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The low level of education among young Americans has been well-documented (see “Smartest Kids in the World Review”), but what happens when uneducated American young people go through college and enter the workforce? The “International Assessment for Adult Competency” data show our rank against international peers: “Americans Rank Last in Problem-Solving With Technology: New report finds U.S. workers lag behind other industrial countries in using digital skills for tasks” (WSJ). Some samples:

A new report finds U.S. workers rank dead last among 18 industrial countries when it comes to “problem solving in technology-rich environments,” or using digital technology to evaluate information and perform practical tasks.

“When you look at this data it suggests the trends we’ve discerned over the last 20 years are continuing and if anything they are gaining momentum,” said Joseph Fuller, a Harvard Business School professor who studies competitiveness. … The countries that scored the highest on the problem-solving with technology criteria were Japan, Finland, Sweden and Norway. Poland scored second to last, just above the U.S.

One stark revelation is that about four-fifths of unemployed Americans cannot figure out a rudimentary problem in which they have to spot an error when data is transferred from a two-column spreadsheet to a bar graph. And Americans are far less adept at dealing with numbers than the average of their global peers.

Data on 16- to 34-year-olds, for instance, found even workers with college degrees and graduate or professional degrees don’t stack up favorably against their international peers with similar education levels.

That a growing percentage of U.S. workers are incompetent is consistent with declining labor force participation compared to other countries (WSJ). It is also consistent with industry expanding at a higher rate in other countries where, even if the average worker is not necessarily better educated than his or her U.S. counterpart, wages and taxes are lower. So at least we can say that we are seeing the global labor market functioning in a manner consistent with Econ 101.

[Update: A few hours after this posting went live, we stopped to have an airplane refueled at one of America’s larger airports and higher-grade FBOs (ramp cluttered with $10 million bizjets and a Boeing 737 for a sports team). Here’s a photo of the right wing taken during the final preflight inspection:

When we got to our destination we rented a car. Here’s how the previous renters had the audio system set up…

I can’t figure out if the typical audio system setup in a rental car is more or less interesting than the fact that Uber drivers seem unable to find and/or use the “Auto” climate control setting.]

 

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Camera/phone experts: Who has the Samsung Galaxy S7? DxOMark says this is the phone with the best camera hardware and, at least to some extent, software. I’m skeptical due to the painful experience that I had with the camera software (unresponsive) on a Note 3.

A friend recently purchased an S7 (not an S7 Edge) and I took some photos of the same scene (indoor close-up; subdued evening light through the window) with her new Samsung and my iPhone 6 Plus. The Samsung images were plainly better in terms of detail and color balance. But I’m wondering how well the Samsung would cope with running children/dogs/etc. This where the Note 3 fell apart and the iPhone does pretty well due to Apple’s brilliant software.

Readers: What do you have to say about the latest Samsung as a practical picture-taking tool?

[Separately, the new Sony A6300 is potentially revolutionary due to its ability to focus on a subject’s eye. (Olympus tried this a few years ago in one of their Four-Thirds camera but it didn’t have a state-of-the-art sensor like the Sony’s.) I am enthusiastic about upgrading from my old A6000.]

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“She Wanted to Do Her Research. He Wanted to Talk ‘Feelings.’” is a New York Times article by a science professor, A. Hope Jahren, that describes women abandoning science:

Within my own field, physical sciences, the results of this shedding were clear. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, seven B.S. degrees are granted to women for every 10 granted to men; three M.S. degrees granted to women for every five granted to men; one Ph.D. degree granted to a woman for every two granted to men. The absence of women within STEM programs is not only progressive, it is persistent — despite more than 20 years of programs intended to encourage the participation of girls and women.

Why should this be?

My own experiences as a student, scientist and mentor lead me to believe that [sexual] harassment is widespread. Few studies exist, but in a survey of 191 female fellowship recipients published in 1995, 12 percent indicated that they had been sexually harassed as a student or early professional.

Since I started writing about women and science, my female colleagues have been moved to share their stories with me; my inbox is an inadvertent clearinghouse for unsolicited love notes. Sexual harassment in science generally starts like this: A woman (she is a student, a technician, a professor) gets an email and notices that the subject line is a bit off: “I need to tell you,” or “my feelings.” … The author goes on to tell her that she is special in some way, that his passion is an unfamiliar feeling that she has awakened in him, the important suggestion being that she has brought this upon herself. He will speak of her as an object with “shiny hair” or “sparkling eyes” — testing the waters before commenting upon the more private parts of her body.

In other words, harassment of women in science is not due to animosity towards women as scientists but rather due to their attractiveness as potential sexual partners.

If Professor Jahren is correct then shouldn’t we expect to find that female science professors are less attractive than female science graduate students who are in turn less attractive than female science undergrads?

[We also have to adjust for “Beautiful People Really Are More Intelligent” and the fact that science requires at least a moderately high IQ. It might be necessary to do this analysis on a state-by-state level. Attractive female scientists in Massachusetts, for example, might learn that having sex with a medical doctor would yield a higher after-tax cash flow under the state’s child support guidelines than working at the median salary for a science professor (see “Women in Science” for an analysis). On the other hand, a female scientist in Minnesota, Nevada, or Texas, would find it more lucrative to continue on through the Ph.D. and then work for wages. It may be the case that female scientists in states that offer unlimited child support revenue abandon the field in greater numbers than those in states where working with a Ph.D. pays better than having children.]

How about an alternative hypothesis? There are a lot of women in undergrad science because they want to go to medical school (roughly 50 percent female). Thus many of them were never on the academic science track to begin with. The observed drop-out rate from master’s to PhD occurs as women get older and more savvy about the life of a working scientist versus alternatives, some of which are almost exclusively available to females.

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“Life and Death in the App Store” chronicles the rise and fall of an app company. The programmers are skilled but the products are not always hits. Maximum annual revenue was under $1 million.

My personal theory about having a successful business is that you need to have either (1) a lower cost of capital than everyone else, (2) knowledge and skill that nobody else has, or (3) experience with customers and a market that few others have.

Way #1 works great for government cronies. They can get capital to build a factory for free. Way #2 is the path taken by a lot of MIT spinoffs. Unfortunately it carries a lot of risk, e.g., if the exciting new technology turns not to work as well as hoped. Way #3 seems to characterize most successful software companies. The founders of SAP, for example, had experience as IBM employees building accounting software for manufacturing companies.

Pixite, the company described in the article, would seem to have tremendous prospects if they were to partner with enterprises that have already identified business needs but don’t have the tech skills to implement. Healthcare.gov and associated Obamacare sites, for example, generated about $1 billion in revenue for the software industry. A company such as Pixite might be better off working together with a health insurer, health care provider, or pharma company in order to mine some of the gold in this part of the economy.

Readers: What should these guys do? Go into a business area with a partner or fold their company and get jobs at Google and Facebook?

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Friends who are parents and/or JavaScript experts: Avni Khatri, John Morgan, Isaac Reilly, and I would appreciate your feedback on an application that we’ve developed: postclipper.com (enables a parent to designate a subset of Facebook postings as an electronic baby book for a child, for example, and then share the book with Facebook friends). You can follow this test script. Feedback via email or here as a comment would be great; we are chasing some JavaScript issues that seem to be browser-dependent.

Thanks in advance for any assistance!

[Note that the app, though designed for parents, can also be used to designate a subset of Facebook postings as a memory of a trip taken, for example.]

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There has been a lot of debate concerning what should be done with the iPhone that Syed Farook was using prior to his death. Gizmodo says that the phone belonged to, and therefore was presumably paid for, by his government employer. That raises the following stupid question: Why did Mr. Farook need a taxpayer-funded iPhone? The government is interested in whether this U.S. citizen used it to support waging Jihad along with Green Card-holding Tashfeen Malik, but today I’m wondering about the non-Jihad aspect of the case. Why would the taxpayers have bought him an iPhone for $600 or $1000? What job function did it serve? (And why wouldn’t a recently bankrupt city have purchased a cheaper Android device or, like some private employers, paid Farook a small amount to use his own phone? (As with everything else relating to employment in the U.S., such a policy can lead to litigation.))

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Folks:

I entered a contest with a first prize of a week in Ft. Lauderdale with some work colleagues and the entire family. I won second prize… two weeks in Ft. Lauderdale!

Is it worth the effort to bring a road bicycle down there? I don’t want to bike on traffic-choked roads, especially if the drivers are beyond their prime driving years.

Thanks in advance!

[Also, please email me at philg@mit.edu if you would like to get together in Ft. Lauderdale. I propose Sunday afternoon coffee (or drinks? Can Floridians gather in the afternoon without alcohol?) on April 3, but can be flexible.]

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Kids on Computers, a 501c3 non-profit that sets up computer labs in rural Mexico, got a brand-new high-performance desktop PC donated to it by Pogo Linux and Micron. This is being auctioned for the charity through eBay. See this page for details. (I’m not bidding on it myself because my PC was built less than a year ago.)

If you need a computer that boots instantly off a 480 GB SSD and want to help a good cause, this could be your solution!

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… and also cut their tax bills substantially.

My Facebook feed is packed with people talking about emigrating to Canada in order to escape the prospect of President Donald Trump.

What about principled corporations? Burger King was criticized by advocates of Bigger Government for skipping out on “hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. taxes” via a Canadian inversion (Reuters). Now that the specter of Donald Trump is stalking our land, could a corporation become Canadian and be celebrated by fans of a Bigger U.S. Government?

Ernst & Young says that the combine federal and provincial corporate tax rate in British Columbia, for example, is 26 percent (source). A successful Silicon Valley firm, such as Apple or Google, is theoretically subject to 8.84 percent California tax (flat rate says the Tax Foundation) plus roughly 35 percent in federal corporate tax (Wikipedia). Of course, Apple doesn’t actually pay this due to their “Double Irish arrangement” but not all firms can work this angle and, at some point, a Bernie Sanders-like figure might shut down the escape hatches.

Nearly every other country on the planet has lower corporate taxes than the U.S. Should we expect to see corporation emigration in 2016 under the banner of “We are morally opposed to Donald Trump?” This would allow a company to escape U.S. corporate taxes and also occupy the moral high ground in the eyes of all consumers except the minority who are passionate Donald Trump supporters.

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Forensic History: Crimes, Frauds, and Scandals, by Elizabeth Murray, covers a bunch of examples of wrongful conviction. Some of this is due to straightforward corruption, e.g., in New York where police officers had a financial relationship with the likely murderer (California also figures prominently among the corruption examples). More typically, however, the chain of erroneous conviction starts with a desire to solve a crime with as little effort as possible. The police and prosecutor therefore settle on an available suspect and ignore evidence that suggests innocence. In the cases that Professor Murray describes, it will be 10-20 years after the crime before a plainly wrong conviction is overturned. Most often this is due to DNA evidence because in fact the police, prosecutors, and judges involved never could admit error otherwise.

I’m wondering if this suggests a change to our procedures in prosecuting criminals. In Hawaii, the judge who hears motions in a divorce lawsuit cannot also hear the trial. The attorney that we interviewed said that this was partly to make the trial a real event, not simply the judge confirming previous decisions made after brief hearings.

Why not mix things up a little bit so that the people who work on the early phases of a criminal case are swapped out for detectives, prosecutors, and judges by the time of plea bargaining and trial? Then at least nobody involved in the actual conviction of a criminal has to swallow what is apparently the bitter pill of admitting “I was wrong.” There would be a little bit of extra spin-up time for the new team members to learn about the facts of the case, but it would be roughly the same workload of cases to detectives, prosecutors, and judges.

[Are there any risks for police, prosecutors, or judges who behave dishonestly? Professor Murray suggests that there are not. Across hundreds of cases that she reviewed she didn’t find any examples of police, prosecutors, or judges being criminally charged for wrongdoing. The wrongly convicted suffered, typically, 10+ years in prison. Taxpayers suffered by paying out millions of dollars per case in restitution, not to mention the costs of multiple legal proceedings. Citizens suffered by being victims of additional crimes (most wrongful convicts meant that the actual criminal was free for at least a period of years). But criminal justice system workers who broke rules in order to obtain wrongful convictions suffered at most the loss of a job (and that sanction was applied in a tiny percentage of cases).]

Related:

• “Should a Judge Rule on His Own Case?” (nytimes, February 29, 2016)

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