Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

A Houston-based friend’s Facebook post:

I’m happy for the Astros winning the World Series. Really I am. But HISD’s decision to cancel school so the kiddos can take part in the festivities? Umm, hello, parents have jobs and stuff! Couldn’t the Astros be festive on Saturday?

He’s referring to “HISD schools, offices closed Friday for Astros World Series victory celebration”.

This is interesting to me because he is not upset that children will be denied the opportunity to learn. He is upset because taxpayer-funded daycare won’t be provided.

[In case you’re thinking that he might be anti-education or anti-intellectual… he is employed as a professor by Rice University.]

Related:

• Smartest Kids in the World: American Schools

Avweb reports that the years-delayed two-seat Icon A5 seaplane will soon be going out the door at $389,000. That’s up from $180,000. At this rate, by 2020 the A5 will cost the same as a good used 10-seat turbine-powered Cessna Caravan on floats. The airplane is already more expensive than this Grumman Albatross on controller.com (the Albatross is about 20 times the size of the Icon A5! See Wikipedia.)

“Top NPR Editor Accused of Sexual Harassment While at The New York Times” (nytimes) would have been more fun if titled “Who will scold the scolders?” but, even with its boring title, raises some interesting questions, e.g.,

• Can an employer fire someone based on conduct at a previous employer?
• If there are some accusations that must necessarily lead to being shunned from the workforce… can the shunned person claim that this is a disability and thus join the SSDI party?

The story concerns an unfortunate middle-aged guy who was anonymously denounced:

In The Post’s report, the women, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that they had faced unwanted sexual advances from Mr. Oreskes as they talked with him about job opportunities. The episodes, they said, occurred in the late 1990s.

Now he is on leave and presumably will be out of a job soon (how is he going to disprove allegations of what he might have said or done 20 years ago?).

First, if he has a contract with NPR can they terminate it because he was anonymously denounced? Even if somehow it could be proved that he did something improper 20 years ago, can NPR fire him? Most employers ask about criminal convictions, but don’t ask “In the years since you were born, did you ever do anything wrong, that you regret, or that someone might denounce you for?” So he wouldn’t have had to lie to NPR.

NPR does seem to be on the road to firing the guy, so let’s assume the answer to the above question is “yes.” Then let’s consider what happens to this guy. What employer would want to take the risk of hiring him? That seems like a slam-dunk way to lose a lawsuit. Any woman in the U.S. can sue the next employer claiming that she met the guy and he made an “unwanted sexual advance.” Plainly his employer should have known about this propensity as it was reported in the New York Times!

So if he can’t work again, is that a “disability” that would qualify him for SSDI? SSDI generally requires a “medical” disability, so unless he is depressed because he was fired… what does society do with guys like this? Should there be a federal agency that hires them all and puts them to work together? (so they can harass each other, but not anyone else) Do they collect welfare checks on condition that they remove to remote areas where there are no attractive young people to harass?

Of course there isn’t truly a “pilot shortage” any more than there is a “gold shortage,” but employers offering the same salaries as in 2007, adjusted for the official inflation rate, will find that not enough qualified people apply. Airlines all over the world are hiring and, with some bureaucratic finesse, can fill a job in a foreign country with a U.S. citizen. I recently spoke with the manager of a small air carrier. He recently raised charter prices by more than 10 percent. I asked if he’d done that because demand was so strong. “No,” he responded. “It is because I had to give all of the pilots a 30-percent raise a few months ago and our costs are now higher.” (The raise was necessary to prevent pilots from jumping “ship” to the big airlines.)

At least until autonomous aircraft are certified for carrying passengers, I wonder if we’ll go through a period where Americans have less mobility (automobile traffic jams getting worse every year (also see this multi-city report) plus higher airfares). This ICAO report says that the crew (“pilot wages and benefits”) costs $489 per block hour out of a total of $2,550. So airline ticket prices might go up at roughly 1/5th the rate of pilot wage increases? [Note that this report puts flight attendants, part of the “crew” as far as the FAA is concerned, into a separate bucket of “passenger service”]

Readers: Are we going into a period of less mobility? If so, is it time to invest more in video conferencing software and hardware?

Related:

• “Unions and Airlines”
• Tyler Cowen asks if we can do big projects (Americans moving less)
• those higher pilot salaries might lead to some additional family court litigation in Massachusetts: “I remember one enterprising young lady who worked as a waitress at Boston’s Logan airport. She targeted three airline pilots, had a child by each of them, and back then was collecting $25,000 in tax-free child support from each pilot…” (that was in the 1980s; today it would be $40,000+/year minimum per child)

A letter, slightly tweaked, from our local public school district, which runs a small K-8 school:

Happy Valley Public Schools become a WorkPlace Lab for Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Doctor of Education Leadership (Ed.L.D.) Program.

… Happy Valley Schools will be the site for fieldwork by 25 graduate students in Harvard’s Doctorate program in Education Leadership (Ed.LD.). This program, at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, is a three-year, full-time multidisciplinary doctorate that prepares graduates to be transformative, system-level leaders in preK-12 education. Each cohort in the program comprises 25 experienced educators, selected from a large number of applicants, and the intensive training includes hands-on experience in local school districts, translating visionary ideas into real-world success. This fall, those 25 students will be doing their fieldwork in Happy Valley.

This massive infusion of brainpower should be awesome, right? Kids in Singapore had better watch out after these 25 high-achievers pump up our academics!

Or can those Asian kids sleep late? It seems that we were able to tell the Harvard geniuses which problems concerned us the most…

The Happy Valley Public Schools leadership had the rewarding challenge of thinking about how best to use the expertise and energy of the 25 experienced educators who are dedicating several weeks of effort to thinking about how to improve our schools. The leadership identified ‘problems of practice’ to serve as focus for the Ed.L.D. initiative:

Social Emotional Learning

What process could we carry out this year as part of our needs-assessment in order to feel prepared to craft a multi-year plan to support the social emotional development and learning for our students across the district? What social emotional content elements should we be attending to?

Public Relations

How could we better communicate with the larger community so that they know of the good work within our schools? What effective ways of communication and promoting the district would be within our resources (given our small size and capacity of administrators)?

Race and Identity

Help us tell the stories of our students’ experiences within our schools as it pertains to race and identity. What does it feel like to be a student of color or a white student?

Collaborative Practice

How can we support teams across the district as a vehicle for driving continued teacher/staff development? What factors, strategies, or approaches have other districts or organizations taken that have led to successful professional learning communities?

So… it turns out that we didn’t ask the young Harvardites for help with improving academic achievement.

“Dartmouth College Professors Investigated Over Sexual Misconduct Allegations” (nytimes) describes three professors who will receive fat salaries while not working: they’re on “paid leave”. This is distinct from professors who receive fat salaries when not working while on “sabbatical.” The article contains the inevitable TED talk mention.

Suspicious activity:

Dr. Heatherton and Dr. Kelley were among the authors of a 2012 research study on how images of food and sex affect the brain. As part of the research, 58 female college freshmen underwent brain scans shortly after arrival on campus while viewing 80 images each of animals, environmental scenes, food items and people — some involved in sexual scenes or consuming alcohol. Six months later, they were called back to the lab, weighed and questioned on their sexual behavior.

One good question is how an American college student would be able to recall his or her “sexual behavior,” since most of it seems to occur at a blood alcohol 2X the legal limit for driving (see Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town (a.k.a. majoring in partying and football))

My comment on the piece:

If they do get fired it will be a good illustration of how my University of California professor friend explains his tenure: “I can be fired for any reason… except incompetence.”

Here’s a comment that might spur some grad school (but probably not Computer Science!) applications:

(from Paolo Francesco Martini) I don’t know the specifics in this case, but as a former Psych professor in the seventies at American colleges, I have to say that I can’t recall ever being subjected to such intense and persistent seduction as I was by my female students. I took to keeping my office door open during ‘visits’ by my most ardent admirers and had to physically peel attractive young women off me. Maybe it was my animal magnetism, but my female colleagues never reported this kind of behavior on the part of their male students. In fact, men and women tend to have different reactions to authority figures and power in general, which is the real issue here: men are generally diffident about sucking up to it, while women attempt to seduce it. Asking a thirty year old to hold out forever in the face of such pulchritude is unreasonable, when we’re talking about people who have not taken an oath of celibacy. By the way, no, I never had sex with a student: it seemed obviously unethical. But the flesh is weak, and it is facile to think of these men as predators and their students as victims.

Related:

• New Hampshire family law (calculate cashflow that might ensue in case whatever the professors did with students resulted in pregnancy)
• “Who Pays for Free College? Crowding Out on Campus” (new paper by Alonso Bucarey, an MIT Econ PhD): “Free tuition increases enrollment to selective programs, making these programs more competitive and pushing them out of reach for many poor students who would otherwise have qualified.”
• “Tuition-free MIT” (my idea from 1999 for helping MIT, not poor students, by making MIT free)

“New York City attack: Who is Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov?” (CBS News) says that the man who killed 8 people in New York City was an immigrant from Uzbekistan and arrived in the U.S. in 2010.

Plainly, at least from native-born Americans’ point of view, Mr. Saipov’s immigration did not work out as hoped and will likely punch a multi-billion dollar hole in the U.S. economy. There will be direct losses from deaths and injuries in the attack itself, costs of treating, prosecuting, and imprisoning Mr. Saipov, costs of providing welfare to his wife and two children (Mr. Saipov won’t be earning a lot in prison), etc. There will be indirect losses due to extra security measures that cities will put in place to try to prevent a repeat jihad.

Perhaps it is too soon to look at the dollars and cents, but how was Mr. Saipov’s immigration supposed to benefit native-born Americans in the best case? The CIA says that Uzbekistan has a per-capita GDP of roughly $6,600 per person, #159 out of 230 countries (ranking). Mr. Saipov was 29 years old and worked as a truck/Uber driver, a job that is expected to disappear within his working lifetime. He had two children and a wife with no reported job. The U.S. has an average per-capita GDP of $57,400 per person per year. So Mr. Saipov would have had to earn $229,600 per year in order to make the U.S. wealthier on a per-capita basis. Maybe somehow existing Americans can become better off if the population grows, but the GDP per-person shrinks? A Mr. Saipov will truck their goods around at a low price. But how can that make them better off overall given our traffic gridlock and skyrocketing housing prices? Mr. Saipov, his wife, and their children have to live somewhere and also get around.

There is more to life than having spending power, avoiding traffic jams, and being able to afford a house, right? So perhaps Mr. Saipov, in an ideal world, could have made the U.S. better even if he had made it poorer per capita and more crowded. But how? By introducing neighbors to Uzbek cuisine? By persuading neighbors to give up their sinful secular and/or infidel ways and live an Uzbek/Islamic lifestyle? What?

See also “From Truck Driver to Uber Driver to Terror Attack Suspect” (nytimes); “New York Terror Suspect Entered U.S. Under Visa Program Trump Wants to End” (Newsweek); and “Trump Blames New York Terrorist Attack on Schumer and Immigration Policies” (nytimes).

Related:

• How much would an immigrant have to earn to defray the cost of added infrastructure?
• Tsarnaev case: more evidence that we think we are smarter than Russians
• Vetting immigrants for terrorism potential
• Death Penalty for Tsarnaev?
• Orlando shooting was in the 51st year of our immigration experiment
• Obama’s speech about San Bernardino

Old, but on point, this article on the health benefits of dark chocolate:

Milk chocolate tastes like diabetes, which is why it’s awesome. Dark chocolate tastes like you’re being punished for only shoveling half the driveway. If someone put dark chocolate in your candy bag at Halloween it was considered a hate crime akin to giving you a tooth brush, and you would egg the bastard’s house, as was only right and proper.

But a while back someone came up with an idea to market health claims around dark chocolate to drive sales, and now we have scantily-clad, coconut-water drinking Crossfit junkies “treating” themselves with one or two squares of paleo-approved dark chocolate after they do their dehydrated and well-lit butt-thrusted instagram selfies, because anti-oxidants.

[chocolate/health snobs] love to obsess over their meager ration of dark chocolate and feel all holier than Hershey-eating thou because it’s a “healthy” treat, even though it tastes like a bag of smashed badger asses and the heaps of sugar and fat somehow don’t get factored into the health washing. It’s not too guilty a pleasure because it’s dark. And dark means nutrition, cuz science. Wash it down with a glass of red wine for the resveratrol and you’re bulletproof.

[The article is also interesting because it links to an eating disorder: Orthorexia Nervosa. This is “fixation on righteous eating.”]

Happy Halloween!

The idea that affirmative action leads to a perception that the favored group is inferior is an old and obvious one. If the standards for admitting members of Group X are lower then other students within a college will notice that people who belong to Group X are less qualified. If hiring standards are lowered for Group Y then coworkers will come to see Group Y workers as less capable.

Is it possible that running affirmative action at Company A could cause people at Company B, which hires people without discrimination, to believe that a favored-by-Company-A group is inferior?

One of the folks with whom I talked at NBAA was a charter company CEO. Based on the people he evaluates as pilot candidates for his firm (roughly 100 pilots), he believes that women are inferior as pilots to men.

It is possible that he is a straight-up sexist, but certainly there have been plenty of accomplished women pilots. How could he ignore Hanna Reitsch, for example, a leading test pilot throughout Nazi Germany’s rapid period of innovation?

[Wikipedia notes that Reitsch was not necessarily a proponent of gender equality:

she presented the idea of Operation Suicide to Hitler at Berchtesgaden, which “would require men who were ready to sacrifice themselves in the conviction that only by this means could their country be saved.”

Despite noting her support for Hitler until the end of the war, e.g., “It was the blackest day when we could not die at our Führer’s side,” her accomplishments as an aviator were sufficient that “In 1961, United States President John F. Kennedy invited her to the White House.”]

Is there a way for his belief to be a rational conclusion from facts? How about affirmative action by airlines? Airlines are much more interested in hiring women than they are in hiring men. Consequently they are willing to hire women with the bare minimum qualifications. Occasionally these inexperienced female pilots will flunk out of simulator training or the initial operating experience in the real airplanes that is required by the FAA. However, as most pilots would prefer a job at an airline (better pay, union protection, stronger financials), this would tend to leave only the dregs of the female pilot workforce available to be hired by charter companies.

I’m wondering if this phenomenon is likely to be true elsewhere in the American workforce. The best employers, such as Google and Facebook, are desperate to increase the percentage of women so as to burnish their reputations. This leaves a skewed population for other employers to interview.