Cross-Country Skiing in MSP - Adelsman

The web is a lot like LA. It has no history.

Almost no history. By web standards Adelsman's XC ski pages are ancient civilization. I linked to them in my 1995 skijoring page (long neglected) but they're still around, and better than ever.

I found them again when I wondered where a marvelous paper listing of Twin Cities trails had come from. Google showed me it was a reformatting of Adelsman's metro ski page.

They do take advertising, but, as marvelous as this site is covering Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Iowa, I doubt they get rich from it. It must be a labor of love.

Our MN state fair visit is past, the days are getting shorter, and now we pray for a rerun of the excellent XC ski season of winter 2010. We'll be using this site, including the lodging section (hint to advertisers :-).

PS. Naturally skinny skiers are big on tradition, but a feed would not be amiss...

Gmail's personalized classifier: your own private AI

When you read about Gmail's new "Priority Inbox" feature, it helps to know that "Classifiers" are at the heart of what we used to call "AI" ...

Gmail Priority Inbox: 

....Google has to build a personalized classifier for each Gmail user and it needs a lot of messages. 'Email importance ranking works best for people who receive a lot of email,' explains Google. Google takes into account implicit signals like: the messages from people you frequently email are important, if a message includes words frequently used in other messages you usually read then it's probably important, the messages you star are probably more important than the messages you archive without opening. There are also explicit signals: click on the important/unimportant buttons, create filters to mark messages as important."...

Classifiers are used in speech recognition, Google Search and so on -- they're not new. For that matter, this kind of "what's important" ranking has been done many times without using formal classifiers.

Still, this is a mini-milestone of sorts. Classic AI technology is moving to our personal lives from multiple directions. The next step is deploying these classifiers into Google's Facebook-alternative, and then it's another step to our pending lifestream classifiers (which might help keep memory-impaired boomers functional longer).

Yes, those are Skynet's footsteps you hear ... :-).

Yes, this is part of why the IT driver of our whitewater world is not going away, but only getting bigger.

Michael Lewis - The Big Short - how we lost our economy

Tim Bray has written a review of Michael Lewis book "The Big Short". Tim loves Lewis book.

Do read Bray's review and lessons learned. Lesson 1: People in the Finance industry are in the business of making money for themselves. Obvious, but easily forgotten.

Bray gives us some links to read. Here they are, followed by some of mine:

Tim's links:

• The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (9780393072235): Michael Lewis (480 reviews, 4 stars)
• The End Of Wall Streets Boom - Michael Lewis - Portfolio.com (I remember reading this Nov 2008 essay at the time)
• Triple A Failure - Roger Lowenstein - New York Times Magazine - 2008. I hate the credit rating agencies too. So should you.

Old posts of mine:

• Lewis and Einhorn - repairing the financial world (Jan 2009, f/u to Lewis Portfolio essay)
• Michael Lewis on the End of Wall Street. My God. My reaction to the Portfolio.com essay.
• The Fall of Citigroup means we don’t understand what’s happening …

It all feels like ancient history, but it was only two years ago, it's not fixed (especially the rating agencies from hell), and most of us are still unsure we really understand what hit us.

Of course I think it was fundamentally computers and China. Robotics, AI and Peak Oil lie ahead, so get used to the whitewater.

Answering Krugman: Why the Obama administration isn't panicking about the elections

Paul Krugman doesn't understand why the Obama administration isn't panicked about a pending electoral catastrophe.

I think he believes they're delusional.

That could be. Denial is a prerequisite for the happiness of a sentient organism. We're good at denial. We're also prone to assume that our local slice of humanity is representative of the nation.

So it would be normal primate behavior for Team Obama to expect catastrophe will be averted.

Except -- they're smart, they're professional politicians, and they don't hate science. So I don't think they're delusional. I think they know what's going to happen this November.

They know the GOP will take at least one of the House and Senate, and probably both. They know this will be very bad, but they expect the Senate will not be able to override a filibuster or a veto. (I will applaud if the GOP ends up trashing the filibuster, though the consequences will be short term terrible.)

They also know that this outcome was decided when the the economy failed to recover. It doesn't matter what they say or do; American elections are decided by "undecideds" and "independents", and those voters typically have no connection to reality [1]. They respond to personal circumstance and mass feeling -- and there's no way either of those are going to change as the Great Recession grinds on.

So Team Obama isn't panicking because that would be pointless. We have already entered a state of political paralysis, and this will probably persist from 2010 to 2012. There will be some opportunities for "lame duck" actions and recess appointments -- and that's where the political pros are fighting now.

Will Obama lose in 2012? It's certainly possible. I fear the Great Recession is going to grind on well into the Peak Oil era, in which case we'll start calling it GD II. On the other hand, I never expected him to win either. Don't underestimate Obama.

[1] Really. The political science profiles are definitive.

RV timeshares today and tomorrow

We've got 3 Kids around 11, 1 dog, an old van and a newish Subaru wagon.

A new van is the default purchase, but most of the time I just need a commuter box. For our epic family road trips an RV might be cheaper and better.

So it occurred to me we need a timeshare RV. These days, to think of a business is to discover it. Turns out, RV Timeshares exist.

I don't know how well they work. There are all sorts of perverse incentive/tragedy of the commons problems in the timeshare industry. I expect they've been a fringe industry.

That's likely to change as we near Peak Oil [1] time and as the Trilateral Commission [2] prepares to implement a Carbon Tax. My family doesn't need a van most of the time, and when we do need it a camper/RV combo would be preferable. If gas were more expensive a market would develop to provide RV type vehicles -- and I could buy a commuter car.

We just have to wait.

[1] Yeah, it's coming. We'd see gas over $4/gallon now if not for the fact that the economy of the industrial world cratered. Given the way things are going the Great Recession will slide right into Peak Oil territory, in which case we'll just call it GD II.

[2] I was a member! Or at least I got their mailings in College. Maybe if it'd been less chatty I'd be a member of the Great Council by now. (PS. This is a joke.)

Guided evolution in cancer therapy

Another of my speculation is cheap (but fun) posts.

I searched Google Scholar today with the terms guided evolution cancer. I didn't find anything interesting. I bet, however, that in 10 years a similar search will have many hits. Today, for example, a search on guided evolution HIV gets some tantalizing hits.

The idea is easier to understand in the context of HIV, particularly if you know the evolutionary history of  parasite/prey relationships. So I'll start with predator/prey, then HIV, then Cancer.

When a pathogen, like the rabies virus or smallpox, is introduced to a new species it is often very lethal. Over time it often transitions from parasite to symbiote. This transition involves adaptation by both host and parasite. This happens because one of the best ways to "get ahead" in the living universe is to "get along" -- particularly if your host shows "promise".

HIV (and other retroviruses) have such mutable genomes that they evolve within the lifespan of a human host. Modern HIV therapy takes advantage of that. Therapy tries to trap the virus into an adaptation box, where one adaptation compromises another. I wouldn't be surprised if the newest therapies try to guide HIV to evolve down a path where a yet-to-be-used drug will be particularly potent. That would be guided evolution in an HIV context.

Which brings me to cancer. All physicians know patients who have lived many years with a metastatic cancer. The malignancy is not gone, but neither does it kill. The host and the "parasite" are "getting along. In time the tumor will kill, but of course we all die. The goal of medicine is not (yet) immortality, but rather deferred morbidity.

If we think of a cancer as a competing set of "parasites" (for the cancer is genetically diverse) laying claim upon the resources of the host, then can we guide the evolution of that ecosystem? Could we use one set of drugs to guide the development of a subset of the cancer that will outcompete other tumor lines? That successful subset might be so guided as to be very vulnerable to a "knockout" drug -- or to persist but in a relatively tame state.

Just speculation. I'm only about 50% right with these sorts of things.

Survivors and Foragers: speculation on group selection and obesity

Speculation is cheap.

What if one of the variables in human weight control was activity response to caloric restriction?

Ok, so that's not too speculative. We know obese humans decrease activity when they diet. This is one reason that, in a nation of very cheap calories, so many Americans are obese. When these people diet, they are put into an involuntary lethargic state.

It's a behavior that makes lots of evolutionary sense. Throughout most of human history these people would have been survivors of famine. We can call them The Survivors.

But what if there's a distribution across the population? What if there are people who respond to caloric restriction with increased activity? That makes a sort of Darwinian sense too, particularly if you think of humans as group selected Big Brain Bees (BBBs). Think of these people as Foragers, they roam from the Hive looking for new options. In todays world, some of them are anorexics, but mostly they're just slender.

I am positive that if I knew the scientific literature on obesity, and I knew the right search terms, I would find articles exploring this model. It feels plausible that there's a range of responses to calorie restriction -- from Survivors to Foragers and everything in between.

Of course feelings are the fount of grant proposals, not of science. This is, however, a testable hypothesis. So it could turn into science.

There are implications for drug discovery. If this model were correct, the magic obesity pill would convert Survivors into Foragers. So pharmas should be looking for Foragers to study ...

Google's bicycle directions are getting scary good in MSP

A few weeks ago Google's bike directions from my home to my office were pretty good, but they did send me over a fairly narrow and crowded overpass. Still, I was impressed. It was as good as I could do at the time.

Today I remembered a really obscure hidden footpath that would be an improvement on that route. I went to Google Maps so I could provide feedback to the bicycle map team.

The route improvement was already there:

Wow.

PS. Don't get too cocky Google. Your "draft" Blogger rich text editor still can't handle European language paragraphs. My theory is it's being developed by a team unfamiliar with the paragraph.

Anthem - Putting the Hell in Health Insurance

My corporate health care insurance is administered by Anthem.

Tonight we tried to find out if a particular physician is in their coverage network.

First I tried their Account Registration. It includes a CAPTCHA test.

Why does it include a CAPTCHA test? Really you don't need to ask. Since CAPTCHA hacking software exceeds human performance, it's really a filter to eliminate humans. Particularly elderly humans who might need expensive services.

I kept failing the test. Emily checked, and I seemed to be typing the correct response. We even tried the audio test. That one would  have impressed Mephistopheles.

So Emily tried their customer service number. Voice recognition of course, no keypad entry. It couldn't understand anything she said. Her voice kept rising, but it didn't help. I tried not to laugh too much.

So I tried the web site again. This time I got a different response: "Sorry, we're experiencing technical difficulties at this time. Please try again later or contact Customer Care. Error ID: 21573301".

Terry Gilliam couldn't have done it better.

It's moments like these that make me more optimistic about the future of humanity. Our civilization is sure to collapse before we can create the sentient machines that will end us. We will be saved by our own greed and incompetence.

PS. The coup de grace came as a post-visit survey. An opportunity to provide feedback! So I started answering questions. The questions kept coming. I noticed the the scroll bar size -- I was only through 15% of what must have been 50 questions. I tried scrolling to the end and submitting. Of course that was rejected; I hadn't answered all the questions. I had to smile at the style of it; sadism with a flourish.

Update 8/27/10: There's an old joke that the best way to improve health insurance plan revenues is to put the registration office on the top floor of a building with no elevators. Only the healthy can join, so that even low rates will be profitable.

The CAPTCHA is the modern equivalent of the top floor office without elevators. In this case there was a web site failure, but I'd wager their web site is always fragile. Since Anthem has already been paid, their incentive is to deny services altogether.

The beauty of these sorts of scams is that they're emergent. They develop in the same fashion as antimicrobial resistance in bacteria, or lousy service in AT&T's flat rate data network. Entropy and funding choices provide the "mutations", the commercial market provides the "selection", the system irresistibly evolves until we get the Anthem web site.

This kind of perverse incentive is built into many systems, but it's particularly strong in the health insurance business. If we recognize and understand these processes we can work around them -- much like modern HIV therapy works with an understanding of the the virus evolves. I suspect oncology is going to go the same way -- using therapies that "guide" the "evolution" of the cancer / tumor ecosystem towards forms that may be most vulnerable to a 2nd wave treatment -- or most compatible with the life of the human "host". (I kind of like that cancer idea btw, I do hope it's really part of modern therapy.)

As a society, however, we're only in the most early stages of understanding the evolution of emergent corporate dysfunction and how to manage it.

Who does phone surveys anyway?

I'm a grateful reader of the FiveThirtyEight Blog, now hosted by the NY Times. They give everyone access to electoral data that was once available only the pros.

Of course their data is only as good as the phone survey. I've been wondering, lately, how well that is working.

We get quite a few "survey" calls. Some of them are surely legitimate, but others are ploys to raise money for campaigns. Some are probably "phishing" (identity theft) operations. Given the range of "survey" calls we get, it's not surprising that we never answer any of them.  (In fact I never had time anyway, but Emily used to be more cooperative.)

So we're not surveyed.

So how common is our reaction? I know we're very peculiar in most things, but I would imagine that the fund raising tricks and phishing exploits must turn quite a few people off of surveys.

PS. We always tell them to take us off the call list, but I doubt that does anything. We're in the 'do not call' registry anyway.

Schmidt really did sell Google's soul to Verizon

Apple could do a deal with AT&T and emerge unchanged because, of course, Steve Jobs is Satan. He is beyond mere corruption.

When Google did a deal with Verizon though, they lost everything (emphases mine) ...

Marvin Ammori: Google-Verizon Pact: Makes BP Look Good

A lot of people have been discussing the Verizon-Google pact, including venture capitalists (on NYT's Room for Debate) and Silicon Valley companies. Most people agree: Google does evil, calls it net neutrality.

Last week I wrote up a guide of the FCC negotiations on net neutrality, setting out all the loopholes, and noting that the carriers needed only one loophole to kill an open Internet. Verizon and Google announced their pact two days ago. Rather than including one loophole, they went down the checklist and included just about every loophole they could.

Maybe the most ridiculous one--which has received almost no attention--is something I didn't mention last week. It's the liability limit. The maximum fine for a violation, after all the loopholes are met, is $2 million dollars...

Fixed rate fines are one of the great scams of American government. A true fine would max out at 30% of Google's yearly revenue.

This Taiwanese video is now quite plausible.

Schmidt is a lesser version of Microsoft's Steve Ballmer. If Google doesn't dump him he'll take them down.

The Bowhead whale can live how long?!!

A graphic in Why Can't We Live Forever? (Scientific American) lists maximal lifespan of various familiar species.

The Jellyfish and Hydra are "immortal". The Galapagos tortoise can live 150 years. Humans 122, Dogs 39, Cats 36, Horse 62(!), Chimp 59(!).

There are a couple of surprises there. I didn't dream a horse could live that long. I imagine that's a bit of a problem for many horse owners. I wonder how many horses ever die a natural death, even if the average lifespan is only half that.

And, of course, the Bowhead whale can live up to 211 years.

WTF?! Where did that come from?

I found this 1999 reference, it's apparently the source for the 211 year estimate ...

... Based on these data, growth appears faster for females than males, and age at sexual maturity (age at length 12-13 m for males and 13-13.5 m for females) occurs at around 25 years of age. Growth slows markedly for both sexes at roughly 40-50 years of age. Four individuals (all males) exceed 100 years of age. Standard error increased with estimated age, but the age estimates had lower coefficients of variation for older animals. Recoveries of traditional whale-hunting tools from five recently harvested whales also suggest life-spans in excess of 100 years of age in some cases.

It turns out Bowhead Whales and Naked Mole Rats both have weirdly long lifespans  ...

... Mitoptosis can be also activated in adult postmitotic somatic cells by evolutionary conserved phenotypic adaptations to intermittent oxygen restriction (IOR) and synergistically acting intermittent caloric restriction (ICR). IOR and ICR are common in mammals and seem to underlie extraordinary longevity and augmented cancer resistance in bowhead whales (Balaena mysticetus) and naked mole rats (Heterocephalus glaber)...

So to live long and prosper spend mealtimes holding your breath rather than eating?

Not surprisingly a 2007 article advocating genome sequencing of mammals with atypical longevity ...

... we propose the sequencing of three organisms of unique interest for aging research: the naked mole-rat (Heterocephalus glaber) whose record longevity of 28.3 years makes it the longest-lived rodent (2), the white-faced capuchin monkey (Cebus capucinus) which can live 50 years (3), and the bowhead whale (Balaena mysticetus), the longest-lived mammal with estimates suggesting that it may live 200 years (4).

Hmm. Maybe we should do this sequencing before we drive all whales to extinction?

Even if the 211 year estimate is an exaggeration these whales live much longer than I'd imagined. I'd have guessed 40 years, but they're still young adults at that point.

Until this minute I was skeptical that there was really much room to slow the human aging process. Now it feels inevitable. Not likely in my lifespan, but maybe the future of my children or their children.

The Corporation - what next?

In my seventh year within the fascinating, feudal, emergent machinery of a classic publicly traded corporation I volunteered to write a white paper about supporting internal collaboration for shared services. I wrote a post in 2008 asking about examples of systems to enable such collaboration.

I can't share the final paper here, but the conclusions were unsurprising. I think they are true of any corporation of significant size.

In the absence of internal markets, contracts, and currencies, true corporate collaboration requires either accounting system reorganization, or serious executive pressure, or some sort of baby-sitting coop style internal currency. All of these things are very hard to do; ironically collaboration outside the corporation is easier (see also - outsourcing) [3]. For example, executive power, like Presidential power, is a limited currency that must be used sparingly. [1]

I felt when I wrote the paper that I was walking old ground, but my real expertise is in health care and more esoteric domains. I didn't know how to follow this trail.

Later I learned I was intersecting the path of Ronald Cause and his 1937 paper The Nature of the Firm [3]. Alan Murray describes the paper in a recent WSJ article on the future of the corporation ...

The End of Management - Alan Murray - WSJ.com

... British economist Ronald Coase laid out the basic logic of the managed corporation in his 1937 work, "The Nature of the Firm." He argued corporations were necessary because of what he called "transaction costs." It was simply too complicated and too costly to search for and find the right worker at the right moment for any given task, or to search for supplies, or to renegotiate prices, police performance and protect trade secrets in an open marketplace. The corporation might not be as good at allocating labor and capital as the marketplace; it made up for those weaknesses by reducing transaction costs.

Mr. Coase received his Nobel Prize in 1991—the very dawn of the Internet age. Since then, the ability of human beings on different continents and with vastly different skills and interests to work together and coordinate complex tasks has taken quantum leaps. Complicated enterprises, like maintaining Wikipedia or building a Linux operating system, now can be accomplished with little or no corporate management structure at all...

I wasn't quite following Ronald Coase however; I was intersecting him. Seventy years after his paper was published, I came from a world where intra-corporate transaction costs were higher than extra-corporate costs. By 2007 collaboration within a typical large corporation had become more difficult than similar collaboration with an external agent.

Why did this happen? That's a rather interesting question. I expect there are publications on it, but they'd be hard for me to find. I wouldn't be be surprised if the costs of intra-corporate transactions are higher in 2007 than in 1937, and that the costs of extra-corporate transactions are substantially lower. The balance has shifted.

So why does the Corporation persist?

Well, for one thing, entrenched institutions are like cities of the northeast or trees tangled in the tropical canopy. They don't collapse overnight just because their sustaining systems are gone. The publicly traded corporation is deeply embedded in American law (including taxation law), accounting standards, international treaty, and politics (senatorial ownership). It's going to be around for decades to come.

Beyond mere inertia, however, Corporations are awfully good at economic warfare; a mode of operation more in the province of Macchiavelli's The Prince than standard economics texts [4]. Microsoft was once the master of this economic warfare, Intel still is. This mode of operation actually destroys customer value, but it's not going away.

Even though the 20th century Corporation will persist, but better and for worse, it's clear we're in one of those times of cranky dissatisfaction where the ancient Monster of the Market is looking vulnerable. We can at least hope there will alternatives.

Murray's sources don't know what those alternatives will be, and they seem reluctant to speculate. His prescriptions are a rehash of the usual management book pap - "agile, flexible, ruthless, cut their losses, lots of bets, Google [5], inspire, entrepreneurs, push decision-making down, wisdom of crowds, feedback, change, innovation, adaptability" , blah-blah-blah.

For my part I've been looking for good speculation since 2006, and I haven't come across much. I wrote up some of my thoughts last June, and some speculations by Iain Banks yesterday. I'm behind on reading Clay Shirky's 2008 book, I suspect I'll have some follow-up posts when I do that.

I'm guessing that we'll somer interesting variations emerge over the next decade. Some of them will resemble Apple (Singaporean model of the brilliant tyrant in what's effectively a public-private corporation), some Google (natural selection - creates sharks and tapeworms), and some may come from China (what is Foxconn [6]?).

I'm hopeful that within a decade I'll be able to invest in privately held companies where the owners have major organ systems in the game. I wouldn't mind working for or owning a part of one of those companies.

Interesting times.

See also

Gordon's Notes

• How big should financial firms be?
• Wanted: examples of publicly traded companies with accounting solutions that support internal collaborative projects
• Beyond the first cause: Deepwater Horizon and the publicly traded company
• Troubled capitalism: The corporate entity
• The corporation as psychopath (2004 - The Economist, lost to a paywall now)
• Canopy Economics (2004)
• Why do corporations exist - theory of the firm (Oct 2010)

Others

• Big and Small - The Baseline Scenario
• Schneier on Security: Here Comes Everybody - Review
• Coding Horror: Revisiting The Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering
• A Freakonomics Contest: The Coase Theorem Online
• Baby-sitting the economy - Paul Krugman - Slate Magazine (2008)

Footnotes

[1] I concluded that any collaboration must be informal. This can work because are many employees will, for a minuscule amount of recognition and commendation, happily share their work. (Unless their private knowledge becomes job security - which is a bit of a big caveat.)

So the question becomes how best to enable informal networks of internal collaboration at a time when personal connections within corporations have greatly weakened.

If I were (heaven forfend) running a publicly traded company I would require my IT department to choose a network sharing environment that supported search and discovery, and I'd train people to use it. I think you could actually do this on a large scale using an improved version of Microsoft SharePoint wiki (the rest of SP is an unredeemable disaster) and its companion search and discovery services.

This is hard stuff to do in hard times of course, and in easy times it does not seem necessary.

[3] Yes, all these Wikipedia links do have special meaning in this context.

[4] Christiansen's original Innovators Dilemma is one of the very few business books worth reading; his follow-up books are not nearly as good. Machiavelli's The Prince is still the champion though.

[5] An unfortunate example considering the tragic mess they've made of so many of their projects. Apple is conspicuously absent from the list of examples. As always, omissions are interesting.

[6] And why is its english Wikipedia entry so very brief?

Update 8/22/10: I rewrote my original post after I'd thought about it for a while.

Troubled capitalism: The corporate entity

Iain M. Banks sticks his ideas into his fiction as digressions. They're often quite interesting digressions.

Transition is one of his books with several digressions. It's a powerful book, but it's not an easy book (my fave reviews: 1, 2, 3). It reads like a mixture of his literary fiction (written as Iain Banks) and his science fiction (written as Iain M Banks).

Since Transition came out in 2009, after the great crash of 2008, and since Banks is a critic of capitalism, it's not surprising that one of his digressions concerns the problems of a world with American style capitalism [1] ....

... this was a Greedist world, a world where the untrammelled pursuit of material wealth and the virtues of money itself were extolled, venerated and even worshipped...

... There are as many types of capitalism as there are types of socialism – or any other ism for that matter – but one of the major differences – a major difference founded on what appears to be a minor detail – between whole bundles of ostensibly fully capitalist societies centres (indeed, depends) on whether commerce is governed by private firms and partnerships, or by limited companies.

... the invention and acceptance of the limited company means people can take big risks with money not their own and then – if it all goes wrong – lets them just walk away from the resulting debts, because the company is somehow regarded as being like a person in its own right, so that its debts die with it (not the sort of fairy story a partnership is allowed to get away with).

It’s a piece of nonsense, really, and I used to wonder that legislatures anywhere bought into this blatant fantasy and agreed to give it legal house room. But that was just me being naive, before I realised that there was a reason why it always dawned on all those ambitious, powerful gents in all those various legislatures that this ludicrous hooey might actually be quite a good idea.

Anyway, limited company worlds often progress faster than other types, but always less smoothly and reliably, and sometimes disastrously. I’ve looked into it and frankly it just isn’t worth it, but you can’t tell that to anyone caught up within the seductive madness of the dream; they have the faith, and are forever relieved by the invisible hand...

I'm sympathetic to the general idea that there's something broken with the publicly traded company. I haven't, however, taken that to mean that there's also something broken with the very idea of the corporation personified.

I'll have to give it some thought.

See also:

• Llamas and my stegosaurus: Artificial Persons (Supreme court decision 1/22/10)
• What Is the First Amendment For? - Stanley Fish - NYTimes.com (2/1/2010)
• Gordon's Notes: Beyond the first cause: Deepwater Horizon and the publicly traded company (2010)
• Gordon's Notes: The perils of compensation plans: housing market version (Nov 2007)

Footnotes

[1] I started typing from the book, then it occurred to me to Google some key phrases. That's how I discovered that there is a Russian web site that contains transcriptions of at least this book - and probably others. It is, of course, completely illegal. The site is entirely in Russian, but Google found the book within it, including this digression.

Public education in America - Primary and Secondary

On the same day Gail Collins tells us about American aristocrats seeking power, Bob Herbert reminds us (yet again) of an inconvenient truth [5] ...

... The Schott Foundation for Public Education tells us in a new report that the on-time high school graduation rate for black males in 2008 was an abysmal 47 percent, and even worse in several major urban areas — for example, 28 percent in New York City....

...More than 70 percent of black children are born to unwed mothers... Black men ... have nearly a one-third chance of being incarcerated at some point in their lives...

...White families are typically five times as wealthy as black families. More than a third of all black children are growing up in poverty...

Those are bad numbers on several fronts, though it's worth noting that 66% of Icelandic infants are born to unmarried mothers and in 2007 60% of babies born to all American women in their 20s were out of wedlock.

Black Americans are not unique on the educational front either ...

The Dropout/Graduation Crisis Among American Indian and Alaska Native Students — The Civil Rights Project at UCLA

... Data from 2005 is drawn from the seven states with the highest percentage of American Indian and Alaska Native students as well as five states in the Pacific and Northwestern regions of the United States ... On average, less than 50% of Native students in these twelve states graduate each year.

Public education isn't even working that well at our above average elementary school and state of Minnesota (in 2007 the St Paul school District was ... "30 percent Asian [2], 30 percent black, 26 percent white and 13 percent Hispanic" [1]) ...

Herbert is right that American blacks, and especially black men, are in serious trouble. At least when it comes to education though, they're not alone. Their trouble is a leading indicator for a lot of others.

So maybe we should beat up on the teachers? I can think of many ways reading and math [4] education and student assessment could be improved, but, at least for the particular St Paul school in the above graphic, I believe the teachers are pretty good to excellent. Some teacher-kid-parent combinations work better than others, but those teachers aren't the problem.

Ok, maybe we should beat up on the parents? Oh, wait, I'm a parent. Skip that one.

Maybe we should get better students? That does work. They used the better student method to improve test schools in Bush era Houston and in Mississippi. Health providers have long used similar techniques to improve health care outcomes. True, this is the same way wolves contribute to the health of caribou, but we don't eat the losers. We house them.

Hmm. So we can't beat up the teachers, we can't pummel the parents, and eliminating the weak kids is kind of cheating. So what's left?

Maybe we need to rethink the goals of our educational enterprise. Maybe, in a turbulent world of rapid change, we need to have different options for different kids. In 2020 it's not hard to imagine that a skilled gardener might have better employment opportunities than an accountant or a dermatologist.

Maybe we need to restart with the end in mind.

See also (my stuff):

• Fake graduation rates and other predictable outcomes of no child left behind (2008)
• The secret of great 10th grade school test scores (2003)
• Pay for performance in health care and teaching - we know how this ends (2010)
• The college bubble goes critical (2010)
• Employment in the Great Stagnation (2010)
• Post-industrial employment: adjusting to a new world (2010)

Footnotes

[1] In Minnesota white flight is often to "Charter" schools.
[2] Large Hmong population.
[3] A nonsensical statement since skills are relative to teacher, student, class topic and so on.
[4] Die Everyday Math, Die!
[5] Glenn Loury, writing for the Boston Review in 2007 about American imprisonment, said much the same thing ...

... a central reality of our time is the fact that there has opened a wide racial gap in the acquisition of cognitive skills, the extent of law-abidingness, the stability of family relations, the attachment to the work force, and the like. This disparity in human development is, as a historical matter, rooted in political, economic, social, and cultural factors peculiar to this society and reflective of its unlovely racial history: it is a societal, not communal or personal, achievement....

Update 9/4/10:

This post on how bad statistics led to a blunder in evaluating small schools is very relevant. With most Pay for Performance initiatives mall schools are randomly rewarded and randomly punished for normal fluctuations in the composition of the student body. The same thing will happen to small health care facilities.