How the Irish Bubble Burst

Tuesday, April 12th, 2011

If you want to study the economic crisis of the last few years, Theodore Dalrymple says, go to Ireland, where you will find it in its purest form:

The madness that gripped the country can be gauged from a few examples. A 25-acre piece of land on the edge of Dublin on which a derelict factory stood sold in 2006 for $550 million. After the banking collapse two years later, it was valued by the National Asset Management Administration, the public-sector organization set up to handle the banks’ toxic assets, at $80 million, a sum itself arbitrary in the absence of a flourishing market.

The Anglo-Irish Bank, which eventually collapsed and left taxpayers a legacy of approximately $40 billion of debt, lent an average of $1.7 billion to each of six property developers; it lent more than $650 million each to another nine. A house in Shrewsbury Road, Dublin, sold for $80 million in 2005 but, now standing empty, is on the way to dereliction, and no house on the road — a millionaires’ row — has sold for the last two years, despite a fall in prices of at least 66 percent.

During the boom, taxi drivers and shop assistants would tell you about the third or fourth house they had bought — on borrowed money, of course — and of their apartments in Europe, from Malaga to Budapest to the Black Sea Coast of Bulgaria. It was not so much a boom as a gold rush, or a modern reenactment of the Tulipomania.

All this would not have been possible were it not for the insouciance of foreign banks. The Royal Bank of Scotland alone lent $50 billion in Ireland. German banks extended $140 billion in credit and the British banks as much again. The champions, on a per capita basis, were the Belgians, weighing in at $57 billion. (The cautious Americans lent only $70 billion.)

The gross external debt of Ireland is just a fraction less than half a million dollars per head, that is to say, more than $2 trillion in total. It is not difficult to see why a rescue was needed, or who was being rescued: not the Irish, but all of us.

Posted in Economics, Policy, Theodore Dalrymple | No Comments »

Pushing Performance Beyond Its Normal Comfortable Level

Monday, April 11th, 2011

Speed of performance can be improved through deliberate practice — something that scientists studied decades ago while studying typists:

The key finding is that expert typists have acquired mental representations to allow them to look further ahead in the text while typing in order to prepare for future key strokes in advance (as shown by high speed filming of anticipatory movement of the fingers of typists).

Typists are able to type at their normal speed for years without increasing it. They are, however, also able to increase their speed of typing beyond their normal speed by pushing themselves for as long as they can maintain full concentration, which is typically between 15–30 minutes per day in the beginning of training (Dvorak et al., 1936).

While they push themselves to type at a faster speed — usually around 10–20% faster than their normal speed — typists uncover keystroke combinations that are comparatively slow and poorly executed. This type of practice allows identification and subsequent correction of weaker components that will allow gradual speed-up of performance during an extended series of practice sessions. More generally, deliberate practice in many different domains involves finding methods to push performance beyond its normal comfortable level by maximal concentration — even if that higher level of performance can be maintained only for short time without errors.

Posted in Education, Science | No Comments »

Will Five Guys overtake In-N-Out?

Monday, April 11th, 2011

Will Five Guys overtake In-N-Out? They’re making their move on the west coast:

Like In-N-Out, Five Guys’ menu is focused on single and double hamburgers and cheeseburgers, along with hand-cut fries. And like In-N-Out, Five Guys restaurants are red and white, with perky employees in red-and-white uniforms.

And Five Guys is coming on strong.

The privately held chain, which has 770 locations in the U.S. and Canada, began moving into California two years ago with a handful of shops in Orange County and the Inland Empire.

Now there are 27 locations in the state, but Five Guys has sold the rights to open 200 more in Southern California alone — nearly double the number operated here by In-N-Out. Next up is a Culver City location, set to open in mid-April.

But to really make inroads here, Five Guys will have to get past a major hurdle: the intense loyalty of In-N-Out customers.

Yes, both chains focus on burgers and have red-and-white decor, but Five Guys does not have perky employees — at least not with In ‘N’ Out’s remarkable consistency.

By the way, perky correlates shockingly well with middle-class — in the same way that sullen correlates with not middle-class.

Posted in Business | 6 Comments »

Serenity Parenting

Monday, April 11th, 2011

Bryan Caplan makes his case for Serenity Parenting — in the Wall Street Journal this time:

Parents need the serenity to accept the things they cannot change, the courage to change the things they can, and (thank you twin research) the wisdom to know the difference. Focus on enjoying your journey with your child, instead of trying to control his destination. Accept that your child’s future depends mostly on him, not your sacrifices. Realize that the point of discipline is to make your kid treat the people around him decently — not to mold him into a better adult.
[...]
The key point to keep in mind is that twin research focuses on vaguely normal families in the First World. It doesn’t claim that kids would do equally well if they were raised by wolves or abandoned in Haiti. But look on the bright side: If you are a vaguely normal family in the First World, the science of nature and nurture shows that you can lighten up a lot without hurting your kids.

Posted in Economics, Education | No Comments »

How to Get a Real Education at College

Monday, April 11th, 2011

Scott Adams (Dilbert) understands why the top students in America study physics, chemistry, calculus and classic literature:

The kids in this brainy group are the future professors, scientists, thinkers and engineers who will propel civilization forward. But why do we make B students sit through these same classes? That’s like trying to train your cat to do your taxes — a waste of time and money. Wouldn’t it make more sense to teach B students something useful, like entrepreneurship?

He goes on to share his entrepreneurial anecdotes on how to get a real education at college:

One day the managers of The Coffee House had a meeting to discuss two topics. First, our Minister of Employment was recommending that we fire a bartender, who happened to be one of my best friends. Second, we needed to choose a leader for our group. On the first question, there was a general consensus that my friend lacked both the will and the potential to master the bartending arts. I reluctantly voted with the majority to fire him.

But when it came to discussing who should be our new leader, I pointed out that my friend — the soon-to-be-fired bartender — was tall, good-looking and so gifted at B.S. that he’d be the perfect leader. By the end of the meeting I had persuaded the group to fire the worst bartender that any of us had ever seen… and ask him if he would consider being our leader. My friend nailed the interview and became our Commissioner. He went on to do a terrific job. That was the year I learned everything I know about management.

I love his scheme to become a paid student manager of his dorm:

The dean required that our first order of business in the fall would be creating a dorm constitution and getting it ratified. That sounded like a nightmare to organize. To save time, I wrote the constitution over the summer and didn’t mention it when classes resumed.

We held a constitutional convention to collect everyone’s input, and I listened to two hours of diverse opinions. At the end of the meeting I volunteered to take on the daunting task of crafting a document that reflected all of the varied and sometimes conflicting opinions that had been aired.

I waited a week, made copies of the document that I had written over the summer, presented it to the dorm as their own ideas and watched it get approved in a landslide vote. That was the year I learned everything I know about getting buy-in.

His bullet-list of entrepreneurial lessons:

  • Combine skills.
  • Fail forward.
  • Find the action.
  • Attract luck.
  • Conquer fear.
  • Write simply.
  • Learn persuasion.

Posted in Business, Education | 2 Comments »

Practice versus Deliberate Practice

Sunday, April 10th, 2011

In their High Ability Studies paper, Giftedness and evidence for reproducibly superior performance, K. Anders Ericsson, et al. present some of the evidence for their expert performance framework — including this famous finding about deliberate practice:

The critical role of deliberate practice in attaining expert performance was first proposed by Ericsson et al. (1993), who reported a study of three groups of expert musicians who differed in level of attained music performance. The first author and his colleagues (Ericsson et al., 1993) examined how the expert musicians spent their daily lives by interviewing them and having them keep detailed diaries for a week.

All expert musicians were found to spend about the same amount of time on all types of music related activities during the diary week — about 50–60 hours. The most striking difference was that the two most accomplished groups of expert musicians were found to spend more time (25 hours) in solitary practice than the least accomplished group, who only spent around 10 hours per week.

During solitary practice the experts reported working with full concentration on improving specific aspects of their music performance — often identified by their master teacher at their weekly lessons — thus meeting the criteria for deliberate practice. The best groups of expert musicians spent around four hours every day, including weekends, in this type of solitary practice.

From retrospective estimates of practice, Ericsson et al. (1993) calculated the number of hours of deliberate practice that five groups of musicians at different performance levels had accumulated by a given age, as is illustrated in Figure 3. By the age of 20, the most accomplished musicians had spent over 10,000 hours of practice, which is 2500 and 5000 hours more than two less accomplished groups of expert musicians or 8000 hours more than amateur pianists of the same age (Krampe & Ericsson, 1996).

The same type of solitary deliberate practice has been found to be closely correlated with the attainment of expert and elite performance in a wide range of domains (for a review see Ericsson, 2006b).

Posted in Education, Science | 2 Comments »

Buying up the Golden Age of Illustration

Sunday, April 10th, 2011

Collectors are moving on from first editions to the original art that went into them:

Last October, Garth Williams’s original drawing for the cover of E.B. White’s 1952 book “Charlotte’s Web” sold at Heritage Auctions for $155,350, five times its high estimate. Two years before that, a British collector paid Sotheby’s in London a record $578,384 for Ms. Potter’s 6-inch-square watercolor, “The Rabbits’ Christmas Party: The Departure.”

On Monday, Sotheby’s in New York will test this market again by offering up 193 original illustrations for children’s books priced to sell for at least $989,000 combined.

Sotheby’s sale is peppered with recognizable characters like “Winnie-the-Pooh,” “Madeline” and “Babar,” each priced to sell for at least $40,000. But the pricier works in the sale stretch back to the late 1800s and early 1900s, including Jessie Willcox Smith’s 1910 portrait of a young girl with rosy cheeks, “How Doth the Little Busy Bee.” Originally published in “A Child’s Book of Old Verses,” the portrait is priced to sell for at least $200,000.

The pool of collectors who focus on original children’s book art is still relatively small and concentrated in America, Britain and Japan, according to Nick Clark, chief curator of the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst, Mass. But the category also draws its share of one-time buyers determined to own something by a childhood favorite like E.H. Shepard, who drew A.A. Milne’s “Pooh” characters.

By and large, collectors will pay more for an illustration used on a cover than for anything displayed inside; they’ll also pay more for a “Babar” elephant drawn by series creator Jean de Brunhoff than for subsequent versions by Mr. de Brunhoff’s son, Laurent.

Since the recession, values seem to be holding up best for children’s-book art made between 1880 and 1940, an era known as the Golden Age of Illustration when technological advances in printing presses made it possible to churn out colorfully ornate books.

Among children’s books, this canon includes British illustrator Arthur Rackham (1867-1939), whose otherworldly characters blend the grotesque imagery of Norse mythology with the Zen of Japanese woodblock prints. Sotheby’s wants at least $50,000 for Mr. Rackham’s pair of 1906 watercolors, “Two Winter Fables: Mother Goose [and] Jack Frost.” Other favorites include Danish illustrator Kay Nielsen (1886–1957), who is best known for his work in Walt Disney’s “Fantasia.”

Posted in Business, Media | No Comments »

Getting in Shape for What Matters

Saturday, April 9th, 2011

US Army infantry soldiers have a weight problem — but not the kind American civilians have:

Infantry soldiers are rarely overweight. But they are carrying more and more weight, and it’s having an adverse effect on performance, morale and physical fitness. Troops are frequently carrying 50-60 kg (110-132 pounds). That means they cannot move as fast as the enemy, and when they try to they tire faster and get frustrated, and often injured (by the enemy or by the sheer physical stress of hustling with all that weight on them.) Long term, troops are developing the kind of physical stress injuries athletes are prone to (eventually) when they overdo it.

Why are they carrying so much gear? It’s not always up to them:

The brass insist on a lot of stuff being carried mainly so there will be no media blowback if someone, somewhere, complains that troops died because they lacked a particular item.
[...]
Many soldiers and marines point out that the SOCOM operators (Special Forces and SEALs) will sometimes go into action without their protective vests. Again, that is done because completion of the mission is more important than covering your ass when a reporter goes after you for “unnecessary casualties.” Many of the troops are willing to take the risk, because they believe, for example, that taking down a sniper when you have the chance, is worth it. If you don’t catch the guy, he will be back in action the next day, killing Americans.

Some numbers:

Currently, the lightest load carried, the “fighting load” for situations where the troops were sneaking up on the enemy and might be involved in hand-to-hand combat, is 28.6 kg (63 pounds). The “approach march load,” for when infantry were moving up to a position where they would shed some weight to achieve their “fighting load”, is 46 kg (102 pounds). The heaviest load, 60 kg (132 pounds), is the emergency approach march load, where troops had to move through terrain too difficult for vehicles. As in the past, the troops often ignored the rules and regulations and dumped gear so they could move, or keep moving.

In Afghanistan, the problem is made worse by the high altitudes (up to 5,000 meters) the troops often operate at. The researchers found that in Afghanistan, even though the infantry were in excellent physical shape, troops would sweat nearly 590 ml (20 ounces) of fluid an hour while marching at high altitudes in bright sunlight in moderate temperatures. That meant more weight, in water, had to be found to keep these guys going.

So the Army has changed its fitness tests to emphasize getting in shape for what matters in modern warfare:

The new physical training puts more emphasis on speed (which is used more in combat, as in sprinting for cover or a new firing position), flexibility (lots of squirming around in combat, going through windows or over obstacles) and strength (troops are carrying more weight, and there’s always been a lot of heavy lifting in combat.) What is deemphasized is long marches (trucks and helicopters have made that rare) and distance running (another very infrequent demand these days).

Posted in Fitness, War | 8 Comments »

Jim Henson’s early work

Friday, April 8th, 2011

Jim Henson’s early work was in advertising — something the work itself often joked about:

Posted in Media | No Comments »

Superbug gene rife in Delhi water supply

Friday, April 8th, 2011

NDM-1 positive bacteria have shown up in patients returning from India, and it appears that the Delhi water supply is full of such drug-resistant bugs:

NDM-1 can cause many types of bacteria — including E coli and Klebsiella pneumoniae — to become resistant to powerful antibiotics called carbapenems, which are used when other antibiotics fail to work. The team also found the gene had spread to bacteria that cause cholera and dysentery. “Worryingly, dysentery caused by this particular isolate is currently untreatable,” said Mark Toleman, one of the authors.
[...]
The scientists involved in the study in New Delhi took samples both from tap water and seepage water collected in pools in streets or in rivulets. The NDM-1 gene was found in two of 50 drinking water samples and 51 of 171 seepage samples.

Poor sanitation in India, where 650 million people do not have access to a flush toilet and probably not to clean water either, is a major issue in the spread of bacteria carrying the gene. High temperatures, which are important for NDM-1 mobility, a crowded population, massive antibiotic over-use, under-use and misuse and poor infection control also contribute.

India’s government won’t admit that they have a problem:

“Following the publication of this study, the Indian government took draconian measures against the Indian scientists who collaborated with us and our colleagues were threatened,” said Toleman.

“This had the effect of severing these productive collaborations and the Indian authorities were in denial of the massive problems southern Asia is facing.”

Posted in Science | No Comments »

The Return of the Class System

Friday, April 8th, 2011

As cruise ships have become more crowded, cruise lines have seen a need for the return of the class system:

Like first-class airline passengers, guests staying in the private complexes pay premiums for their perks. Depending upon the time of year, a three- or four-night cruise to the Bahamas on the Disney Dream, for example, costs $439 per person double occupancy in a regular stateroom with balcony. A balcony room on the concierge level is $2,159 per person.

While cruise lines must invest in the extra amenities and staff, these guests also tend to spend more when they’re onboard.

Royal Caribbean began what it calls its “suite enhancement program” two years ago after it noticed that guests staying in suites were giving their staterooms high marks in guest feedback surveys, but were rating the overall cruise less favorably than other passengers. Focus groups showed that these high-end guests “weren’t feeling like they were special when they left their suite,” says Lisa Bauer, senior vice president of hotel operations for Royal Caribbean International.

The top amenity the guests wanted was separate spaces reserved for them alone. So the brand added private pool-deck areas, reserved seating at the theaters, private cocktail parties with the ships’ captains and priority boarding and disembarking. “The ratings soared,” Ms. Bauer says.

A major perk of being a ship-within-a-ship guest is getting to skip the lines.

Posted in Business | No Comments »

Upbringing is all-important. So are genes.

Thursday, April 7th, 2011

In discussing his Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, Bryan Caplan addresses the old nature-nurture argument:

Admittedly, there’s a sense in which upbringing is all-important: If a baby is raised by wolves, he won’t know any words. (There’s also a sense in which genes are all-important: If you had wolf DNA, you wouldn’t know any words either.) But twin and adoption research focuses on questions that are much more relevant for parents: how your child will turn out if you switch to another parenting style.

Posted in Economics, Science | No Comments »

Tempest Freerunning Academy

Thursday, April 7th, 2011

The Tempest Freerunning Academy welcomes you “no matter your age, skill, or athletic level” — and their video-game themed promotional video creates the illusion that you could just show up and start leaping effortlessly from platform to platform:

Posted in Fitness | No Comments »

They will not preach what they practice

Thursday, April 7th, 2011

Charles Murray discusses the state of white America — avoiding contentious issues of race by discussing non-Hispanic whites of ages 30-49, contrasting the upper 20% (the upper middle class) from the bottom 30% (the working class):

Steve Sailer picks out some salient factoids about the new class distinctions:

  • For example, the being-married rate among upper middle class whites has fallen only trivially from 88% in 1960 to 83% in 2010. Among the bottom 30%, however, the being-married rate has dropped from 83% to 48%.
  • Among the bottom 30% of whites, the illegitimacy rate was 6% in 1960 and approaching 50% in 2010.
  • A substantial majority of the upper middle class retains effective religious involvement, while a substantial majority of the white working class does not. It’s another case of data not matching popular impressions. Among those with a religion, fundamentalism is increasing. But, actual religious involvement in the working class is plummeting.

John Derbyshire has his own favorite bits:

  • The older you are in this room, the more likely it is statistically that your parents did not have college educations, and that you grew up in a working-class or lower-middle-class home yourself The younger you are in this room, the more likely it is that your parents were in the upper-middle class, were college-educated, and that you have spent your entire life living in an upper-middle class environment.
  • One of the curious things about the new upper class is precisely that they are behaving in all the right ways. They’re getting married, they’re working hard … They’re doing all the right stuff [but] they won’t dare say: “This is the way people ought to be.” They will not preach what they practice. I put this down to non-judgmentalism …

Posted in Policy | 1 Comment »

The Montessori Mafia

Thursday, April 7th, 2011

Our political and corporate elites may belong to the Harvard mafia, but our creative elites belong to the Montessori mafia:

Google’s founders Larry Page and Sergei Brin, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, videogame pioneer Will Wright, and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, not to mention Julia Child and rapper Sean “P.Diddy” Combs.

Is there something going on here? Is there something about the Montessori approach that nurtures creativity and inventiveness that we can all learn from?

After all, Henry Ford and Thomas Edison were famous life-long tinkerers, who discovered new ways of doing things by constantly improvising, experimenting, failing, and retesting. Above all they were voraciously inquisitive learners.

The Montessori learning method, founded by Maria Montessori, emphasizes a collaborative environment without grades or tests, multi-aged classrooms, as well as self-directed learning and discovery for long blocks of time, primarily for young children ages 2 1/2 to 7.

The Montessori Mafia showed up in an extensive, six-year study about the way creative business executives think. Professors Jeffrey Dyer of Brigham Young University and Hal Gregersen of globe-spanning business school INSEAD surveyed over 3,000 executives and interviewed 500 people who had either started innovative companies or invented new products.

“A number of the innovative entrepreneurs also went to Montessori schools, where they learned to follow their curiosity,” Mr. Gregersen said. “To paraphrase the famous Apple ad campaign, innovators not only learned early on to think different, they act different (and even talk different).”

When Barbara Walters, who interviewed Google founders Messrs. Page and Brin in 2004, asked if having parents who were college professors was a major factor behind their success, they instead credited their early Montessori education. “We both went to Montessori school,” Mr. Page said, “and I think it was part of that training of not following rules and orders, and being self-motivated, questioning what’s going on in the world, doing things a little bit differently.”

Will Wright, inventor of bestselling “The Sims” videogame series, heaps similar praise. “Montessori taught me the joy of discovery,” Mr. Wright said, “It’s all about learning on your terms, rather than a teacher explaining stuff to you. SimCity comes right out of Montessori…”

Meanwhile, according to Jeff Bezos’s mother, young Jeff would get so engrossed in his activities as a Montessori preschooler that his teachers would literally have to pick him up out of his chair to go to the next task. “I’ve always felt that there’s a certain kind of important pioneering that goes on from an inventor like Thomas Edison,” Mr. Bezos has said, and that discovery mentality is precisely the environment that Montessori seeks to create.

Neuroscience author Jonah Lehrer cites a 2006 study published in Science that compared the educational achievement performance of low-income Milwaukee children who attended Montessori schools versus children who attended a variety of other preschools, as determined by a lottery.

By the end of kindergarten, among 5-year-olds, “Montessori students proved to be significantly better prepared for elementary school in reading and math skills than the non-Montessori children,” according to the researchers. “They also tested better on “executive function,” the ability to adapt to changing and more complex problems, an indicator of future school and life success.”

Of course, Montessori methods go against the grain of traditional educational methods. We are given very little opportunity, for instance, to perform our own, original experiments, and there is also little or no margin for failure or mistakes. We are judged primarily on getting answers right. There is much less emphasis on developing our creative thinking abilities, our abilities to let our minds run imaginatively and to discover things on our own.

But most highly creative achievers don’t begin with brilliant ideas, they discover them.

Posted in Education | 1 Comment »

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