People who obsessively exercise are boring
I’m not saying anything you don’t know already. I’m just stating the obvious: people who obsessively exercise are super boring. They talk all the time about their times, and their workout progress, and their aching muscles, and it’s like you don’t even have to be there, you could just replace yourself with a gadget that listens, nods, and then says encouraging things like, “Way to go!” at the very end. Excruciating.
Look, don’t get me wrong. I’ve gone through bouts of obsessive exercise myself, and those bouts sometimes were pretty lengthy. And no, it didn’t ever make me skinny, just incredibly fit. I remember I trained for a sprint triathlon once, and man was I fit by the time it finally happened in the spring on 2004.
But then, when I got to the starting line, and there I was wishing I could reorder the events so the the beginning swim would 5 kilometers and the run at the end were a quarter mile – I’ve never been much of a runner – and I just looked around at myself and everyone else there, and I wondered how I’d become so incredibly boring and self-obsessed that I had paid good money and driven miles and miles just to obsessively exercise in front of other people.
What was going on with me? I became increasingly disgusted by my own boringness throughout the race. I think the worst part was how many people said “You go, girl!” when I jogged by. They were trying to encourage the fat girl, I get it, but it made it even more obvious that I was doing something that I honestly didn’t need to be getting public response to.
Look, I’m not against exercise, and I love doing it, or at least I love having done it because it makes you feel good, and I encourage everyone to be fit and happy. But I’m serious when I say I will no longer tolerate hanging out with people who obsess over it and want to talk to me about their obsession. Too frigging boring, people!
So if someone mentions that they went biking over this gorgeous spring weekend, then awesome, I’ll be happy for them. But if they want to talk about which bike they used, and what their time around Central Park was, and how they’re training for this or that event, then no. I will tell them “sorry but can we talk about something not incredibly boring now?”
Why do I mention this today? Because I finally figured out what my hostility towards the Quantified Self crowd is, and it’s this same thing. All those gadgets and doodads are essentially props to pull out and use to have that same boring conversation that I’ve already refused to give into. So please, don’t show me your sleep tracker or your step monitor and expect me to care. I don’t care.
And don’t get me wrong – again – I know some people will benefit from that kind of thing. And some people actually have illnesses or physical therapy and exercise and particularly quantified exercise might particularly help them keep track of their health! I get it!
But let’s face it, most people are not doing this for health. They are doing it for some other weird, narcissistic and anxiety-shielding coping-mechanistic self-competitive (or outright competitive) reason. And again, I’m not hating on them exactly, because I get it, and I’ve been there. But I don’t want to talk about it with them.
Aunt Pythia’s advice
Readers, readers!
Aunt Pythia rarely does this, and really has never ever made up a question, but she absolutely needs to share a couple of things that nobody even came close to asking about this week. And yes, they’re about sex, or at least about genitals. Please skip this next section, and possibly all Aunt Pythia columns ever, if you are not interested in vulgar discussions of dirty topics. And yes, she’s taking this as an excuse to use the plural forms.
Clitorides
First, it might not surprise people to learn that Aunt Pythia talks about sex with her girlfriends. A lot. And she’s noticed a pattern in those conversations: some women can orgasm during intercourse, others cannot. And when I say cannot, I don’t mean cannot without help from, say, hands or a toy (Aunt Pythia does not often meet women who are in the alleged 15% of the population who cannot orgasm). I mean women who cannot through intercourse alone, with only a partner’s pelvic bone as tool.
Such an intriguing and natural categorization of women does not leave Aunt Pythia cold! She wants to get to the bottom of this! Why is this not one of the most basic conundrums of human existence, she wonders? Well, it is, and it has been (possibly! hopefully!) solved, in this article. It’s all about measuring distances, and once you say it like that, it makes perfect sense. Mystery revealed.
Penes
Aunt Pythia has been thinking a lot about objectification lately, and wondering why it happens so much more to women. One slightly philosophical approach to this question is understanding the extent to which men’s genitals are, to put it delicately, ripe for objectification versus, say, women’s breasts.
And the thing is, dear readers, they are not. Not as a general rule. And that is why, in my opinion, this video is so deeply radical. Warning! Please do not watch this video unless you are ready to have your mind blown! And please don’t say I didn’t warn you about this video.
Addendum: I feel like there should be a phrase invented for that video. Something like, hey man, don’t make me robocop your dick, or hey dude, don’t robocop your own dick. Suggestions welcome.
Back to our regularly scheduled advice column
After enjoying (or not!) today’s Aunt Pythia post and advice:
think of something to ask Aunt Pythia 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,
Inspired by the PDF Hackathon, I was wondering if anyone has scraped any of the sites where things like NECAP and MCAS scores are posted ala Wikileaks. Are these things publicly available, and I just haven’t looked in the right places?.
I’m working on a letter to the chair of a committee in the state legislature that is considering a bill that would exempt teachers rated “highly effective” or “effective” from being evaluated the next three years. The link you posted to the six articles on VAM in New York have provided me with a lot of material. Mandatory inclusion of test scores in teacher evaluations is scheduled to be implemented this year in RI and I’m hoping that if we can drag our feet in RI until the negative effects in early adoption states become widely known maybe we can avoid making some of those mistakes. Unfortunately our education commissioner is one of Jeb Bush’s infamous “chiefs for change” and has a lot of clout.
Confused in RI
Dear Confused,
First, I feel your pain. And I’m not sure which link of mine you were referring to but it might as well be Eugene Stern’s guest post on his fears of a VAM-like model being implemented in New Jersey, which he wrote about a year ago, when it was being pushed by Chris Christie (I wonder what happened to that initiative? Eugene?). In fact please feel free to write your letter with many of the same points Eugene was making.
Second, there’s no way we want student test scores leaked ever, and for this purposes especially. The models themselves are secret, and the amount of details and information necessary to reconstitute even one teacher’s VAM score would expose many innocent people to scrutiny that they don’t deserve and is outright illegal and rightly so.
I’m afraid you will have to play this out politically, not using data. The whole point of it is that they control the data and are using the model as an opaque and threatening weapon.
Aunt Pythia
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Dear Aunt Pythia,
My best friend and I used to talk often on the phone (like once a week for an hour, over the course of 5 years) but gradually over the past year, the frequency and length has declined, and also now she never initiates the calls or texts. She’s pretty busy – she is overworked at a job she hates, and has had various boyfriends, and recently moved in with one, and hangs out with friends who live close to her (I don’t). A few times lately she has failed to return my phone calls.
I am a really lonely guy … I have tried basically the kitchen sink at finding a girlfriend, but haven’t been successful yet and so she is who I typically turn to for emotional support. Anyways, I love talking with her, but often times lately I have been feeling sad because I feel so ignored by her, and I kind of feel that I am not valued as a friend. Do you think I should I stop initiating calls and texts? Not because I want to stop being friends with her, but because it’s a bit unfair of me to ask for so much support from her, and I should try to finding an actual girlfriend instead?
Lonely in New York(?!)
Dear Lonely,
I love it when my job is easy and the tough answer has already been provided. Yes, you need to go find your own girlfriend and stop asking one friend for that much support and love. She probably loves you and knows you need to disconnect from her in order to connect with others. Once you have a real live woman to talk to in New York I bet she’ll be psyched for you and more willing to return your (less frequent and less pathetic) calls.
Plus, according to this interactive love map created by Jonathan Soma, you should count your statistically lucky stars that there are 5 extra single women per 100 single men in New York.
And by the way, you definitely should start hanging out with friends first. Making friends is easier than finding a girlfriend and often helps.
Auntie P
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Dear Aunt Pythia,
I’m an undergraduate woman at a well-regarded (and presumably well-endowed) university in the South, in fact it once had the winning Putnam team and the winning NCAA basketball team in the same year, or some such nonsense.
Tuition is exorbitant, and in order to afford it, I have turned to some financially rewarding but controversial, um, artistic endeavors, let’s say, in which I exhibit my natural beauty and enhance my acting skills.
Some say these gigs are demeaning to or objectify women, others say they are a freedom of expression of things our culture tends to repress. Anyways, what would your advice to me be? Should I stay in the industry?
BK
Dear BK,
Let’s think about this pragmatically and long-term. Besides the risk of STD’s, which I assume you’re taking care of, I think the main question is the extent to which you are putting your future goals at risk by taking these gigs now, rather than a more standard, presumably lower-paying evening job.
So, how easily identifiable will you be to later potential employers? And what kind of employment are you interested in? In the extreme case, where you want to be a politician and you’re a huge internet porn star, I think we have a problem. On the other extreme, where you want to be a lab scientist and you are stripping at a local bar with no recordings, I don’t think there’s a major risk.
Your actual case is probably in the middle, and although I don’t know what it is, I’d venture to guess that you also don’t know exactly what it is, because you’re probably 19 or 20 or so and don’t know exactly what you’re doing with your life.
So my advice for staying or leaving hinges on this concern, that your options are being at least somewhat narrowed without you really knowing it. Or even if your options are not explicitly being narrowed, I’m hoping you gird yourself for assholes and assumptions, and I hope you can push back.
And when I say that, I’m also saying “fuck this society” under my breath. We are super prudish in the best of times and at less good time we are freaky and hostile towards women. That’s not your fault.
As to whether the industry is demeaning and objectifying, I’d say it’s objectifying almost by definition, and whether it’s demeaning is probably something you will not be able to fully answer until you live with the ramifications of having been in it. So get back to me in 10 years and tell me what you think.
Good luck,
Aunt Pythia
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Please submit your well-specified, fun-loving, cleverly-abbreviated question to Aunt Pythia!
Envy, greed, and the American Dream #OWS
I was sent this Falkenblog post entitled Why Envy Dominates Greed a while back (hat tip David Murrell). The post suggests an interesting thought experiment which I’d like to discuss this morning.
Namely, it asks us to examine the extent to which our economic assumption that “everyone is working in their own self-interest” can be replaced by the assumption that “everyone is working to improve their relative ranking” and whether you’d get more clarity from economics that way.
I’ve done myself the favor of ignoring everything author Eric Falkenstein actually says about the economic theory, because he’s focusing on investing in the stock market, which honestly only a minority of people ever do even once. Even so I’d like to consider this idea of envy versus greed and try to make sense of it.
First of all, I do think that a certain kind of relativity combined with proximity is deeply important to humans. When members of my Occupy group talk about living on $2 a day while sleeping at homeless shelters in New York City, surrounded by men in suits with chauffeurs, it is very relevant that the privations described are combined with with a deep sense of humiliation of their understanding of their relative position. These are highly intelligent people who know how things look and they feel it keenly.
Similarly, when I think about poor people in other countries, it’s a different level of destitution than we see here, and yet it doesn’t make me want to drop everything and work in India. There’s something about proximity that we all respond to, and which has been well examined by social scientists.
Going back to my New York friend: is that envy being displayed, exactly? I don’t think so. I think it’s something more like dispossession and despair. And it’s honestly something I believe our natures would rather avoid, but sometimes just slaps us in our face, especially in places like New York City.
I’m not throwing envy out altogether. In fact, I do think envy is strongly at work, but only at a local level. I am working at Columbia now, so it’s natural and proper that I am envious of my colleague’s slightly-larger office. I ignore the stuff I don’t see like how the trustees are chosen and treated. A person in a given town is envious of their neighbor’s house or car or job or wife, but they don’t think about what’s happening in a different neighborhood. In fact they might obsess over such things. It happens. But again, it’s local.
Evidence that people only think very locally about wealth and inequality is everywhere; so when people are polled and asked to describe income or wealth inequality, they always think it’s much less skewed than it is. Why? I’ll guess. It’s because they extrapolate from their very local experience, where there the outliers are not so very outlying at all. It’s a safe kind of assumption that doesn’t boil the blood.
So envy is there, it’s powerful, but it biases us enormously. If anything, I’m starting to think envy is something to distract us from something more dangerous, which is that sense of privation and dispossession, which runs deeper and is more anarchic. By contrast, envy seems like a myopic feeling that keeps us acting safely inside the system, where if we follow the rules but we’re a little bit better at them, we will get that bigger office or bigger car.
In the end, I reject envy as a unifying glue that describes our world, at least in times of severe inequality like now. It just doesn’t address the growing hostility that I’m sensing, which is that second kind of feeling, which exists beyond envy.
Moreover, I think the assumption that everyone is feeling something as small as envy, or rather the projection of envy onto the entire population, is damaging.
So, for example, there was an New York Times Op-Ed recently entitled Capitalize Workers! that suggested we get more people involved for saving for their retirement by investing in the stock market with “minimum pensions”.
I think the idea here is that everyone wants a piece of that amazing stock market return. But if you think about where people actually are financially, it’s such a weirdly out-of-touch plan, the idea that everyone is a Wall Street trader or wants to be.
For most people I meet and talk to, at this point retirement is not at all about the thrill of risk-taking, but rather the avoidance of risk altogether. If you asked those people, they’d rather just have their Social Security benefits doubled. They are not trying to take their chances to double their money, but rather trying to eke out a retirement without severe pain.
Why is this happening? Why are the authors of this piece, who both work at the think tank Third Way, making such bizarre assumptions about how poor people want to retire? My first guess was that they are just working with the funds on Wall Street who would reap (even more) profits if more people invested.
But another less suspicious possibility is given by my above observation. Namely, they are projecting their myopic envy, that makes sense in their world, onto the poor and middle class worrying about retirement.
In their neighborhood, the way envy works is about trading and making big gains with extra money, but of course to do that you have to have extra money to start out with. In other words, the distance between the authors and the people they claim to be trying to help is too large for their system of envy to translate meaningfully.
Does OpenSSL bug prove that open source code doesn’t work?
By now most of you have read about the major bug that was found in OpenSSL, an open source security software toolkit. The bug itself is called the Heartbleed Bug, and there’s lots of information about it and how to fix it here. People are super upset about this, and lots of questions remain.
For example, was it intentionally undermined? Has the NSA deliberately inserted weaknesses into this as well? It seems like the jury is out right now, but if I’m the guy who put in the bug, I’m changing my name and going undercover just in case.
Next, how widely was the weakness exploited? If you’re super worried about stuff, or if you are a particular target of attack, the answer is probably “widely.” The frustrating thing is that there’s seemingly no way to measure or test that assumption, since the attackers would leave no trace.
Here’s what I find interesting the most interesting question: what will the long-term reaction be to open source software? People might think that open source code is a bust after this. They will complain that something like this should never have been allowed to happen – that the whole point of open software is that people should be checking this stuff as it comes in – and it never would have happened if there were people getting paid to test the software.
First of all, it did work as intended, even though it took two years instead of two days like people might have wanted. And maybe this shouldn’t have happened like it did, but I suspect that people will learn this particular lesson really well as of now.
But in general terms, bugs are everywhere. Think about Knight Capital’s trading debacle or the ObamaCare website, just two famous recent problems with large-scale coding projects that aren’t open source.
Even when people are paid to fix bugs, they fix the kind of bugs that cause the software to stop a lot sooner than the kind of bug that doesn’t make anything explode, lets people see information they shouldn’t see, and leaves no trace. So for every Knight’s Capital there are tons of other bugs in software that continue to exist.
In other words it’s more a question of who knows about the bugs and who can exploit them. And of course, whether those weaknesses will ever be exposed to the public at all.
It would be great to see the OpenSSL bug story become, over time, a success story. This would mean that, on the one hand the nerds becoming more vigilant in checking vitally important code, and learning to think like assholes, but also the public would need to acknowledge how freaking hard it is to program.
Let’s stop talking about HFT for a little while
It’s unusual that I find myself in the position of defending Wall Street activities, but here goes.
I just don’t think HFT is that big of a deal relative to other Wall Street evils. I have written a couple of times about HFT and I’m not a huge fan, and I don’t buy the “liquidity is good and more liquidity is better” argument: at some point enough is enough. I do think that day-to-day investors have largely benefitted from it but that people whose money is in massive funds which are regularly traded have seen their money get skimmed every month. Overall it’s a smallish negative tax on the average person, I’d expect.
Here’s why HFT deserves some of our hatred: there’s way too much human resources going into this stuff and it’s embarrassing, what with the laying of cables and blasting through mountains and such. And it’s a great sociological look into the absolutely greed-led mindset of the Wall Street trader, but honestly I think we already had that. It’s really business as usual at a microscopic scale, and nobody should really be surprised to learn that people will do anything to make money that’s technically possible and technically legal, and that they will brag about how they’re making the world a better place while they do it. Same old same old.
So I’m not saying HFT is awesome and we should encourage more of it. I’m all for thinking about how to slow down trading to once a second and make it “more fair” for more players (although that’s hard to do even as a thought experiment), or taxing transaction to make things slow down by themselves, which would be easy.
But here’s the thing, it’s not some huge awful thing we should focus on, even though Michael Lewis is a really good and engaging writer.
You wanna focus on something? Let’s talk about money laundering in HSBC and now Citi that is not under control. Let’s talk about ongoing mortgage fraud and robo-signing and the ongoing bailout/ taxpayer subsidy and people still losing their homes, and the poor still being the targets of illegal and predatory loans, and Too-Big-To-Fail getting worse, and the direct line between the bailout and the broken pension promises for civil servants and the overall price list for fraud that has been built.
Let’s talk about the people who created the underlying fraud still at work in places like Bank of America, and how few masterminds have gone to jail and how the SEC and the Obama administration has made that happen through inaction and passivity and how Congress is sitting on its hands because of the money coming in from lobbyists. Let’s talk about the increasing distance between the justice system for the poor and the justice system for the rich in this country.
Tell me what I missed.
The HFT noise is misplaced and a distraction from the ongoing real story.
An Interview And A Notebook
Interview on Junk Charts
Yesterday I was featured on Kaiser Fung’s Junk Charts blog in an interview where he kindly refers to me as a “Numbersense Pro”. Previous to this week, my strongest connection with Kaiser Fung was through Andrew Gelman’s meta-review of my review and Kaiser’s review of Nate Silver’s book The Signal And The Noise.
iPython Notebook in Data Journalism
Speaking of Nate Silver, Brian Keegan, a quantitative social scientist from Northeastern University, recently built a very cool iPython notebook (hat tip Ben Zaitlen), replete with a blog post in markdown on the need for openness in journalism (also available here), which revisited a fivethirtyeight article originally written by Walt Hickey on the subject of women in film. Keegan’s notebook is truly a model of open data journalism, and the underlying analysis is also interesting, so I hope you have time to read it.
Defining poverty #OWS
I am always amazed by my Occupy group, and yesterday’s meeting was no exception. We decided to look into redefining the poverty line, and although the conversation took a moving and deeply philosophical turn, I’ll probably only have time to talk about the nuts and bolts of formulas this morning.
The poverty line, or technically speaking the “poverty threshold,” is the same as it was in 1964 when it was invented except for being adjusted for inflation via the CPI.
In the early 1960’s, it was noted that poor families spent about a third of their money on food. To build an “objective” measure of poverty, then, they decided to measure the cost of an “economic food budget” for a family of that size and then multiply that cost by 3.
Does that make sense anymore?
Well, no. Food has gotten a lot cheaper since 1964, and other stuff hasn’t. According to the following chart, which I got from The Atlantic, poor families now spend about one sixth of their money on food:
Rich people spend even less on food.
Now if you think about it, the formula should be more like “economic food budget” * 6, which would effectively double all the numbers.
Does this matter? Well, yes. Various programs like Medicare and Medicaid determine eligibility based on poverty. Also, the U.S. census measures poverty in our country using this yardstick. If we double those numbers we will be seeing a huge surge in the official numbers.
Not that we’d be capturing everyone even then. The truth is, in some locations, like New York, rent is so high that the formula would likely be needing even more adjustment. Although food is expensive too, so maybe the base “economic food budget” would simply need adjusting.
As usual the key questions are, what are we accomplishing with such a formula, and who is “we”?
Aunt Pythia’s advice
Aunt Pythia is psyched to be writing today after missing a couple of days of regular posts. Aunt Pythia loves you people and understands how much you rely on her ridiculous advice, so she really goes out of her way to get up on Saturdays, stretch out on the couch in her underwear and armed only with a laptop and copious coffee, and spout utter nonsense. She knows you love it to, and want it to continue indefinitely. So please, after enjoying today’s bilge:
think of something to ask Aunt Pythia 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 am an undergraduate at a liberal arts college applying to REUs. If I don’t get into any, I won’t have any opportunities to do research before applying to PhD programs. Would that mean I won’t get into grad school either? What options do I have to prove I am research-ready?
Possibly Not Research Ready
Dear PNRP,
I’m just blown away by the list of REU’s that have sprung up since I was a wee lass. I mean, I went to one, it was at Duluth and run by the incomparable Joe Gallian, but I’m more or less sure it was the only one around back then. He’s been doing it since 1977, and although I wasn’t at the very first one, I was early enough so that all the participants names could fit on one shirt. Holy crap there’s a picture of me from this page at my REU:
Man, we played a lot of bridge that summer.
OK sorry for the nostalgic stream of consciousness. I will now attempt to answer your question.
First of all, given that very few people used to do REU’s before grad school, I obviously don’t think that it’s strictly necessary. On the other hand, given how many now exist, I’m guessing it’s become a common if not vital signaling device for getting into grad school (readers, weigh in!). It’s also probably gotten easier to get into. Definitely apply to many of them.
If you somehow didn’t apply to enough and it’s too late and you don’t get in anywhere, don’t despair. Look around for a teacher at your school or a nearby school, or even online, that is willing to do a reading course with you and develop some kind of senior thesis type project, or open problem to solve.
I feel that I need to add that most of these programs don’t actually ask you to solve open problems. It’s more like a peek at graduate school math and a mindset of research rather than an expectation that you will publish a paper. I know because I’ve taught at a couple since my college years.
Good luck!
Aunt Pythia
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Dear Aunt Pythia,
What kind of skills/classes do I need to break into data science as an undergrad? It seems like a really interesting field and I don’t know whether I’m qualified to jump into an internship or not. Currently a math major without any stats classes under my belt.
Data Internship Youngster
Dear DIY,
First steps: take a CS class in a scripting language like python, take probability and statistics, and read my recent book or at least skim it at the bookstore.
Second steps, if you have time: take classes on machine learning, Bayesian statistics, and ethics.
Third steps, if you have even more time: take an advanced programming class, an optimization or information theory class, and become an anthropologist.
In the meantime, keep an eye on the curriculums for the industry data science camps not popping up everywhere, for example at the Microsoft Research Center.
Good luck!
Aunt Pythia
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Dear Pythia,
Thank you for answering my question about “fairness” rankings by mentioning the Gini coefficient and upward mobility study, both of which I found interesting and hadn’t seen before.
Though obviously major, money wasn’t the only thing I had in mind. Judicial systems that imprison unfairly – possibly due to unfair laws to begin with – unfair job and housing discrimination, unfair environmental conditions and situations (Bhopal comes to mind), reasonable access to medical care, or lack thereof – all of these could be tossed into a fairness score as well.
I guess that in the end though, “fairness” may be a little too vague and subjective a term to be attached to any meaningful objective ranking. Fortunately the world already has lots of watchdog organizations that observe and report on objectively measurable facets of human life. OWS is one such organization.
Thanks again,
EVENFLOWIV
Dear EVENFLOWIV,
First of all, that’s Aunt Pythia to you. Har har.
Actually, even though it doesn’t appear that you’ve asked another question, I want to thank you for giving me an opening to my favorite recent rant.
In the context of my weekly Occupy meetings, I’ve been thinking more and more about the outrageous prison system in our own country and the multitude of mostly minority young men in that system. It’s a truly disgusting and predatory big business. As one of my co-occupiers said, if you’re too poor for us to make money off of you directly, we will throw you in prison and make money off of your incarceration.
Which brings me to your idea of measuring that kind of unfairness, even within our own country, and indeed even within the city of New York. Here’s the idea I’ve been tossing around inside my head.
It’s been long tossed around that the rate of marijuana use is similar for whites and blacks but blacks are going to jail way more for possession, essentially because of Stop & Frisk. In other words, blacks are more likely to get caught and to not have a fancy lawyer to get them out of trouble when they find themselves in trouble.
It brings up a host of questions, but I’ll focus on one: what is the relative chance that someone can get away with a mistake?
In other words, think about it this way. We all make mistakes, and young men (and women) are especially impulsive and judgment-lacking. So instead of asking whether they make mistakes, ask instead what the chances are that such mistakes will land them in jail or prison. I feel like those probabilities might be a good start at what you’re getting at. Do you agree?
Love,
Aunt Pythia
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Dear Aunt P,
My question may appear a little blunt but it’s one that’s troubled me for ages and I can’t think of any other way to ask it, so here goes: Does clitoris size reflect sexuality?
I mean, might larger be associated with more dominant or further along the hetero/homo-sexual scale, for example?
My follow-up question is, how would one go about assessing this? No, I don’t mean you to say ‘with warm hands and a micrometer’ but a suggestion of the mathematic parameters and procedures.
Jenny Taylor
Dear …umm… Jenny,
I’m going to say no. I have the following reasons for this answer, with exactly zero evidence gathered and assessed. Namely, it’s patently untrue of penises, which we all think about all the time in this society, so why should it be true of clitorides? Yes, that’s the plural of clitoris, I looked it up.
Now it’s true that a given woman’s clitoris ebbs and flows depending on how sexually stimulated she is, but other than that I think you just assume randomness.
As far as follow up, I’m gonna have to say: none needed, but if you want to turn this into a weird pick-up line at a bar then the more power to you.
Aunt Pythia
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Please submit your well-specified, fun-loving, cleverly-abbreviated question to Aunt Pythia!
What Monsanto and college funds have in common
College
I recently read this letter to the editor written by Catharine Hill, the President of Vassar College, explaining why reducing family contributions in college tuition and fees isn’t a good idea. It was in response to this Op-Ed by Steve Cohen about the onerous “E.F.C.” system.
Let me dumb down the debate a bit for the sake of simplicity. Steve is on one side basically saying, “college costs too damn much, it didn’t used to cost this much!” and Catharine is on the other side saying, “colleges need to compete! If you’re not willing to pay then someone else will!”
Here’s the thing, there’s an arms race of colleges driving up costs. In some perverse combination of US News & World Reports model gaming and in responding to the Federal loan support incentive system, not to mention political decisions methodically removing funding from state colleges, college costs have been wildly rising.
And when you have an arms race, as I’ve learned from Tom Slee, the only solution is an armistice. In this case an armistice would translate into something like an agreement among colleges to set a maximum and reasonable tuition and fee structure. Sounds good, right? But an armistice won’t happen if the players in question are benefitting from the arms race. In this case parents are suffering but colleges are largely benefitting.
Monsanto
This recent Salon article detailing the big data approach that Monsanto is taking to their massive agricultural empire is in the same boat.
The idea is that Monsanto has bought up a bunch of big data firms and satellite firms to perform predictive analytics on a massive scale for farming. And they are offering farmers who are already internal to the Monsanto empire the chance to benefit from their models.
Farmers are skeptical of using the models, because they are worried about how much data Monsanto will be able to collect about them if they do.
But here’s the thing, farmers: Monsanto already has all your data, and will have it forever, due to their surveillance. They will know exactly what you plant, where, and how densely.
And what they are offering you is probably actually a benefit to you, but of course the more important thing for them is that they are explicitly creating an arms race between Monsanto farmers and non-Monsanto farmers.
In other words, if they give Monsanto farmers a extra boost, it will lead other farmers into the conclusion that, without such a boost, they won’t be able to keep up, and they will be forced into the Monsanto system by economic necessity.
Again an arms race, and again no armistice in sight, since Monsanto is doing this deliberately towards their profit bottom line. Assuming their models are good, the only way to avoid this for non-Monsanto farmers is to build their own predictive models, but clearly that would require enormous investment.
Navigating sexism does not mean accepting sexism
Not enough time for a full post this morning, but I’d like people to read a New York Times article ironically entitled Moving Past Gender Barriers to Negotiate a Raise (hat tip Laura Strausfeld). It has amazing and awful tidbits like the following:
“It’s totally unfair because we don’t require the same thing of men. But if women want to be successful in this domain, they need to pay attention to this.”
If you read on you realize that what they mean by “pay attention to” is “roll over and conform to stereotypes”. Super gross, and fuck that.
I feel like this is a more subtle, New York Times version of Susan Patton’s terrible advice for young women in snaring husbands. What happened to the feminists?!!
Lobbyists have another reason to dominate public commenting #OWS
Before I begin this morning’s rant, I need to mention that, as I’ve taken on a new job recently and I’m still trying to write a book, I’m expecting to not be able to blog as regularly as I have been. It pains me to say it but my posts will become more intermittent until this book is finished. I’ll miss you more than you’ll miss me!
On to today’s bullshit modeling idea, which was sent to me by both Linda Brown and Michael Crimmins. It’s a new model built in part by the former chief economist for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) Andrei Kirilenko, who is now a finance professor at Sloan. In case you don’t know, the CFTC is the regulator in charge of futures and swaps.
I’ll excerpt this New York Times article which describes the model:
The algorithm, he says, uncovers key word clusters to measure “regulatory sentiment” as pro-regulation, anti-regulation or neutral, on a scale from -1 to +1, with zero being neutral.
If the number assigned to a final rule is different from the proposed one and closer to the number assigned to all the public comments, then it can be inferred that the agency has taken the public’s views into account, he says.
Some comments:
- I know really smart people that use similar sentiment algorithms on word clusters. I have no beef with the underlying NLP algorithm.
- What I do have a problem with is the apparent assumption that the “the number assigned to all the public comments” makes any sense, and in particular whether it takes into account “the public’s view”.
- It sounds like the algorithm dumps all the public comment letters into a pot and mixes it together to get an overall score. The problem with this is that the industry insiders and their lobbyists overwhelm public commenting systems.
- For example, go take a look at the list of public letters for the Volcker Rule. It’s not unlike this graphic on the meetings of the regulators on the Volcker Rule:
- Besides dominating the sheer number of letters, I’ll bet the length of each letter is also much longer on average for such parties with very fancy lawyers.
- Now think about how the NLP algorithm will deal with this in a big pot: it will be dominated by the language of the pro-industry insiders.
- Moreover, if such a model were to be directly used, say to check that public commenting letters were written in a given case, lobbyists would have even more reason to overwhelm public commenting systems.
The take-away is that this is an amazing example of a so-called objective mathematical model set up to legitimize the watering down of financial regulation by lobbyists.
Update: I’m willing to admit I might have spoken too soon. I look forward to reading the paper on this algorithm and taking a deeper look instead of relying on a newspaper.
Aunt Pythia’s advice
Aunt Pythia is so very pleased to bring you more of her pearls of wisdom this nearly-believably-spring morning.
In celebration of above-freezing temperature, she’s extra cheerful and she welcomes the clouds and drizzle. After all, late March showers bring late April flowers, or something like that! Let there be blooming and cleansing!
And please, after you enjoy Aunt Pythia’s wisdom, and possibly after you clean out the front closet, please don’t forget to:
think of something to ask Aunt Pythia 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,
What the hell is goin’ on with Bitcoin? Will it survive into the future (or something else akin to it) or is it ultimately doomed???
Thanks,
Bitcoin Boogie
p.s. – I hope you realize you’ll probably have more success explaining quantum mechanics to me than Bitcoin.
Dear BB,
I promise not to try to explain Bitcoin’s underlying algorithms. But I think I can still answer your questions.
First of all, Bitcoin has been in the news lately in bad or confusing ways, first with the exchange (Mt. Gox) that went bankrupt, and second because regulators and institutional authorities are having trouble figuring out what Bitcoins are.
Even so, think of these hiccups as growing pains, according to Coinbase co-founder and former Goldman Sachs foreign exchange trader Fred Ehrsam, quoted as saying inspiring things like:
I would go to the bathroom and trade bitcoin on my smartphone and then return to my real desk to do my real job trading real currency.
If you don’t know about it, Coinbase is the “digital wallet” company that you’d probably sign up with if you wanted Bitcoins and you weren’t a huge nerd or a criminal willing to do things on the technical downlow: it makes owning Bitcoins easy, like signing up for a normal checking account.
And they are seeing lots of people joining, and they just got Overstock to accept Bitcoins as payment. So Ehrsam and people like him are pretty positive, and you never know.
Between you and me, though, I think the biggest competitor out there is Google, which has plans to allow people to share money over gmail (hat tip Suresh Naidu). Instead of paying heavy fees, you – guess what – tell Google about your checking accounts and other financial information. I see this potentially competing with banks, Apple, and of course PayPal, which sucks.
I hope that helps!
Aunt Pythia
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Dear Aunt Pythia,
I am originally from a country where it’s normal to be sentimental. I am easily moved to tears and worry that this annoys others around me. Of course I can take counter-measures, for example I try to steady myself if the music is becoming emotional or before viewing some breathtakingly beautiful scenery, or, when news about a disaster or a sad film is being shown on the television I discreetly leave the room before it affects me.
I would like to be strong enough to withstand what appears to provoke no reaction in people here. Do you have any suggestion?
Too Sensitive
Dear Too,
I hear you, I’m a huge cryer too. I blame the Irish side of my family.
What I do is I playfully prepare people I’m around, for their own comfort, and especially when they are not familiar with this side of me. So when I feel some sentimentality coming on, I’ll announce, “Hey I’m about to totally cry, because that’s what I do! Please bear with me and please ignore the tears, I’ll be OK in 10 minutes or less.” and then I’ll laugh, usually out of embarrassment.
That way they will know I realize it’s about me, not them, and that they’re not responsible to comfort me in any way. It works great, and it’s easy for me to do because I’m an extrovert. If you’re shy, it’s going to be harder, but the alternative is often that you have to explain yourself while you’re crying, which I think is worse.
Good luck!
Auntie P
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Dear Aunt Pythia.
I am but a humble traveler trying to win you over with a Firefly reference and desperately seeking your advice.
Come July, I will find myself in New York for a week. I will be in need of a place to stay and some things to do while I’m visiting your fine city.
I have been looking on airbnb for a place to stay over a hotel or a hostel but am overwhelmed by all the options. Do I stay in Brooklyn, or Lower Manhattan? Harlem or the Upper West Side. I am a young data analyst from New Zealand, what do I know of New York neighborhoods?
And then there is the sightseeing, do I go and tick off all the tourist spots or are there better things for me to do with my time? Do you know any secret spots filled with good food, great coffee and devoid of the fanny-pack wearing, obnoxiously-photographing tourist hordes?
Yours,
Seeking Habitation In New York
P.S. In New Zealand we call fanny-packs ‘bum-bags’. A fanny in NZ is something entirely different!
Dear SHINY,
I don’t know from Firefly, sorry. But I’ll answer you anyway and let readers add their opinions.
I’d suggest you stay in a different neighborhood every night or two. That way you get to see more of New York, and any annoyance is short-lived. Most of your time will be spent traveling from place to place, so pack light. Make sure at least one night is in Astoria, Queens, which is just cool and kind of the epitome of the melting pot.
The reason I suggest this is that, for me, official tourist destinations are incredibly boring and expensive for what they offer (and what they offer is bum-bag bearing tourists, which you can already see in NZ anyway). I mean, if you think you’ll regret not going to the top of the Empire State Building, then by all means go, but go 10 minutes before they open and depart quickly.
Authentic sight-seeing in New York City consists, in my opinion, of walking through neighborhoods and checking out bars and restaurants and the local cultural gathering places. Look for live music in each neighborhood you stay in, if you like that sort of thing. Or if you are into food, make a plan for a foodie tour of each neighborhood. Yum!
Aunt Pythia
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Dear Aunt Pythia,
In searching online dating profile in New York City (I live nearby), I encounter a bunch of profiles of finance professionals working in, say, investment banking. After reading your blog, I have become convinced that people who work in banking
1) are morally bankrupt
1.5) are swindlers
2) are not very thoughtful in regards to the concerns of the 99%
3) are greedy
4) are arrogant … they think they are the best and the brightest, and point to the fake wealth they created to justify their salary
5) are overworked, stressed out at work, and their job is slowly killing them physically and emotionally
6) have expectations of a lavish lifestyle (nothing wrong with that, just not for me…I can’t compete, and perhaps mo money mo problems)
Am I right or am I right? Should I even bother expressing an interest in these profiles?
Just Pondering
Dear Just,
There are two questions here, which I’d like to pose separately.
First, are investment bankers are morally bankrupt swindlers who ignore lesser folk and hate their jobs?
Second, how do optimize my chances of finding love – or at least great sex with a tolerable partner – on an online dating site?
The answer to the first questions is, of course not. There are plenty of people in finance and even in investment banking that are perfectly nice and even sensitive and empathetic. On the other hand, there is some story explaining why they’re there, and it often exposes a weird side to them. On the other other hand, who here doesn’t have a weird side? On the whole I’d say, never disqualify someone on one attribute, especially if they otherwise seem great and you find yourself liking them at a basic human level.
The answer to the second question is a lot trickier, though, and is related to the first in the following sense: if you are playing the numbers – which is all you can do on these websites – then you might well decide to avoid investment bankers. After all, you only have so much time and some many free Friday nights, and you want to optimize for best chance of liking someone. All you have is demographic information like their job and age, and even if you gather more information through emails, you might first want to filter out red flags, and you might find “investment banker” to be a red flag.
As an aside, I would love someone to do a quantitative and qualitative investigation to see how people have changed their dating and mating habits through online dating. It seems like the most profound area of the internet affecting cultural practices.
My bottomline suggestion is to try to find a date through a friend of a friend. Good luck!
Aunt Pythia
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Please submit your well-specified, fun-loving, cleverly-abbreviated question to Aunt Pythia!
Interview with a high school principal on the math Common Core
In my third effort to understand the Common Core State Standards (CC) for math, I interviewed an old college friend Kiri Soares, who is the principal and co-founder of the Urban Assembly Institute of Math and Science for Young Women. Here’s a transcript of the interview which took place earlier this month. My words are in italics below.
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How are high school math teachers in New York City currently evaluated?
Teachers are now evaluated on 2 things:
- First, measures of teacher practice, which are based on observations, in turn based on some rubric. Right now it’s the Danielson Rubric. This is a qualitative measure. In fact it is essentially an old method with a new name.
- Second, measures of student learning, that is supposed to be “objective”. Overall it is worth 40% of the teacher’s score but it is separated into two 20% parts, where teachers choose the methodology of one part and principals choose the other. Some stuff is chosen for principals by the city. Any time there is a state test we have to choose it. In terms of the teachers’ choices, there are two ways to get evaluated: goals or growth. Goals are based on a given kid, and the teachers can guess they will get a certain slightly lower score or higher score for whatever reason. Otherwise, it’s a growth-based score. Teachers can also choose from an array of assessments (state tests, performance tests, and third party exams). They can also choose the cohort (their own kids/ the grade/the school). The city also chose performance tasks in some instances.
Can you give me a concrete example of what a teacher would choose as a goal?
At the beginning of year you give diagnostic tests to students in your subject. Based on what a given kid scored in September, you extrapolate a guess for their performance in the June test. So if a kid has a disrupted homelife you might guess lower. Teacher’s goal setting is based on these teachers’ guesses.
So in other words, this is really just a measurement of how well teachers guess?
Well they are given a baseline and teachers set goals relative to that, but yes. And they are expected to make those guesses in November, possibly well before homelife is disrupted. It definitely makes things more complicated. And things are pretty complicated. Let me say a bit more.
The first three weeks of school are all testing. We test math, social studies, science, and English in every grade, and overall it depending on teacher/principal selections it can take up to 6 weeks, although not in a given subject. Foreign language and gym teachers also getting measured, by the way, based on those other tests. These early tests are diagnostic tests.
Moreover, they are new types of tests, which are called performance-based assessments, and they are based on writing samples with prompts. They are theoretically better quality because they go deeper, the aren’t just bubble standardized tests, but of course they had no pre-existing baseline (like the state tests) and thus had to be administered as diagnostic. Even so, we are still trying to predict growth based on them, which is confusing since we don’t know how to predict performance on new tests. Also don’t even know how we can consistently grade such essay-based tests- despite “norming protocols”, which is yet another source of uncertainty.
How many weeks per year is there testing of students?
The last half of June is gone, a week in January, and 2-3 weeks in the high school in the beginning per subject. That’s a minimum of 5 weeks per subject per year, out of a total of 40 weeks. So one eighth of teacher time is spent administering tests. But if you think about it, for the teachers, it’s even more. They have to grade these tests too.
I’ve been studying the rhetoric around the CC. So far I’ve listened to Diane Ravitch stuff, and to Bill McCallum, the lead writer of the math CC. They have very different views. McCallum distinguished three things, which when they are separated like that, Ravitch doesn’t make sense.
Namely, he separates standards, curriculum, and testing. People complain about testing and say that CC standards make testing easier, and we already have too much testing, so CC is a bad thing. But McCallum makes this point: good standards also make good testing easier.
What do you think? Do teachers see those as three different things? Or is it a package deal, where all three things rolled into one in terms of how they’re presented?
It’s much easier to think of those three things as vertices of a triangle. We cannot make them completely isolated, because they are interrelated.
So, we cannot make the CC good without curriculum and assessment, since there’s a feedback loop. Similarly, we cannot have aligned curriculum without good standards and assessment, and we cannot have good tests without good standards and curriculum. The standards have existed forever. The common core is an attempt to create a set of nationwide standards. For example, without a coherent national curriculum it might seem OK to teach creationism in place of evolution in some states. Should that be OK?
CC is attempting to address this, in our global economy, but it hasn’t even approached science for clear political reasons. Math and English are the least political subjects so they started with those. This is a long time coming, and people often think CC refers to everything but so far it’s really only 40% of a kid’s day. Social studies CC standards are actually out right now, but they are very new.
Next, the massive machine of curriculum starts getting into play, as does the testing. I have CC standards and the CC-aligned test, but not curriculum.
Next, you’re throwing into the picture teacher evaluation aligned to CC tests. Teachers are freaking out now – they’re thinking, my curriculum hasn’t been CC-aligned for many years, what do I do now? By the way, importantly, none of the high school curriculum in NY State is actually CC-aligned now. DOE recommendations for the middle school happened last year, and DOE people will probably recommend this year for high school, since they went into talks with publication houses last year to negotiate CC curriculum materials.
The real problem is this: we’ve created these new standards to make things more difficult and more challenging without recognizing where kids are in the present moment. If I’m a former 5th grader, and the old standards were expecting something from me that I got used to, and it wasn’t very much, and now I’m in 6th grade, and there are all these raised expectations, and there’s no gap attention.
Bottomline, everybody is freaking out – teachers, students, and parents.
Last year was the first CC-aligned ELA and math tests. Everybody failed. They rolled out the test before any CC curriculum.
From the point of view of NYC teachers, this seems like a terrorizing regime, doesn’t it?
Yes, because the CC roll-out is rigidly tied to the tests, which are in turn rigidly tied to evaluations of teachers. So the teachers are worried they are automatically going to get a “failure” on that vector.
Another way of saying this is that, if teacher evaluations were taken out of the mix, we’d have a very different roll-out environment. But as it is, teachers are hugely anxious about the possibility that their kids might fail both the city and state tests, and that would give the teacher an automatic “failure” no matter how good their teacher observations are.
So if I’m a special ed teacher of a bunch of kids reading at 4th and 5th grade level even through they’re in 7th grade, I’m particularly worried with the introduction of the new and unknown CC-aligned tests.
So is that really what will happen? Will all these teachers get failing evaluation scores?
That’s the big question mark. I doubt it there will be massive failure though. I think given that the scores were so clustered in the middle/low muddle last year, they are going to add a curve and not allow so many students to fail.
So what you’re pointing out is that they can just redefine failure?
Exactly. It doesn’t actually make sense to fail everyone. Probably 75% of the kids got 2’s or 1’s out of a 4 point scale. What does failure mean when everyone fails? It just means the test was too hard, or that what the kids were being taught was not relevant to the test.
Let’s dig down to the the three topics. As far as you’ve heard from the teachers, what’s good and bad about CC?
My teachers are used to the CC. We’ve rolled out standards-based grading three years ago, so our math and ELA teachers were well adjusted, and our other subject teachers were familiar. The biggest change is what used to be 9th grade math is now expected of the 8th grade. And the biggest complaint I’ve heard is that it’s too much stuff – nobody can teach all that. But that’s always been true about every set of standards.
Did they get rid of anything?
Not sure, because I don’t know what the elementary level CC standards did. There was lots of shuffling in the middle school, and lots of emphasis on algebra and algebraic thinking. Maybe they moved data and stats to earlier grades.
So I believe that my teachers in particular were more prepared. In other schools, where teachers weren’t explicitly being asked to align themselves to standards, it was a huge shock. For them, it used to be solely about Regents, and also Regents exams are very predictable and consistent, so it was pretty smooth sailing.
Let’s move on to curriculum. You mentioned there is no CC-aligned curriculum in NY. I also heard NY state has recently come out against the CC, did you hear that?
Well what I heard is that they previously said they this year’s 9th graders (class of 2017) would be held accountable but now the class of 2022 will be. So they’ve shifted accountability to the future.
What does accountability mean in this context?
It means graduation requirements. You need to pass 5 Regents exams to graduate, and right now there are two versions of some of those exams: one CC-aligned, one old-school. The question is who has to pass the CC-aligned versions to graduate. Now the current 9th grade could take either the CC-aligned or “regular” Regents in math.
I’m going to ask my 9th grade students to take both so we can gather information, even though it means giving them 3 extra hours of tests. Most of my kids pass 2 Regents in 9th grade, 2 in 10th, and 3 in 11th, and then they’re supposed to be done. They only take those Regents tests in senior year that they didn’t pass earlier.
What are the good and bad things about testing?
What’s bad is how much time is lost, as we’ve already said. And also, it’s incredibly stressful. You and I went to school and we had one big college test that was stressful, namely the SAT. In terms of us finishing high school, that was it. For these kids it’s test, test, test, test. I don’t think it’s actually improved the quality of college students across the country. 20 years ago NY was the only one that had extra tests except California achievement tests, which I guess we sometimes took as well.
Another way to say it is that we did take some tests but it didn’t take 5 weeks.
And it wasn’t high stakes for the teacher!
Let’s go straight there: what are the good/bad things for the teachers with all these tests?
Well it definitely makes the teachers more accountable. Even teachers think this: there is a cadre of protected teachers in the city, and the principals didn’t want to take the time to get rid of them, so they’d excess them out of the schools, and they would stay in the system.
Now with testing it has become much more the principal’s responsibility to get rid of bad teachers. The number of floating teachers is going down.
How did they get rid of the floaters?
A lot of different ways. They made them go into the schools, take interviews, they made their quality of life not great, and a lot if them left or retired or found jobs. Principals took up the mantle as well, and they started to do due diligence.
Sounds like the incentive system for over-worked principals was wrong.
Yes, although the reason it became easier for the principals is because now we have data. So if you’re coming in as ineffective and I also have attendance data and observation data, I can add my observational data (subjective albeit rubric based) and do something.
If I may be more skeptical, it sounds like this data gathering was used as a weapon against teachers. There were probably lots of good teachers that have bad numbers attached to them that could get fired if someone wanted them to be fired.
Correct, except those good teachers generally have principals who protect them.
You could give everyone a bad number and then fire the people you want, right?
Correct.
Is that the goal?
Under Bloomberg it was.
Is there anything else you want to mention?
I think testing needs to be dialed down but not disappear. Education is a bi-polar pendulum and it never stops in the middle. We’re on an extreme but let’s not get rid of everything. There is a place for testing.
Let’s get our CC standards, curriculum, and testing reasonable and college-aligned and let’s keep it reasonable. Let’s do it with standards across states and let’s make sure it makes sense.
Also, there are some new tests coming out, called PARCC assessments, that are adaptive tests aligned to the CC. They are supposed to replace Regents down the line and be national.
Here’s what bothers me about that. It’s even harder to investigate the experience of the student with adaptive tests.
I’m not sure there’s enough technology to actually do this anyway very soon. For example, we were given $10,000 for 500 student. That’s not going to go far unless it takes 2 weeks to administer the test. But we are investing in our technology this year. For example, I’m looking forward to buying textbooks and get my updates pushed instead of having to buy new books every year.
Last question. They are redoing the SAT because rich kids are doing so much better. Are they just trying to get in on the test prep game? Because, here’s the thing, there’s no test that can’t be gamed that’s also easy to grade. It’s gotta depend on the letters and grades. We keep trying to shortcut that.
Listen, this is what I tell the kids. What’s going to matter to you is the letter of recommendation, so don’t be an jerk to your fellow students or to the teachers. Next, are you going to be able to meet the minimum requirements? That’s what the SAT is good for. It defines a lower bound.
Is it a good lower bound though?
Well, I define the lower bound as 1000 in total. My kids can target that. It’s a reasonable low bar.
To what extent do your students – mostly inner-city, black girls interested in math and science – suffer under the wholly gamed SAT system?
It serves to give them a point of self-reference with the rest of the country. You have to understand, they, like most kids in the nation, don’t have a conception of themselves outside of their own experience. The SAT serves that purpose. My kids, like many others, have the dream of Ivy League minus the understanding of where they actually stand.
So you’re saying their estimates of their chances are too high?
Yes, oftentimes. They are the big fish in a well-defined pond. At the very least, The SAT helps give them perspective.
Thanks so much for your time Kiri.
The Lede Program: An Introduction to Data Practices
It’s been tough to blog what with jetlag and a new job, and continuing digestive issues stemming from my recent trip, which has prevented me from drinking coffee. It really isn’t until something like this happens that I realize how very much I depend on caffeine for my early morning blogging. I really cherish that addiction like a child. Don’t tell my other kids.
Speaking of my new job, the website for the Lede Program: An Introduction to Data Practices is now live, as is the application. Very cool.
We’re holding information sessions about the program next Monday and Thursday at 1:00pm at the Stabile Center, on the first floor of the Journalism School which is in Pulitzer Hall. Please join us and please spread the news.
We are also still looking for teachers for the program, and we’ve fixed the summer classes, which will be:
- Basic computing,
- Data and databases,
- Algorithms, and
- The platform
I’m really excited about all of these but probably most about the last one, where we will investigate biases inherent in data, systems, and platforms and how they affect our understanding of objective truth. Please tell me if you know someone who might be great for teaching any of these, they are intense, seven week classes (either from end of may to mid-July or from mid-July to the end of August) which will meet 3 hours twice a week each.
Tia Pythia’s advice
Aunt Pythia is coming to you from Costa Rica, where she’s been on vacation all week and is officially 100% sunburnt, relaxed, and happy, except for the occasional digestive issue.
To commemorate the occasion and location she’s temporarily changed her name to “Tia Pythia”, but don’t worry, you can expect consistent obnoxious and over-the-top advice coming from her. She hasn’t lost her edge, even in 95 degree heat!
After you enjoy her column (and the copious fruity drinks!) today please don’t forget to:
think of something to ask Tia Pythia at the bottom of the page!
By the way, if you don’t know what the hell Tia Pythia is talking about, go here for past advice columns and here for an explanation of the name Pythia.
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Dear Tia Pythia,
I am a graduate student still early in my career, at a university that I am quite happy with (people, subject areas good; geography tolerable for 5 years). However, my (would-be, as-of-yet-unofficial) adviser is moving to a more prestigious, if less outwardly friendly, math department (the way it was described to me is, my current institution is solidly “tier n” while they are considering moving to a “tier n-1” school). They have offered to bring me with them, but I am nervous about a)whether I could cut it at a more competitive place and b)even if I could, whether 3-4 years of relative misery is worth a “more prestigious” degree.
I’m very excited about the research that my adviser is doing and the field in general, and the prospect of more favorable geography along with a higher “payoff” (in terms of where my degree is from) is attractive, but I’m still seeking sage advice in case I haven’t thought of it in a certain way.
Also, a more direct question: could you have done everything you’ve done since getting your phd if it hadn’t been from Harvard, but from some middle-of-the-road school?
With love,
Future Anxiety Revealed, Troubling Situation
Dear FARTS,
Nice sign-off, and it kind of makes up for a super long letter.
As I’ve written about recently, not all graduate school experiences are the same. Even so, Harvard wasn’t known as the most friendly department and I made it work for me, partly because of the location and the fact that I could make friends outside math. It helped that I grew up in the area and knew people like Nancy from Fair Foods and crucial information like where the best yarn stores were.
I’d suggest visiting the place and seeing if it can work. And importantly, try to make it work. Having an exciting advisor you trust is crucial to the graduate school experience, so I would definitely do my best if I were you to stick with him or her.
In terms of prestige, I definitely think it helps me personally, but I’m never sure how much of that is because I’m a woman – it definitely still seems true that you have to be top-notch to impress people if you’re female whereas men often get the benefit of the doubt.
Also it depends on whether you’re talking to someone inside math or outside math, because outsiders don’t have a definite sense of ranking and also don’t usually care too much. So it also depends on what you want to do with your life after school.
Good luck!
Tia Pythia
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Dear Aunt Pythia,
I’ve never had a girlfriend. I’ve worked for a long time (years) to get one. It hasn’t been a complete waste of time from a social skills and self-improvement point of view, but I haven’t gotten anywhere, and the lack of success has taken its toll.
Logically, I tell myself that it has no bearing on my worth as a human being (compare Isaac Newton and Charlie Sheen for example), that I should enjoy being young and single, and I don’t get as depressed about it as I once did, but we all know that logic isn’t everything. And to clarify, I know I don’t need or am entitled to a girlfriend (I know a lot of guys in my situation do), and my life is satisfying – or getting there – on my own.
I fear that when I’m older, I’ll look back on these years-my most sexually fertile, as well as my most “fun” ones, and see barrenness, when others see great memories with lovers. And I’ll be constantly reminded that they do. I just feel so… tired, or deadened sometimes when thinking about it. What can I do about this?
Draußen vor der Tür
Dear Draußen,
Pardon me for cutting about 85% of your letter, it was just too long. I’m in a short question – short answer kind of mood this morning. Something about the last day of a vacation. And I didn’t cut out the part about Charlie Sheen, because honestly I don’t get it and I’m wondering if readers do and could comment on a possible interpretation.
Look, I have sympathy for your situation. As a guy in physics (part of what I cut), I’m sure you spend most of your time around other guys. It must be tough to meet nice women.
But at the same time, I guess I’m wondering what it is you’ve been doing to try to meet women, and importantly how you’ve talked to them when you’ve met them. From the 85% of your letter that I cut, I can tell you spend a lot of time thinking about yourself and what you should do with your life.
But to be honest, unless someone is already your friend, they probably don’t care about that stuff. At all. If I meet someone who starts talking about that stuff, I find a quick reason to depart.
You need to make sure you have opinions about other things besides yourself. Like, do you read the paper? What do you think about Ukraine? Or the new SAT? Make sure you are not too self-involved and that you have truly interesting opinions and things to say before you meet women. Even better: have ideals. Have plans to fix problems. That’s interesting! That’s possibly even sexy!
Another idea: try reading How Not to Be a Dick: An Everyday Etiquette Guide (hat tip Becky Jaffe). And I’m not saying that because I think you’re a dick (although I’m also not saying you aren’t a dick!) but because it has lots of great points about communication and making sure you’re coming across well. I know I learned something reading it!
One last thing: it doesn’t have to be work. Find something you like doing that lots of women also like doing, and go enjoy yourself. Joy is extremely catchy. Worst case you make some new friends.
Good luck,
Tia Pythia
——
Dear Aunt Pythia,
What do nerdy women talk about at lunch?
I’m a woman who recently started working in an office after a few years of working at home. It’s an educational technology company, and I’m in the unique and fortunate position of being both an educator and a software tester in training.
Most days when I go to the communal kitchen to heat my lunch, many of the women from the education team are engaging in loud discussions about their kids. I’ve started noticing that most of the men educators and people from other departments bury themselves in a book or take their food back to their desks. As a non-parent, I’m sometimes curious about life on the other side, but there’s such a thing as too much information. Today after yet another round of hearing about children’s eating habits, sleep habits, etc, I took my plate and headed for the tech zone for more stimulating conversation.
Any suggestions on things I can ask my coworkers with kids to steer the topic in another direction? I would like to get to know them better and pick their brains on their career paths and aspirations. Or am I better off spending more time with the mostly male tech geeks and absorbing their lingo?
Lunch Uncomfortable Need Conversation Help
Dear LUNCH,
First, congrats on the new job, it sounds cool.
Second, to be honest I have never encountered this problem personally because I’m such a freaking loudmouth. I pretty much just barge into conversations and change the topic if I’m bored. I often even tell people they’re really boring and need to spice up their conversation, preferably with sex. Nobody ever seems to complain that they want to talk more about their sleeping or non-sleeping kids. Not sure they like me, but whatevs.
I mean, I don’t literally interrupt the conversation, because I’m not totally rude. But I’ll wait for a good moment and just jump in with something off-topic like the new SAT or Putin or whether House of Cards is too cynical or not cynical enough.
My advice: come prepared with a short list of 4 non-parenting but general topics and see how they fly. I’m guessing they are themselves just bored and talking about that stuff out of habit and will welcome new blood.
Also, engage the men as well, especially if you go with sex.
Good luck!
Tia Pythia
——
Dear Aunt Pythia,
An acquaintance has started sending emails urging his “friends” to call upon their political leaders to oppose immigration reform. The first time, I assumed his message was spam and deleted it. I replied to the second message saying that I thought his account had been hacked. He replied that he had indeed sent it, explaining his position. After another message, which he forgot to BCC, one of the recipients replied with a well-reasoned rebuttal. The spammer’s response was to remove that person from his contact list.
Of course, everyone is entitled to their opinion, but I was initially confused because:
1. I met this person through an organization that celebrates cultural diversity.
2. His wife and stepson are immigrants.
His reasons for opposing immigration reform:
1. He was forced into early retirement because his employer went out of business.
2. Big business is profiting off cheap illegal labor, taking better paying jobs from Americans.
3. “Those people” are migrating northward, taking over, etc. (His wife is from a country bordering Europe, and the immigrants he opposes come from other places.)
So, the question is, should I ignore the emails, ask him to stop, or attempt to find common ground? I would generally ignore such spam, but I consider his wife a good friend. What kinds of holes can I point out in his argument, like the many forms of corporate greed?
Stop Propagating Antagonizing Messages
Dear SPAM,
Awesome sign-off. Both topical and sensical. Seriously, you should hold a master class in these motherfuckers.
In terms of your quandary, I’ll tell you what I’d do. I’d ask him politely to take you off the email list, and I’d never discuss it again with him. I’d continue to be friends with his wife.
Here’s why. He’s gotten it into his head that he lost his job for an abstract political reason. In doing so, he’s made it incredibly personal, and no amount of factual evidence is going to change his stance. You are not going to change it either.
Maybe at some point something will change it, but it will be emotional and deeply personal to him, not something you can effect.
Better yet, just build a filter to send his emails to trash and never think about it again.
Tia Pythia
——
Dear Tia Pythia,
From your remark of blowing off steam at a conference I remembered this article. Have you read it? It’s very informative and fun.
If conferences like JMM were to have bowls of condoms at the end of the tables where you pick up your badge do you think people would get the idea and pocket a hand full, then use them?
Open Relationships Rock
Dear ORR,
Wait, what article? That’s super unfair.
Tia Pythia
——
Please submit your well-specified, fun-loving, cleverly-abbreviated question to Aunt Pythia!
Billionaire money and academic freedom
If you haven’t seen this recent New York Times article by William Broad, entitled Billionaires With Big Ideas Are Privatizing American Science, then go take a look. It generalizes to all of scientific research my recent post entitled Billionaire Money in Mathematics.
My favorite part of Broad’s article is the caption of the video at the top, which sums it up nicely:
Funding the Future: As government financing of basic science research has plunged, private donors have filled the void, raising questions about the future of research for the public good.
In his article Broad makes a bunch of great points.
First, the fact that rich people generally ask for research into topics they care about (“personal setting of priorities”) to the detriment of basic research. They want flashy stuff, bang for their buck.
Second, academics interested in getting funding from these rich people have to learn to market themselves. From the article:
The availability of so much well-financed ambition has created a new kind of dating game. In what is becoming a common narrative, researchers like to describe how they begged the federal science establishment for funds, were brushed aside and turned instead to the welcoming arms of philanthropists. To help scientists bond quickly with potential benefactors, a cottage industry has emerged, offering workshops, personal coaching, role-playing exercises and the production of video appeals.
If you think about it, the two issues above are kind of wrapped up together. Flashy academic content goes hand in hand with flashy marketing. Let’s say goodbye to the true nerd who doesn’t button up their cardigan correctly. And I don’t know about you but I like those nerds. My mom is one of them.
This morning I thought of another way to express this issue, from the point of view of the individual scientist or mathematician, that might have profound resonance where the above just sounds annoying.
Namely, I believe that academic freedom itself is at stake. Let me explain.
I’m the last person who would defend our current tenure system. It’s awful for women, especially those who want kids, and it often breeds a kind of arrogant laziness post-tenure. Even so, there are good things about it, and one of them is academic freedom.
And although theoretically you can have academic freedom without tenure, it is certainly easier with it (example from this piece: “In Oklahoma, a number of state legislators attempted to have Anita Hill fired from her university position because of her testimony before the U.S. Senate. If not for tenure, professors could be attacked every time there’s a change in the wind.”).
But as we’ve seen recently, tenure-track positions are quickly declining in number, even as the number of teaching positions is growing. This is the academic analog of how we’ve seen job growth in the US but it’s majority shitty jobs. And as I’ve predicted already, this trend is surely going to continue as we scale education through MOOCs.
The dwindling tenured positions means there are increasing number of people trying to do research dependent upon outside grants and funding, and without the safety net of tenure. These people often lose their jobs when their funding flags, as we’ve recently seen at Columbia.
Now let’s put these two trends together. We’ve got fewer and fewer tenure jobs, which are precariously dependent on outside funding, and we’ve got rich people funding their own tastes and proclivities.
Where does academic freedom shake out in that picture? I’m going to say nowhere.
Optimizing for Einstein and other homo-erotic theories
Jointly posted with Naked Capitalism.
At 41, I’m a grown woman. I’ve had enough weird and bad experiences as a woman in the mathematics part of “STEM,” inside and outside of academia, that my skin is relatively thick, a fact I’m proud of. Most of the time I let stuff roll off of me.
Even so, there are certain things that really get under my skin. Examples include terrible advice to young anxious women, and anything having to do with Princeton, New Jersey.
The recent appearance of the “Princeton Mom” Susan Patton (more about her below) has created a perfect storm inside me and I feel I have to comment, at the risk of giving her book more buzz. Note this post is not at all quantitative or even nerdy, except for some free market chit-chat which doesn’t really count. Instead it is much more straight-up ranting that I allow myself from time to time on mathbabe. If you want a more scientific and polite takedown, please see this Huffington Post article.
Princeton, New Jersey
There are two kinds of people in the world: people who hate Princeton, New Jersey, and people who are über successful white men (and sometimes Asian men). And I guess there’s a third kind, the people who have never visited Princeton.
I know that sounds histrionic, and I’ll make some caveats later on, but bear with me, it’s coming from personal experience.
I spent one horrific year (the academic year 1997-1998) as a visiting graduate student in the Princeton math department. Coming from the Harvard math department, I’d been socialized to think that spending all night in the library reading musty old French mathematical manuscripts was cool, and the very least one could do to impress one’s advisor.
In other words, I knew from male-dominated macho nerd culture. I girded myself for more of the same when I got to Princeton. But Princeton turned that up quite a few notches, and it wasn’t pretty. And it might have had something to do with being newly married, but that kind of makes my point stronger, not weaker, as you will see.
The first thing I noticed was that there were no other women in the math department. Well, that’s not quite true, since there were secretaries, and there was one female professor, who I never once spotted, and there was one other female graduate student, at least in theory, but it took me weeks and weeks to run into her.
But even so, I was kind used to that, being an experienced math nerd. I would normally just make do with hanging out with the social nerd boys. Unfortunately I couldn’t find any. It seemed like a department that either selected for anti-social people or efficiently turned them into anti-social people after they arrived.
As an illustration, let me tell you about the most social experience among graduate students I ever witnessed. It started out as a joyous scene: an enthusiastic young man bounded into the common room (which was almost always empty and didn’t really deserve the name “common room” at all) holding a book. He was showing off his newly bound thesis to an unusually large crowd of fellow graduate students – maybe 7 other men.
Instead of congratulating him, someone from the crowd grabbed the thesis and immediately and loudly proclaimed he’d found a typo. Everyone laughed. Long pause. The guy took his thesis and walked out of the room.
As you might imagine, I didn’t spend too much time in the math department. Instead, naïf that I was, I gave myself the task of finding friendly people I could truly connect with in the cultural wasteland that was Princeton Township.
The problem was, it felt like a village frozen in time. Of the perhaps 7 people I got to the point of trusting enough to share my desire for connection, no fewer than 3 of them suggested I join a church (that always made me wonder, what do Jewish people do in Princeton?), and the other 4 suggested I have a child in order to have company and something to do with myself. No shit. Human being as hobby.
I could go on – I could describe the pathetic attempt to attend a female graduate student mixer (“canceled for lack of attendants”) or the desperate time I sought counseling from the sole campus Mental Health Professional. Her exact words: “If it helps, I think I eventually see every female graduate student at Princeton.” Me: “Yes, it helps! I’m getting the FUCK out of here.” And I did.
I’ve been back once or twice, mostly to see the one person I became fond of in my year-long visit, and I am always amazed to see how little has changed. The last time I went, I attended a conference at the Institute for Advanced Study, and after lunch one afternoon I was in the cafeteria there, looking for coffee, when someone (a man! an oldish white man!) asked me to “find more plates, please” because there were no more clean ones. I looked down at my clothes: was I wearing a kitchen staff uniform like other people working the kitchen? Not at all, but I did suspiciously have my boobs with me. I must be kitchen staff.
Hey, I might be wrong
Other people have been to Princeton in the past 15 years, and some of them tell me it’s gotten somewhat better, and there are sightings of more than one woman at a time in the math department, and so on. I mean, the standards are super low, so “better” doesn’t necessarily mean much, but then again I don’t want to make it seem impossibly fixed. I’m glad the President of Princeton is was a woman.
On the other hand, another friend of mine had this to say about a very recent visit (less than 3 months ago):
I was a job candidate there. Put up at that Inn. Eating by myself, and there was a long table in the center of the room – all white men, many in bow ties, I swear. They were talking loudly about curriculum changes in the humanities over time, and what a shame it was that they couldn’t teach the classics anymore, laughing about having to teach world literature, etc. And everyone serving them was black. It was disgusting.
My theory of Princeton
I have a kind of fun theory of why Princeton is like this. The short version is that the culture has optimized to producing “geniuses,” which started with Einstein. In fact, Einstein’s success story also pinpoints the moment that time froze there. It was like the lesson learned for the town was that, if they could only keep the place exactly like it was the moment Einstein entered Princeton, then maybe it would be a breeding ground for many many more geniuses to make the town proud.
So that’s what’s happened: everything that is done there is done in the hope that more Einsteins will pop up among the population. Would-be geniuses are worshipped in weird ways, and anyone who is not themselves a genius candidate has to tailor themselves to those who are.
And since by definition geniuses are not women – and nor are minority men – we know what their roles turn out to be. Women, at least white women, are seen as useful in as much as they can have man-children who may grow up to be geniuses. Everyone else is even less crucial.
Do you think I’m being too harsh? Perhaps. To be honest, there is a space for white men to be tagged as successful without being full-blown geniuses, especially if they’re undergraduates. Namely, if they are potentially super rich, preferably by working in finance. In any case it’s all about the successful male narrative. There is no room for any other narrative.
Why am I talking shit about Princeton?
Here’s the thing. I have come to appreciate Princeton, in a wry way (“If you’re suicidal,” one character says, “and you don’t actually kill yourself, you become known as ‘wry.’ ”), and only as long as I’m not actually there. It is such a perfect example of old-fashioned, fucked up shit. You can’t make that stuff up.
But you can point to it and say, I will never live like that. It’s become a convenient counterfactual for me personally.
But not everyone has my perspective. My biggest fear nowadays about Princeton is that people are not sufficiently up front about how awful it is, and because of that people are sometimes tricked into visiting or even moving there.
It is this fear that I’m writing this essay, that I might be able to warn people away from that place, and possibly other places like it, although I don’t know of any. I’m a one-person anti-PR machine, but there’s only so much I can do.
Susan Patton to the rescue
It turns out my job is getting easier, thanks to Susan Patton, self-proclaimed “Princeton Mom”.
As if to amplify my complaints about Princeton, Patton has come out with yet more advice for girls who are aspiring to be Princeton wives. Her new advice to young women is to get fake boobs and whatever other plastic surgery deemed necessary in high school so you can attract a man in college.
Let’s back up for just a moment, though. Who is this woman?
You have heard of Susan Patton. She’s the confused bitch that wrote a now-famous letter to undergraduate women telling them to stop thinking about careers and start getting engaged whilst in college.
Oh, and she also suggested in a recent Valentine’s Day column (subtitle: “Young women in college need to smarten up and start husband-hunting.”) in the Wall Street Journal (where else!?) that, if you want men to marry you, you shouldn’t fuck them too soon, because, in her words, “men won’t buy the cow if the milk is free.”
Yes, she said that. I’ve got two responses to that tidbit. First, this:
mooooooo, motherfucker, moooooooooooo!!
Next, Aunt Pythia mentioned this but it bears repeating: Patton is objectifying women by calling them cows.
She’s doing the same when she tells young women to get boob jobs in high school. That’s in fact the name of her game. She is insisting that women abandon any hope of intellectual curiosity, goals or ambitions while they are still teenagers and start in on a desperate competition to be a Princeton wife.
Why is Patton so nuts?
By her own account, Susan Patton married the wrong guy – a non-Princeton guy – and later got divorced. She’s bitter about her lack of foresight. In some sense this is just a pathetic story about one sad person.
But in another way it’s not. I’ve been reading a super interesting book called Why Love Hurts: a Sociological Explanation that explains why Susan Patton has some things right. In fact she’s kind of brilliant, but for obviously weird reasons, and her plan to deal with the issues she rightly raises is completely fucked up.
Here’s what she’s understood: there has been a revolution in mating rituals and partnering, and it has become a competition, and it has become increasingly important to be sexually attractive to win this competition. And although it’s not the only competition young women are enduring in college, it’s the one she’s fixated on.
In fact to a large extent we’ve gone from a social contract partnering society to a kind of pseudo-free market partnering society. The results of that transition include various things like how men and women see themselves, and specifically how they (women, not men) blame themselves for failed relationships, and moreover how they are incentivized (or not) to get married, or have kids, or importantly, to keep their word.
One of the most interesting points, at least as it pertains to Susan Patton, is that whereas men used to need to get married and have children to assert their masculinity, this is no longer true.
Nowadays, according to this theory, men in question increasingly assert their masculinity to each other through the sexual attractiveness of their girlfriends, and they don’t care very much whether they get married and have kids, or at least they don’t feel any urgency (which gives rise to both “the noncommittal man” and “the woman who loves too much”).
So when Patton tells women to get boob jobs, she’s essentially telling them to improve their odds in that existing free market. It’s not about sexual gratification, or even “self confidence” for the women. It’s really a homo-erotic, all-male issue: be something that other men will be jealous of. And what is the measure of their jealousy? That other men are responding sexually to “my” woman. So this means men are focusing on signs of sexual responses in other men and deriving gratification from them.
Here’s what Patton has tragically wrong, though. Given that you’re willing to toss out your personal and intellectual growth for the sake of winning this competition, even given that, which is a sad way to approach life, it still doesn’t have a chance of working.
Because, once we’ve acknowledged and entered this free market for sexual and romantic partnership, it’s simply not going to work in this day and age to expect the men to want to get married when they’re 20 years old, and it’s also certainly not going to work to withhold sex from 20-year-old men and expect them to marry you. It’s just not where 20-year-old men are at in this system. In fact by doing those things a woman is signaling desperation, which – as is explained in this book – works against a given woman, not for them.
Patton and my theory
I’d like to square her advice with my optimized-for-geniuses theory of Princeton.
The main point of my theory is that it’s all about the men, and specifically, it’s all about the successful male narrative. Whereas before it was enough for women to subjugate their personality, personal ambitions, and long-term goals for the purpose of potential geniuses and/or rich finance guys, Patton is now calling for women to also mutilate their bodies for the cause.
As a signaling device, it indicates real hunger for the role. As some guy said:
Fake boobs say, ‘I objectify myself, therefore I have no problem with you doing the same.’
But as I mentioned above, it is a failed signaling device. It’s an indication that the cultural worship of men has gone too far in Princeton, New Jersey. I’m hopeful that the smell of desperation will be so obvious that people will have to take a closer look and scrutinize the culture.
I’d also like to start a petition to demand that the Wall Street Journal make up for the publishing Patton’s column by also printing this excellent essay on getting laid really well when you’re a divorced fat woman. We need an antidote.
Let’s not replace the SAT with a big data approach
The big news about the SAT is that the College Boards, which makes the SAT, has admitted there is a problem, which is widespread test-prep and gaming. As I talked about in this post, the SAT mainly serves to sort people by income.
It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone when a weak proxy gets gamed. Yesterday I discussed this very thing in the context of Google’s PageRank algorithm, and today it’s student learning aptitude. The question is, what do we do next?
Rick Bookstaber wrote an interesting post yesterday (hat tip Marcos Carreira) with an idea to address the SAT problem with the same approach that I’m guessing Google is addressing the PageRank problem, namely by abandoning the poor proxy and getting a deeper, more involved one. Here’s Bookstaber’s suggestion:
You would think that in the emerging world of big data, where Amazon has gone from recommending books to predicting what your next purchase will be, we should be able to find ways to predict how well a student will do in college, and more than that, predict the colleges where he will thrive and reach his potential. Colleges have a rich database at their disposal: high school transcripts, socio-economic data such as household income and family educational background, recommendations and the extra-curricular activities of every applicant, and data on performance ex post for those who have attended. For many universities, this is a database that encompasses hundreds of thousands of students.
There are differences from one high school to the next, and the sample a college has from any one high school might be sparse, but high schools and school districts can augment the data with further detail, so that the database can extend beyond those who have applied. And the data available to the colleges can be expanded by orders of magnitude if students agree to share their admission data and their college performance on an anonymized basis. There already are common applications forms used by many schools, so as far as admission data goes, this requires little more than adding an agreement in the college applications to share data; the sort of agreement we already make with Facebook or Google.
The end result, achievable in a few years, is a vast database of high school performance, drilling down to the specific high school, coupled with the colleges where each student applied, was accepted and attended, along with subsequent college performance. Of course, the nature of big data is that it is data, so students are still converted into numerical representations. But these will cover many dimensions, and those dimensions will better reflect what the students actually do. Each college can approach and analyze the data differently to focus on what they care about. It is the end of the SAT version of standardization. Colleges can still follow up with interviews, campus tours, and reviews of musical performances, articles, videos of sports, and the like. But they will have a much better filter in place as they do so.
Two things about this. First, I believe this is largely already happening. I’m not an expert on the usage of student data at colleges and universities, but the peek I’ve had into this industry tells me that the analytics are highly advanced (please add related comments and links if you have them!). And they have more to do with admissions and college aid – and possibly future alumni giving – than any definition of academic success. So I think Bookstaber is being a bit naive and idealistic if he thinks colleges will use this information for good. They already have it and they’re not.
Secondly, I want to think a little bit harder about when the “big, deeper data” approach makes sense. I think it does for teachers to some extent, as I talked about yesterday, because after all it’s part of a job to get evaluated. For that matter I expect this kind of thing to be part of most jobs soon (but it will be interesting to see when and where it stops – I’m pretty sure Bloomberg will never evaluate himself quantitatively).
I don’t think it makes sense to evaluate children in the same way, though. After all, we’re basically talking about pre-consensual surveillance, not to mention the collection and mining of information far beyond the control of the individual child. And we’re proposing to mine demographic and behavioral data to predict future success. This is potentially much more invasive than just one crappy SAT test. Childhood is a time which we should try to do our best to protect, not quantify.
Also, the suggestion that this is less threatening because “the data is anonymized” is misleading. Stripping out names in historical data doesn’t change or obscure the difference between coming from a rich high school or a poor one. In the end you will be judged by how “others like you” performed, and in this regime the system gets off the hook but individuals are held accountable. If you think about it, it’s exactly the opposite of the American dream.
I don’t want to be naive. I know colleges will do what they can to learn about their students and to choose students to make themselves look good, at least as long as the US News & World Reports exists. I’d like to make it a bit harder for them to do so.
The endgame for PageRank
First there was Google Search, and then pretty quickly SEOs came into existence.
SEOs are marketing people hired by businesses to bump up the organic rankings for that business in Google Search results. That means they pay people to make their website more attractive and central to Google Search so they don’t have to pay for ads but will get visitors anyway. And since lots of customers come from search results, this is a big deal for those businesses.
Since Google Search was based on a pretty well-known, pretty open algorithm called PageRank which relies on ranking the interestingness of pages by their links, SEOs’ main jobs were to add links and otherwise fiddle with links to and from the websites of their clients. This worked pretty well at the beginning and the businesses got higher rank and they didn’t have to pay for it, except they did have to pay for the SEOs.
But after a while Google caught on to the gaming and adjusted its search algorithm, and SEOs responded by working harder at gaming the system (see more history here). It got more expensive but still kind of worked, and nowadays SEOs are a big business. And the algorithm war is at full throttle, with some claiming that Google Search results are nowadays all a bunch of crappy, low-quality ads.
This is to be expected, of course, when you use a proxy like “link” to indicate something much deeper and more complex like “quality of website”. Since it’s so high stakes, the gaming acts to decouple the proxy entirely from its original meaning. You end up with something that is in fact the complete opposite of what you’d intended. It’s hard to address except by giving up the proxy altogether and going for something much closer to what you care about.
Recently my friend Jordan Ellenberg sent me an article entitled The Future of PageRank: 13 Experts on the Dwindling Value of the Link. It’s an insider article, interviewing 13 SEO experts on how they expect Google to respond to the ongoing gaming of the Google Search algorithm.
The experts don’t all agree on the speed at which this will happen, but there seems to be some kind of consensus that Google will stop relying on links as such and will go to user behavior, online and offline, to rank websites.
If correct, this means that we can expect Google to pump all of our email, browsing, and even GPS data to understand our behaviors in a minute fashion in order to get at a deeper understanding of how we perceive “quality” and how to monetize that. Because, let’s face it, it’s all about money. Google wants good organic searches so that people won’t abandon its search engine altogether so it can sell ads.
So we’re talking GPS on your android, or sensor data, and everything else it can get its hands on through linking up various data sources (which as I read somewhere is why Google+ still exists at all, but I can’t seem to find that article on Google).
It’s kind of creepy all told, and yet I do see something good coming out of it. Namely, it’s what I’ve been saying we should be doing to evaluate teachers, instead of using crappy and gameable standardized tests. We should go deeper and try to define what we actually think makes a good teacher, which will require sensors in the classroom to see if kids are paying attention and are participating and such.
Maybe Google and other creepy tech companies can show us the way on this one, although I don’t expect them to explain their techniques in detail, since they want to stay a step ahead of SEO’s.
Working at the Columbia Journalism School
I’m psyched to say that, as of today, I’m helping start a data journalism program at the Columbia J-School. It’s a one or two semester post-bacc program to get people into data, coding, and visualizations who are starting from non-technical fields. It starts this summer and runs through the end of the year.
And although it’s being held in the J-School, it’s not only meant for journalists. The idea is that people from other humanities who see value in working with data can enroll in the program and emerge competent with data.
There’s no time to waste, as the program starts soon (May 27th) and we don’t even quite have a name for it (suggestions welcome!). We’re also looking for students and teachers. What we do have is plenty of great plans of what to teach, lots of institutional support, and some scholarship money.
Exciting!
mathbabe 