A posting every day; an interesting idea every three months…
Mindy the Crippler and I are teaching at MIT today and you’re welcome to join. I will be teaching the undergraduates about helicopter aerodynamics. Mindy will be teaching them to keep their hands in their pockets. Room 24-619 from noon to 1. Pizza will be served.
Full post, including commentsMy parents still live in my home town of Bethesda, Maryland and still get the paper newspaper. Mom sent me a clipping from the Washington Post in the U.S. Mail (she will be their last retail customer!), an obituary of David L. Levy. After spending the family savings on a custody lawsuit under Maryland’s “pick one parent” system in 1985 he started a group to advocate for shared parenting, thus lobbying against the interests of the $50 billion/year divorce litigation industry. As my blog posting on Maryland’s new custody law shows, in 30 years he made zero headway (though the organization he founded does have a nice web site; Guidestar shows that they operate on a budget of less than $200,000 per year (i.e., one lawyer in one custody lawsuit makes more than this advocacy group has at its disposal)). Maryland continues to operate a winner-take-all system, soon to be under new rules drafted by people who get paid to appear in court during custody disputes, and parents continue to pour what would have been the children’s college savings into trying not to be the loser.
[His death before achieving any change shows that Marylanders who don’t like the winner-take-all system would do better by moving to an adjacent state than lobbying against one of America’s most successful industries. Child support guideline numbers are lower in Virginia (though still profitable over Bill Comanor’s actual cost numbers), thus giving plaintiffs less of a financial incentive to seek sole custody of children. Virginia’s guidelines also cover unlimited amounts of income, at a straight 2.6 percent of gross income rate for one child (compare to about 11 percent in Massachusetts when judges extrapolate and about 6 percent in California) after a defendant earns more than $35,000 per month. This certainty reduces the chance that a case will go to trial. Someone who lives in western Maryland could move across the border into West Virginia where child support revenue that can be spent by a successful custody plaintiff is capped at about 5X the basic cost of a child (additional amounts are obtainable through litigation but must be placed in trust for the child). Do parents also seek sole custody for non-financial reasons? “You also see it where a parent has few friends or is jealous of the child’s bond with the other parent. Seeking primary custody is typically done for the parent’s gain, not out of concern for the child,” said a litigator just over the border into Pennsylvania. In those cases that are not financially motivated moving to Virginia wouldn’t be helpful, but Marylanders who live near the Delaware or Pennsylvania borders can move across to those states, where 50/50 shared parent tends to prevail by guideline (DE) or custom (PA, even in the rural areas).]
Coincidentally, right about the same time that this came in, a friend told me “Deval Patrick [the governor of Massachusetts at time], is so cozy with David Lee [$800-per-hour divorce litigator] that he agreed to serve as the officiant at the wedding of Lee’s associate, Claire Forkner.” (A quick Google search brought up this act of the Rhode Island legislature, enabling Patrick to marry ” Claire Elise Koehler and Adam Hale Forkner in marriage within the City of Newport, Rhode Island, on or about September 21, 2013,” confirming the story.)
Full post, including commentsI don’t think of New Yorker magazine as a technical references, but “The Cobweb” by Jill Lepore explains archive.org remarkably well and also helps to explain the many gaps in archive.org. It turns out to be trivial to remove stuff from the archive:
The Wayback Machine collects every Web page it can find, unless that page is blocked; blocking a Web crawler requires adding only a simple text file, “robots.txt,” to the root of a Web site. The Wayback Machine will honor that file and not crawl that site, and it will also, when it comes across a robots.txt, remove all past versions of that site. When the Conservative Party in Britain deleted ten years’ worth of speeches from its Web site, it also added a robots.txt, which meant that, the next time the Wayback Machine tried to crawl the site, all its captures of those speeches went away, too.
So it’s an archive only of stuff that publishers want archived…
Even if you already knew the above, I recommend Lepore’s article for the quality of the writing.
Full post, including commentsI spent last night reading Coming Clean: A Memoir
In mid-July, a letter came from the Emerson financial aid department. I had a small trust in my name from an accident I’d had as a child that was set up so that I wouldn’t be able to access the funds until I was twenty-one. But because that trust existed, the school decided that I no longer qualified for financial aid. Without financial aid, I couldn’t go back to Emerson. I couldn’t take out the kinds of loans necessary to pay for the pricey private school. I was majoring in theater, and even at eighteen, I knew that I would never be able to pay back that kind of debt on a waitress’s salary. I called the school and tried to explain, but the financial aid officer professed that until those funds were utilized they wouldn’t be required to give me any need-based aid. But I wouldn’t be able to touch that money until halfway through my senior year of college.
(Translate “financial aid” to “discount off an insanely high list price.”)
It seems that Obama has given up a plan to kill off the 529 college savings plans (nytimes). Aside from further plunging Americans into a tangle of paperwork and government-approved vendors (not just anyone can offer a 529 plan! It has to be a financial institution that is somehow a crony of a state government), I wonder if 529 plans actually help anyone other than colleges. If parents on average save more for college because the government encourages them to set up 529 plans, won’t colleges just raise their prices to absorb the newly available funds?
One of our students at MIT this week provided an illustration of this. He was in a one-year MBA program at MIT. Over the lunch break I said “That’s great compared to the two-year program since you’ll be saving $50,000.” [The real number is $63,750 per year for tuition.] He responded “Actually the price is about the same as for a two-year MBA program.” In other words, the price has no relationship to marginal cost and instead MIT can charge whatever it is worth to the customer (monopoly pricing power ). This led to a group discussion about how a lot of people might be willing to pay the full cost of a two-year MBA program for a two-week MBA and imagine what kinds of profits could be earned from that.
So while it is painful to pay taxes on savings (which is why we should spend all of our money on McMansions and SUVs and let the Chinese do the saving for us), I think Obama may have been on the right track. American’s university system does not need new sources of easy money. Unless we think that the U.S. is spending too little on its higher education system, why does putting money aside to save for college get more favorable tax treatment than putting money aside to save for an investment in a business?
Full post, including commentsFolks:
Our three-day RDBMS programming class at MIT got snowed out today. We were already using Google Drive for collaboration with a shared workspace Doc into which everyone could paste a solution. So we decided to hold the class virtually using Drive and Google Hangouts.
It should have worked great. All that we had to do was tell folks via audio and in the chat window alongside the Google Doc to start working on Problem N. Then they could ask questions in the chat window or by pasting stuff into the Doc.
We ran into the following problems:
Are there any better free tools that we could have used with a little more structure? Something that would have enabled us to figure out that students were or were not paying attention? Something that would have prodded students to post progress reports? Kept track of contributions by student? Enabled anyone in a class of 25 (plus about 5 teachers) to inject some audio and video for a question? Enabled everyone to share at least one window of their screen at all times (to replace what we had available to us when we already around the classroom and could see at what stage people were with each problem)?
How does it work at University of Phoenix and similar online schools? How do the teachers know that the students are engaged?
Related: “Using Google Docs for Classroom Instruction”
Full post, including commentsI don’t trade individual stocks but if I did I would be buying shares of Shack Shack (New Yorker has the history) in its upcoming IPO. A visit to Harvard Square is sufficient to show how well-managed Shack Shack is compared to the competition. Tasty Burger and Shack Shack opened up at roughly the same time. A visit to Tasty Burger involves multiple return trips to the counter so that the order can be corrected. The staff have trouble taking orders and making change. Although they are hiring from the same labor pool, Shake Shack is full of energetic workers who seem competent and, indeed, have never messed up one of my orders.
Because IPOs are nearly always overvalued due to hype I am going to predict that Shake Shack does well but not spectacularly. My guess is that an investment in Shake Shack will outperform the S&P 500, between now and January 2020, by 20 percent.
Full post, including commentsI finally sorted through a stack of mail and came across the latest Robinson Helicopter newsletter. There is a good story about two Robinson owners who found and rescued a missing hunter and his dog Maggie, who kept him warm and chased away a bear (newspaper story; TV story) I found a YouTube video corresponding to the story about Paul Bissonnette having an ice bucket dumped on his head from an R44 (legality under Part 91 seems questionable since it would have been tough to avoid hitting Mr. Bissonnette with the helicopter, rather than just the ice-water, in the event of an engine failure). Taxpayers in Jordan can rest easy now that their military turbine trainers have been replaced by R44s that cost about $325/hour to run (the turbine trainers cost about $1000 per hour to run or $4000 per hour if it is U.S. tax dollars being spent (see second to last paragraph of my first Heli-Expo 2014 posting)).
Of course the coolest stuff is happening in Africa. Coena Smith and his R44 were called out to help 11 people stranded when their “safari vehicle” was swept away by a river current. Smith picked up all 11 with a tow cable (photos). (Search for “helicopter Christmas tree harvest” on YouTube if you want to see some skilled long-line work.)
Full post, including comments“The Talking Cure” is kind of a TED talk in the form of a New Yorker article. Some folks noticed a correlation between unsuccessful children and the fact that their parents hadn’t talked to them as much as the parents of successful children. Now an army of do-gooders are fanning out into the homes of the unsuccessful trying to encourage parents to talk more to their young children.
One thing that was interesting was the ratio of praise to correction:
Among the more affluent families studied by Hart and Risley, a higher proportion of the talk directed at children was affirming, which was defined to include not just compliments like “Good job!” but also responses in which parents repeat and build on a child’s comments: “Yes, it is a bunny! It’s a bunny eating a carrot!” In those families, the average child heard thirty-two affirmations and five prohibitions (“Stop that”; “That’s the wrong way!”) per hour—a ratio of six to one. For the kids in the working-class families, the ratio was twelve affirmatives to seven prohibitions, and in the welfare families it was five affirmatives to eleven prohibitions.
There does not seem to be any attempt to figure out to what extent these differences are a consequence of the children’s natural behavior. I spend a lot of time with young children of “the more affluent.” One thing that is a constant source of wonder to me is how little correction these children need. They generally aren’t breaking things in the house, writing on the walls, hitting each other, shouting or screaming, etc. The classic summary of all of the relevant literature, The Nurture Assumption
The New York Times has a story about how a party they characterize as “left-wing” and “anti-austerity” has won an election in Greece. Given that the country does not have its own currency, what can such a party do as a practical matter? If they can’t print money because other nations control the Euro and they can’t borrow because investors won’t lend more, what can these new leaders do?
Full post, including commentsThis New Yorker story about sociologist Howard Becker is an efficient way to learn about the field. I wonder if it also shows why American politics is more fragmented today than 50 years ago when everyone watched the same TV shows at night (since there were only three channels). It seems that each group has its own rules and considers other groups to be “deviant.” If there is no popular culture that is truly universally popular then a society can support more groups.
Full post, including comments