or both.

There’s one more profession that’s going through a “labor shortage,” namely fruit pickers (hat tip Tom Adams). This is because we have many fewer Mexicans coming in for work, and Americans are generally unwilling to break their backs for a measly $11.33 per hour median wage. This is somewhat different from the other industries, because there’s really no lower bar for training, and anyone willing to do the work is given a job. There are also no benefits or job security, and obviously conditions are horrendous.

Even so, the solutions are still obvious: make the job better or pay more.

I’m happy to announce that I’m on the Program Committee for Bloomberg’s Data For Good Exchange. This is a one day event, taking place on September 28th at the Bloomberg offices. It’s been scheduled to lead into the annual Strata NY conference which is run by O’Reilly.

In addition to the event, which will have speakers and keynotes by people like my buddy Jake Porway, there’s a competition for papers that contribute to the public good. The fact that I’m on the Program Committee means that I get to choose a bunch of papers which were submitted according to this call for papers, take a look at the contents, and rate them.

I’ve taken a quick look at the papers and they look pretty amazing. Stay tuned for more.

It’s time to get busy, people. I need to find futurist conferences to go to (and to speak at), I need to hobnob at cocktail parties. Now that I care deeply about predicting and shaping the future, I need to get on top of this shit.

As part of my research, I have stumbled upon Dylan Matthews’s brilliant Vox piece entitled I spent a weekend at Google talking with nerds about charity. I came away … worried. In a word, Matthews agrees with my post from yesterday.

He spent a weekend at an “Effective Altruism” (EA) conference at Google Mountain View, with many other “white male nerd(s) on the autism spectrum” and he came away with this observation:

In the beginning, EA was mostly about fighting global poverty. Now it’s becoming more and more about funding computer science research to forestall an artificial intelligence–provoked apocalypse. At the risk of overgeneralizing, the computer science majors have convinced each other that the best way to save the world is to do computer science research. Compared to that, multiple attendees said, global poverty is a “rounding error.”

This particular brand of futurism takes refuge in “existential threats” which they measure very carefully with lots of big powers of 10. They worship a certain extra-special white male nerd from Oxford named Nick Bostrom. From Matthews’ piece, where a majority of those at the conference were worrying about the risk robots taking over:

Even if we give this 10^54 estimate “a mere 1% chance of being correct,” Bostrom writes, “we find that the expected value of reducing existential risk by a mere one billionth of one billionth of one percentage point is worth a hundred billion times as much as a billion human lives.”

No, it doesn’t matter what that means. The point is that it’s a way of nerdifying the current messy world and thereby have an excuse for not improving things now.

Matthews sees through this all, in terms of their logic as well as their assumptions. Here’s his logical argument:

The problem is that you could use this logic to defend just about anything. Imagine that a wizard showed up and said, “Humans are about to go extinct unless you give me $10 to cast a magical spell.” Even if you only think there’s a, say, 0.00000000000000001 percent chance that he’s right, you should still, under this reasoning, give him the $10, because the expected value is that you’re saving 10^32 lives.

And here’s his critique on their assumptions:

…the AI crowd seems to be assuming that people who might exist in the future should be counted equally to people who definitely exist today.

Just in case you’re thinking that this stuff is too silly to be taken seriously, some of the people putting money into think tanks that worry about this crap include Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and other Silicon Valley success stories. The money, and the Google location, adds to the self-congratulatory tone. An event organizer made this embarrassingly clear: “I really do believe that effective altruism could be the last social movement we ever need.”

From left: Daniel Dewey, Nick Bostrom, Elon Musk, Nick Soares, and Stuart Russell. Taken from Vox by Anna Riedl.

I find this kind of reasoning very familiar, and here’s why. Anyone who’s worked at a hedge fund has heard far too many people with a similar “Bill Gates Life Plan”: first, amass asstons of money by hook or by crook, and then, and only then, deploy their personal plans for charity and world improvement.

In other words, this whole movement might simply be a way of applying a sheen of scientific objectivity and altruism to a vain and greedy impulse.

I’ve got my work cut out for me. Please tell me if you know of conferences or such which I can apply to.

I’ve been thinking about the future a lot recently, so I’ve decided to throw my hat into the futurism ring. Don’t get me wrong, this wasn’t an easy decision. Nevertheless I think it’s the right one.

It all started with fretting over the present. Things seem to be unraveling, and I spend at quite some time each day worrying about stuff like our country’s oligarchy problem, our racist policing and justice systems, and the overall lack of good middle class jobs.

So far that’s just a list of our present woes, but any plan to address them needs to incorporate a hopeful plan for the future, right? So naturally I decided to look into “futurism,” which attempts to anticipate and guide our future plans.

Here’s the thing, though. As described beautifully in Rose Eveleth’s Atlantic piece, Futurism Needs More Women, the field is currently clogged with white North American men between the ages of 55 and 65 who talk optimistically about super cool future technology, and living longer, and uploading their brains, and so on.

It’s is not a particularly appealing pool to jump in on, but here I come anyway. And, being a world class cannonballer, I’m not afraid of making a splash.

So, there’s a big problem with futurism right now, which is that, on the whole, they pretty much entirely ignore social issues, which as you’ll notice are highly entwined with my top three concerns, politics, racism, and the end of work (otherwise put: the only way to compete with robots is to become one). I plan to change futurism; I’ll be the loudmouth at the futurism conference talking about other things and how we need to plan. I’ll make this shit real. I mean, after all, why should the white guys have all the fun of deciding what the future might look like?

Before I go on, let me explain why women (so far!) have been reluctant to join the futurism movement. We remain unimpressed with their major visions so far: live forever, become one with a machine, let technology solve all social problems. Here’s why.

Living forever/ the singularity. Women get their period when they’re young, then they go through menopause when they’re old, and then they die when they’re really old. I mean, oversimplification, but whatever; the point is they are firmly tied to their aging bodies and are well aware of the ticking biological clock, and not just the one for having babies. Personally I’m 43 and even though getting my period is a messy pain, at this point I am deeply nostalgic for my youth every time it happens.

By contrast, men grow pubes at the age of 14 and nothing ever seems to change again. They might have even forgotten they ever didn’t have them. In any case men are more likely to consider the idea of putting their brains in jars – hooked up to the internet, of course – as a reasonable approximation of their current state of existence. I feel sorry for them. Being reminded of death once a month makes it impossible to be so silly. Or at least much harder.

Technophilia. Men – especially futurists – seem to love technology, and fail to cast a critical eye on anything that seems remotely “innovative.” I call this the “I win” blindspot, whereby people who are generally rewarded in a system seem to think the system must be great. After all, if you’re the one creating the surveillance software or analyzing the surveillance footage or sensor data on say, long-haul trucks, you’re getting paid really well to promote “progress.” Not so much the story for the truckers being surveilled, but whatever, I guess they should have learned to code.

I mean, that’s just one small example, but I could go on for hours. And I think women, and for that matter anyone who isn’t a successful white dude, sees both sides. That’s why we’re not jumping at the chance to join the technophiliac bandwagon.

Anyhoo, futurism is unbearably narrow at the moment, but I don’t think that should stop me. In spite of my focus on social issues, I have the credentials required to worm my way into the conversation. In fact, I have a convincing explanation for why their approach so far – into the probability of various future trends – is fatally flawed. Namely, they’ve got too few variables. They focus on technological change without taking into account human beings. So their Monte Carlo engine, if you will, of possibly futures ends up with only tweaks that they allow in their tiny little list of possibilities. I plan to add to that list. And given that they seek to influence policy as well as the individual’s forward-looking self, this list might matter.

Please congratulate me! I cannot wait to meet Ray Kurzweil in person and congratulate him on all his rings.

This is a guest post by mathematrucker.

There are a lot of pros and cons to being an over-the-road (OTR) truck driver, namely, one who spends weeks or even months at a time on the road. The pros can outweigh the cons for those like me who enjoy long highway trips. But this may be about to change.

A huge issue right now is surveillance. Inward-facing cameras that keep a constant watch on the driver may soon become the norm. Swift Transportation (the largest carrier in the U.S.) began installing them in all its company-owned trucks a few months ago.

Most OTR drivers are allowed to drive up to eleven hours per work shift and seventy hours every eight days. Their actual driving hours frequently reach these limits. That’s a lot of time to be in front of a running camera, never knowing for sure who might be watching you. If these cameras become widespread they are sure to cause many drivers (including me) to look for different work.

ELDs and Hours of Service Rules

One surveillance tool that is already well established is the electronic logging device (ELD). The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA, the regulatory body that covers interstate trucking) recently sent a rule to the White House for final review mandating that all trucks use them.

Federal hours-of-service regulations require drivers to maintain an up-to-date log book. Unlike paper logs, ELDs effectively prevent drivers from driving way past the legal limits. But they can also severely hinder drivers from driving short distances when they need to.

Most OTR drivers are paid by the mile—the more miles they drive, the more money they make. This provides a strong incentive to use all eleven driving hours per work shift. With paper logs, if a driver needs to exceed the limit by a few minutes to get to a safe place to sleep (versus stopping after say ten hours, possibly sacrificing some pay), they can. With ELDs this same scenario might force the driver into choosing between (1) sacrificing pay, (2) sacrificing overnight safety by stopping wherever, or (3) recording a logging violation to get to the safe place.

But many ELDs offer a fourth option as well: gaming the device (without tampering with it). Carriers can and usually do program some flexibility into ELDs. For example, trucks might be allowed to travel up to one mile below 10 MPH without the current duty status going to line 3 (driving), with resets occurring every time it does go to line 3. (Anyone catching a whiff of loophole here may want to hold their nose before reading the next sentence…) Many ELDs update and display the current duty status every second, but only record it at the top of every minute.

If the truck is not on a freeway, the driver can easily game such a device by alternately accelerating to around 45 MPH and decelerating to below 10 MPH once every minute, perhaps signaling a phantom turn to help avoid notice. To keep from decelerating too late, a smartphone can be used to watch the time to the second. Though no logging violation gets recorded, this technique does leave a trail of evidence on the device that might be noticed in an audit, but audits are infrequent. The alternative—recording a logging violation—will be detected immediately.

The FMCSA’s proposed mandate should require that ELDs record duty status by the second. It probably doesn’t.

The hours-of-service rules themselves are far from perfect. For one thing they do too little to prevent employers from depriving drivers of sleep. Ones who sleep nights are routinely directed to drive all night. Such orders went into my personal “go ahead, fire me if you need to” (for refusing) category many years ago, but this shouldn’t have been necessary.

The hours-of-service rules never said anything about time of day until a new rule was introduced in 2013 requiring two 1 AM to 5 AM periods in every thirty-four-hour rest break (such breaks reset hours driven to zero). Strong industry resistance caused this rule to be suspended in December 2014.

Of course, the problem of fatigue at the wheel will finally be solved when automation replaces truck drivers. Some studies predict it will happen soon. Anyone under the age of thirty (forty?) should take this into consideration if they are thinking about becoming a trucker.

Per Diem Pay

Due to a corporate tax strategy that has gained wide acceptance in recent years, income figures reported nowadays for OTR truckers are probably considerably lower than actual—perhaps by as much as twenty percent.

For many years the tax code has supplied OTR truck drivers with a surprisingly generous deduction called the standard meal allowance. For the past several years it has been $47.20 (80% of $59) per day on the road. Multiplied by 300 days (a typical number), this equals $14,160. The driver’s log book suffices to document how many days were spent on the road.

This sweet tax deduction sours into something called per diem pay when employers decide to get in the middle and “reimburse” drivers instead. They get the money to pay for this by reducing wages. Some companies report this nontaxable pay in Box 14 “Other” on the W‑2 but many do not report it at all; they are not required to.

Per diem pay is bad for drivers and good for companies. Companies mainly benefit from the reduction in payroll taxes. Per diem can also subtly reduce driver vacation pay per week: many companies pay 1/52 of the previous year’s earned income. Drivers also get socked with an “administrative fee” when per diem pay is used. I’ve seen this fee as high as 3% of gross income. The other downsides to per diem are too numerous to go into here. More info can be found in this article.

The reason I left my longtime, relatively well-paying OTR job five years ago wasn’t so much because my employer switched over to using per diem pay, it was more because of a deceptive “more pay in your pocket” ad campaign it foisted on drivers while per diem was still optional. Most drivers were not fooled by it. After spouting the same nonsense over and over for nearly two years, the company finally made per diem mandatory in late 2009.

Rather than resign immediately, I decided to stay on until the following June when my annual vacation pay would accrue. Without knowing it at the time, this decision would also bring me the million-mile safe driving award (during calendar years in which I had no preventable accidents, my paid miles at this company added up to more than a million by 2010). The purpose of these awards is mainly to promote the company image, but they do also look good on the resume, so I gladly accepted.

Closing Remarks

Returning to the theme of pros and cons, I close with a few pros:

• It doesn’t take an inordinate amount of training to get behind the wheel of a truck. Many say more training should be required—and they are probably right—but as of now it doesn’t take that much. Viewed strictly within the context of job-seeking my years of formal math education have served little to no useful purpose to date. By contrast, in 1994 after just a three-week training course plus three more weeks of paid, on-the-road training, I was earning a modest living doing something that didn’t even seem like work (it still doesn’t).
• One of the standard pros people cite is you don’t have a boss breathing down your neck. You do have one telling you where to go and when, but yes, the physical distance helps. Unfortunately inward-facing cameras threaten to obliterate the no-boss-breathing advantage.
• It’s real easy to get out of jury duty if you’re an OTR driver and you don’t want to go.

I’ve been enjoying thinking about ways for Uber drivers to game the surge pricing algorithm at Uber. I don’t know how it works, exactly, but I’m going to imagine that it’s along these lines:

• there are well-defined neighborhoods in a city. This seems to be corroborated by the way the Uber app works for both drivers and riders.
• in a given neighborhood, there are two groups: people asking for a ride who haven’t yet been picked up, and drivers looking to give a ride.
• If the number of riders is 5 more than the number of drivers, then it becomes a “surge zone” for some amount of time, say 30 minutes.

Of course, I made up the numbers 5 and 30, but I’m guessing it’s more or less of this form, and those particular values don’t matter for the rest of the discussion anyway.

So here the thing, Uber wants to keep their riders happy, but to do that they actually tend to want to avoid creating surge situations, since surge situations usually imply riders wait longer and pay more. On the other hand, Uber drivers prefer surges, since they get paid more, and sometimes much more.

That means Uber drivers have a great incentive to game the system and create artificial surges. One way they can do this is by waiting outside an area that might become surge, wait for it to become surge, and then go into that area and swoop up a rider.

But it would make a lot more sense for drivers to work together to do this. Imagine what would happen if all the drivers agreed to sit together in some central location, wait for surge pricing somewhere, and then assign people in order to go get those riders. Pretty much all the rides would become surge. Again, that wouldn’t make the riders happy, but it would benefit the drivers.

All they’d need to coordinate this is something like a walkie talkie system. Or an app. And oh, wait, such a thing already exists, and it’s called Blinkr (hat tip Alex Rosenblat). Instead of congregating in the same place, though, they had an even simpler idea, namely to turn off their Uber app, thus decreasing the local supply of drivers, then wait for surge pricing.

It’s something like an Uber strike, and it requires coordination, but I don’t think it’s illegal, right? I mean, Uber can’t fire them for doing this, since they aren’t employees, right?

I’m super proud to say that Alex Carp, a journalist who was present for more than half of Occupy Summer School last month, did a fantastic job of writing up the OSS experiment for the New Yorker’s Talk Of The Town column.

Here is Alex’s New Yorker Piece, called “Protest U,” please enjoy!

We also got coverage from the German Public Radio, which includes a picture:

I’m the blue-haired person on the left.

Anyone who speaks German can go ahead and tell me if it’s a nice piece.

What, what? My friend Becky Jaffe sent me this video of Tig Notaro giving advice:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7L0aPqvkS4

I thought it was moving and intimate, just like an advice column should be. What do you think, should Aunt Pythia go video?

Pros for Aunt Pythia going video:

1. the connection with the audience,
2. doesn’t have to wear anything below the waist,
3. can show nutella crepes in real life, no more boring pics.

Cons for Aunt Pythia going video:

1. maybe too much intimacy (TMI),
2. has to wear a shirt,
3. sometimes fakes it and bakes Pillsbury cinnamon rolls.

Please make a suggestion below if you are an Aunt Pythia fan. If you hate Aunt Pythia then I don’t really care what you think.

Readers! Dear readers! Aunt Pythia lovers everywhere should stop what they’re doing and watch this trailer immediately, all about the female orgasm:

It looks adorable, n’est-ce pas? Aunt Pythia planning to watch it in its entirety very soon. Stand by for a review.

But enough dilly dallying, readers, Aunt Pythia has a serious job to attend to! If you enjoy her intemperate, unreasonable ramblings, then before you go,

ask Aunt Pythia any question at all at the bottom of the page!

By the way, if you don’t know what the hell Aunt Pythia is talking about, go here for past advice columns and here for an explanation of the name Pythia.

——

Dear Aunt Pythia,

We had two interactions recently with the police and my wife disagrees with me if this is an example of “driving while white”, so I wanted your opinion of how this would have gone if I was African-American.

1) My 18-year old son was driving our Tesla on the PA Turnpike and was pulled over by the police. The officer walked over to the car and complemented him “Nice car.” And walked away without giving any other reason for stopping him. Do people actually get stopped to get compliments?

2) I was driving through Baltimore and looking for a rest stop. I took an exit and realizing that it was simply leading to another highway, I pulled off onto the very ample shoulder and then walked into the woods to pee. When I turned to return, I saw two Baltimore police officers with their hands on their holsters. They asked me what I was doing in the woods. When I told them they gave me a warning, saying I should “keep an empty bottle in the car for emergencies” and let me go on my way. Did I do something wrong? What did they think I was doing?

Why He Is Traffic-Stop Exempt

Dear WHITE,

Well, I’m also white, so I don’t have first hand knowledge of the counterfactual, but I’m happy to think about it with you.

I don’t know why anyone would be stopped for no reason at all, so let’s think about why your son was pulled over. I’ll wager it was because he was too obviously young to afford a Tesla, and the cop was wondering if he had stolen it. If that is the case, then the fact that your son didn’t appear overly nervous once he was stopped could have contributed to his not getting harassed further. On the other hand, imagine how it might have gone another way for the son of a black Tesla owner. The very act of being pulled over and confronted by a cop with suspicions might have freaked him out, not because he was guilty, but because he was aware of how cops treat young black men.

Similarly, why did those guys care about you peeing in the woods? I don’t know, but their hands on their holsters tells us they were ready for something violent. Again, the counterfactual is always missing, but then again unless you’ve been living under a rock it’s hard to rule out something ridiculous happening in both cases.

In summary, I can easily imagine how this could have gone differently for both you and your son had you been black, but I’m not sure that means there is something truly out of the ordinary going on in either case. That’s the thing with discrimination, it’s statistical rather than deterministic.

To answer your original question, I’d say that instead of thinking about specific events being white privilege events, think overall about how often your interactions with power are pleasant or unpleasant; after all, you have more than two data points. Personally I have gotten out of illegal driving maneuvers by crying, having kids in the car, and even once just because I had kid car seats in my car. I am most definitely a white woman and it has worked for me. Of course, those police might just have been nice to everyone; again, it’s statistics, and I can’t prove my white privilege, but I don’t doubt it one bit either.

Every now and then the situation is more clear cut. I was walking up Broadway the other day and I walked by a scene where a white man was getting a parking ticket from an black female cop. He was very upset about the ticket, and was swearing at the top of his lungs, stuff like, “This is complete shit! You’re an asshole! Fuck this ticket! I was only gone for a few minutes!” The cop said absolutely nothing while she wrote the ticket. She remained calm, and while I didn’t stay until the end, I presume she simply handed the guy his ticket at the end. I kicked myself afterwards for not whipping out my phone and recording it, but I do think it was absolutely inconceivable that if the roles had been reversed, and it had been a white male cop giving a ticket to a black women, I would have seen her acting in the same way.

Aunt Pythia

——

Hi Aunt Pythia,

A while ago, someone sent you a music video for “Dangerous” and you didn’t much like it. I just ran across this alternative video for the same song, and I think it meshes with your aesthetic much better…

But It’s Good! Don’t Argue, Try Again

Dear BIGDATA,

Very clever, I like it!

Aunt Pythia

——

Aunt Pythia,

Bad answer to the anal sex guy. I happen to like it myself, but seriously how many times does his girlfriend have to say “no” to having his dick in her ass before he listens? Your answer should have been more like “you first with a dildo.” Their tune changes very quickly when it’s their asshole being probed.

Answer

Dear Answer,

First of all, he might have been fine with a dildo up his butt; some people are just kinkier than other people. Second of all, I don’t think it’s great marital advice to tell your spouse to “shut up about their sexuality already.” That might work fine at work, or with an acquaintance, but with a spouse you’re really in it for the long haul and things could go badly if that’s your attitude. I stand by my answer.

Aunt Pythia

——

Hi Aunt Pythia,

Do you have any friends who just suck your positive energy away? I do. This friend always has something to complain about her life, with so much drama. She is a really dear friend too, so I feel quite strong sadness with her every problem in life. But when someone is just dumping their problems on you (I know she is more like sharing them, but still), how sustainable that relationship is? It is horrible to abandon people when they need you, but is there a good time/reason/way to restructure your friendship with someone?

Friendship Rest In ENjoyable Distance

Dear FRIEND,

I feel your pain. Or actually, no I don’t. But I do acknowledge your pain.

And therein lies the difference, and my advice. Make time for your friend to tell you about her problems, but don’t make them your problems. Listen to her, have compassion, smile and give her love and support, but don’t get yourself empathetic to the point of suffering yourself, because that’s not helpful to either of you. That’s the first piece of advice I have for you.

Second: indicate to your friend that your conversations are somewhat lopsided, and you’d like to discuss happier things as well as struggles, because that way it is more fun and forward thinking. Tell her three things you are grateful for from the past week, and make it part of your relationship that you talk about more than her problems.

Another possibility, if that seems unlikely or too difficult to handle: make your meetings about something, rather than straight up bitch sessions or coffee. Go to Magic Mike XXL with her, or take a walk, or take her to the yarn store, or get her engaged in a project of some kind that she would like. Make the meetings about that project and the future.

If all else fails – and do try a couple of the above first – give yourself a break and tell her you are busy when it just seems like too much work to listen to her. Wean her off of you gradually, and she will find other people to talk to.

Good luck!

Aunt Pythia

p.s. One piece of advice I didn’t give you is to give her advice on her problems. I do this by nature, so I assume you’ve already tried it, but the truth is I don’t think it helps very much. I mean, it helps me think I’m being a good friend, of course, but my experience is that people who talk a lot about their problems don’t want advice to fix them. Of course, some people do ask advice and take it, but they are typically people who talk only infrequently about their problems. And also, giving advice extends the time that you spend talking about her problems instead of something else.

——

Readers? Aunt Pythia loves you so much. She wants to hear from you, and then tell you what for in a most indulgent way. Will you help her do that?

Please, pleeeeease ask her a question. She will take it seriously and answer it if she can.

Click here for a form for later or just do it now:

Have you been reading about the shortage of workers in the trucking industry? Have you wondered why, in this crappy economy, they haven’t been able to find more workers? Here’s an excerpt from recent Wall Street Journal’s coverage of this worker shortage crisis:

Operators across the country are short 30,000 long-distance drivers, the American Trucking Associations estimates. The group projects the shortage could top 200,000 in the next decade. Average annual pay for long-distance drivers was $49,540 in 2013, according to ATA estimates. Hiring and wages in truck transportation have inched up this year, according to the Labor Department.

I’ve got a theory. Here’s what it is: they trucking companies aren’t paying enough. Funny how demand and supply and efficient markets go out the window when there’s a political point being served, though: Congress is considering passing a law that would allow 18-year-olds to be long-haul truckers. A terrible idea considering how younger drivers are much more dangerous.

Of course, $50K isn’t nothing. But on the other hand, truckers have to be trained, competent, and regularly spend many days on the road. Moreover, the current surveillance technology has severely degraded their quality of life, which I learned by reading about Karen Levy’s work on the industry. Also, new truckers probably make substantially less than $50K when they start.

Partly the surveillance arose from the very real risk of truckers driving too much per day – it was an attempt to make sure truckers were driving safely. But since the technology has been installed in many large-company fleets, the companies have used it to essentially harass their drivers, telling them when break is over and so on. This has worked, in the sense that larger companies with more surveillance have managed to lower costs, pushing out smaller and individual truckers. And that means that truckers who used to own their own business now reluctantly work for huge companies.

For an industry that has historically prided itself for its independent nature, this change does not sit well with drivers. The turnover rates are staggering:

When you make your workers lives worse, and you don’t compensate them with cash money to make up for it, you find your workers quitting. That’s what’s happening here.

Conclusion: we either need to improve truckers’ work experiences or pay them more. There’s no worker shortage, there’s simply an unwillingness, on the employers’ side, to face up to the facts.

There’s a provocative article over at Medium.com about women in tech. As the article points out in about a thousand ways, it’s not just a pipeline problem, it’s an environmental problem.

Fellow math nerd Rachel Thomas, the author, points out a bunch of sad facts about working in tech. For example, how VC’s prefer men, how men’s applications are preferred in hiring processes, how women get punished for negotiating and for being pushy whereas men get rewarded.

Having worked in tech myself, I can say the maternity policies are crap, the long hours are unreasonable, and the frat-like atmosphere exhausts me. No, I do not want to play ping pong during my lunch hour.

But having said that, I don’t think I’ve experienced the worst of it; I was already a grownup, with a Ph.D., when I entered this stuff, and as such I’m allowed to have stronger opinions than the average engineer.

The most interesting issue brought up in Rachel’s piece is the retention rates for those qualified for tech jobs. Unfortunately, both Rachel’s piece and this related NPR piece which Rachel points to only discuss the statistics for women retention, namely that about 40% of women leave engineering after they get degrees in engineering (and I think Rachel’s piece actually gets that stat wrong).

Presumably, that’s higher than men, but how much higher? And do women leave jobs more often in general, or is this a tech-related retention problem? What’s the breakdown on reasons why women and men leave? Can we address them individually?

These are important questions, and if we can figure out what is happening, we should. I’ve been thinking about how to grow the pipeline for girls and women in STEM subjects at the high school and college level, but it would be ridiculous to spend an enormous amount of time on that if, once the get a job, that job proves unattractive.

Update: In the subtitle of the piece, it says 17% of men end up leaving the field compared to 42% of women, with a link to this 100 page pdf (hat tip Ewout ter Haar). I still want to know how many women leave other fields to give more context, but it’s a good start.

Papers have mistakes all the time. If they’re smallish mistakes that don’t threaten the main work, often times the author is told to write an erratum, which the academic journal publishes in a subsequent volume. Other times the problems are more substantial, and might deserve the paper to be retracted altogether.

For example, if a paper is found to have fraudulent data, retraction is called for. Even when the claims made are outlandish, implausible, and unreproducible, but the authors hadn’t been intentionally fraudulent, there still may be just cause to seriously question their claims and retract. On the other hand, if a paper that was once deemed cutting edge and new is, in retrospect, not very innovative at all, then typically no retraction is called for; the paper is simply ignored. When exactly retraction happens, and how, probably depends on the journal, and even the editor.

Today I want to tell you a story in which that process seems to have gone badly wrong.

Elsevier, the academic publishing giant owns a journal called the Journal of Computational Science (JoCS) which published a paper called Twitter Mood Predicts the Stock Market (preprint version here) back in 2010. It got a lot of press, and even more, and according to Google Scholar has been cited 1300 times. According to media reports, the paper showed that Twitter, when it was enhanced with emotional tags, was able to predict the Dow Jones Industrial Average with an accuracy of 87% (whatever that means).

Full disclosure: I haven’t read the paper, but even so I don’t believe the results of this paper. People in hedge funds have been trolling for signal in all sorts of news and social media text-based ways for a long while, and there’s simply no way that they would have ignored such a strong signal all the way into 2008. If it was real, they wouldn’t have ignored it, and it would have faded. But I also don’t think it’s so real either.

Anyway, that’s my personal intuition about this, but I could be wrong! That’s what’s cool about academic publishing, right? That we could just be super wrong and people can say what they think and then we get to have this open conversation?

Well, sometimes. What actually happened here is that a bunch of people tried to replicate these results, which was harder because suddenly Twitter started charging lots of money for their data, and a hedge fund also tried the Twitter strategy that was similar to the one outlined in the paper, but everyone lost money*.

After a while, one of these frustrated would-be traders, who we will call LW, decides to write a letter to the editor complaining about the original paper. He even blogged about his letter here. In his letter he had two complaints. First, that the results were consistent with datamining, which is to say that there’s statistical evidence the authors cherry picked their data. Second, that if the results were true, they would violate the “Efficient Market Hypothesis,” and would surprise a bunch of traders with many decades of experience.

So far, so good. A paper is published, people are complaining that the results are wrong or extremely implausible. This is what academic publishing is for.

Here’s what happens next. The editor sends out the letter to reviewers. Two out of 3 of the reviewers respond, and I’ve got a copy their responses. The first reviewer is enthusiastic about doing something – although whether that means retracting the Twitter paper or publishing the complaint letter in the “Letter To The Editor” section is not clear – and uses the phrase “The original paper’s performance claims are convincingly shown to be severely exaggerated.” That first reviewer has minor requests for modifications.

The second reviewer is less enthusiastic but still thinks there is merit to the complaint letter. The second reviewer is dubious as to whether the original article should be withdrawn, but is clearly also skeptical of the stated claims. Finally, the second reviewer suggests that the original authors should be given a chance to respond before their article is retracted.

At this point, the editor writes to the complaint letter writer LW and says, you need to modify your letter, at which time I’ll “reconsider my decision.” The editor doesn’t say whether that decision is to retract the paper or to publish the letter.

So far, still so good. But here’s where things get very weird. After modifying the letter, LW sends it back to the editor, who soon comes back with another review, and importantly, a decision not to take further action. Here are some important facts:

1. The new review is scathing, passionate, and very long. Look at it here.
2. The new review has a name on it – possibly left there by accident – it’s the author of the original paper!
3. Perhaps this was intentional? Did the editor want to give the original author a chance to defend his work?
4. In the editor’s letter, he states “Reviewers’ comments on your work have now been received.  You will see that they are advising against publication of your work.  Therefore I must reject it.”
5. The way that was phrased, it doesn’t sound like the editor was acknowledging that this was not an unbiased reviewer, but was in fact one of the original authors.
6. In any case, before the final reviewer weighed in, it looked like the reviewers had been suggesting publication of the letter at the very least, possibly with the chance for another reaction letter from the author. So this author’s review seems to have been the deciding vote.
7. You can read more about the details here, on the complaining letter writer’s blog.

What are the standards for this kind of thing? I’m not sure, but I’m pretty certain that asking the original author to be the deciding vote on whether a paper gets retracted isn’t – or should not be – standard practice.

To be clear, I think it makes sense to allow the author to respond to the complaints, but not at this point in the process. Instead, the decision of whether to publish the letter should have been made, with the help of outside reviewers, and if it was decided to publish the letter, the original author should have been given a chance to compose a rebuttal to be published side by side with the complaint.

Also to be clear, I’m not incredibly sympathetic with someone trying to make money off of a published algorithm and then getting pissed when they lose money instead. I’m willing to admit that more than one of these parties is biased. But I do think that the process over at Elsevier’s Journal of Computational Sciences needs auditing.

* Or at least the ones that are talking. Maybe other traders are raking it in but aren’t talking?

Dear readers,

Do you ever wake up not knowing what you want to do when you grow up? And then you realize you’re far too old to feel that way? Well, that’s the way Aunt Pythia feels this morning. She’s in no position to give anyone advice.

And yet. And yet, it’s fun to give people advice! So here goes. Afterwards she’s planning to whip up a batch of delicious “Identity Crisis Crepes” to cheer herself up a bit. They’re going to look like this:

Identity Crisis Crepes have extra nutella.

Are you addicted to carbs like Aunt Pythia? Do you wish to demonstrate solidarity to the cause? If so, before you go,

ask Aunt Pythia any question at all at the bottom of the page!

By the way, if you don’t know what the hell Aunt Pythia is talking about, go here for past advice columns and here for an explanation of the name Pythia.

——

Dear Aunt Pythia,

A bit lazy to sugarcoat this. I’ve noticed that your personal history/internal biases come out very strongly on some topics and result in irrational/illogical conclusions/actions including banning challenges to your logic.

Have you noticed this yourself? Do you care? If you do care – how would you (do you try to?) address this issue (which I assume every single person suffers from)?

Curious About Rational Exchange

Dear CARE,

Why, no, I hadn’t noticed! Isn’t that why they’re called internal biases? If you’d like to point out specific examples, we can discuss further.

Come to think of it, there are certain things I’m happily opinionated and even stubborn about, but that’s what it means to have a personality, isn’t it? And isn’t that why people ask an advice columnist her opinion? Because the other person is bound to have an opinion?

Of course, one is free to ignore someone else’s opinion, even if it comes from a blogger. But I wouldn’t advise it (har har)!

Aunt Pythia

——

Dear Aunt Pythia:

My work history includes math, data, operations and government analyst jobs, and direct service work. I love collaborating and sharing ideas but I find myself frustrated at a lot of the shitty attitudes that are moving into this space now that its “hot”. I loved your four political camps of big data post and felt like it was one of the few things I’ve come across that addressed this thing I am trying to get my head around.

My problems are twofold:

(1) Not punching someone in the face when they tell me they want to “hack poverty” or any number of other things that speak to a critical lack of familiarity with the context of public interest or work for social good.

(2) Feeling left behind in the job race and shut out of the bigger conversation. I’ve been doing solid research and policy work on issues I care about for quite some time and I hate the idea that the even the president (given his community organizing background) is touting corporate tech as the place to find talent to help build data capacity for the govermment. How do I get my invite to the big kids table?

For now my plan is to keep on keeping on putting data to use in communities I care about and helping community based organizations build capacity around data use and service delivery but I need some help planning ahead.

Yours Truly,

BITCHY?

p.s. Sorry there’s not a sex piece to this!

Dear BITCHY,

I feel you! How about you email me (address available on my “About page” and tell me what you’re working on, why it’s important, and then we can scheme on how to get more publicity for you. I agree that there is far too much absolute bullshit out there, and I’d like to help by promoting substantial work.

Also, one thing about the four political camps. There should have been five, I left out the academic camp which consists of people who genuinely want to make progress on stuff like medicine research and are constantly frustrated by HIPAA laws that protect privacy. Take a look at Daniel Barth-Jones’s work for a great example of this perspective.

Love,

Aunt Pythia

p.s. Nobody’s perfect!

——

Dear Aunt Pythia,

What the…

Google Chrome Listening In To Your Room Shows The Importance Of Privacy Defense In Depth

…is this for real?

Overheard, In California

Dear Overheard,

Well, I know it’s for real, because my son showed me how to use the “OK, Google” feature on his MacBook. But in order to use it, you have to activate it in your Google Chrome settings (or at least that’s what they claim!).

As for how creepy this is, it really depends on how you think about it. I mean, Siri listens too, right? Is that creepy? I think it depends on how much we trust Google and Apple. And the answer is: a fuck ton. We let Google read all our emails already, don’t forget.

As far as I know, voice transcribing still doesn’t work very well compared to actually have the text of email. So I guess if I had to list the creepy stuff in order, I’d start with gmail.

Aunt Pythia

——

Hi Aunt Pythia!

Here is my probably oh-so-familiar story. I’m a grad student in pure math, looking to get out and interested in data journalism. I’ve looked through your notes from the Lede program, and think that working at ProPublica would be AMAZING (though likely a pipe dream).

Beyond material at the level of AP exams, I have no experience in statistics, programming, nor journalism. However, I think reporting stories stemming from statistical analyses or making interactive news applications for readers to explore data themselves would be really cool. For someone in my position with these goals, would you make some suggestions for skills to pick up, people to talk to or emulate, workshops or informational events to attend?

(Addendum/Clarification to the question: Searching the web for “data journalism” and its variants, I find programs and resources for journalists to bulk up their data-science skills or calls for programmers to get involved with news agencies. However, what concrete suggestions would you give to someone starting from scratch who wants to break into this field? I am somewhat more interested in analyzing and interpreting data than in making graphics.)

Thank you in advance!

News Enformer Wanna Be

p.s. You should check out Amanda Cox’s work and talks if you haven’t!

Dear NEW B,

I happen to have some good news for you. Scott Klein of ProPublica came to the Lede Program and told us he hires people based on their webpage projects. If they are cool, innovative, and newsworthy, then he is interested. This is somewhat different from other editors who depend on your ability to get your work published by mainstream news outlets.

So in other words, I suggest you create an online portfolio of work that you think is super interesting and newsworthy, and then you start applying for jobs. To do this, you’ll need to learn statistics and computer programming, but I’d suggest starting with the project and then picking up skills you need to do it. Steal ideas from various online syllabi and such, and feel free to enroll in an actual program or do self-study. Go to hackathons and learn quick and dirty skills.

It’s a long-term plan (or at least not a short-term one), and you might not get a job at ProPublica, which I agree is a dreamy kind of dream, but you might well get another great job, and in any case you’ll learn a lot. Also definitely collaborate with journalists starting now – many great freelance journalists already have great stories and would love to work with mathy/ computer people. Go to a local journalism school and introduce yourself.

Aunt Pythia

p.s. Amanda Cox kicks ass!

——

People, people! Aunt Pythia loves you so much. And she knows that you love her. She feels the love. She really really does.

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I spent the morning watching this one hour lecture by David Kung, who has been studying the gender and racial achievement gaps in mathematics. Interesting stuff, with historical perspective – math has a sad history – and a call for the end to passive lecturing and much more:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V03scHu_OJE

Watch it if you have time. You can skip to 7:20 to start.

Are you fascinated by the “debt as moral weight” arguments you see being tossed around and viciously debated over in Germany and Greece nowadays? It seems like the moral debate has superseded the economic reality of the situation. Even the IMF has declared the current Greek deal untenable, but that hasn’t seemed to interfere with the actual negotiations.

What gives? Many point to history to explain this. Besides the whole Nazi thing, or maybe exactly because of it, the Greeks keep reminding the Germans that they (and others) forgave half of existing German debt after World War II, with the1953 London Debt Agreement. The Germans have responded vehemently that such ancient history is irrelevant, and that the Greeks are a bunch of lazy olive-eating tax avoiders. It’s a dirty fight, and getting dirtier every week.

I maintain we don’t have to examine the history of 60 years ago to understand at least some of the moral anxiety. Instead we should look a mere 7 years ago, at the enormous German bailout of their own banks, which had invested quite recklessly in all sorts of the most risky financial instruments and, most relevantly, Greek bonds.

Start with the basic facts. German and French banks invested very heavily in Greek bonds, partly because they were allowed by European Basel “risk regulation” laws to set the risk of those Greek bonds at zero, and partly because they were just investing in anything and everything with a relatively high yield. Since Greek bonds were at a higher yield than other government bonds that maybe deserved the “zero risk” designation more, they naturally bought an asston of those.

[Side note: whenever there’s a market with a spectrum of products, the ones with the biggest yield for a given risk profile will be snatched up the fastest, because people want to maximize profits. We’ve seen that this almost always is a bad thing and creates bubbles very quickly. But it’s also the reason people are constantly inventing new products that hide risk. In this case they didn’t need to “invent” anything, because it was a political decision to designate Greek bonds at zero risk.]

There are two ways to look at this story from a morality standpoint. One is that, no matter who owns this debt now, the Greek government is on the hook for borrowing it and needs to figure out how to pay it back. From this point of view it was a mistake of the Greeks to issue too much debt and to spend it unwisely, while not cracking down on tax avoiders.

The other way to look at it is that, German banks should have known better to buy this debt in the first place. After all, it’s a free market, and nobody forces you to buy things, and after all if there really were no risk at all on it there would also be no yield (beyond inflation). But the very reason Greek bonds had yield was because the market was differentiating it from German bonds. From this point of view it was a mistake of the German bankers.

Either way, when the Germans bailed out their banks, they took what was a bank problem and made it into a taxpayer problem.

Have I oversimplified? I’ll also admit that, after that whole bailout went down, a series of “Greek bailouts,” all of which were clearly insufficient, made the European governments even more involved, and the Greeks owed way more on paper to the European taxpayers, which layered on the debts while destroying the Greek economy. But most of those bailouts were simply loans which were used to pay back the original loans. Put another way, the Greeks might not have needed bailing out if the original Greek bonds had been refused by risk-averse bankers in the first place.

This is not to suggest that there was perfect planning going on by the previous Greek governments. But I do think that, if we’re looking for who deserves blame in this story, we might want to circle back to the German bankers who couldn’t resist subprime mortgages and Greek bonds back in the early 2000’s.