College for the Masses

Thursday, April 30th, 2015

Stark admissions cutoffs provide researchers with a kind of natural experiment:

Students who score an 830 on the SAT are nearly identical to those who score an 840. Yet if one group goes to college and the other doesn’t, researchers can make meaningful estimates of the true effects of college.

And the two studies have come to remarkably similar conclusions: Enrolling in a four-year college brings large benefits to marginal students.

Roughly half of the students in Georgia who had cleared the bar went on to earn a bachelor’s degree within six years, compared with only 17 percent of those who missed the cutoff, according to one of the studies, by Joshua S. Goodman of Harvard and Michael Hurwitz and Jonathan Smith of the College Board. The benefits were concentrated among lower-income students, both studies found, and among men, one of them found.

Strikingly, the students who initially enrolled in a four-year college were also about as likely to have earned a two-year degree as the other group was. That is, those who started on the more ambitious track were able to downshift, but most of those who started in community colleges struggled to make the leap to four-year colleges. That finding is consistent with other research showing that students do better when they stretch themselves and attend the most selective college that admits them, rather than “undermatching.”

Perhaps most important, the data show that the students just above the admissions cutoff earned substantially more by their late 20s than students just below it — 22 percent more on average, according to the Florida study, which was done by Seth D. Zimmerman, a Princeton economist who will soon move to the University of Chicago. “If you give these students a shot, they’re ready to succeed,” said Mr. Zimmerman, adding that he was surprised by the strength of the findings.

[...]

But book learning isn’t anywhere near the full story of Mr. Escanilla’s growing up. His path also highlights another benefit that college can bring: Its graduates have managed to complete adulthood’s first major obstacle course. Doing so helps them learn how to finish other obstacle courses and gives them the confidence that they can, so long as they stay focused. Learning to navigate college fosters a quality that social scientists have taken to calling grit.

Baltimore Cop in the Hood

Thursday, April 30th, 2015

A former Baltimore cop explains things:

You know, cops are put in this horrible position where they have to solve the problems of America that nobody wants to deal with. The same idiots who burned shit down Monday, they’re gonna be there today and tomorrow. The cops are always dealing with them, whether they’re burning things down or not. They’re always there.

I was speaking to a cop, a black guy from East Baltimore, and he’s like look, “Cops reflect where they work. Yeah they can be dicks, but that’s the neighborhood they’re working in. Whether they’re from there or not, they end up speaking the language of the ghetto.”

[...]

And they feel that outsiders, particularly liberals and the media don’t really understand what cops have to deal with. They know things are fucked up, but we put cops in an impossible situation. We tell them to do the best they can, and then when an individual cop messes up, everybody blames the police. And cops feel strangely victimized by this system — they’re put in the middle and used as political tools.

[...]

Of course, another thing is that most people who can leave have left. And so, in these pockets, how can you have good community relations when a substantial number of people are actively or passively involved in crime?

I think there are a lot of cops that just say, “Fuck ‘em, they want burn their neighborhood, let ‘em.” But on the other hand, the cops are out there putting their lives on the line to save their city.

This jumped out:

What does a cop feel when the police begin assembling as they did on Monday to confront unrest?

Whatever they’re doing, keep in mind, they’ve never done it before. They’ve never really trained for this. We had like a half day of riot training in the academy. There’s fear, but mostly of the unknown. You’re going to work and kissing your loved ones and you don’t know what the hell you’re going into. You don’t know if and when you’re coming home. You don’t know. I try not be a cop cheerleader, but they could, at some point, say, “Fuck it, I quit. I don’t like this job anyway.”

There are still swaths of vacant lots in the Eastern District that haven’t recovered from the ’68 riot, he notes.

All that is given to us

Thursday, April 30th, 2015

Problems in Baltimore run much deeper than Mr. Gray’s death and the conduct of the police, according to the New York Times:

Near the burned-out CVS, Robert Wilson, a college student who went to high school in Baltimore, said: “With the riots, we’re not trying to act like animals or thugs. We’re just angry at the surroundings, like this is all that is given to us, and we’re tired of this, like nobody wants to wake up and see broken-down buildings. They take away the community centers, they take away our fathers, and now we have traffic lights that don’t work, we have houses that are crumbling, falling down.”

I can’t imagine why the people currently acting like animals or thugs haven’t been given better surroundings. What was the House Fairy thinking?

Can civilisation reboot without fossil fuels?

Thursday, April 30th, 2015

Is it possible to build an industrialised civilisation without fossil fuels? Maybe:

On the face of it, it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that a progressing society could construct electrical generators and couple them to simple windmills and waterwheels, later progressing to wind turbines and hydroelectric dams. In a world without fossil fuels, one might envisage an electrified civilisation that largely bypasses combustion engines, building its transport infrastructure around electric trains and trams for long-distance and urban transport. I say ‘largely’. We couldn’t get round it all together.

While the electric motor could perhaps replace the coal-burning steam engine for mechanical applications, society, as we’ve already seen, also relies upon thermal energy to drive the essential chemical and physical transformations it needs. How could an industrialising society produce crucial building materials such as iron and steel, brick, mortar, cement and glass without resorting to deposits of coal?

[...]

An alternative is to generate high temperatures using solar power directly. Rather than relying on photovoltaic panels, concentrated solar thermal farms use giant mirrors to focus the sun’s rays onto a small spot. The heat concentrated in this way can be exploited to drive certain chemical or industrial processes, or else to raise steam and drive a generator. Even so, it is difficult (for example) to produce the very high temperatures inside an iron-smelting blast furnace using such a system. What’s more, it goes without saying that the effectiveness of concentrated solar power depends strongly on the local climate.

No, when it comes to generating the white heat demanded by modern industry, there are few good options but to burn stuff.

But that doesn’t mean the stuff we burn necessarily has to be fossil fuels.

Lewis Dartnell wrote The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Civilization in the Aftermath of a Cataclysm.

Medieval Combat as Modern Sport

Wednesday, April 29th, 2015

Medieval combat has been turned into a modern, international sport, at the Battle of Nations:

The picturesque Croatian island of Trogir is home to a 12th Century medieval walled village. Here, an Australian team of enthusiasts, clad in homemade armour, watch nervously as wounded fighters strewn across the playing field are tended to by medics and carried away for the next round of battles to begin. Paul Smith, a chef back home who has been training for months, notes that the tournament is “the closest thing we are ever going to get to actual medieval combat”.

The rules are simple: three points of contact with the ground and you’re out, last team standing wins. Blades are real but blunted, and injuries are common. “The thrill of being hit repeatedly in the head with a sword and surviving it is certainly a rush”, says Paul. As the bugle signals the next fight this Aussie knight readies himself: “Now I feel ready to go to war, really”.

Sunshine and Atropine

Wednesday, April 29th, 2015

East Asia is growing increasingly myopicliterally — but ophthalmologists there have a solution:

Jason Yam, an ophthalmologist and professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, says it’s the first piece of advice he gives parents who bring in their nearsighted children. “The parents say yes, but they don’t do it,” he says.

Usually they come back and say their children didn’t have time to go outside because of homework. However, when he brings up another prevention strategy — using daily atropine eye drops — parents are very committed, Dr. Yam says.

Atropine, a drug used for decades to dilate the pupils, appears to slow the progression of myopia once it has started, according to several randomized, controlled trials. But used daily at the typical concentration of 1%, there are side effects, most notably sensitivity to light, as well as difficulty focusing on up-close images.

In recent years, studies in Singapore and Taiwan found that a lower dose of atropine reduces myopia progression by 50% to 60% in children without those side effects, says Donald Tan, professor of ophthalmology at the Singapore National Eye Centre. He has spearheaded many of the studies. Large-scale trials on low-dose atropine are expected to start soon in Japan and in Europe, he says.

Researchers are unsure how long children should use the eye drops for maximum effect. So far, the longest study has followed children for five years. In Singapore, children typically receive drops for three to six months at the first sign they’re becoming nearsighted. If their myopia continues to progress, they typically continue the drops for up to a year, Dr. Tan says.

Why CEOs make so much money

Tuesday, April 28th, 2015

A retired CEO explains why CEOs make so much money — or, rather, why they started making so much more a couple decades ago:

Thank our regulators and corporate governance efforts to reduce CEO compensation through disclosure and oversight of board decisions.  I’ve been a long time observer of public companies and a reader of their proxy statements. In 70’s and even the 80’s the compensation of the CEO seemed to be mostly a matter arrived at between the board and the CEO that resulted from discussions and negotiations and the public disclosure was a matter of a few pages. But there was then nothing like the  pressure to conform to best practices backed up by the reliance upon the advice of consultants and the concommitant availability of market data that there is today.

You can guess how it works. No board that isn’t about to fire its CEO really wants to admit that their CEO is a less-than-average performer by paying him or her less than average. But if the lowest-paid CEO’s are always being brought up to the average, then the average increases every year. Then for the high performers to be paid well, their compensation needs to be increased, but that raises the average… and so on every year. And the compensation committee and the board always have this market data before them, the recommendations of their consultants and “best practices” to adhere to. These influences are not easily resisted. You see the result.

Like many regulatory unintended consequences, it’s hard for me to see an easy way back. But it’s more than an academic question if you are a director serving on a compensation committee.

Hayek and Business Management

Tuesday, April 28th, 2015

Arnold Kling cannot emphasize enough how much he agrees with this:

If extensive knowledge is possible, then bosses might be able to manage big companies well. If not, then centrally planned companies will be inefficient. Sure, perhaps competition will eventually weed out egregious incompetence, but market forces might not grind so finely as to eliminate all inefficiency.

Kling explains:

Because I spent 15 years in business, I got an opportunity to see large organizations close up. I saw that in a large business, the top management cannot keep track of more than about three major initiatives at a time. I saw that compensation systems have to be frequently overhauled, because employees learn to game any system that stays in place for more than a couple of years. I saw the “suits vs. geeks” divide, as specialists in information technology or financial modeling had difficulty communicating with executives who had only general knowledge.

The notion of large, efficient organization is an oxymoron. If you think that large corporations have overwhelming advantages, then you have explained why IBM still dominates the computer industry, while Microsoft and Apple never really got amounted to much of anything. I like to say that if you are afraid of large corporations then you have never worked for one.

Of course, large corporations do exist. That is because as clumsy as they are, they can still be less clumsy than the alternative, which is to break a corporation into a network of contractually related divisions.

Everything Changes

Tuesday, April 28th, 2015

Ben Casnocha recommends Sam Harris’s hard-headed take on spirituality and meditation, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion:

Meditation feels like it’s at the peak of the hype cycle right now. The new Wisdom 2.0 conference in San Francisco attracts flocks of suit-wearing business people, not spiritual loonies. Calm.com raised over a million bucks to bring a guided meditation app to the masses.

[...]

For a time, I began to identify as “spiritual but not religious” without really knowing what it meant. The designation pained me because of how irrational so many “spiritual” people tended to be. Many people I encountered who talked about their spirituality did not seem very rigorous in their thinking. In 2009 I wrote a post somewhat backing away from the label. I’ve since come back around to the word “spiritual,” for reasons Harris describes in his book:

Yes, to walk the aisles of any “spiritual” bookstore is to confront the yearning and credulity of our species by the yard, but there is no other term — apart from the even more problematic mystical or the more restrictive contemplative — with which to discuss the efforts people make, through meditation, psychedelics, or other means, to fully bring their minds into the present or to induce nonordinary states of consciousness. And no other word links this spectrum of experience to our ethical lives.

Over the years, I’ve gotten increasingly curious about — and have taken steps to understand — more advanced forms of meditation and the Buddhist ideas behind them and the connection between the two.

Modern Buddhists talk a lot about the unhappiness of rock stars, CEOs, and others who’ve won fame and fortune in today’s world. It’s an idea that resonates strongly: many of the people I know who have it all seem not much happier than those who lead lives of average material existence. Harris offers a helpful re-frame of the famous Buddhist line that “life is suffering.” It’s not “suffering” we all must deal with. It’s the unsatisfactoriness of more and more external success, as those successes — and everything in life — is ultimately impermanent. “Everything changes” is Buddhism summed up in two words. Thus, true happiness and purpose must come from within.

The Only Relevant Thing

Monday, April 27th, 2015

Instead of learning science, British pupils will learn about the way science and scientists work within society, because their education must be relevant to the 21st century — which reminds David Foster of this passage from C.S. Lewis’s A Preface to Paradise Lost, contrasting Milton’s takes on Adam and Satan:

Adam talks about God, the Forbidden tree, sleep, the difference between beast and man, his plans for the morrow, the stars and the angels. He discusses dreams and clouds, the sun, the moon, and the planets, the winds and the birds. He relates his own creation and celebrates the beauty and majesty of Eve…Adam, though locally confined to a small park on a small planet, has interests that embrace ‘all the choir of heaven and all the furniture of earth.’ Satan has been in the heaven of Heavens and in the abyss of Hell, and surveyed all that lies between them, and in that whole immensity has found only one thing that interests Satan.

The only thing relevant to Satan is Satan himself:

One need not believe in a literal Satan, or for that matter be religious at all, to see the force of this. There is indeed something Satanic about a person who has no interests other than themselves. And by insisting that everything be “relevant” and discouraging the development of broader interests, the educational authorities in Britain are doing great harm to the children put in their charge.

The new lite-yet-relevant curriculum leads to questions on the national exam like this:

In a multiple choice question, teenagers were asked why electric wires are made from copper. The four possible answers were that copper was brown, was not magnetic, conducted electricity, or that it conducted heat.

Parents Can Help Preemies

Monday, April 27th, 2015

A new study is testing the crazy idea that parents might help care for their own babies who are born prematurely:

The idea is to put parents in charge for at least eight hours a day of taking care of their babies in the neonatal intensive care unit, or NICU. Typically, babies born prematurely, who might weigh little more than a pound, are considered too fragile for anyone but highly trained doctors and nurses to care for.

“Yes, they are fragile. But parents aren’t the source of bad things that can happen, they’re the source of good things that can happen,” says Dr. Douglas McMillan, a neonatologist at IWK Health Centre in Halifax, Nova Scotia, one of the study sites.

The study, being conducted at 20 hospitals in Canada and 10 in Australia and New Zealand, follows a pilot program at Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital that involved 42 premature newborns. The outcome: Preemies cared for by their parents gained 25% more weight and were nearly twice as likely to be breastfeeding when they went home as those taken care of primarily by nurses. Infections, 11% in the nurse group, fell to zero in the parent group.

The Adventures of Lil Cthulhu

Sunday, April 26th, 2015

It’s a new day, and the stars are right. Wake up Lil Cthulhu! It’s time to play!

(Hat tip to Borepatch.)

Microbiomes and Temperament

Sunday, April 26th, 2015

Gut microbiomes help explain temperament in young children:

From 2011 to 2012, researchers at Ohio State University in Columbus recruited 77 pairs of mothers and toddlers, age 18 to 27 months. Mothers rated their children’s temperament on questionnaires and provided information about breast-feeding and timing of solid foods. Gut bacteria were analyzed from stool samples on diapers.

Boys were more active and extroverted, and had less self-control compared with girls. More physical movement and higher sociability were significantly associated with a particular composition of gut bacteria in boys. In girls, higher self-control and fear of potentially unpleasant or threatening situations were associated with specific clusters of gut bacteria.

No association was found between diet, gut bacteria and temperament differences in boys or girls, though consuming less meat and vegetables was linked to a greater need for stimulation in boys. It isn’t clear if the findings reflect the effects of temperament on the gut or the effects of the gut on temperament, or a combination of the two, researchers said.

Marvel’s Farm System

Saturday, April 25th, 2015

It’s not the actors who make the character, but the character who makes the actor:

Disney-owned Marvel has mastered that approach and made A-listers out of previous unknowns. Chris Pratt, for example, was best known for his supporting role on the sitcom “Parks and Recreation.” Then he landed the starring role in last summer’s “Guardians of the Galaxy,” by far the season’s biggest box-office winner, bringing in $774 million. He’s now one of Hollywood’s most sought-after leading men and will star in “Jurassic World” this June.

Mr. Hemsworth was an Australian soap-opera star before Marvel plucked him to play the titular God of Thunder in 2010’s “Thor.” Soon afterward, he played the lead role in a second franchise, “Snow White and the Huntsman,” and has headlined thrillers including “Rush” and “Blackhat.”

Marvel takes the same approach with directors—in contrast to competitors like Warner Bros., which has entrusted its superheroes to high-end auteur Christopher Nolan and experienced action director Zack Snyder. Kenneth Branagh’s career directing big-screen Shakespeare adaptations petered out several years before Marvel picked him to direct “Thor.” After that film hit it big, Mr. Branagh continued a second career in big-budget movies such as last year’s “Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit” and March’s live-action “Cinderella.”

“Everyone pays attention to who’s starring, who’s directing, who’s writing Marvel movies,” said producer and former Sony executive Michael De Luca. “Because of their track record… how can you not pay attention to their farm system?”

[...]

To secure lead actors for its series of interlocking sequels and spinoffs, Marvel typically signs them to six-movie deals. For stars, upfront salaries are paltry by Hollywood standards, often just barely over $1 million per picture for the first two films in a deal, after which they start to rise.

Actors receive bonuses when films meet box-office milestones, but the total payday is still far below what A-listers like Johnny Depp regularly earn on similarly successful blockbusters like “Pirates of the Caribbean.”

[...]

The company’s successful track record ironically allows for more experimentation in genre and form than is typically allowed in Hollywood these days—so long as it’s done with comic-book characters. It’s unthinkable that any other studio would greenlight a big budget political thriller like next year’s “Captain America: Civil War” or a science-fiction action-comedy like last year’s “Guardians of the Galaxy.”

In addition, since the studio makes only two to three movies a year, its president and top creative executive Kevin Feige is personally involved with every project, and the company rarely develops scripts it doesn’t intend to make.

“It makes a huge difference to deal with Kevin all the time, as opposed to several layers of people trying to guess what their boss wants,” said Anthony Russo, co-director with his brother Joe of last year’s “Captain America: The Winter Soldier.”

Mr. Feige is said to be a firm believer that the characters and the Marvel brand itself are the stars of his films. That approach syncs well with Mr. Perlmutter’s tight-fistedness and gives Mr. Feige the leeway to make bold choices. He cast Mr. Downey as “Iron Man” in 2008, even though the actor’s career was on the rocks at the time, because his showboating bad-boy persona mirrored the character of Tony Stark, the man behind the Iron Man mask.

How Much is the U.S. Worth?

Saturday, April 25th, 2015

All the land in the US is worth $23 Trillion:

That’s William Larson’s estimate for the value of the 1.89 billion acres of land that accounts for the 48 contiguous states and the District of Columbia. The dollar figure — equal to about 1.4 times last year’s gross domestic product – represents only the value of the land, and not buildings, roads or other improvements, and excludes bodies of water.

He also determined values for every state. California is worth the most at $3.9 trillion and Vermont is worth the least at a paltry $44 billion. On a per acre basis, New Jersey has the most valuable land at $196[,41o] an acre and Wyoming the least, $1[,557] an acre.

[...]

His estimates reflect the land’s value in 2009. Therefore it shows a post-recession figure (he says country’s value fell 24% from 2006 to 2009) and doesn’t account for the changes in value due to the shale-gas activity in the Midwest and elsewhere.

Some key findings:

  • The federal government owns 24% of all land, worth a collective $1.8 trillion. (That’s 8% of the country’s total value, or around 10% of the total outstanding federal debt.)
  • Just 5.8% of U.S. land is developed, but that land accounts for 50.7% of the total value.
  • Almost half, 47%, of U.S. land is used for agriculture.

A typical state is just 7 percent developed, with a land value of just $10[,000] per acre. D.C., on the other hand, is 87 percent developed, with a land value just over $1,000[,000] per acre.