When Everyone Goes to College

Monday, June 6th, 2016

What happens when everyone goes to college?

South Korea leads the world in college attendance rate, which is approaching 100%. This sounds great at first, until you consider that the majority of the population (in any country) lacks the cognitive ability to pursue a rigorous college education (or at least what used to be defined as a rigorous college education).

A 2013 McKinsey study found that lifetime earnings for graduates of Korean private colleges were less than for workers with just a high-school diploma. The unemployment rate for new graduates has topped 30 percent.

Posted in Education, Policy | 1 Comment »

AmazonBasics

Monday, June 6th, 2016

Amazon is using insights from its store to build a private-label juggernaut that now includes more than 3,000 products — from apparel to laptop stands:

At first, AmazonBasics — launched in 2009 — focused on batteries, recordable DVDs and such. Then for several years, the house brand “slept quietly as it retained data about other sellers’ successes,” according to the report. But in the past couple of years, AmazonBasics has stepped up the pace, rolling out a range of products that seem perfectly tailored to customer demand.

“When we saw AmazonBasics products as bestsellers in several categories, our stomachs dropped and [we] started thinking, ‘we need to learn from them,”’ the report’s authors said. AmazonBasics now has more than 900 products, including 284 launched last year alone, according to Skubana.

[...]

Initially, Amazon partnered with traditional chains such as Gap, Nordstrom and Eddie Bauer but retailers decided to pursue their own Web stores. Now, a shopper searching Amazon for a “women’s v-neck sweater” will find a black cashmere number from Lark & Ro, which also sells dresses and swimwear.

Lark & Ro is one of seven apparel brands trademarked by Amazon. Besides women’s clothes, the company also sells men’s dress shoes from Franklin & Freeman and suits from Franklin Tailored. Scout + Ro makes kids’ clothes. Altogether, Amazon’s apparel brands sell 1,800-plus products, according to Edward Yruma, a retail analyst at KeyBanc Capital Markets.

While Amazon’s apparel brands remain relatively obscure, the online behemoth has a huge advantage over better-known labels. Shoppers increasingly start on Amazon.com to search for products, bypassing Google and traditional chains’ websites. In a survey of 2,000 U.S. consumers conducted by digital marketing firm BloomReach, 44 percent said they go directly to Amazon.

So not only can Amazon track what shoppers are buying; it can also tell what merchandise they’re searching for but can’t find, says Rachel Greer, who worked on the private label team until 2014. Then, she says, “Amazon can just make it themselves.”

Posted in Business | No Comments »

Pinpoint

Sunday, June 5th, 2016

The United States Air Force never really wanted GPS, Greg Milner explains (in Pinpoint):

The 621B program, the precursor to GPS, was underfunded. After it evolved into the GPS program in the early 1970s, the Air Force largely neglected it, to the point of disowning it and defunding it. A few times, it tried to kill its own creation, and GPS was kept alive by the Pentagon’s largesse…

One reason the Air Force was slow to embrace GPS is the space-based projects were never seen as a priority. “The Air Force is not a big user of space,” says Scott Page..”The Air Force gets to build for space, but the Marine Corps, Army, and Navy are much more reliant on actual space services than the Air Force itself is. The budget for space is in the Air Force, but in terms of the number of customers and users, they’re all in the other services.

Tyler Cowen also cites Milner on “death by GPS”:

It describes what happens when GPS fails you, not by being wrong, exactly, but often by being too right. It does such a good job of computing the most direct route from Point A to Point B that it takes you down roads which barely exist, or were used at one time and abandoned, or are not suitable for your car, or which require all kinds of local knowledge that would make you aware that making that turn is bad news.

Posted in Technology | 2 Comments »

Whatever Happened to the Work Ethic?

Sunday, June 5th, 2016

Our national discussion about how to fix capitalism seems limited to those who believe that more government will fix the problem and those who think that free markets will fix themselves, Steve Malanga laments:

The genius of America in the early nineteenth century, Tocqueville thought, was that it pursued “productive industry” without a descent into lethal materialism. Behind America’s balancing act, the pioneering French social thinker noted, lay a common set of civic virtues that celebrated not merely hard work but also thrift, integrity, self-reliance, and modesty — virtues that grew out of the pervasiveness of religion, which Tocqueville called “the first of [America’s] political institutions,… imparting morality” to American democracy and free markets. Some 75 years later, sociologist Max Weber dubbed the qualities that Tocqueville observed the “Protestant ethic” and considered them the cornerstone of successful capitalism. Like Tocqueville, Weber saw that ethic most fully realized in America, where it pervaded the society. Preached by luminaries like Benjamin Franklin, taught in public schools, embodied in popular novels, repeated in self-improvement books, and transmitted to immigrants, that ethic undergirded and promoted America’s economic success.

What would Tocqueville or Weber think of America today? In place of thrift, they would find a nation of debtors, staggering beneath loans obtained under false pretenses. In place of a steady, patient accumulation of wealth, they would find bankers and financiers with such a short-term perspective that they never pause to consider the consequences or risks of selling securities they don’t understand. In place of a country where all a man asks of government is “not to be disturbed in his toil,” as Tocqueville put it, they would find a nation of rent-seekers demanding government subsidies to purchase homes, start new ventures, or bail out old ones. They would find what Tocqueville described as the “fatal circle” of materialism — the cycle of acquisition and gratification that drives people back to ever more frenetic acquisition and that ultimately undermines prosperous democracies.

And they would understand why. After flourishing for three centuries in America, the Protestant ethic began to disintegrate, with key elements slowly disappearing from modern American society, vanishing from schools, from business, from popular culture, and leaving us with an economic system unmoored from the restraints of civic virtue. Not even Adam Smith — who was a moral philosopher, after all — imagined capitalism operating in such an ethical vacuum. Bailout plans, new regulatory schemes, and monetary policy moves won’t be enough to spur a robust, long-term revival of American economic opportunity without some renewal of what was once understood as the work ethic — not just hard work but also a set of accompanying virtues, whose crucial role in the development and sustaining of free markets too few now recall.

Posted in Economics, Policy | 7 Comments »

1984, Brave New World, and Harrison Bergeron, for Girls

Saturday, June 4th, 2016

I haven’t followed the recent battle over the politicized Hugo awards, so I hadn’t noticed that the conservative rabid puppies‘ list included the two-part opener of My Little Pony‘s fifth season, “The Cutie Map” — which Jim describes as 1984, Brave New World, and Harrison Bergeron, written for ten-year-old girls:

A commie pony has established a commie utopia, and our major characters drop in to investigate.

There is the mandatory official happiness of “Brave New World”, the destructive equalizing downwards of “Harrison Bergeron”, and the poverty, ugliness, and lying authoritarianism of “1984”. All depicted for ten year old girls.

Of course “My Little Pony” is in the business of teaching little girls prosocial lessons, and the first lesson that we are beaten over the head with is “people can disagree, and still be friends”. Which gets repeated numerous times. Sounds pretty bland and innocent as a lecture to ten year old girls. Right? Except that it is set in a society of terrifying political correctness where everyone agrees with everyone or else. Which makes it not at all bland and innocent.

The list also includes a number of works from There Will Be War Vol. X.

Posted in Media, Policy | 1 Comment »

Conservatives Anonymous

Saturday, June 4th, 2016

“We’re basically named after gays in Hollywood and alcoholics nationwide,” Jeremy Boreing, Friends of Abe’s executive director quips:

Within Friends of Abe, there’s a fierce debate over whether a blacklist exists. “Anyone who denies it is intentionally misleading you or clueless,” says actor F. Lee Reynolds. “There is actual blacklisting. It does happen,” says actress Mell Flynn. Neither Reynolds nor Flynn nor anyone else I spoke to could offer proof that conservatives have been deliberately excluded from jobs. Most members say that the bias is more subtle: People hire those they know and like and, typically, those are people who think and act as they do.

Over the next few months, Gary Sinise called Jon Voight, Kelsey Grammer, and Patricia Heaton, and the lunch group multiplied from three people to six, six to twelve, dozens to hundreds, growing until bigger venues were needed.

Whether a blacklist exists will likely never be proven, but the fact that many members are convinced that it does speaks to the psychological need that Friends of Abe has served to fill — and never more so than at the new-member lunches. Every month or so, a few dozen initiates and their sponsors gather in the private room of the Bistro Garden restaurant in Studio City and introduce themselves and say why they want to join. On one occasion, a line producer described being dropped from a project after she expressed pro-life views. On another, a stuntman talked about how his colleagues said American troops are murderers. Grown men and women break down in tears as they reveal what they’ve gone through — and express relief in letting it all out. “It’s people who don’t have a tribe,” says John Sullivan, a documentary producer and director, “and when they find out they have a tribe, they’re so happy.” “You unburden your soul and say, ‘I have this secret that I’m not allowed to share with anybody,’” says the comedian Evan Sayet.

If this description sounds like an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, that’s how Friends of Abe members talk about the lunches. The anonymity, the sponsors, the confiding, the emotional release, the lingo (“Hi, I’m John, and I’m a conservative”) come straight from AA. “They are very similar organizations,” says Rob Long, a former executive producer on Cheers and a columnist for National Review, “because it’s like, ‘Don’t talk about it. We don’t need any scrutiny here. We’re just here for fellowship.’ To this day, Friends of Abe is the only social group in Hollywood outside of AA where the budget classes mingle.”

The AA connection was there from the start, inspiring the group’s name. Tom Dreesen knew that AA members referred to one another as a “friend of Bill W.” — a nod to co-founder Bill Wilson — and that closeted men in Hollywood during the 1940s sought out one another by asking, “Are you a friend of Dorothy?” — a Wizard of Oz reference. “We’ve got to be a friend of somebody,” Dreesen recalls saying to Sinise and Chetwynd. Dreesen and Sinise had grown up in Illinois, so he suggested Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president. “We’ll say, ‘Are you a friend of Abe?’ That way, if the liberals hear it, they’ll think that we’re talking about an agent from William Morris.”

Posted in Policy | 2 Comments »

The Future of Sports

Friday, June 3rd, 2016

This anecdote about the future of sports rings true:

Last summer, on a family vacation in a house with 10 very loud children, I attempted to watch a baseball game on the only available television set. It did not go well. My nieces and nephews acted like I was forcing them to watch a process hearing in the state legislature. They groaned and booed. They rolled their eyes. They dropped to the floor and pretended to sleep.

Frantic to please, I turned the channel, and happened upon a reality show I’d never seen before: a wacky obstacle-course event called “American Ninja Warrior.” Situated on an outdoor stage bathed in red, white and blue lights, it featured sinewy men and women of all ages, jumping and scurrying from platforms to ropes to monkey bars, plunging into water traps when they missed.

The room erupted. It was as if Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber had just shown up with free pizza and iPhones. It turned out my loud, young in-laws all loved “American Ninja Warrior.” They crammed around the TV, rapt.

Posted in Media | 1 Comment »

A Practical Electric Plane for NASA

Friday, June 3rd, 2016

Tom Neuman designed a practical electric plane for NASA’s design contest, and he thought about retrofitting a Cirrus SR22 with fuel cells:

The SR22’s normal power plant is a Continental IO-550-N, a six-cylinder, horizontally opposed, air-cooled engine that weighs 187 kg and provides 310 horsepower (231 kilowatts). By removing the engine and fuel and replacing them with a fuel cell of the same weight, I could possibly produce a similar amount of power. But to do that, the fuel cell would have to provide 500 W/kg of specific power. And at that level of specific power, the specific energy of the fuel cell would be about 400 Wh/ kg, roughly as good as the best batteries I could expect to use, which I already knew wouldn’t let my plane fly very far. To provide a specific energy of 800 Wh/kg, the fuel cell’s specific power drops to 200 W/ kg, well below the power needed to fly at 200 mph.

Vapor Airplane

Unlike combustion engines, electric motors are compact and efficient. These small, light motors can be placed in many more locations on the aircraft than would be practical for a combustion engine. If applied strategically, this tactic can distribute the power production across more or larger propellers. And the greater the area swept by propellers, the more efficient and quieter they become.

I ran yet another analysis and found a sweet spot in efficiency using two rather large propellers attached to a pair of motors. Instead of mounting them conventionally, on the wing or fuselage, I put them in my design atop the plane’s V-shaped tail, where the airflow is cleaner.

This simple strategy not only improved propulsive efficiency (from 85 to 92 percent), it also benefited the plane’s aerodynamics. Now air could flow more cleanly over both fuselage and wing. And although the propellers were large, putting them on the tail meant that I didn’t have to increase the height (and therefore, weight) of the landing gear. Having short gear made choosing retractable wheels much more palatable, and this reduced drag even further.

When I ran the next analysis, I found that this change, combined with some more optimization, decreased the plane’s energy consumption by another 27 percent. Indeed, this design change had lowered the power demand to the point that it became feasible to fly the plane on hydrogen-powered fuel cells. That’s when I dubbed my V-tailed, hydrogen-powered design “Vapor.”

Posted in Technology | 1 Comment »

Old Music Outsold New Music

Thursday, June 2nd, 2016

The simultaneous advent of streaming music and the vinyl renaissance has led to some very interesting recording industry statistics over the past few months:

Last month, the RIAA reported that vinyl revenues outpaced sales from streaming services, despite actual streams vastly outnumbering physical vinyl sold. Now, Nielsen has released data revealing that, for the first time ever, old music (the “catalog,” defined as music more than 18 months old) outsold new releases in 2015.

Hat tip to Tyler Cowen, who also notes this factoid: Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon was the third-best-selling vinyl record of 2015.

Posted in Business, Media, Technology | 5 Comments »

Danger at the Zoo

Thursday, June 2nd, 2016

Zoos accredited by organizations like the Association of Zoos and Aquariums have weapons teams trained to use deadly force to prevent death or serious harm:

Although the procedures followed by the ‘weapons teams’ are standardized, the firearms used appear to be chosen by the individual zoos and/or the leader of each team. Open source information points to a combination of 12 gauge shotguns and high-powered rifles being on hand at most major zoos.

From a story in the St Petersburg Times:

The team armed themselves with four guns from a locked cabinet kept in the general curator’s office. Salisbury carried a 12-gauge shotgun. The remaining staff carried two .375 rifles and a 30-06 rifle.

Zoo employees also train and qualify with local and state law enforcement agencies.

From a story in the Pittsburgh Tribune:

Pittsburgh Public Safety Director Stephen A. Bucar said police officers and zoo workers went through training immediately after the incident Nov. 4, 2012, when 2-year-old Maddox Derkosh was killed. Bucar said police don’t carry weaponry needed to bring down a large animal in the event of a similar incident. They don’t know enough about animal behavior to shoot an animal, he said.

Some guidelines:

Always make sure that firearms are on safety and handled with extreme caution. The use of a killing weapon must always be tempered by the potential to endanger human life.

Whenever possible, the shooter should stay in a vehicle when approaching the animal.

Never run after the animal. It’s certain that you can’t outrun it. You will be out of breath, which will not allow you to have a steady hand.

Make sure you have a good clean shot. Be aware of what is in front and behind your target.

If you must shoot, shoot to kill. If you do not feel you are capable of doing this, relinquish the responsibility to another qualified shooter (if one is available)

If you haven’t seen the raw footage:

Posted in Animals, Weapons | 2 Comments »

Ten to Twelve Percent Slower

Thursday, June 2nd, 2016

Transgender athlete Joanna Harper explains what happened after her transition:

In 2005, nine months after starting HRT, I was running 12% slower than I had run with male T levels; women run 10-12% slower than men over a wide range of distances. In 2006 I met another trans woman runner and the she had the same experience. I later discovered that, if aging is factored in, this 10-12% loss of speed is standard among trans women endurance athletes. The realization that one can take a male distance runner, make that runner hormonally female, and wind up with a female distance runner of the same relative capability was life changing for me.

Posted in Fitness, Science | No Comments »

Light Recycling

Wednesday, June 1st, 2016

Incandescent bulbs may make a nanophotonic comeback through light recycling:

But instead of allowing the waste heat to dissipate in the form of infrared radiation, secondary structures surrounding the filament capture this radiation and reflect it back to the filament to be re-absorbed and re-emitted as visible light. These structures, a form of photonic crystal, are made of Earth-abundant elements and can be made using conventional material-deposition technology.

That second step makes a dramatic difference in how efficiently the system converts electricity into light. One quantity that characterizes a lighting source is the so-called luminous efficiency, which takes into account the response of the human eye. Whereas the luminous efficiency of conventional incandescent lights is between 2 and 3 percent, that of fluorescents (including CFLs) is between 7 and 15 percent, and that of most commercial LEDs between 5 and 20 percent, the new two-stage incandescents could reach efficiencies as high as 40 percent, the team says.

The first proof-of-concept units made by the team do not yet reach that level, achieving about 6.6 percent efficiency.

Posted in Technology | No Comments »

Hyperandrogenism and women vs women vs men in sport

Wednesday, June 1st, 2016

Ross Tucker discusses hyperandrogenism and women vs women vs men in sport before going on to interview Joanna Harper:

Caster Semenya is about as sure a gold medal bet as there is at this year’s Olympic Games.  If I had one bet to make, and my life was at stake, I’d put in on her to win the 800m.  This past weekend she just missed out on the Diamond League record, running 1:56.46, at a jog.  A month ago, she won the 400m, 800m and 1500m at the SA champs, all on the same day.  The 400m and 800m, 50 minutes apart, were run in 50.7s and 1:58, with a second lap faster than 60 seconds, suggesting that she could go much, much faster.  I watched them in Stellenbosch and have never seen anything like it.  The 400m was jogged until the last 100m, and could have been under 49 seconds, and the 800m could have been run in 1:55 if it was needed.

Caster Semenya could, and should, break the 800m world record.  It’s the oldest record on the tracks, held by one Jarmila Kratochvilova, and if you know anything about the sport, you know that whoever it was who broke that record was going to be faced with a few probing questions.  Most of them would have been doping-related, but in the case of Semenya, thanks to the public drama that played out in 2009, they’re related to sex/gender.

Specifically, we know that Semenya was identified as having elevated testosterone levels after her gold medal in Berlin (1:55.45, as an 18-year old).  We know that some intervention was applied, and we can, through pretty basic deduction, figure out that it involved lowering her testosterone levels.  How?  Well, at the time Semenya emerged, from nowhere, the IAAF and IOC policies on gender verification (they should call it ‘sex verification’, by the way, because sex is biological, gender is social, but anyway) were vague and unrelated to testosterone.

It was as a result of Semenya, and the absolutely disastrous handling of that situation, that the policy changed, and until last year, the policy in place said that women could compete only if their testosterone levels were below an upper limit.  That upper limit, 10 nmol/L, was set up based on a study done on all the women competing in the World Championships in 2011 and 2013.  The researchers took the average testosterone levels of women with a condition called Polycystic Ovary Syndrome, which was already elevated at 4.5 nmol/L, and then added 5 SD to it.

The addition of 3 SD (which created a level of 7.5 nmol/L) would have meant that 16 in 1000 athletes would exceed the cutoff.  That’s why the extra 2 SD were added, to make sure that the upper limit would apply only to those with hyperandrogenism (or those who are doping).

99% of female athletes, by the way, had testosterone levels below 3.08 nmol/L. So the upper limit of 10 nmol/L was three fold higher than a level that applies to 99 in 100 women participants.

Semenya’s performances, under this policy of reducing testosterone, dropped off in a predictable manner.  Having run the 1:55.45 at 18, she never got close again, though did win Olympic silver in London (behind a doper), and a World silver in 2011.  Last year, she failed to advance beyond the semi-finals in Beijing, and hadn’t even made the qualification mark for the preceding year’s Commonwealth Games.  2:00 had become a significant barrier, when the world record had been plausible at 18.

Now, she is untouchable.  People will (and have said) that it’s down to her focused training, recovery from injury and so forth, but I’m not buying that.  The change has happened for an obvious reason – the restoration of testosterone levels, and that is thanks to the courts – CAS, the Court of Arbitration for sport, last year ruled that the IAAF could no longer enforce the upper limit of testosterone, and in so doing, cleared the way for Semenya, and at least a handful of others, to return to the advantages that this hormone clears provides an individual.  That CAS ruled this way because they felt that there was insufficient evidence for the performance benefits is one of the stupidest, most bemusing legal/scientific decisions ever made.

In any event, the situation now is this – Semenya, plus a few others, have no restriction.  It has utterly transformed Semenya from an athlete who was struggling to run 2:01 to someone who is tactically running 1:56.  My impression, having seen her live and now in the Diamond League, is that she could run 1:52, and if she wanted to, would run a low 48s 400m and win that gold in Rio too.

Semenya is of course not the only such athlete.  And in the absence of a policy, I fully expect more in future.  However, right now, Semenya is the unfortunate face of what is going to be a massive controversy in Rio.  That’s because she was so unfairly “outed” in Berlin in 2009, when what should have been handled discreetly became a public drama, thanks to inept/arrogant SA officials.  It won’t be any consolation to Semenya, and the media, frankly, have no idea how to deal with this – nobody wants it to be about the athlete, and it certainly is not her fault.  However, it is a debate we must have, and I want to try to have it from the biological, sporting perspective, and steer clear of the minority bullying that so often punctuates these matters.

Posted in Science | 1 Comment »

Newer Entries »