mathbabe

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.

Well, here’s your chance to spread your Aunt Pythia love to the world! Please ask her a question. She will take it seriously and answer it if she can.

Click here for a form or just do it now:

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:

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.

Last Friday I visited my high school math camp, HCSSiM, where I became a nerd. I also taught there multiple times over the years, and in 2012 I blogged my lectures.

Why the visit? You see, we loyal alums of HCSSiM have a tradition of going back every July 17th to celebrate “Yellow Pig day,” which consists of a talk where founder and director (David) Kelly talks extensively about fun facts regarding the number 17, which happens before dinner, and then after dinner we sing “yellow pig carols” and eat an enormous amount of cake in the shape of a yellow pig. You can learn more about this ridiculous and hilarious tradition here.

Anyhoo, this year we (I went with other nerds) missed the 17 talk because of traffic in Connecticut but we made it for the dinner and carols. Luckily at dinner I had the chance to talk to Kelly, and I asked him if there were any new 17 facts this year. He told me there was one, and it was slightly mysterious. This post is an attempt to explain it a bit.

The mathematical set-up is explained here. Namely, we start with something called the Ulam Spiral, which is simply a way to label the boxes of an infinite two-dimensional grid with the natural numbers. You start at some place and then spiral outwards from there. Here’s a picture:

The center of the Ulam Spiral

OK, so the first thing to say is that, when you label the plane like this, primes tend to cluster along lines. I think this is what Ulam thought was cool about his spiral:

Primes are black. This is the spiral with 200 layers.

Now comes the observation. You need to know what a triangular number is first, though. Namely, it’s a number that corresponds to counting up how many dots you need to form a triangle. We say the nth triangular number corresponds to a triangle with n rows. Here are the first few:

You can also draw these triangles so that consecutive ones fit together to form squares.

When you highlight the triangular numbers in the Ulam Spiral, instead of the primes, then you get something that looks weird:

Green dots are triangular numbers within the Ulam Spiral.

OK so if you count those spiral arms, you’ll see there are 17 of them. But does that last forever? And if so, why?

Well, the answer is going to be yes. And here’s a rough proof. Rough because it uses asymptotic limits, so technically I will not show that the above picture extends perfectly, but rather that it eventually does look like a spiral with 17 arms.

A famous story about Gauss tells us that the formula for the nth triangular number is

Also, by construction of the Ulam Spiral, the bottom right corner of each “spiral layer” is an odd square, and that if we call that number there will be boxes on the very next layer, corresponding to the 4 sides of the next layer plus the 4 corners of the next layer.

Now imagine that there’s a triangular number right on that bottom right corner. That would mean that for some

or in other words that

This is when things get asymptotic. Imagine that is very very large. That would mean that is too (everything here is a positive integer), and in particular that the term would dwarf the term above. In other words, we could approximate:

My next question is, how many triangular numbers would lie on the next layer of the spiral? Well, as we said above there are spots in the next layer, which we will approximate by  and the triangular number coming after is which is bigger than corresponding to adding one layer to a triangle with rows. We will approximate  by  again ignoring small terms.

For that matter, the next few triangular numbers after come regularly, about spots after the first. Therefore there are about triangular numbers in the next row of the Ulam spiral. That comes out to which is about 2.83.

So far we’ve figured out that, when is huge, then after meeting the th triangular number on the th row, we will see two more, and get most of the way to a third, by going one more row.

Now let’s do that 6 more times. After traveling 6 rows past a triangular number, we will meet about more triangular numbers. But

which is very close to 17. So after traveling the Ulam Spiral for 6 rows, we will just about hit 17 triangular numbers, which will be more or less evenly spaced from each other.

What this means is that we should expect to see a spiral with 17 arms, but that when the picture is enlarged to include a very large number of rows, we will see the spiral shifting very slightly to the other direction.

By the way, I didn’t figure this out immediately. First I had a most delightful time understanding when, exactly, square numbers and triangular numbers coincide. In other words, I wanted to understand when there is a and an so that:

or

I might write this up in another post, but play around with it for a while if you get bored on the subway.

The Occupy Summer School students are organizing a clever demonstration tomorrow morning to protest racial and gender inequality. From the men/women pay gap to how the police arrest black and brown people for minor nuisance crimes, the girls from the UAI have figured out thoughtful ways of raising consciousness while having fun.

The plan is to have two tables. At the first table, there will be a “bake sale” where cupcakes will be “sold” for $1 to men but 77 cents to women, to protest unequal pay. They will be handed over using a plate which details many other kinds of gender inequalities. In actuality, anybody who shows up to the protest can get a free cupcake.

At the other table, we’ll be handing out brownies with toothpick flags, which are toothpicks with facts about racial inequalities taped to them. For example one might read, “While people of color make up about ​30 percent​of the United States’ population, they account for ​60 percent​of those imprisoned.”

Everyone loves free food, of course, but given that black women like Sandra Bland get killed in this country for minor traffic infractions, there’s a deeply serious side to it as well.

If you have time, please join us. The event will take place on Cadman Plaza near Tillary, in downtown Brooklyn, tomorrow morning from 9-11am. The girls will appreciate your visit.

When I was a young idealistic mother, pregnant with my first kid, I had this crazy idea that I’d dress my kids in gender neutral clothing, like they have on Star Trek. In fact my actual goal was to get them Star Trek uniforms, but I knew that might be slightly difficult. It was 1999 and we were all worried about Y2K.

Little did I realize, until after the kiddo was born, how difficult it would be to get anything remotely gender neutral. Especially because I was rarely willing to spend lots of money on clothes I knew would be immediately outgrown, I ended up shopping at places like Toys R Us and similar, and man oh man are those clothes gendered. There’s a pink section and a royal blue and red section. Nothing in between, and no overlap.

Well, things have changed in the past 16 years, and nowadays there are clothing companies deliberately creating kids clothing that doesn’t have the awful princess/superhero dichotomy embedded into every garment. According to this Bloomberg article, there are now pink and purple clothes for boys and dinosaur, pirate, and science clothes for girls. Svaha, for example, sets itself up as a place that makes “clothes that empower your children.” Here’s an example of a girls’ shirt:

There’s also a boys’ shirt, also pink, with flowers and test tubes. That would have been great for my first son, whose favorite color was, as he described it at the time, “light red.”

A couple of things. First, these shirts are $25. That’s approximately 4 times more than these shirts that are standard issue “boy” clothes. Partly that’s just because it’s not a concept that’s really taken off, so we don’t have huge factories in Bangladesh churning out these shirts at ridiculous rates. But even so, it means that, like organic food, open-ended gender categorical clothing is firmly within the realm of the well-off parent.

Second, I don’t think it’s all that reasonable to say a shirt “empowers” a kid. Most times, when a kid is defined externally, through a shirt or a social convention or an adult’s comment, or even another kid’s comment, it’s an exercise in limiting that kid, not expanding him or her. Kids assume they can do anything until we tell them otherwise. When you say to a young girl, “You can be a scientist too, you know!” she thinks, “I never thought I couldn’t. Wait, why should I think I couldn’t?”. It’s not until they’re teenagers that they get this stuff, and can have a critical mindset about it.

In other words, I’m going back to Star Trek uniforms for everyone. The great thing about them is how utterly vapid they are of style or message. If you had to pin a message on to them, it would be an awesome (but distant) future.

Yesterday, as I was accompanying Adam Reich to the Occupy Summer School on the downtown 2 train, he pointed over my shoulder at someone reading a Metro, because the girls were on the front page:

We also were on the second page:

After I got to the UAI, the high school where we run Occupy Summer School, I found the online version of the Metro story as well, which is also exciting.

Since Occupy Summer School (OSS) is half over, I think it’s a good time to update you on what’s been happening.

• Last Monday we introduced ourselves, met the students, talked a little bit about Occupy, agreeable disagreement, and had a discussion about what they wanted to focus on using “stack.” Among the issues they came up with: inequality, Black Lives Matter, taxing the rich, how teenagers are unfairly targeted, and gender issues.
• Tuesday Ale and Mo, a high school activist, came and talked to the girls about activism. We discussed how organizing actually works, what were the props for events, like stickers, flyers, signs and banners, how to get the word out among networks via text or twitter or other social media, and so on. We ended the day by quickly planning a protest against overly lengthy standardized tests.
• Wednesday Tamir’s friends from Local 79 came and talked about unions and union organizing. The girls didn’t know much about unions, and were interested to learn how power can be created through numbers. 
• Thursday Gerald provoked a fantastic discussion on #BlackLivesMatter and related topics. This was the first time where the girls really took over the discussion and the grownups in the room were merely listening and every now and then joining the discussion.
• Friday Marni dazzled the girls with her approach to creative protests. She brought her own entourage, which ended up being how we got into the Metro. The day ended by planning a bake sale where women would be charged 78 cents and men one dollar for the same brownies, to illustrate the difference in pay.
• This Monday I spoke to the girls about “why high school is free but college is expensive,” and then about debt more generally. We ended the day by planning a protest around a $100 ticket one of the girls had gotten for “doubling up” in the subway with her cousin, who didn’t have a student Metro card. The demand was to be unlimited metro rides for high school students on all days, not just school days.
• Yesterday Adam came and talked to them about sociology, what is power (power is the opposite of dependence), and his work helping orgainze workers at Walmart. By the end of it he had two volunteers who wanted to join the cause.

I can’t wait for the rest of OSS! I’ll write another update at the end of next week when it’s over.

As you already know, Puerto Rico is in a debt crisis. It’s unsustainable – take a look at some of the numbers – and people are suffering. There’s very high prices, few jobs, and on top of that there’s a terrible drought as well. I’m trying this week to learn what some of the details are of this situation, which is incredibly complicated because Puerto Rico is a U.S. commonwealth, not a state, and has historically been ignored by the political system.

Here’s what I know. The bond markets for Puerto Rico have historically been attractive to investors because the bonds are “triple exempt,” which basically means no taxes are applicable to them. This made it too easy for Puerto Rico to borrow money and has put it in a hole, very analogous to the Greek situation. And now we have to decide how much the people should suffer for the results of the bond markets.

Yesterday I reblogged a post by Marc Joffe, who argued that the U.S. should extend Chapter 9 to Puerto Rico. Hypothetically this would allow Puerto Rico to declare bankruptcy and restructure its debts in some reasonable way. However, as Kristi Culpepper explained in this Medium piece (hat tip Tom Adams), it actually wouldn’t give Puerto Rico the relief that it needs, first of all because it would redefine Puerto Rico as a “state” but states are not eligible to declare bankruptcy, and secondly because the corporate bonds issued by Puerto Rico’s public corporations have a special status that also prevents them from restructuring.

Culpepper also notes in her piece that people who cry foul at the concept of restructuring debt after it has been issued can rest assured that there is precedent for it. Personally, I don’t even understand that complaint; surely everyone realizes that any debt might go into default, and it hardly matters exactly what that procedure looks like.

Culpepper recommends something else entirely, namely a federal financial control board. The idea is that there’s also precedent for this, in the 1990’s in Washington D.C.. However, it would essentially mean handing over control over its finances to the board. Culpepper notes that this could even happen without consent. I think the Puerto Rican people may have something to say about this. She also suggests we could provide liquidity for Puerto Rico if we wanted, although it might look something like a bailout.

The biggest problem is that, even now, no politician seems to really care about Puerto Rico, except to fight against it becoming a state.

Today I want to tell you about $heriff, an awesome new tool I learned about recently. It’s currently an add-on to the Firefox and IE browsers, but it will be compatible with Chrome soon. I mention this because I think you will want to use it, partly for the good of scientific discovery, but partly for your own good.

Because here’s what $heriff does for you. It allows you to see how prices for goods you’re interested in buying would change depending on where the request is coming from. And sometimes the answer is “a lot,” even on Staples.com or Amazon.com.

I talked to one of the creators, Nikolaos Laoutaris, who works as a computer science researcher in Barcelona. Nikos described how he came across the idea of creating $heriff. Namely, he and a friend were discussing their upcoming vacation to a town in Austria, and they were both looking into booking the same type of room at the same hotel (at the same time, since they were doing it over Skype) and they were seeing very different prices.

The way it actually works is that there’s a way to “check” prices when you come across one, and the results pop up in a separate window. Here’s a screenshot of what happened with Nikos showed me $heriff checking on the price of a fancy camera at digitalrev.com:

The list corresponds to what price showed up when a bunch of servers at academic institutions were asked to send a price request that $heriff extracted from the local webpage. To be clear, your personal request for price, coming from your browser, might depend on location as well as your cookies and referral url, among other things, but these other prices correspond to “clean browsers,” with no browsing history, and no login history, making a request from a specific location. So those price variants correspond to location changes only.

There’s also a space below for “Results from local users,” and this is where you come in. If there’s a person with a $heriff add-on in your local area, the idea would be to use the information your browser collects to allow someone to compare their price with your price. In this way we would (slowly) also learn how prices change depending on browsing history. The more people who use $heriff and donate their data to the project (third party cookies, some browsing history, and prices), the faster we will learn about how prices vary.

Among other things, this could be a way of figuring out how to intentionally set your input data so that you get the best price for a given product.

A few notes:

• Local sales tax and shipping costs are valid reasons for prices to depend on location of the buyer, but they are typically added later, after the prices are shown.
• It’s possible that tariffs come into play, but they don’t seem consistent. Also, the prices vary too much to be accounted for by tariffs.
• Nikolaos Laoutaris and his colleagues have also been doing great work looking into how people are tracked, and how such information is used to steer them into environments of “search discrimination,” which means that which products or offers they are shown changes, rather than the prices themselves.
• Also, he’s part of a cool project called the Data Transparency Lab.

Get started with $heriff or learn more about Nikos’s work, by going here.

Yesterday i had the good fortune to interview Sonja Starr, who has been researching evidence-based sentencing models and wrote this New York Times op-ed on the subject.

If you haven’t heard about them, they are “recidivism risk” models being widely used by judges – in 20 states at least – to help determine sentencing lengths. Different judges will use them differently, but think of them as one factor in deciding how long someone convicted of a crime goes to jail. Recidivism refers to the concept of returning to jail, so high recidivism risk means someone is deemed by this model to be likely to return to jail, and when a judge sees that, they typically put them in jail for longer.

Moreover, the attributes which go into recidivism models are often proxies for race and class, which means that, hidden underneath the computer code, a given judge is essentially putting someone away for longer because they are poor.

So, there are lots of issues, but one thing I asked her to talk to me about was whether recidivism is the right question in the first place. After all, when we consider recidivism we are judging someone more harshly if “people like them,” however that is defined, have recommitted crimes after being in jail. In other words, we are judging them more harshly because we suspect they might commit a crime in the future. This is Minority Report type stuff.

The other side of the argument is that judges are explicitly told to decide on sentencing based on multiple factors, and always have been. Namely:

1. Punishment for the crime that was committed (“just deserts”)
2. deterrence for others who will want to avoid prison,
3. the public good – we want to protect people from criminal acts, and
4. rehabilitation, where we prepare the prisoner to be a well-functioning member of society after they leave prison.

The third goal, that of protecting the public, is where recidivism comes in. If we have good reason to believe the person will commit yet another crime, we want to keep them away from doing so, or even better decrease their recidivism risk with various methods. A few problems, however:

• The models don’t measure the effect of prison on recidivism risk.
• In fact they don’t measure how recidivism risk changes at all.
• The recidivism risk models are probably amplifying that third factor in judges’ sentencing opinions.
• Drug offenders have higher recidivism risks than people who commit violent crime, but we really only care about the latter in terms of the public good.

After thinking this through, I’m pretty convinced that, aside from using problematic inputs in recidivism models, we need to carefully examine how we want to weight those four factors.

Occupy Summer School is going great! Hopefully today we’ll start a blog of some sort to document the goings on. And, as promised, I don’t have a lot of time.

However, I did want to share this with you, keeping in mind I have no idea how representative it is:

Quick question: how often did women of yore get leather stains on their light colored hosiery? Is that really a thing?

I’m very excited for the first day of Occupy Summer School. It will run for three weeks, every morning, in downtown Brooklyn, so I’m not sure how much blogging I’ll be doing. Hopefully I’ll find time to document some of what’s happening. We’re very excited about the line-up, and we have high hopes for the final event.

Today we introduce the kids to ourselves and Occupy, we talk about the next three weeks, we ask them to introduce themselves to us, we ask what they are planning to get out of the experience, and of course we eat donuts.

Readers!! Dear friends! Aunt Pythia is overwhelmed with happiness. She is currently sitting in the middle of the woods scribbling away inefficiently on an android tablet, doing her best to deliver a knock-out advice column for your reading pleasure. It’s absolutely nuts that she can accomplish this fear considering her environment, but that’s just how much she loves you.

Definitely not as hot as Manhattan.

Please enjoy being rustic with Aunt Pythia!

Oh, and before you leave,

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,

Do you dream of composing the perfect Aunt Pythia question, complete with awesome sign-off? I guess you don’t, but maybe you have the same issue with Dan Savage?

That’s my problem. I just can’t stop obsessing and find myself so jealous of the problems of others. Why can’t I be “an intellectual property lawyer, who is launching a big data business with a former colleague/lover, who has just given up lesbianism and decided to become a man, and who can’t quite decide on how to deal with her residual feelings of attraction for said business partner”?

Or, what about wanting to be able to write “I’m completing my junior year majoring in Clown and, while I would love to go to graduate school, just feel I don’t measure up against my classmates who are so ahead they’re already working on Advanced Buffoonery  and researching theoretical foundations integrating hijinks, pratfalls, and farce. I feel like a Paul Reubens amidst all these future Lucys. Can I make it?”

With awesome problems like those, how can my mundane life make it onto the hallowed pixels of an AP page? I’m afraid I’m going to start creating a mini-crisis in my life, just to have some entertaining material for you. Help!

Lousy Sign-off Doesn’t Trump Really Interesting Person

Dear LSDTRIP,

I just can’t believe I figured out how to copy and paste on a tablet. Very excited over here.

Great sign off by the way. I get the impression it’s accurate as well.

Here’s the thing. You don’t need complicated problems. Asking how to feel happy or even non suicidal in the midst of everyday life is already hard and interesting. And I would prefer genuine kindness over being entertained any day.

As for the question of whether I dream of asking question, no. I have always wanted to give advice more than ask it. Probably a personality defect but there it is.

Aunt Pythia

Aunt Pythia,

I have a math question. I am writing a series of short stories, based the Many-worlds theory of Quantum Mechanics. The stories postulate (in contrast to current theory, science fiction, you know) that there is a way to pass information between universes. Naturally in an infinite number of universes, some, an infinite number, use this technology, like painting, photography, writing, mosaics, film, TV, and the Internet, for porn.

My questions is, if the resolution of every quantum event creates at least two new universes, what is the cardinality of that infinity? It seems like aleph-null but it’s been a long time since my last legitimate use of infinities.

No cats were harmed in the forming of this question.

Slim Odds And Possible

Dear SOAP,

Is this the day for weird questions? I mean don’t you need to tell me what a quantum event is and how often to expect a quantum event? Does it happen every time someone passes porn between universes? Even if that is the case I would need to know there are a positive number of horny people in existence.

Unless I am being dumb, I don’t have sufficient information here.

Aunt Pythia

——

Aunt Pythia,

I think I’m in love with my best friend. She told me about a year ago that she wasn’t interested in romantic relationships because her ex-boyfriend hurt her / she hurt him / they had a bad breakup. I haven’t told her my feelings, because of a variety of reasons, including I wanted to tell her in person (we live on opposite coasts of the US), I don’t want to hurt her (she is going through some serious stuff right now, and I don’t want to add to that), I have literally zero romantic experience and I don’t want to fuck things up with her (I kind of feel like I’m going to fuck up my first few relationships), and last but not least I’m bad at talking. We’re going to college together next fall. I want to tell her at some point in the future, because of some kind of honesty idea and also it seems unfair to try and get rid of these feelings without asking her. What do you think I should do?

Having Equanimous Love Problem

Dear HELP,

First of all thanks for the perfect sign off and straight forward letter. Although not sure you are equanimous.

Next, believe me, you are in love. No need to say you think maybe you are. Babe, you got it bad.

Third, you want to tell her because love demands it of us. It has nothing to do with a sense of honesty or fairness. Love has its own logic, or illogic, and we are slaves to it. That’s OK.

Seeing as you asked, I say go for it. Make it happen my friend. Which is to say: tell her you love her in a dramatic and romantic and absolutely unmistakable way. Be that guy who really spills out his guts and lays it on the table.

You know what there isn’t enough of nowadays? I’ll tell you what. Gut spilling. We are all so careful not to offend or appear vulnerable we forget that none of that really matters. What really matters is living life fully and taking chances and going out on a limb and being the person you always wanted to be.

And here’s the thing about it. It’s not really a risk. If she says no you will be crushed, to be sure, but in fact you will be crushed if you say nothing. It will just take longer and feel less courageous. Also she’s your best friend so I imagine we can trust her not to be cruel.

Tell me how it goes, and good luck!

Aunty P

P.s. nobody has experience at your age.
P.P.s. if you’re worried about talking then write a letter of a song or a poem.
P.P.P.s. ignore her bad ex. Everyone gets over their bad exes eventually. Plus it’s been a year. Don’t ignore her current problems though. Just tell her how much you want to be there for her.

——

Aunt Pythia,

We clearly have a long way to go still for getting more girls and women into STEM careers, but there has been a lot of progress as well. For example, my department has a pretty M/F balanced group of faculty and grad students. I also notice there are various programs and events for women and minorities in mathematics, which appear to build some lasting professional relationships and you know, like,  friendships.

My gripe is that many of these programs are *exclusively* intended for women, leaving minority men, especially black men, out in the cold while universities are patting themselves on the back for publicly fulfilling their diversity initiatives. I don’t think there’s a great conspiracy behind this, just that there aren’t very man black men in STEM fields, particularly math, to let everyone know- Hey! We’re here too!!

Comparatively, women, black women, uh literally any other group you could reasonably get higher education statistics on, is doing better than we are. Most of these programs aren’t helping us, and I know of none specifically designed for us. You probably know the statistics better than I do, but according to this article [http://chronicle.com/article/Black-Man-in-the-Lab/149565/] from 1992-2012 there were only 203 black men that got math PhDs. Wait, in 20 FUCKING YEARS?? Please be a typo. One black guy per year in the ENTIRE COUNTRY has been getting a math PhD for two decades…? JESUS CHRIST ON A STICK, THAT’S SOME FUCKERY, PLAIN AND SIMPLE. No really, I have to be making some kind of error somewhere.

Of course, these are just averages; the actual count probably is trending upward and probably increasingly so from 2012-2015. JUST NO, VOICE OF STEADINESS AND REASON, TODAY YOU CAN STFU, YOUR SERVICES ARE NOT NEEDED. Why? For one, these numbers include graduates of historically black colleges and universities, which are disproportionately represented. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, but if a sizeable chunk of the 203 PhDs are concentrated in these schools, then of course the rest have fewer than expected PhDs produced, and the baseline was already at WTF.

There’s nothing wrong with that, but as black guy interested in math, I don’t want to go to the black school I want to go to the math school; no offense to Howard, but I’m aiming for Harvard. The article then says, for all STEM degrees combined, there was an upward trend from black men making up 1% of all PhDs awarded in ’92 to 2% in ’12. If you have no soul, you can convince people of improvement by saying it doubled, but it’s still really, really fucked. So (finally) my question is: Given the obvious need, why isn’t there a program similar to Edge for men in math from underrepresented groups?

P.S. Who lets the mathematicians of the African diaspora website remain on the internet? It’s hella embarrassing.

Randomblackdude

Dear Randomblackdude,

I’m with you. Those are some outrageously low numbers. And I don’t know what resources there are out there but clearly not enough. Maybe my readers will fill us in. Also agreed about people who deliberately mislead with statistics having no soul.

Aunt Pythia

——

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

Well, here’s your chance to spread your Aunt Pythia love to the world! Please ask her a question. She will take it seriously and answer it if she can.

Click here for a form or just do it now:

Some of you may have stumbled across the New York Times’ recent Room For Debate, addressing the pursuit of happiness. Short and insufficient summary:

1. William Davies: Once you focus on optimizing happiness, you will be asking for trouble. At the individual level, optimizing for happiness will be used against us at work. At a higher level, it will be a form of social control.
2. Bina Agarwal: We need both objective (GDP, health) indicators and subjective (happiness, satisfaction polls) to measure the progress of nations.
3. Barbara Ehrenreich: Happiness scores can be easily tampered with, and rarely gets at the concept of accomplishment of goals.
4. Sonja Lyubomirsky: Don’t measure happiness too much, but don’t forget to measure happiness, because it’s good for you.

I found the conversation frustrating. I’ve been thinking about happiness a bit lately, and it strikes me that the above conversation is entirely muddled because of its lack of precision. There are different kinds of happiness, and only the third debater, Barbara Ehrenreich, really touches on that.

So, at the very least, there’s hedonic pleasure, and then there’s eudaimonic pleasure, which basically correspond to short-term versus long-term. Hedonic joy comes when you see a naked body or you eat doritos. It can also happen when you see your child laugh or enjoy the smell of garlic. In other words, it doesn’t have to be bad for you, but it is a form of short-term sensation.

Eudaimonic joy happens when you feel the pleasure of some kind of longer-term accomplishment. Aristotle invented this concept, deeming happiness vulgar, and stressing that not all desires are worth pursuing as, even though some of them may yield pleasure, they would not produce wellness. We experience eudaimonic joy when we clean our house, when we gain understanding of something that was elusive, or when we spend “quality time” with our friends and loved ones. It’s anything that gives us pleasure and contributes to our goals.

Now that we are equipped with these terms, the above debate is easier to parse. And of course the debaters weren’t given very much space for their arguments, so I’m not suggesting they don’t know this stuff, but it’s still helpful for us readers.

Barbara Ehrenreich’s point is that hedonic pleasure, being fleeting, is also easy to manipulate; at the same time, when we are asked whether we’re happy, we often interpret it to be some combination of those two kinds of happiness, with possibly random weights assigned to each. Right after I get off a roller coaster I’m more likely to be thinking hedonic pleasure, right after I listen to a poetry reading, or take a nap, maybe I’ll be more interested in the eudaimonic kind.

William Davies, on the other hand, is mostly discussing hedonic happiness, because in terms of brain chemicals, we can measure the stimulation of the pleasure centers of our brains, and we can manipulate people based on those measurements. Davies imagines a world where our corporate masters have a perfect view into our brains and have figured out how to stimulate our pleasure centers so that we are maximally “productive.” This approach is deliberately unrelated to our eudaimonic pleasure, because it’s not focused on our long-term goals, but rather the goals of our employer.

Bina Agarwal seems to want to understand eudaimonic happiness but is making do with the random mix, and Sonja Lyubomirsky seems to confuse “trying too hard to be happy” with focusing on hedonic happiness.

We could get better data and better debates around “happiness as a thing to strive for or not” if we distinguished between short-term happiness and long-term happiness. It’s not that hard to do, and it obviously matters.

You might have heard about Sidewalk Labs, which is backed by Google and plans to repurpose phone booths all over New York City as wifi hubs. They are also planning to install large advertising screens on the sides of the phone booths to display dynamic advertising to passersby. A few comments and questions.

• When you use that wifi, they can track what you do.
• Even if you don’t use it, if you walk by with a wifi-enabled device (smart phone), the phone booth will sense your device and tag you.
• Presumably this is not charity. They will expect to make ad revenue with their screens.
• Best guess: they will tailor the advertisements depending on who is walking by and what they’re doing.
• The overall negotiation then is that we are willing to exchange free wifi for having our experience in a public space tracked by a private company. I’m not sure we are all thinking that’s a good deal.
• They plan to do it in other cities, using street lamps and bus shelters as well.
• Prepare to enter into a realm of existence one step closer to Blade Runner.

Last Sunday I had the pleasure of meeting Anna Bernasek and Dan Mongan, who came to the Alt Banking group meeting to tell us about their book All You Can Pay: How Companies Use Our Data To Empty Our Wallets.

While they were discussing their book, the topic of online advertisement naturally came up. Dan and Anna made an interesting point in that discussion which I’ve been chewing on ever since. Namely, they provocatively suggested that we should never use the word “advertising” to describe the complicated and sophisticated process of tailored and targeted offers to an individual internet browser. Instead, we should call it a “negotiation.” Let me explain their reasoning.

They started by introducing the concept of a “consumer surplus.” This is the difference between what a given consumer would be willing to pay for a product versus what the price actually is for that product. If the difference is positive, the consumer buys the product and has a theoretical bit of “extra” money in their wallet, which corresponds to the happy fact that the price was lower than their maximum price. If the difference is negative, the consumer doesn’t buy the product because it’s too expensive for them.

Does that make sense? For me it only kind of makes sense. I mean, it makes quite a bit of sense for certain situations, like when I’m buying something I don’t actually need, out of funds I consider limited but discretionary. So, for example, after my soggy experience a couple of weeks ago I threw away my faulty tent, so I’m looking at buying a new tent, but then again I’m not going camping any time soon, so the price has to be right.

Here’s an important example where it doesn’t make as much sense. If I’m poor and I need a car to go to work, and I know I have to borrow money to buy the car, then the amount of the loan is less important than the fact that I can get a loan in the first place. The “consumer surplus” is less obvious when it’s a matter of debt rather than cash, and when it’s a desperately needed purchase rather than discretionary.

Anyhoo, let’s imagine consumer surplus to be a thing that people consider useful. The point Is, big data companies are getting better and better and determining or at least approximating what a given consumer’s surplus is, and making offers accordingly.

So, if you’re on a platform where there are advertisements, the algorithms behind those offers might infer that you have a certain amount of money to spend on a car or hotel, and might offer you certain models of cars with or without leather seats, or hotels in certain neighborhoods priced in a certain range, to squeeze out your consumer surplus. Yes, there might be cheaper versions of these things that you’d be happy with, and that would save you money, but the algorithm has determined your spending power, which is all they care about.

Thus, instead of an advertisement, which sounds like something we imagine many many people see, this is a personalized negotiation, just to you personally, and crucially, you don’t see what other people are being offered. So it’s a one-sided negotiation with enormous information asymmetries.

Note this is the opposite of what we’d expect in the “free market,” where all the offers are on the table and you get to choose the one with the lowest price. Partly we ignore that vision because many of the platforms we now spend time on are more or less monopolistic in nature, and partly it’s because of the nature of the auction system of advertising: the “ad” for a more expensive hotel room, that’s still in your price range, will win an auction because it is worth more to the seller.

I think it’s a pretty good distinction, although I’m not sure “online sale negotiations” is a catchy enough phrase to replace “online ads” any time soon.