DeLong on the MOOC

Berkeley Professor Brad DeLong on MOOCs (Massively Open Online Courses)

The fever of the MOOC has broken. As we got to have suspected all along, the students who will benefit enormously from MOOCs and Kahn Academy and so forth are the students with a cognitive skills, energy, and persistence to have been able to learn from the open University on TV, or programmed instruction, or simply picking up a book. For those who do not have the requisite skill, energy and persistence, the coming of the MOOC and of education over the Internet will do little: If they are to learn effectively, they need to be embedded in the social matrix of a university--classes and deadlines and attendance and tests and papers and peers around them all doing the same. And those who do not need this sociological matrix are a small minority, even at Berkeley.

Not that technological change isn't coming:

A speech by David Simon

Via dkos, in the Guardian. 
One of his "dangerous" ideas:

I'm not a Marxist in the sense that I don't think Marxism has a very specific clinical answer to what ails us economically. I think Marx was a much better diagnostician than he was a clinician. He was good at figuring out what was wrong or what could be wrong with capitalism if it wasn't attended to and much less credible when it comes to how you might solve that.

You know if you've read Capital or if you've got the Cliff Notes, you know that his imaginings of how classical Marxism – of how his logic would work when applied – kind of devolve into such nonsense as the withering away of the state and platitudes like that. But he was really sharp about what goes wrong when capital wins unequivocally, when it gets everything it asks for.

What Hunter said

On the clueless Georgia State Insurance Commissioner.

The corruption of America

Professor Juan Cole on corruption in America.

My own take is that the Anglo-Saxon genius is to legalize what would be considered corrupt in most places.  William Jenning Bryan's characterization of British rule in India as a system of legalized pillage was an eye-opener in this regard.  You will notice that little that Prof. Cole describes is considered illegal.   Other countries dissolve into disorder because the corrupt are scofflaws, but here, corruption is self-reinforcing.

Freedom Tower, NYC

From the Staten Island Ferry:

Label GMO foods!

For the purposes of this note only, let me stipulate that a GMO (Genetically Modified Organism) food by itself is no more dangerous than non-GMO food.   I still say that one might want GMO foods to be labelled.

The most common used genetic modification is to give the food crop herbicide-resistance, specifically glyphosate-resistance.  The idea is that farmers can control weeds but not harm the food crop by using herbicides.  And so the use of Monsanto's glyphosate-based herbicide, Roundup, has increased tremendously.   As some weeds have gained resistance to glyphosate, the genetic engineers are trying to confer further herbicide resistance to crops, so that other ones, like 2-4-D can also be used.  So a lot more of these chemicals are entering the environment, and also, leaving residues in food.

Are these chemicals dangerous to humans? Tested individually, for a short period of time, the answer is "scientifically no deleterious effects are found".  But no one has tested these for long term exposure, and more importantly, no one has tested the effects of a cocktail of these chemicals.

Even in the context of just Roundup, it is claimed that the surfactant used therein plus glyphosate is much more dangerous to people than glyphosate on its own.  It is also claimed that these chemicals have effects on our microbial environment (remember, your body carries ten times as many microbes as cells with your own DNA).  For instance, the rise of botulinism in cattle is supposedly because glyphosate affects negatively the bacteria that normally keep the botulinum bacteria in check.  I say "it is claimed" because I haven't yet examined all the literature for myself.

We already know of environmental effects, such as the loss of milkweed, which is essential in the habitat for Monarch butterflies, and that provides sustenance for a number of other species.
E.g., Milkweed loss in agricultural fields because of herbicide
use: effect on the monarch butterfly population in Insect Conservation and Diversity (2012) doi: 10.1111/j.1752-4598.2012.00196.x

Agriculture needs to be done in a sustainable way, and that means taking a systems approach to evaluating the effects of changes in agricultural practices.  One cannot take the piecemeal approach of reductionism, because the class of problems involved cannot be reduced to a single dominant cause. 

Another example of where the search for a single cause has been futile is that of the Colony Collapse Disorder afflicting honey bees.   No single cause has been identified for this, it is likely a melange of small but significant interacting factors in the environment that is proving to be deadly.

In light of the above, a responsible citizen may want to be made aware of their choices in the grocery store,  and it is therefore, in my opinion, the right thing to do - label GMO foods.

PS: incidentally, software systems that have grown over years by evolution, with little refactoring, show this kind of terminal complexity.  There may be 80 different causes of failures, each contributing to 0.5% of the defects reported by users.  Many managers are simply unable to grasp this, and keep looking for a silver bullet, the one thing to fix, that would eliminate all problems. 

PPS: I think in general, we do not have the societal ability to address multi-dimensional problems.  The problems with schools, higher education, health care, poverty, increasing inequality, etc., all require lots and lots of small fixes, I think, but politically, it is difficult to implement a program of manifold small fixes, no single one of which will show a significant impact.

QOTD

From Slate:

The MSUM and UDC decisions demonstrate something crucially important and monumentally depressing about the state of the American public university: It is an immaculately landscaped corporate park with its own apparel store, full of the sound of tuition money disappearing and the fury of a thousand feet on a rock wall, but signifying nothing.

12 days of Christmas - old favorite

Boy Mongoose:

A wee bit more on Genetic Determinism

The FDA is in a spat with the genetic information company 23andMe.com.  A lot of people on the web support the FDA, because they say 23andMe provides medical diagnosis and medical advice.  I really don't think so, I think they just take your genetic features and compare with the available scientific literature.    Anyway, it prompted me to look more closely at what they do.

To take a specific example, PBC (Primary Biliary Cirrhosis).  They give the scientific research 4 stars out of 4 for level of confidence.   They tell me that the average risk in European populations is 0.08%, i.e., on the average 0.08 out of 100 men of European ancestry will develop PBC between the ages of 20 and 79, assuming it is absent at age 20; and that in European men who share my genotype, the risk is 0.11%, i.e., 0.11 out of 100 men of European ancestry with my genotype will develop PBC between the ages of 20 and 79, assuming that it is absent at age 20". 

They tell me that this genetic marker has not been tested in people of African or Asian descent. Further, in the technical review, where they go into more detail, they say about a particular SNP and the risk of PBC associated with it (what is an SNP?):

Multiple studies have confirmed this association in populations with European ancestry. A Japanese study examined this SNP in an Asian population but was not able to confirm the association, possibly because the version of the SNP associated with risk in European populations is very common in Asian populations.

Notice the highlight.  As far as I can tell from Google searches is that the PBC incidence rate in China and Japan is not higher than that in Europe (but the numbers are sketchy).  It is believed to be rare in India also,  but suspected to be higher in migrant populations than in India.

Just another grain of sand that the whole system - whole genome and environment - will need to be considered in all but the simplest of cases. 

Reporting versus Opinionating

Lara Logan of the CBS News show "60 Minutes" has been put on a leave of absence, because her story was based on a rather uncritical acceptance of Dylan Davies' story of having been there at the attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi, when she could have rather readily checked that Davies had told to the FBI quite the opposite.

It turns out Lara Logan has a strong point of view,  and Al Ortiz, the CBS News Executive Director of Standards and Practices found (via Digby)

In October of 2012, one month before starting work on the Benghazi story, Logan made a speech in which she took a strong public position arguing that the US Government was misrepresenting the threat from Al Qaeda, and urging actions that the US should take in response to the Benghazi attack. From a CBS News Standards perspective, there is a conflict in taking a public position on the government’s handling of Benghazi and Al Qaeda, while continuing to report on the story.

 Digby also notes that Lara Logan has rather strong opinions about the war in Afghanistan.  She thinks America was/is fighting the wrong fight. 

The best analogy I can give you, what you're doing to your U.S. troops on the ground, line up all hundred thousand or so of those troops, handcuff them behind their backs, give them a shove, send them straight into the Taliban guns. Because that's effectively what you're doing. The enemy is not in Afghanistan. The low hanging fruit, the expendable people, are in Afghanistan. The real enemy is across the border in Pakistan, and I'm not advocating for war in Pakistan. But there are a thousand things you could do to address that. As long as you are not going after the command and control and the true source of the enemy-- and by the way, we have the capacity and the information to do that and we have not because of our foreign policy towards Pakistan-- then you have no business being in the fight.
...
...The Quetta Shura runs the Afghan war from the city of Quetta inside Pakistan..... You take them out the same way you took out al-Loki and Nek Muhammad and all the others that have been killed that way.....And you do it, you target not just the Quetta Shura, you target the Miran Shah Shura, the Peshawar Shura, the Haqqani Network. 

You take 24 to 48 hours out of your day where you target all the people who you know where they are and you send a message to the Pakistanis that putting American bodies in Arlington Cemetery is not an acceptable form of foreign policy.

And there is this, Lara Logan points out to Gen. John Allen some unpleasant facts about Pakistan, and he says, she is telling the truth.


No one can be both a reporter and an advocate for a point of view. Lara Logan was exactly right about the problem that Pakistan posed. Gen. Allen and I - we agree. But she had a choice to report on the problem and on what policies the US was following to address the problem; or else, to have policy opinions and be a pundit, and not be a reporter.

Cape May Monarch Migration Monitoring

The numbers are dismal. 
Table reproduced below.
The slim hope is that a rebound is possible just as after 2004.

Table #1. CAPE MAY POINT ROAD CENSUS - 1992-2013

Week	1992	1993	1994	1995	1996	1997	1998	1999	2000	2001	2002	2003	2004	2005	2006	2007	2008	2009	2010	2011	2012	2013
1	7.7	12.0	95.5	43.0	9.1	185.6	3.0	23.9	2.5	23.4	6.6	24.8	5.5	32.0	25.0	42.4	14.3	25.9	21.8	8.63	16.87	6.95
2	14.2	13.5	213.6	26.9	4.2	65.4	54.6	10.9	3.3	42.2	42.8	14.8	3.2	21.8	74.4	23.9	6.0	7.3	143.2	5.88	141.71	6.21
3	14.5	109.9	120.6	16.2	141.9	216.4	4.3	298.8	32.9	67.9	62.7	3.3	9.2	22.2	132.6	131.1	28.4	38.3	500.3	9.76	171.18	9.17
4	15.3	152.9	143.3	22.1	78.5	226.1	93.5	413.4	112.8	134.3	70.3	5.4	11.7	115.5	750.2	59.1	11.6	24.2	42.9	13.0	236.77	27.86
5	7.7	149.1	162.2	25.4	127.3	71.2	96.9	1536.8	53.7	189.6	8.5	78.3	16.3	79.4	629.7	64.6	77.2	87.4	49.4	210.0	442.19	21.91
6	14.3	57.2	15.4	27.0	48.6	77.3	46.2	531.4	18.0	53.2	34.2	135.7	16.9	13.0	52.3	38.0	48.3	67.5	233.4	261.0	75.22	5.95
7	18.9	20.5	17.0	36.6	49.6	65.0	71.3	20.9	15.1	58.5	20.5	90.3	6.7	235.2	53.8	262.2	63.2	4.4	21.3	90.0	34.06	12.32
8	0.9	14.9	54.1	15.0	33.3	8.3	33.3	5.6	8.8	75.6	26.2	28.4	2.2	15.4	17.8	79.0	12.4	20.2	9.3	69.82	94.87	14.94
9*	0.0	14.6	18.1	36.3	11.1	4.3	0.0	7.5	3.6	13.7	5.0	11.3	2.3	3.7	7.6	45.7	4.4	6.0	4.9	13.64	*9.39	7.42
Final	11.3	66.6	93.5	27.4	60.1	113.4	47.9	359.8	30.6	77.3	32.9	45.2	8.9	63.2	216.7	81.2	31.1	34.4	130.0	85.29	183.15	12.74

                      *week 9 is a partial week and in 2012 census route roads were closed on Oct 29 and 30 due to storm Sandy

Extinction of the Monarch Butterfly Imminent

The NYTimes has this:

ON the first of November, when Mexicans celebrate a holiday called the Day of the Dead, some also celebrate the millions of monarch butterflies that, without fail, fly to the mountainous fir forests of central Mexico on that day. They are believed to be souls of the dead, returned. 

This year, for or the first time in memory, the monarch butterflies didn’t come, at least not on the Day of the Dead. They began to straggle in a week later than usual, in record-low numbers. Last year’s low of 60 million now seems great compared with the fewer than three million that have shown up so far this year. Some experts fear that the spectacular migration could be near collapse. 

“It does not look good,” said Lincoln P. Brower, a monarch expert at Sweet Briar College. 

It is only the latest bad news about the dramatic decline of insect populations.

Another insect in serious trouble is the wild bee, which has thousands of species. Nicotine-based pesticides called neonicotinoids are implicated in their decline, but even if they were no longer used, experts say, bees, monarchs and many other species of insect would still be in serious trouble.

 Previously:

For the past 15 years, scientists have been watching monarch numbers plummet, as much as 81 percent between 1999 and 2010.

....

Nearly every link in the monarchs’ chain of being, he said, is at risk. Illegal logging in Mexico has reduced their winter habitat — an already vanishingly small area, which is itself being altered by the warming climate. Ecotourists who come to witness the congregation of so many butterflies disturb the creatures they have come to see. But perhaps most damaging is the demise of milkweed. 

Monarchs have the misfortune to rely exclusively on a plant that farmers all across the Midwest and Northeast consider a weed. There is a direct parallel between the demise of milkweeds — killed by the herbicide glyphosate, which is sprayed by the millions of gallons on fields where genetically modified crops are growing — and the steady drop in monarch numbers. 

To anyone who has grown up in the Midwest, the result seems very strange. After decades of trying to eradicate milkweed, gardeners are being encouraged to plant it in their gardens, and townships and counties are being asked to let it thrive in the roadside ditches. What looks like agricultural success, purging bean and corn fields of milkweed (among other weeds), turns out to be butterfly disaster. This is the great puzzle of species conservation — it has to be effective at nearly every stage of a species’ life cycle. And this, too, is the dilemma of human behavior. We live in a world of unintended consequences of our own making, which can never be easily undone.

Quote from Theodore Roosevelt

A colleague pointed me to this speech by Theodore Roosevelt from 1910, and specifically the following:

.....Yet there are certain failings against which it is especially incumbent that both men of trained and cultivated intellect, and men of inherited wealth and position should especially guard themselves, because to these failings they are especially liable; and if yielded to, their- your- chances of useful service are at an end.

Let the man of learning, the man of lettered leisure, beware of that queer and cheap temptation to pose to himself and to others as a cynic, as the man who has outgrown emotions and beliefs, the man to whom good and evil are as one. The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer.

There are many men who feel a kind of twister pride in cynicism; there are many who confine themselves to criticism of the way others do what they themselves dare not even attempt. There is no more unhealthy being, no man less worthy of respect, than he who either really holds, or feigns to hold, an attitude of sneering disbelief toward all that is great and lofty, whether in achievement or in that noble effort which, even if it fails, comes to second achievement.

A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticise work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life's realities - all these are marks, not as the possessor would fain to think, of superiority but of weakness. They mark the men unfit to bear their part painfully in the stern strife of living, who seek, in the affection of contempt for the achievements of others, to hide from others and from themselves in their own weakness. The rôle is easy; there is none easier, save only the rôle of the man who sneers alike at both criticism and performance.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Shame on the man of cultivated taste who permits refinement to develop into fastidiousness that unfits him for doing the rough work of a workaday world. Among the free peoples who govern themselves there is but a small field of usefulness open for the men of cloistered life who shrink from contact with their fellows. Still less room is there for those who deride of slight what is done by those who actually bear the brunt of the day; nor yet for those others who always profess that they would like to take action, if only the conditions of life were not exactly what they actually are.

The man who does nothing cuts the same sordid figure in the pages of history, whether he be a cynic, or fop, or voluptuary. There is little use for the being whose tepid soul knows nothing of great and generous emotion, of the high pride, the stern belief, the lofty enthusiasm, of the men who quell the storm and ride the thunder. Well for these men if they succeed; well also, though not so well, if they fail, given only that they have nobly ventured, and have put forth all their heart and strength. It is war-worn Hotspur, spent with hard fighting, he of the many errors and valiant end, over whose memory we love to linger, not over the memory of the young lord who "but for the vile guns would have been a valiant soldier."

Habits

Sent to me:  the 14 habits of highly miserable people, a sort of parody of the 7 habits of highly effective people?  There are fewer habits to have to be effective, but one must have all of them;  it takes only one of the fourteen to make oneself miserable.

Why not NJ - 2?

The venture capital investments in 2012 by geography can be found here (chicagobusiness.com)
An excerpt of a chart from there is below:

Why not in NJ?

The NYT tells us:

A study conducted last year by two Stanford professors estimated that nearly 40,000 active companies generating annual revenue of $2.7 trillion can trace their roots in some way to Stanford.

Amazing what a entrepreneurial culture and a great university can do.

But apart from Mayor Bloomberg in New York City,  I don't see anyone around who is doing anything - I think the NYC - Philadelphia corridor ought to be another great technology center.

New York City’s ambitions to challenge Silicon Valley as a technology center are taking root on a narrow isle in the East River, where Cornell University is building a $2 billion campus and startup incubator.

....

The graduate school, known as CornellNYC tech, is part of a broader push by Mayor Michael Bloomberg to make the city a global technology leader. In December, Cornell and the Technion- Israel Institute for Technology beat out six competing bids to build the campus, including one from Stanford University. A $350 million donation from Cornell graduate Charles Feeney helped seal the university’s victory.

The city is donating space on Roosevelt Island and as much as $100 million for infrastructure improvements. The mayor is founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News.

The project is meant to bolster job creation in the city and generate 600 spinoff companies and $23 billion in economic activity over the next three decades. Until the Roosevelt Island campus opens in 2017, it will run in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, in space leased rent-free from Google.

QOTD - Dallas

James McAuley, in the New York Times:

Dallas — with no river, port or natural resources of its own — has always fashioned itself as a city with no reason for being, a city that triumphed against all odds, a city that validates the sheer power of individual will and the particular ideology that champions it above all else. “Dallas,” the journalist Holland McCombs observed in Fortune in 1949, “doesn’t owe a damn thing to accident, nature or inevitability. It is what it is ... because the men of Dallas damn well planned it that way.”.........The country musician Jimmy Dale Gilmore said it best in his song about the city: “Dallas is a rich man with a death wish in his eye ... a rich man who tends to believe in his own lies.”

 On the few occasions I have visited Dallas, I have felt it was a city without a soul.  Maybe I'm wrong, but that is why Jimmy Dale Gilmore resonates with me.

McAuley further writes of Dallas' economic vibrance but notes:

But those are transient triumphs in the face of what has always been left unsaid, what the now-defunct Dallas Times Herald once called the “dark night of the soul,” on which the bright Texas sun has yet to rise. The far right of 1963 and the radicalism of my grandparents’ generation may have faded in recent years, they remain very much alive in Dallas.

"The Lakes of Pontchartrain" - Aoife O'Donovan - 11/16/2013

I was awakened from a deep nap yesterday, by this song on the radio. In my drowsy condition, the notes sounded like showers of silver coins and pearls. And it seemed twice as long. Of course, with waking up, the magic diminishes.


This is an old traditional song of unknown origin, if you believe youtube, which has many versions of this song.

Custom-made employees

With the advent of Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs)  one of the bees buzzing in CEOs' bonnets is the idea that they can have custom-educated employees.  E.g., to get an entry-level position in such-and-such-role at MegaCorp, the applicant must have successfully completed such-and-such MOOCs. 

Of course, Gigantic Inc., whose offices are next door, might have a different course list.  I cannot but sympathize in advance with the job-seeker of the future.

Piling of correlations upon correlations

In a previous blog post, I had linked to R. Plomin et. al.'s results that literacy and numeracy are more heritable than "g" (IQ).    One of the things to understand is that at least one set of "g" measurements they used was a test conducted by telephone.  The paper says, and it is expounded on here, about how much telephone tests correlate with in-person tests.

"Testing cognitive abilities by telephone in a sample of 6- to 8-year-olds" (2002)

Intelligence Volume 30, Issue 4, July–August 2002, Pages 353–360

Abstract

Telephone-administered measures of cognitive ability have been shown to be efficient and cost-effective alternatives to in-person-based assessments. The current study examined the validity of a telephone-assessed measure of cognitive ability using a sample of fifty-two 6–8-year-old children. The telephone test was composed of verbal- as well as performance-based measures of cognitive ability. The telephone-assessed measure of general cognitive ability correlated r=.65 with in-person-assessed measures. After correction for range restriction, the correlation was r=.72. Thus, measures of cognitive ability administered by telephone appear to be feasible, even in elementary school-age children.

-----
About IQ measurement:

Alan S. Kaufman, clinical professor of psychology at the Yale University School of Medicine:

There's no such thing as "an" IQ. You have an IQ at a given point in time. That IQ has built-in error. It's not like stepping on a scale to determine how much you weigh.

The reasonable error around any reliable IQ is going to be plus or minus 5 or 6 points, to give you a 95 percent confidence interval. So, for example, if a person scores 126, then you can say with 95 percent confidence that the person's true IQ is somewhere between 120 and 132; within our science we don't get any more accurate than that.

But as soon as you go to a different IQ test, then the range is even wider, because different IQ tests measure slightly different things.

But while there is no single IQ – it's a range of IQs – you can still pretty much determine whether a person is going to score roughly at a low level, or an average level, or a high level.

However, IQ is a relative concept. IQ is how well you do on an IQ test compared to other people your age, and that is true whether you are 4 or in your 40s.

Now I'm wondering how much do the errors pile up.  I need to read the papers carefully to see if they indeed say, "what we have measured is "g" +/- 4%.  

PS: another annoying thing about these papers is that they are all about the variance - they do not mention the value of the mean.   I for one, can think of possible anomalies that would be made visible by the mean.