Category: From the Old Server

MIT is having a holiday on Monday and Tuesday and the Boston weather forecast is unappealing…. good excuses for hopping a plane to Mexico City.  I’ve never been there before and would appreciate comments on where to stay and what to see.  My main interests are Pre-Columbian history and artifacts, soaking up the lifestyle, and modern architecture.  I’ll be alone.

[In case you’re curious, I’m not taking my own airplane down to Mexico.  At 150 mph it would take roughly 16 hours to cover the 2000 nautical mile distance.  I have taken the plane into Baja, Mexico and wrote up the experience in http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/baja]

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The October 10, 2003 issue of MIT’s student newspaper, the Tech, carried some articles about a group of unfortunate students who decided to hold a ghetto/rap-themed party in their dorm.  The invitation email started “Callin all you playas, pimps, hos, gangstas, and bitches…”.  Various campus functionaries indicated their displeasure at what they viewed as an assault on the sacred principle of diversity. The students immediately issued a craven apology to the community but nonetheless Chuck Vest, the president of MIT, responded by noting that his administration would “deal swiftly and fairly with those responsible for the event.”

Today’s issue of the Tech carries some more invective from the administration directed as these allegedly racist students.

There was no actual evidence of racism by the students holding the party and in fact the only people involved in this dispute who are known to judge others by the color of their skin are the MIT administrators themselves.

A very similar situation occurred in the 1990s at University of California Riverside.  A fraternity held a “South of the Border” party advertised with a poster featuring a sleeping Mexican, complete with sombrero and tequila bottle.  The frat boys were harshly disciplined until a lawyer sued the school, pointing out that (a) half of the fraternity brothers were Mexican-American, and (b) the First Amendment prohibited a state institution from editing the fraternity’s party posters.  A federal judge sided with the students.

So many university administrations have tried to muzzle their students that an entire non-profit organization, http://www.thefire.org, exists to fight back.

Perhaps, however, the university bureaucrats are doing the right thing after all.  The U.S. Constitution guarantees that the government won’t interfere with your right to free speech.  Private employers, however, are free to say “You will continue to receive a paycheck so long as you stay in your cubicle with your head down and your mouth shut.”  Only a tiny fraction of Americans have a practical right to free speech and these are primarily the very rich and the very poor.  A primary mission of a college is to prepare young people for the real world.  Does it really make sense to delude kids into thinking that they can say whatever they want and still have a paycheck and health insurance?  Perhaps it would be better for a university president to address the incoming freshmen thusly… “This is my plantation and if you want to stay here for four years you’ll learn to say ‘Yes, Massah'”.

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Today’s Boston Globe carries two contrasting front-page stories.  “As economy gains, outsourcing surges” talks about how American workers at for-profit companies must compete with 84 million Filipinos, many of whom are well-educated, speak good English, and are delighted to work for $300/month.  Things are looking more cheerful for U.S. workers in the not-for-profit sector.  A front-page story on Boston University’s search for a new president revealed that the school decided to pay Dan Goldin $1.8 million in exchange for… not working at all.  Considering that Mr. Goldin had yet to start his job, that’s a pretty good hourly rate.  You could hire a staff of 45 Filipino engineers for ten years with that $1.8 mil!

[Update:  the Globe runs a three-article series on “the white collar job migration”.  Article 2 is “US workers see hard times” and includes a quote from a venture capitalist:   “Right when you think about Employee 11, you should think about India.  My view is you should not start a company from scratch in the United States ever again.”  Article 3 is “US business students find opportunity is global” and talks about how MBAs are adapting.  A more interesting article appears in the same issue, November 4, “As work shifts, internship in India the new rite of passage” and starts with “An increasing number of US students are going to India to intern at top information technology services firms or to participate in tours that allow them to network with the country’s corporate elite.”  The American interns, most of whom are MBAs or MBA students, get paid about $350/month (compared to their old internships of $7000/month in the U.S.).]

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One of our friends has a young Cuban lover and she goes to visit him there periodically.  This situation spurred some reflection:  “Why are there so many artists and musicians in Cuba?”  The next thought “Well, why not?”  In the U.S. when Johnny decides to ignore his family’s advice and take up oil painting or guitar playing instead of investment banking it is a big crisis.  Johnny is very likely giving up the opportunity to own real estate, send his kids to private school, and otherwise enjoy the great festival of materialism that is the United States.  In an economy with hardly any opportunity, however, why wouldn’t a person choose to do art or music?

Art doesn’t require a lot of capital investment.  You really just need a crayon and some paper (or scissors and paper if you were Matisse).  If human ability is equally distributed across the globe you’d therefore expect the best art to come from the poorest countries where people have no competing bourgeois job offers.  Yet paradoxically the art for which people are willing to pay the most money seems to come from advanced economies such as Germany, England, Japan, and the U.S.

For the comment section:  Why?

[I’ll start by throwing out a personal opinion:  art can only touch you if the artist shares a similar social and economic environment, which is why Westerners mostly like the art that is produced in Western countries; art produced in poor countries is actually much better but we can’t appreciate it because, despite heavy doses of ecotourism, we can’t understand the milieu in which it was produced.]

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Today’s New York Times carries an article that ties together the themes of women at MIT (see yesterday’s posting, below) and music sharing.  Make absolutely sure that you read through to the end.

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The November 2003 Atlantic carries some interesting articles, many of which are available on the Web, on college admissions.  Of interest to aviation enthusiasts will be the article by William Langewiesche on the Columbia space shuttle investigation.  At the very least it will make you feel fortunate that you’re not working for a large bureaucracy.

Speaking of bureaucracies, the college admissions articles are collectively very revealing.

First, due to the dumbing down and rescaling of the SAT test it is very tough to predict who will get into top colleges.  Harvard, for example, receives about 500 applications every year from students with 1600 (perfect) on the SATs… and rejects more than half of them!  Paradoxically the dumbing down of the SATs seems to have had a pernicious effect on black high schoolers.  White kids go to SAT cram courses and get 100% of the easy questions right.   Black kids don’t necessarily do well on those questions that are easy to prep for but often do much better on questions that can only be answered by those who’ve hit the books.  ETS, the fantastically profitable non-profit (“non-taxpaying” would perhaps be more accurate) that runs the SAT, responded to research showing this racial bias by trying to figure out how their data had leaked rather than looking at the substance.

“Selective” colleges and those ranked high in reputation by U.S. News and World Report (which immediately causes a rush of applications and therefore a “selective” statistic) are swamped by applicants.  At the same time a National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) found that the actual quality of undergraduate experience was uncorrelated with the U.S. News top schools ranking (the results of this survey are kept secret from the public and the Ivy League schools have refused to participate but a handful of state schools make their results available).  Those pesky economists, who tend to reduce everything to dollars, make the case in a National Bureau of Economic Research report (link) that selective colleges are of no value.  Kids from rich families who go to Harvard end up being richer adults than immigrants who go to state schools, of course.  However, students who get into really selective colleges but decide to go to less selective ones end up having the same lifetime income than those who accepted their spot at the really selective school.

In terms of practical advice to young people and their parents anxious to game the system the magazine offers little.  The obvious technique of being born into the correct racial group is not covered.  In addition to practicing racial discrimination, however, it is important for Asian-Americans and non-Hispanic whites not to forget that college admissions departments also engage in sex discrimination.  Liberal arts colleges are hurting for male students so, for example, the chance of getting into Pomona College will rise from 20% to 27% if Jane Applicant decides to embark on a hormone and surgery program to turn herself into Joe Applicant.  A sex change operation is even more effective when applying to engineering and science schools.  Across the street from Pomona is Harvey Mudd College where Joe Applicant’s 29% acceptance rate can turn into 61% after a sex change.  The effect of an applicant’s sex is larger at MIT where males are admitted at the rate of 12% and females at 28%.

[If your kid doesn’t want to undergo surgery but you still want him or her to get into a school with a high reputation the message is “send Johnny to an airy-fairy liberal arts school and send Jane to Nerd Central”.]

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Here are a few minor items from the November 2003 issue of the Atlantic:

• a study ranks the U.S. as one of the world’s most likely spots for a large-scale terrorist attack (already report in this Guardian story)
  
• economic sanctions against governments are increasingly common (50+ incidents in the 1990s versus 15 in the 1950s) but there is no evidence that they are effective
  
• single scientists, artists, writers, and criminals are vastly more productive into middle age than married men (the journal article is hidden behind a commercial publisher’s veil but this summary on nature.com is available)
  
• R.J. Rummel of the University of Hawaii (http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/) contribute a graph of “Statistics of Democide”, killing of people by their own governments.  These deaths dwarf the numbers killed in wars.  The largest mass killing since World War II was by Pakistan against its Bengali citizens around 1970 (background).  Partly this was an attempt by a Muslim government to kill as many Hindus as possible but it was intensified by the fact that some East Pakistanis were attempting to achieve independence and create an independent state of Bangladesh.

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The chickens are coming home to roost, all around early December, which will necessitate a drastic reduction in posting here.  Here’s what I’m up to…

• co-teaching a software engineering lab course
  
• taking an atmospheric physics course (all Coriolis force, all the time)
  
• taking an evening drawing class
  
• trying to finish my Commercial airplane certificate (tough because a lot of the maneuvers need to be done close to the ground, which means unpleasant turbulence most days in New England (wind + hills = bumps))
  
• trying to finish my helicopter rating
  
• finishing a hardcopy edition of Internet Application Workbook (looks like MIT Press is willing to do a hardcopy version without attacking the Web version)
  
• planning some trips for the winter and spring

Check back around January 1, 2004 for new stuff.

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I’m soliciting suggestions (in the comments area for this posting or via email if you prefer) for a round-the-world trip departing westbound from Boston around December 10.  Here are some constraints:

• want to be back in town after 5-6 weeks to catch up with friends, dog, etc.
  
• want a good amount of daily sunshine (Southern Hemisphere) but not extreme heat (35C/95F max; 26C/80F would be ideal for a daily high)
  
• prefer to avoid visa application hassles so want to visit places where U.S. citizens can just drop in (my passport has an Israeli stamp in it from a June 2003 visit to a university there so I wouldn’t be able to get a visa to most Muslim countries in any case)
  
• would like to get some in some cultural tourism but also do some snorkeling and bicycling
  
• my best languages are, in descending order of competence, English, French, Italian, and German

Here’s a tentative itinerary:

• Boston
  
• either
  
  
  
  • SF/LA, Maui (never been), South Pacific (Fiji?)
    
  • Argentina via Mexico City (art museums)
  
  
• Tasmania
  
• Perth (plus the coral reefs farther north on the coast of Western Australia or will it be too hot in Dec/Jan?)
  
• Chiang Mai, Thailand (never been) if I have to continue via Bangkok (visited before)
  
• Cape Town, South Africa (too hot?)
  
• London (dreary but maybe go to the theater for a night or two?)
  
• Boston

I might try to get a Star Alliance (United, Lufthansa, Singapore, Thai et al) round-the-world business class ticket (reasonably cheap and flexible, comfortable for those insanely long segments).  So it would be best to find places that are easy to get to on these airlines.

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Just back from touring a couple of “cottages” in Newport, Rhode Island.  Built towards the end of the 19th Century, the larger houses there have ballrooms sufficient in size to secure entry into the “400 club”, for which one needed to have at least $3 million in ready cash (like $100 million today?) and a ballroom large enough to accomodate 400 people.  More or less every week there was an enormous party in every house.  This invites a comparison between Alva Vanderbilt and modern-day young people.  Ask a member of an engaged couple any time within one year of the wedding to take part in an activity.  “Oh no,” he or she will reply, “I am working on wedding planning.”  But a woman like Alva Vanderbilt could plan a 100-person party in a heartbeat then go back to her work on women’s suffrage.

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