Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

A Facebook friend who lives in Cambridge posted a link to a story about Iowa considering changing its laws to allow children to shoot pistols under parental supervision (the change). This yielded a rich harvest of comments from Massachusetts Facebookers:

• Just reinforcing the following… IOWA – Idiots Out Wandering Around!!! And I thought “Floriduh” was the #1 state for stupidity!
• UnFUCKINGly deranged.
• Facebook missed out on the WTF emoticon for things like this
• Horrifying. I am getting so I just don’t want to know what shit this country can come up with next. We are ceaselessly horrifying. It’s depressing.
• Can t believe this is possible!
• Another side effect of Trumpification of America
• Unbelievable!
• They have truly gone insane.
• Omg! What the Hell is going on with this country!

I’m not a gun owner so I don’t have an informed opinion regarding the law. What was interesting to me is the psychology behind the discussion. It turns out that if the change were adopted in Iowa, the result would be the same as the prevailing law in Massachusetts and most other states, i.e., that children can shoot pistols when with their parents. All of these folks were so eager to feel superior to Iowans that they didn’t bother to check the status of the law in their own state.

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Elizabeth Holmes managed to convince investors in Theranos that being young and attractive was worth more than Siemens’s drawers full of experienced German chemistry PhDs. New Yorker has an article on a vaguely similar situation in Japan:

The revolutionary behind the work was Haruko Obokata, a thirty-year-old postdoctoral researcher who was the first author on both papers. With the publications, Obokata—a stylish, self-possessed beauty, uncommonly adept at maneuvering in the mostly male world of Japanese science—was hailed as a maverick. “A brilliant new star has emerged in the science world,” an editorial in the Asahi Shimbun read. “This is a major discovery that could rewrite science textbooks.” As an outsider—young, female, and not an established stem-cell biologist—Obokata, the newspapers argued, was unhindered by conventional notions of what cells can and cannot do. Her fresh perspective, coupled with dogged work and natural genius, had conspired to create one of the great scientific breakthroughs of the twenty-first century.

… The papers created an international sensation, and in Japan Obokata became a celebrity—an icon of the country’s future preëminence in the sciences, and of the new Japanese woman. …

… Five months after publication, both STAP papers were retracted, under intense scrutiny and growing doubt about their validity.

The article notes that scientific papers should be approached with skepticism:

Reproducibility has been an essential step in the scientific process since the Enlightenment, and it is currently the subject of a great deal of angst in American science. In 2012, a former research director at the pharmaceutical company Amgen reported that he and his colleagues had attempted to reproduce the findings of fifty-three prominent papers. Only six panned out—a validation rate of eleven per cent.

But the author fails to reference the classic 2005 work “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False,” by John P. A. Ioannidis (not young and attractive enough for the Wikipedia contributors to have added a photo to his page).

As with most American writing about science (contrast to British), the explanations are confusing and little attempt is made to communicate scientific concepts. Nonetheless it is an interesting article.

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I’m sure that this was a solved problem 100 years ago, but I can’t figure out how. An airplane can avoid a thunderstorm by flying around it. But an airship is so slow that I don’t see how it can escape a frontal squall line. Landing and waiting out the thunderstorm is a standard technique for an airplane or helicopter, but that works because (a) the aircraft is much faster than any front moves, (b) there are a lot of airports with hangars and/or tie-downs, (c) aside from hail, a thunderstorm is not hazardous to a tied-down airplane or helicopter (with the blades tied down).

“Helium Dreams” is a New Yorker article about various companies trying to make cargo blimps. It doesn’t address the above question, however. A blimp hangar is a rarity and some of the new airships they discuss would seemingly be too big to hangar anywhere. Is it possible to tie a blimp up so that a thunderstorm won’t harm it? We must have some experience with advertising blimps, which often are operating in cities that lack blimp-size hangars. But if the airship is going over an ocean?

How does it work to combine an airship with real-world heavy weather?

[The article has some other interesting points. The market for cargo blimps is non-existent, but there is already plenty of litigation: “most of the airship designers I talked to had competed for the same Defense Department funding, and engineers skipped in and out of one another’s projects, their lips supposedly sealed but probably not, and so there were squabbles, lawsuits, and settlements.” It seems that military-funded technology gets a sharp discount in the civilian world: “[English airship engineer Roger Munk’s] Skycat design had been awarded a five-hundred-million-dollar contract from the U.S. Army. The Army wanted a surveillance ship that could fly twenty thousand feet above the war zone in Afghanistan for weeks at a time. The team in Bedford, under contract to Northrop Grumman, built the ship, and the Army named it the Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle, or LEMV. On August 7, 2012, it made its first test flight, at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, in Lakehurst, New Jersey, the same field where the Hindenburg exploded. … But the budget sequestration in 2013 abruptly ended the Army’s experiment, and the blimp was auctioned for scrap. Hybrid Air Vehicles paid a little more than three hundred thousand dollars for it, dismantled it, packaged it in dozens of wooden crates, and sent it, by ship, back to Bedford, [England].”]

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Every year the Coeur d’Alene Symphony puts on a Young Artist concert with soloists who’ve won a competition. I attended last year and especially enjoyed Mona Sangesland on the flute and Thomas Cooper playing the violin. This year’s concert proves that there are a lot of hard workers among America’s youth. Sarah Hall kicked off the concert with the Saint-Saens Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso, coaxing a beautiful rich warm Old World tone out of her 1697 Testore violin. Sarah Cooper then sang Handel and Mozart arias with great assurance. From the Department of Making Others Feel Better About Their Accomplishments, 17-year-old Edison Tsai played part of a Schumann piano concerto. When he’s not playing the piano, he’s finishing his PhD in Electrical Engineering at Portland State University (target date: next year). Brenda Miller achieved tremendous dynamics in a Saint-Saens piano concerto. Laura Pillman challenged the audience with an Ibert flute concerto. Tasha Koontz won the professional category and dared to bring one of the most familiar arias from La Traviata to the stage. She carried it off wonderfully. Fortunately for the audience there was no “You must be taller than this line to play with the orchestra” sign to keep out 12-year-old Yesong-Sophie Lee of the Heatherwood Middle School in Mill Creek, Washington. She first soloed with the Seattle Symphony at age 8. Lee played Franz Waxman‘s adaptation of Carmen originally intended for Jascha Heifetz. The audience went nuts for Lee. (People in Idaho don’t read David Brooks in the New York Times and therefore mistakenly believe that playing the violin at a professional level is some sort of accomplishment.)

One great part of the concert was the intimate size of the hall, within the Kroc Center. Classical music has been done a disservice, in my opinion, by today’s enormous halls.

Related:

• a 10-year-old Lee playing back in 2014
• Tasha Koontz Master’s Degree recital from 2015
• Sarah Hall plays solo
• Sarah Hall and her brother playing the Brahms Double Concerto
• Sarah Cooper sings an aria with piano
• Brenda Miller plays Gershwin
• Laura Pillman plays Ibert

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From Mineral Ridge, east of Coeur d’Alene:

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“In College Endowment Returns, Davids Beat the Goliaths” starts off by pointing out that small college endowments and large ones had roughly the same return:

the smallest endowments— those under $25 million — edged out the biggest endowments, averaging a five-year annualized return of 10.6 percent to the $1 billion-plus category’s 10.4 percent.

[Don’t expect these returns going forward for your own portfolio! We’re still getting a dead cat bounce from the Collapse of 2008.]

Curiously, the Times considers 10.6 versus 10.4 to be a significant difference in favor of the smaller endowments, but the real story is in the next paragraphs:

Even more surprising, the top-performing endowments over 10 years among all schools reporting data weren’t giants like Harvard and Stanford or even Yale … the top-performing colleges are two Virginia universities whose financial resources amount to a negligible fraction of the typical Ivy League endowment. … Radford University, which ranked first, has an endowment of $55.5 million, and Southern Virginia University, which was second, has an endowment of just $1.1 million. Radford’s annualized 10-year return is 12.4 percent, and Southern Virginia’s is 11.2 percent. For the most recent fiscal year, 2015, Radford earned over 13 percent and Virginia Southern’s return was 10.5 percent. The average return last year for all endowments was just 2.4 percent.

Should we be surprised that a particular portfolio of $1.1 million outperformed a portfolio of $37.6 billion? Perhaps, but not if there is a bell curve of performance and there are a lot more $1.1 million portfolios than there are $37.6 billion ones.

The Gates Foundation went down this road after finding that a lot of the best high schools in the U.S. were small. The conclusion was that smallness leads to better academic performance. It later transpired that small high school performance fell on a bell curve, just the same as large high schools, but with a somewhat higher standard deviation (and therefore it was easier to find good-performing small schools). See this analysis in Marginal Revolution. (And, of course, don’t forget that a high school falling on the center of the U.S. bell curve would be considered an emergency situation in Finland, Shanghai, Singapore, or South Korea! See “Smartest Kids in the World Review”.)

Readers: Did the New York Times fall into the same statistical trap that led the Gates Foundation to squander hundreds of millions of dollars? If so, why are we so prone to this one? Can we blame the lack of emphasis on null hypothesis testing in AP Statistics?

 

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Guantánamo Diary by Mohamedou Ould Slahi contains a Jihadi’s view of light aircraft. Our tax dollars paid for him to fly from Senegal to Mauritania to Jordan to Afghanistan to Cuba. Here are Mr. Slahi’s notes on the trip from Senegal to Mauritania:

But it didn’t take very long to realize I had my own plane to myself. As soon as the guy returned with my stamped passport, all five of us stepped toward the runway, where a very small white plane was already running its engines.

The plane was as small as it could be. We were four, and barely managed to squeeze ourselves inside the butterfly with heads down and backs bent. The pilot had the most comfortable place. She was a French lady, you could tell from her accent. She was very talkative, and rather on the older side, skinny and blond.

The bigger guard and I squeezed ourselves, knees-on-faces, in the back seat, facing the inspector, who had a little better seat in front of us. The plane was obviously overloaded.

I heard her at one point telling him that the trip was only 300 miles, and would take between 45 minutes and an hour, depending on the wind direction. That sounded so medieval.

I hate traveling in small planes because they’re shaky and I always think the wind is going to blow the plane away.

My company seemed to have a good time checking the weather and enjoying the beach we had been flying along the whole time. I don’t think that the plane had any type of navigation technologies because the pilot kept a ridiculously low altitude and oriented us with the beach.

The account of the trip from Mauritania to Jordan is hard to reconcile with geography. This is a 2600-mile (nautical) trip so a fuel stop makes sense, but not in Cyprus, which is about the same distance from Mauritania as Jordan. And it certainly wouldn’t make sense to make a fuel stop between Cyprus and Amman, which is what Slahi describes. Maybe this is why the U.S. government has been interrogating him for 15 years. There is no way to get a straight story out of him! (The one area where Slahi is consistent and clear is in assigning blame for terrorism: “The whole problem of terrorism was caused by the aggression of Israel against Palestinian civilians, and the fact that the U.S. is backing the Israeli government in its mischiefs.”)

 

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We like to think about the U.S. as a meritocracy compared to Third World countries and Old World countries. Achievement is how you get to the top. But what would young people see when they look at recent Presidents and Presidential candidates?

• George W. Bush: son of former president
• Barack Obama: supported by many voters on the basis of his skin color
• Hillary Clinton: wife of former president; supported by many voters on the basis of her current gender identification (but will Hillary still identify as a woman in January 2017?)
• Donald Trump: child of rich parents

We would have to go back 24 years, to the 1992 election of Bill Clinton, to find an example of meritocracy in action at the Presidential level. How will parents be able to tell their children “You could grow up to be President” if there are hereditary, marital, skin color, or gender requirements?

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One thing that I’ve noticed in talking to high school students from high-income families in which both parents have a lot of fancy degrees is that a lot of these young people want to major in “international relations” once they get to college. And in fact quite a few colleges offer this major (partial list; list of schools outside the U.S.).

This leads to the stupid question of the day: If so many people around the world are studying international relations, why are countries constantly fighting? (if not always in a shooting war then at least some sort of verbal conflict)

Slightly less stupid question: What do young people actually learn when they study “international relations”? Presumably they can’t get hands-on experience negotiating agreements!

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“How Society Pays When Women’s Work Is Unpaid” is an interesting New York Times article.

Cultural change is also important, [Melinda] Gates said.

She recalled being unhappy about the long commute to her oldest daughter’s preschool. Mr. Gates, then chief executive of Microsoft, said he would drive their daughter two days a week.

“Moms started going home and saying to their husbands, ‘If Bill Gates can drive his daughter, you better darn well drive our daughter or son,’ ” Ms. Gates said. “If you’re going to get behavior change, you have to role-model it publicly.”

In other words, she married a guy who brought $80 billion into the household, but ended up being unhappy with the division of labor in the household.

A subtext in the article and in reader comments is that men are able to earn more money because women do “unpaid work” around the house. This is kind of a cornerstone of the American family law system, i.e., that the lower-earning spouse somehow contributed to the higher-earning spouse’s ability to earn (successful women who pay child support and alimony to ex-husbands so that they can have sex with younger/hotter women end up not being too happy about this theory), though it is no longer an assumption in Germany.

Certainly there do seem to be a lot of high-earning people with spouses who don’t work for wages. But maybe that is simply due to a combination of high tax rates for those marginal earnings and also the fact that increasing after-tax household earnings by 5 percent won’t significantly improve living standards. (And typically sufficient cash can be extracted through litigation following a divorce. See how Jamie Cooper-Hohn collected about $500 million from the English courts without working for wages.) Consider Sheryl Sandberg. She earned over $1 billion, mostly from Facebook shareholders, without a stay-at-home spouse. Judith Faulkner‘s husband has continued to work as a physician (source) and that hasn’t stopped Ms. Faulkner from earning nearly $3 billion by building Epic Systems. Hillary Clinton would perhaps argue that Judith Faulkner could have made a lot more if she had been a guy, but does anyone argue that she would have earned more if her husband had quit his doctor job?

New York Times readers don’t seem to have much doubt as to the potential earnings boost from an adult at home 9-5. Here’s a reader comment:

if the man is able to gather assets into the marriage because he has his wife at home doing his laundry, cooking his meals, and caring for his children, the assets reasonably and ethically belong to both parties. If he wants to negotiate a rate of pay with her, wherein he pays her for all the things she does for the family, then it would make more sense to talk about who earned what if it becomes time to divide the property.

I agree with this comment’s second point, which is not too different from what happens in some European jurisdictions where lifetime alimony is not available. If a couple makes the decision that one will stay at home, the working partner puts money into the stay-at-home partner’s retirement account. This way they don’t spend 100% of their assets (and their children’s assets) on legal fees to have a judge figure out what is the fair division of assets and income post-divorce.

The first point raises a question, however. I responded with

Is there a basis for the assumption that a stay-at-home spouse increases a person’s earnings? Do companies find out that an employee has a stay-at-home spouse and say “Wow, here’s your fat pay raise”? In nearly every part of the U.S. a child can be parked with the government until 3 pm and then be seamlessly handed off to an “after-school program” until dinner time. If a child is in school or in an after-school program from 8 am to 6 pm, how does the presence or absence of a stay-at-home spouse affect the earnings of a worker?

You mention laundry. There are services that will pick up and drop off laundry. You mention cooking meals. Americans have been known to survive on take-out or pre-prepared meals from supermarkets.

If you’re right on the impossibility of making money without having a stay-at-home spouse, how is it that single people are able to earn significant money? Who does their laundry and cooks their meals?

Of course it is nice to have a wonderful home environment and there is a lot of value delivered to a family by an adult who enhances that environment, but I am not sure how we get from that to the assumption that this affects the earnings of a full-time worker who is part of that household.

Readers: What do you think? Does consuming a home-cooked meal enable you to earn more money? Does sleeping in an elaborate suburban home enable you to earn more money than if you lived in a smaller full-service apartment? Can you earn more money if you have a stay-at-home spouse doing child care compared to if kids are parked in commercial care?

[Personally I was at my most productive when I lived in a modest rental apartment and consumed most meals from restaurants and/or corporate cafeterias. For one thing, I didn’t spend half of my life on the phone with Whirlpool and GE trying to get appliances repaired!]

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