Emperor Tiberius, Angel Investor

Monday, August 9th, 2010

Matt Ridley argues that it is the ever-increasing exchange of ideas that causes the ever-increasing rate of innovation in the modern world — but there’s something to be said, as any Silicon Valley venture capitalist will tell you, for bringing capital and talent together:

For most of history, people have been adept at keeping them apart.

In imperial Rome, scores of unknown slaves no doubt knew how to make better olive presses, better watermills, and better wool looms, while scores of plutocrats knew how to save, invest, and consume. But the two lived miles apart, separated by venal middlemen who had no desire to bring them together.

An anecdote repeated by several Roman authors drives home the point. A man demonstrates to Emperor Tiberius his invention of an unbreakable, malleable form of glass, hoping for a reward. Tiberius asks if anybody else knows his secret and is assured nobody does. So Tiberius beheads the man to prevent the new material from reducing the relative value of gold to that of mud.

The moral of the tale — whether it is true or not — is not just that Roman inventors received negative reward for their pains but that venture capital was so scarce that the only way to get a new idea funded was to go to the emperor.

Posted in Economics, Technology | No Comments »

Calculated Consumption

Monday, August 9th, 2010

Stephanie Rosenbloom reports that we’re moving from conspicuous consumption to calculated consumption:

On the bright side, the practices that consumers have adopted in response to the economic crisis ultimately could — as a raft of new research suggests — make them happier. New studies of consumption and happiness show, for instance, that people are happier when they spend money on experiences instead of material objects, when they relish what they plan to buy long before they buy it, and when they stop trying to outdo the Joneses.

Posted in Economics | 3 Comments »

The Neuroscience of Screwing Up

Sunday, August 8th, 2010

Jonah Lehrer demonstrates the neuroscience of screwing up with an anecdote:

It all started with the sound of static. In May 1964, two astronomers at Bell Labs, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, were using a radio telescope in suburban New Jersey to search the far reaches of space. Their aim was to make a detailed survey of radiation in the Milky Way, which would allow them to map those vast tracts of the universe devoid of bright stars. This meant that Penzias and Wilson needed a receiver that was exquisitely sensitive, able to eavesdrop on all the emptiness. And so they had retrofitted an old radio telescope, installing amplifiers and a calibration system to make the signals coming from space just a little bit louder.

But they made the scope too sensitive. Whenever Penzias and Wilson aimed their dish at the sky, they picked up a persistent background noise, a static that interfered with all of their observations. It was an incredibly annoying technical problem, like listening to a radio station that keeps cutting out.

At first, they assumed the noise was man-made, an emanation from nearby New York City. But when they pointed their telescope straight at Manhattan, the static didn’t increase. Another possibility was that the sound was due to fallout from recent nuclear bomb tests in the upper atmosphere. But that didn’t make sense either, since the level of interference remained constant, even as the fallout dissipated. And then there were the pigeons: A pair of birds were roosting in the narrow part of the receiver, leaving a trail of what they later described as “white dielectric material.” The scientists evicted the pigeons and scrubbed away their mess, but the static remained, as loud as ever.

For the next year, Penzias and Wilson tried to ignore the noise, concentrating on observations that didn’t require cosmic silence or perfect precision. They put aluminum tape over the metal joints, kept the receiver as clean as possible, and hoped that a shift in the weather might clear up the interference. They waited for the seasons to change, and then change again, but the noise always remained, making it impossible to find the faint radio echoes they were looking for. Their telescope was a failure.
[...]
For the radio astronomers, the breakthrough was the result of a casual conversation with an outsider. Penzias had been referred by a colleague to Robert Dicke, a Princeton scientist whose training had been not in astrophysics but nuclear physics. He was best known for his work on radar systems during World War II. Dicke had since become interested in applying his radar technology to astronomy; he was especially drawn to a then-strange theory called the big bang, which postulated that the cosmos had started with a primordial explosion. Such a blast would have been so massive, Dicke argued, that it would have littered the entire universe with cosmic shrapnel, the radioactive residue of genesis. (This proposal was first made in 1948 by physicists George Gamow, Ralph Alpher, and Robert Herman, although it had been largely forgotten by the astronomical community.) The problem for Dicke was that he couldn’t find this residue using standard telescopes, so he was planning to build his own dish less than an hour’s drive south of the Bell Labs one.

Then, in early 1965, Penzias picked up the phone and called Dicke. He wanted to know if the renowned radar and radio telescope expert could help explain the persistent noise bedeviling them. Perhaps he knew where it was coming from? Dicke’s reaction was instantaneous: “Boys, we’ve been scooped!” he said. Someone else had found what he’d been searching for: the radiation left over from the beginning of the universe. It had been an incredibly frustrating process for Penzias and Wilson. They’d been consumed by the technical problem and had spent way too much time cleaning up pigeon shit — but they had finally found an explanation for the static. Their failure was the answer to a different question.

And all that frustration paid off: In 1978, they received the Nobel Prize for physics.

Kevin Dunbar’s research on researchers found that science is a deeply frustrating pursuit:

Although the researchers were mostly using established techniques, more than 50 percent of their data was unexpected. (In some labs, the figure exceeded 75 percent.) “The scientists had these elaborate theories about what was supposed to happen,” Dunbar says. “But the results kept contradicting their theories. It wasn’t uncommon for someone to spend a month on a project and then just discard all their data because the data didn’t make sense.” Perhaps they hoped to see a specific protein but it wasn’t there. Or maybe their DNA sample showed the presence of an aberrant gene. The details always changed, but the story remained the same: The scientists were looking for X, but they found Y.
[...]
According to Dunbar, even after scientists had generated their “error” multiple times — it was a consistent inconsistency — they might fail to follow it up. “Given the amount of unexpected data in science, it’s just not feasible to pursue everything,” Dunbar says. “People have to pick and choose what’s interesting and what’s not, but they often choose badly.” And so the result was tossed aside, filed in a quickly forgotten notebook. The scientists had discovered a new fact, but they called it a failure.

Lehrer’s advice on how to learn from failure:

  1. Check your assumptions.
  2. Seek out the ignorant.
  3. Encourage diversity.
  4. Beware of failure-blindness.

Posted in Science | No Comments »

Foreign Viewers Shape US Films

Saturday, August 7th, 2010

Foreign viewers’ tastes increasingly shape US films, as foreign ticket sales have grown over the past decade from 58 to 68 percent of the $32 billion global film market:

Studios have begun to cast foreign actors in American-themed blockbusters like “G.I. Joe.” Scripts are being rewritten to lure global audiences. And studios are cutting back on standard Hollywood fare like romantic comedies because foreign movie-goers often don’t find American jokes all that funny. Several Hollywood studios have gone as far as financing, producing and marketing original movies for markets like South Korea and Brazil.
[...]
Satisfying foreign audiences has been tricky for Hollywood. Years ago, audiences in Japan or South Korea would faithfully go to the multiplex to watch movies that were written, produced, and cast out of Hollywood. Now, increasingly sophisticated local films are giving Hollywood a run for its money.

In South Korea, ticket sales to local movies accounted for about 10% or 20% of box-office revenue in the 1990s. Hollywood movies grabbed the lion’s share. Now, local fare makes up nearly 50% of South Korean ticket sales, according to Screen Digest.

Posted in Business, Media | No Comments »

What Prohibition Can Teach Us About Marijuana Legalization

Friday, August 6th, 2010

Last Call by Daniel OkrentDaniel Okrent (Last Call) answers readers’ questions about Prohibition on the Freakonomics Blog:

No factor played a larger role in the repeal of Prohibition than the government’s desperate need for revenue as the country fell into the grip of the Depression. Before Prohibition’s advent, a substantial amount of federal revenue came from the excise tax on alcohol. As the collection of income taxes and capital gains taxes plummeted between 1930 and 1933, politicians realized that the return of liquor and beer could help shore up federal finances. In fact, in the first post-repeal year, 1934, fully nine percent of federal revenue came from the revived alcohol tax.

In today’s political climate, where no one seems to be willing to raise income-tax rates, both state and federal governments are turning increasingly to excise taxes, use taxes and other levies that could easily be applied to marijuana. Californians will be voting on such a measure — it’s actually called the “Regulate, Control and Tax Cannabis Act” — this November.

Despite rumors to the contrary, Prohibition did reduce drinking:

At the end of Prohibition, Americans were consuming approximately 70 percent as much alcohol as they had in 1914. (Demographic historians use that as a base year, as many states began to pass sharply restrictive liquor laws around that time.)

In fact, it wasn’t until 1973 that we returned to pre-Prohibition levels of alcohol consumption, and only a few years later the per capita consumption figure began to decline again. Even now, we’re only inching our way back to the 1914 high-water mark. (Or maybe I should call it the “high-alcohol mark”!)

One figure we’ll never reach again: the 7.5 gallons of absolute alcohol the average American drank in 1830 – the equivalent of 90 fifths of 80-proof liquor, or nearly three times as much as we consume today.

What did the mobsters do when Prohibition was repealed?

Some went straight: the Bronfmans, who controlled Seagram’s, used the production facilities, distribution relationships and brand recognition they had built during Prohibition to become one of North America’s wealthiest families, dominating the distilling industry. Others stayed crooked: the national crime syndicate that reigned for decades after repeal was the product of inter-city peace pacts and cooperation agreements forged at two conferences – one in Atlantic City, the other in Chicago – during Prohibition.

And some took a middle path. In the years after Prohibition, culminating in a major effort after World War II, one-time bootleggers from eight different states east of the Mississippi decided to look west in an effort to find a way not just to preserve their fortunes, but also to enhance them. Their solution: they invented Las Vegas.

Posted in Economics, Policy | No Comments »

Hiring Goats to Clear an Overgrown Backyard

Friday, August 6th, 2010

Hiring goats to clear an overgrown backyard is the latest upper-middle-class fad:

Generally, companies truck goats to work sites (some gas required) where the animals munch inside portable fencing or electric netting, often powered by solar panels. Prices can range from $200 a day for a dozen goats to upward of $1,000 for larger herds of 100 or more. On bigger projects, animals may stay overnight supervised by the business owners or specially trained guardian dogs.

At Vanderbilt Mansion, where a small herd currently grazes on seven hilly acres, the job’s $9,000 annual price tag is about two-thirds what hired manpower would run, says Dave Hayes, the estate’s natural-resource program manager. “And the goats are a lot more popular.”

They’re also gentle. Casey Brewer of Duvall, Wash., hired The Goat Lady LLC to clear half an acre overrun with salmonberries. The tally came to just over $1,000 for three days, and Ms. Brewer says the goats didn’t harm her cherished old-growth cedar stumps.

“It’s a wonderful alternative to bulldozing the property,” she says.

There can be snafus. Josh Farmer, 49, runs The Goat Lady with his partner Jill Johnson, an eighth-grade schoolteacher. While electric netting and an Anatolian shepherd dog protect their goats from predators or household dogs, neighborhood children pose a unique threat. “There are those who think it’s fun to unplug my electric fence just when it gets dark, letting goats escape,” Mr. Farmer says.

And some plants are toxic to goats including ornamentals such as azaleas, oleanders and rhododendrons. Lois Anne Keith paid about $14,000 to bring in 130 goats from Rent-A-Ruminant LLC for several weeks of clearing around her 25-acre Woodinville, Wash., property. The experience went smoothly, except one evening when four goats got sick munching old rhododendron stumps because they were hidden by blackberries. Fortunately the owner, Tammy Dunakin, was sleeping on site in a truck and had medicine to give the goats.

“It’s not a simple line of work,” says Ms. Dunakin, who expects to gross just over $100,000 this year, her sixth in the business, and is developing an “affiliate” model to train others in goat brush-clearing. From setting up fencing to giving goats shots, water and mineral supplements, she says, “there are a lot of mistakes people can make.”

Town and city rules about livestock vary. Often animals can’t be raised on property not zoned for agriculture use — but are allowed to visit. In 2004, some residents of the Pacific Palisades, Calif., enclave Marquez Knolls complained, unsuccessfully, to city officials when a resident temporarily parked a trailer with her brush-clearing goats on the street. At night, coyotes circled the truck, recalls Haldis Toppel, president of the neighborhood association. “This is a residential area with dogs, cats and kids and there is a safety factor,” she says.

Posted in Animals, Business | No Comments »

How to be a good Samaritan without getting beat down

Friday, August 6th, 2010

An 18-year-old guy was beating his girlfriend as they got off the bus in Saint Paul, Minnesota, when a 33-year-old man came to the girl’s defense — and promptly got beat down. His training as a military police officer in the Minnesota National Guard wasn’t enough apparently.

Mark MacYoung explains how to be a good Samaritan without getting beat down:

When someone is actively engaging in physical violence, the last thing you want to do is run up… and then start woofing at him. And yet, this is what entirely too many people (who end up like the Samaritan in the story) attempt to do.

What they don’t understand is that if it’s gone physical, it is past the threat display and posturing stage that precedes most physical violence. In short, this tactic puts you into the middle of a situation, but you are way behind the power curve. And the attacker knows it. So it is extremely likely that he will simply turn his physical violence onto you.
[...]
While running up to someone and yelling isn’t a good idea, staying back and yelling, has a far better track record — especially if you’re yelling that the police are coming. It’s even better if you’re telling the truth.

911 on your cell phone, a “HEY YOU! I’M CALLING THE COPS!” and then giving the attacker’s location and description will do a whole lot more to scare him off than running up, sticking out your chest and calling him names.

Violent people tend not to be scared of you, but they are scared of the police — especially if the police show up while they are being violent. While the cops must be polite and restrained when the attacker isn’t doing anything (or has done something) when the police show up and he is being violent… all kinds of unpleasantness can happen. This includes him flopping on the floor while the taser does its five second cycle.

Posted in Crime, Martial Arts | No Comments »

Teachers Unions vs. Online Education

Friday, August 6th, 2010

Katherine Mangu-Ward looks at teachers unions vs. online education:

A growing number of kids and their parents are figuring out ways to sneak schoolwork online. More than 1 million public school students are enrolled in online classes, up from about 50,000 a decade ago. In Florida, nearly 80,000 kids take classes in the state-sponsored Florida Virtual School. Virtual charter school companies such as K12 Inc. provide full-time online education to 70,000 students in 25 states. Hundreds of small, innovative companies are springing up, vying to combine learning with the power of the Internet. Nationwide, 17 percent of high school students report having taken an online course for school in the last year; another 12 percent say they took a class on their own time. Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, co-author of Disrupting Class, a seminal 2008 book about online education, estimates that half of all high school courses in the United States will be consumed over the Internet by 2019.
[...]
Online education’s biggest success to date is the Florida Virtual School (FLVS). Founded in 1997, FLVS was the first public statewide online education program in the country. Founder Julie Young had snagged a $200,000 “Break the Mold” grant from the state of Florida to experiment with online learning. In the early days, as she traveled the state selling the idea to local districts, the reception was muted. “People were sitting there with arms folded and saying, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’?” recalls the friendly, carefully manicured Young, who had previously worked as a teacher and technology adviser in the state’s public schools.

With the election of Jeb Bush in 1998, Young found herself working under a governor with a serious interest in education reform. With Bush’s support, legislation expanding the virtual school gave the program a unique advantage: Rather than allowing school officials to be the arbiters of who gets to go online and how, the law said any Florida student who wants to take an FLVS course online must be allowed to do so. The students themselves — not preoccupied guidance counselors, budget-conscious principals, or any other gatekeepers — decided whether to give the virtual school a try.

As the Harvard education scholar Paul Peterson put it in his 2010 book Saving Schools, “Much like an Everglades alligator, Young took a quiet, underwater approach.” At a time when Gov. Bush and his cadre of education reformers were regularly butting heads with the educational establishment, Young went out of her way not to antagonize teachers unions or disparage traditional schools. “From day one, what we tried to do was design FLVS so that it was not competitive with the schools, but complementary,” she says. Her pedagogical philosophy is noncontroversial — with a few exceptions, the curriculum is typical of the stuff Florida students would get in a traditional classroom — and she is studiedly nonpolitical. The courses offered by FLVS are supplemental; the virtual school cannot grant degrees on its own. Nearly every student remains enrolled in a full-time program at a physical school. The funding formula adopted by the state takes only a fraction of the annual per-student cost from their local school, and FLVS gets paid only when students successfully complete the course.

Young doesn’t use the language of reform or revolution. Instead she talks about “doing what’s right for kids.” Yet Florida Virtual School’s model is, in its own way, revolutionary. The school employs 1,200 accredited, nonunion teachers, who are available by phone or email from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., seven days a week. Kids take what they want, when they want. The academic results are more than respectable. FLVS boasts that kids in advanced placement courses — 39 percent of whom are minority students—score an average of 3.05 out of 5, compared with a state average of 2.49 for students in offline public school classes. FLVS students also beat state averages in reading and math at all grade levels, with 87 percent of eighth-graders receiving at least a passing score on the state standardized test in math, compared with 60 percent statewide. Even critical studies of educational achievement in Florida’s online courses find that the results are as good as or better than state averages on virtually every measure.

Not all of the major players in online education have opted for the stealthy alligator approach. K12 Inc., one of the largest private providers nationwide, doesn’t mind picking political fights. One of its founders is Reagan administration Secretary of Education Bill Bennett, an outspoken conservative. (He resigned from the school’s leadership in 2005 after some intemperate remarks about the alleged links between abortion, race, and crime.) While FLVS was sneaking up on the Sunshine State’s educational establishment, K12 Inc. started showing up all over the country in 2000 with a bullhorn.

Unlike FLVS, K12 provides full-time instruction. That means students from kindergarten through 12th grade can do their entire school year online. While the curriculum isn’t particularly innovative, the model is potentially far more disruptive than a program like FLVS. K12 takes children and teenagers out of school and away from traditional teacher-student relationships. The company has some partnerships with traditional public schools, but K12 primarily works by helping charter schools in states with lenient laws go virtual, accepting kids (and the money they bring with them) from all over the state.

In the zero-sum world of education dollars, that approach means that state education bureaucrats generally don’t show up at K12’s virtual door with welcoming tater tot casseroles. In 2003 Wisconsin’s Northern Ozaukee School District was experiencing declining enrollment and hoped that bringing in a virtual charter might attract students (and their per-pupil spending allocations) from around the state. This worked brilliantly, with 500 students signing up for the virtual charter school from all over the state in the program’s first year. The district and K12 split the $5,000 that came with each kid, and everyone was happy. Well, everyone except the administrators and teachers in the districts losing enrollment dollars to the experiment in online learning. The conflict exploded in January 2004 with a lawsuit brought by the teachers union and the elected state superintendent. State Sen. John Lehman (D-Racine), who heads his chamber’s education committee, accused private education companies of “profiteering off of kids.”

The result was a compromise that neutered virtual education in Wisconsin. K12 could continue to operate, but it could enroll students only from the physical district where the charter school was located — essentially stopping the Internet at the county line. And enrollment was capped at 5,250 students. For good measure, Wisconsin announced plans to create an FLVS-like state-sponsored virtual academy, which will compete with K12 on lopsided terms and, unlike in Florida, be firmly under the control of the education bureaucracy.

Posted in Education, Policy | No Comments »

For Humans, Slow And Steady Running Won The Race

Thursday, August 5th, 2010

For its “human edge” series, NPR looks at how slow and steady running won the race:

“Most animals are designed for speed, for power, not for endurance,” Lieberman explains, as we make a turn onto the bridge. “And we are a special species in having been selected for endurance, not speed.”

So we grew longer legs and lighter feet; the joints in the legs and pelvis got bigger to absorb a lot of impact; and we grew a bigger butt muscle.

Lieberman says these and other changes allowed us to run down and exhaust prey, like antelopes. He notes that “persistence hunters” in Africa have been known to do that. And the payoff would’ve been big for early humans: lots of high-calorie meat to feed a bigger brain.

Lieberman is creating a computer model of how we run — in contrast to how other primates might run:

“There are no humans out there with faces as large as Neanderthals,” he explains as he rummages through a cupboard, “so people wear weights in their mouths, which then changes the center of gravity of their head.”

Understanding head control is important. If you don’t keep your head still, you can’t focus your eyes. Lieberman says modern humans, unlike apes, have a special muscle that connects each arm to the neck and head. As you swing your arms, they become counterweights to stabilize your head.

Posted in Animals, Fitness, Science | No Comments »

Breast Milk Sugars Give Infants a Protective Coat

Thursday, August 5th, 2010

A large part of human milk cannot be digested by babies — but it can be digested by a subspecies of Bifidobacterium longum:

The indigestible substance that favors the bifido bacterium is a slew of complex sugars derived from lactose, the principal component of milk. The complex sugars consist of a lactose molecule on to which chains of other sugar units have been added. The human genome does not contain the necessary genes to break down the complex sugars, but the bifido subspecies does, the researchers say in a review of their progress in today’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The complex sugars were long thought to have no biological significance, even though they constitute up to 21 percent of milk. Besides promoting growth of the bifido strain, they also serve as decoys for noxious bacteria that might attack the infant’s intestines. The sugars are very similar to those found on the surface of human cells, and are constructed in the breast by the same enzymes. Many toxic bacteria and viruses bind to human cells by docking with the surface sugars. But they will bind to the complex sugars in milk instead. “We think mothers have evolved to let this stuff flush through the infant,” Dr. Mills said.

Posted in Science | No Comments »

Undermining Our Dysfunctional Ruling Class

Thursday, August 5th, 2010

What can we do, Lexington Green asks, to undermine our dysfunctional ruling class‘s cultural confidence?

Why does an elite that is actually not admirable in what it does, and not effective or productive, that has added little or nothing of value to the civilizational stock, that cannot possibly do the things it claims it can do, that services rent-seekers and the well-connected, that believes in an incoherent mishmash of politically correct platitudes, that is parasitic, have such an elevated view of itself?

The old British aristocracy could at least truthfully say that they had physical courage and patriotism and cared for their shires and neighborhoods and served for free as justices of the peace. The old French aristocracy could at least truthfully say that had refinement and manners and a love for art and literature and sophistication and beautiful things. The old Yankee elite could truthfully say that it was enterprising and public spirited and willing to rough it and do hard work when necessary. This lot have little or nothing to be proud of, but they are arrogant as Hell.

Why aren’t these people laughed out of the room?

Jim Bennett describes our ruling class as all noblesse and no oblige.

Posted in Policy | 2 Comments »

American Bantustan

Thursday, August 5th, 2010

After the Civil War, the North decided not to create an American Bantustan, Joseph Fouché explains:

In The Soul of Battle, agricultural expert Victor David Hanson presents three great interventions of liberation: Epaminondas’s liberation of Messenia and Arcadia from Sparta during his first invasion of the Peloponnese, Sherman’s March to the Sea, and the march of Patton’s Third Army into Germany. The contrast between Hanson’s portrayal of Epaminondas’s intervention and Sherman’s intervention is telling. Epaminondas built fortresses for the Messenians and Arcadians, arranged them into potent and territorially contiguous confederacies, and armed them. Both confederacies outlasted Sparta, their former master, and, in the case of Arcadia, even absorbed Sparta’s weakened remnant.

In contrast to Epaminondas, William Tecumseh Sherman liberated the slaves but left them dispersed among their former oppressors, indifferently armed, indifferently protected, and vulnerable. In Freakonomics, Steve Levitt analyzed the pattern of lynching in the South. The number of lynchings were high in the initial decades after the Civil War but then dropped off.

Why?

Levitt makes a plausible case that, as time went by, lynching did its work. Those African-Americans who were most resistant to white rule had been killed. The community had been decapitated. Resistance to white rule had become muted and directionless for almost another century. The educational function of lynching, except for the occasional remedial lesson, was completed.

The best solution to protecting African-American civil rights would have been to relocate them to a single contiguous block of territory where they were a majority that could govern themselves, armed them, and ensured they had an adequate economic base. While the idea of a bantustan is abhorrent to contemporary sensibilities that favor racial integration, a bantustan was more feasible in the late nineteenth century than the racial integration pursued by the Radical Republicans. It would also correspond to the dominant ideological idea that emerged from the twentieth century: people would rather be oppressed by someone who looks like them and talks like them and acts like them than be ruled well by someone who does not look like them and does not talk like them and does not act like them.

In the early nineteenth century, many white Americans from Henry Clay to Abraham Lincoln already realized this. However, their preferred solution, the emigration of freed slaves to Africa, was unworkable because of the costs of shipping that many people back to Africa and, the major stumbling block, most African-Americans had no desire to emigrate. Ulysses S. Grant’s proposal to annex Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic) and use it as a refuge for African-Americans was at least in the same hemisphere but foundered for the same reasons African colonization failed. Though the politics of the time didn’t favor it, a better solution would have been to set aside a substantial piece of American territory specifically for African-Americans. In the name of justice, this piece of territory should have been South Carolina, with its white, secessionist population expelled. Florida would be even better but even the territory that later became North Dakota or Arizona would have been preferable to decapitation through mob attrition.

This was not the solution selected. Instead, the solution selected was repeated Federal intervention. Certainly consistent Federal intervention could have protected the freed slaves from local Southern revanchists and, until 1877 and even into the 1890s, it did. However, the same discretion granted by the Fourteenth Amendment that allowed the Grant Administration to intervene in the South to protect African-Americans allowed the Hayes Administration to withdraw that protection.

Live by Federal discretion. Die by Federal discretion.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Your Customers Don’t Want to Talk to You

Thursday, August 5th, 2010

Your customers don’t want to talk to you:

Have you ever walked into an airport, seen that there is nobody in line at the check-in counter, but still made a bee-line for the self-service kiosk? Better yet, have you ever waited in line for an ATM machine even though there is nobody in line for the teller inside the bank?

If you answered “yes” to either of these questions, you’re not alone. Most customers these days demonstrate a huge — and increasing — appetite for self-service, yet most companies run their operations as if customers prefer to interact with them live.

In our research on this topic (which we discuss in our recent HBR article “Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers“), we’ve found that corporate leaders dramatically overestimate the extent to which their customers actually want to talk to them. In fact, on average, companies tend to think their customers value live service more than twice as much as they value self service. But our data show that customers today are statistically indifferent about this — they value self-service just as much as using the phone. And guess what? By and large, this indifference holds regardless of their age, demographic, issue type, or urgency.

Posted in Business | 4 Comments »

Higher Education

Wednesday, August 4th, 2010

In an NPR interview, Professor Andrew Hacker — co-author of Higher Education? — argues that what our system offers is neither higher nor education — it’s mere training.

His book is subtitled How Colleges are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids and What We Can Do About It — which implies that the high cost of going to college is tuition being paid by students’ parents to professors, when parents are largely paying for room and board, students are foregoing wages, and professors are getting paid via government research grants.

Again, some of his points are grounded — for instance, that tenure is more of a liability than an asset, or that when 3,000 people are writing articles on William Faulkner, that’s not exactly curing cancer — but some are very, very ivory tower — like the notion that everyone should be getting a liberal arts education, and that every young person “has a mind, has an intellect, has curiosity,” etc.

I love this argument against vocational training:

Well, first of all, one of the problems with what we call vocational training, is that the decision is made, let’s say, when a person is a senior in high school or a freshman in college. And a lot of them say, hey, I want to go to engineering school. Do you know, Tony, that almost half of engineering school students drop out? Why? Because they discover engineering isn’t what they thought it was. And by the way, the teaching in engineering is absolutely abysmal. But those kids have wasted, you know, $20,000 maybe more in those first few years of their vocational training that didn’t work out.

Yeah, half of engineering students drop out because they discover engineering isn’t what they thought it was. They thought engineering was easy.

Posted in Education | 5 Comments »

A Handy Bunch

Wednesday, August 4th, 2010

Modern humans are a handy bunch — much handier than the first handy man, Homo habilis:

Handy man made tools, but they were crude. That could be because his wrists and hands were still pretty ape-like. Now, apes make tools. Scientists have trained a bonobo, called Kanzi, to do that. But Kanzi’s not much good at it.

“He just can’t get the motions down,” Williams says. That’s because he can’t grip the stones, his thumbs aren’t long enough and his fingers are too long and he’s clumsy. He can’t move his wrists — he can’t extend his wrist and get this important “snap.” He makes a mess.

An ape’s brain is up to the task, but his anatomy isn’t. He doesn’t have the hands. It took millions of years of evolution to produce the hands of a skilled flint-knapper like [Dennis Sandgathe, an archaeologist from Simon Fraser University in Canada].
[...]
On an office table, Orr has laid out the skeletal hands of three apes and a human. The apes’ hands are enormous — the orangutan’s is like a catcher’s mitt.

But their thumbs are tiny and splayed out to the side; the fingers are long and curved. They look powerful, but Orr says the strength runs vertically, from the wrist up through the fingers. That’s good for hanging on tree limbs, but not for much else.

The human hand is smaller, and it works differently. Orr hands me a two-foot-long club to illustrate.

“Here, try to hold this without using your little finger, and just using those other digits,” he says. That’s the way an ape might hold it. I make to swing it but realize it will fly out of my hand if I do.

The strength in my hand extends across my palm. My thumb is stronger, and so is my pinky. I can wrap that thumb over my other fingers and then secure the grip at the bottom with my pinkie. An ape can’t manage that very well.

And my opposed thumb and wider fingertips also mean I can grip a round stone — like a hammerstone — with more control than an ape can.
[...]
“When I flip the arm over so that the palm is up you can see, underneath these tendons, that we have just a ton of muscles that are just in our palms that help us finely move our fingers.”

It’s a spider’s web of muscles and tendons under the skin, many of them unique to the human hand. The hand’s exquisite architecture allows us to play Bach, shuffle a deck of cards, or write poetry — the things we often think of that define us as human. And all it took to get it was a few million years of whacking two rocks against each other.

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