August 4, 2013

Being a Human Sign is just another job robots will do

2006
Back in 2006, I pointed out that the rapid spread from Mexico to California of "human directionals," people paid to stand on street corners and jiggle giant arrows pointing to real estate open houses exemplified the 21st Century's Cheap Labor / Expensive Land economy.

As I wrote in a 2008 short story "Unreal Estate" about a house-hunting trip to Antelope Valley:
Once off the highway, you see at least one person standing at every intersection twirling or jiggling a giant arrow pointing to an open house. “Human Signs,” nods Travis. “Like back in the Depression when guys would walk around wearing sandwich boards reading ‘Eat at Joe’s.’ But this is the opposite of a depression. Real estate commissions are six percent, so, on a $400k house, that’s $20k, which pays for a lot of twirling.”

2013
But, robots are now taking over the Human Sign profession.

From the L.A. Times:
Levy imports his battery-operated mannequins from China. They rent for $370 a month or can be purchased for $797. The plug-in electric models go for about $50 less. 
Although male mannequins are available, "the females outsell them 99 to 1," Levy said. "We have a busty model and one with a regular figure. The regular one is more popular: I personally think the busty one is overdone." 
Passing motorists find the 65-pound sign wavers convincingly realistic. 
"I was at a convention in Las Vegas last weekend, and several guys came up and tried to talk to the sign dolls," Levy said. Bar customers, he said, sometimes pose with the mechanical female sign waver parked in front of a nearby shop. 
The makers of robotic mannequins tout their creations as ideal workers who are always on time, never need a lunch break and never complain about being underpaid. 

Lactose tolerance hotspots

From Nature:
Most people who retain the ability to digest milk can trace their ancestry to Europe, where the trait seems to be linked to a single nucleotide in which the DNA base cytosine changed to thymine in a genomic region not far from the lactase gene. There are other pockets of lactase persistence in West Africa (see Nature 444, 994–996; 2006), the Middle East and south Asia that seem to be linked to separate mutations3 (see 'Lactase hotspots'). 
The single-nucleotide switch in Europe happened relatively recently. Thomas and his colleagues estimated the timing by looking at genetic variations in modern populations and running computer simulations of how the related genetic mutation might have spread through ancient populations4. They proposed that the trait of lactase persistence, dubbed the LP allele, emerged about 7,500 years ago in the broad, fertile plains of Hungary. 
Once the LP allele appeared, it offered a major selective advantage. In a 2004 study5, researchers estimated that people with the mutation would have produced up to 19% more fertile offspring than those who lacked it. The researchers called that degree of selection “among the strongest yet seen for any gene in the genome”. 
Compounded over several hundred generations, that advantage could help a population to take over a continent. But only if “the population has a supply of fresh milk and is dairying”, says Thomas. “It's gene–culture co-evolution. They feed off of each other.”

Much of Northwestern Europe comprises difficult land for growing crops, but grows grass abundantly. Without dairying, the population density would have stayed low outside the rich river valleys, keeping this largely a fringe area, like Finland. (This lactose tolerance-centric theory of history was put forward by Irish dairy farmer/economist Raymond D. Crotty.)

Random fluctuation causes crisis

For some reason, turnout was low.
From the New York Times:
Women Scarce In the Top Posts Of Los Angeles 
By ADAM NAGOURNEY 
LOS ANGELES — There are 1.9 million women in Los Angeles. The two senators from California are women, as is the state’s attorney general.

But this city, a bastion of progressive politics, has a curious distinction these days. Only one woman holds elective office in the entire government of Los Angeles, a member of the 15-person City Council from the San Fernando Valley who was sworn in only on Friday. 
The mayor is a man, Eric M. Garcetti, who defeated a woman, Wendy Greuel, for the job in May. The city attorney is a man. The city controller? You guessed it. 
Los Angeles County, with a population of 9.9 million that includes Los Angeles, has just one woman on its five-member Board of Supervisors. And the race to fill the City Council seat for Hollywood, which Mr. Garcetti vacated when he was elected mayor, gave voters a choice of 12 candidates — all men.

Los Angeles, especially the hilly section like Garcetti's old district, has a lot of gay men, but it's a lousy place for lesbians: too expensive, and Los Angeles's straight women are far too obsessed with their looks to pay heed to lesbian feminist scolds. Beverly Hills Persian women, for instance, pay a lot of money to gay men for various luxuries, but they would also be about the last people on earth to take lesbians seriously. Vermont would be a lot more attractive to lesbians.
The overwhelmingly male lineup in local elected offices has caught many people here by surprise, overlooked in the general lack of interest in this year’s campaigns. And it has become a subject of considerable chagrin, civic embarrassment and impassioned discussions about exactly what happened. 
“When I was in elementary school, there were like five women on the City Council,” said Nury Martinez, the city’s lone woman in elected office, speaking in her empty Council office at City Hall. “It’s a shame and embarrassing that in a city of four million people we are down to one woman.” 

Eventually, Nagourney gets around to relating this non-story to something more interesting:
The case in Los Angeles might be particularly egregious, but the number of women holding office across the country has flat-lined in recent years. 
“Can you believe it?” said Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster who works extensively with female candidates, including Ms. Greuel. “It’s part of a national trend. We are seeing this in a lot of places — in offices in statewide office, in a number of city councils. But it’s really shocking. That is a state that is very pro-women.” 
The situation here has caught the attention of national women’s advocacy groups, including Emily’s List, which is planning to begin a training and recruitment campaign here aimed at enlisting women to run for office. 
“We do not want to see any city without equal representation of women — and in this case, we are really, really off, “said Stephanie Schriock, the president of the organization. 
Katherine Spillar, the head of the Feminist Majority Foundation, called the situation “shocking.” 
“I’m very concerned,” she said. “We have gone backwards instead of forwards. Shame on Los Angeles.” 
To some extent, the gender lineup at City Hall is an anomaly, the result of the natural ebb and flow of electoral politics. Ms. Greuel, the previous city controller, had to leave her position because of term limits — in this case, to run unsuccessfully for mayor. She would have been Los Angeles’s first female chief executive. 
Several analysts suggested that the sheer number of women in high elected office in California had inured voters to the issue, and blunted what might otherwise have been a historical urgency to Ms. Greuel’s campaign. 

I've met Wendy Greuel. She's a nice lady. But, "historical urgency" is hardly the first term that she inspires.
There is no reason to expect the situation to change significantly any time soon; few obvious female candidates are on the horizon. Indeed, to a large extent, the issue here and across the country reflects a lack of interest on the part of many women in seeking office, political analysts said. 
“The issue isn’t that voters won’t vote for women — it’s that we don’t have enough women running,” Debbie Walsh, the director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, said in an e-mail. “It’s a recruitment issue.” 
In one measure of the representation of women in state and local government, 73 women hold elected statewide positions across the nation, or 23 percent of available positions, according to the center. That is almost identical to the percentage reported in 1993. The figure then increased through 2001, to 28 percent, but has been in a steady decline over the past 12 years, the center said. 

The current surge in these kind of feminist bean-counting articles is an artifact of the 2012 Obama campaign reinflating old feminist resentments for the sake of increasing turnout among Obama's core supporters, who are America's fringe voters.

But the reality is that nothing much is going on in terms of gender trends. The current feminist era began 44 years ago, and by a couple of decades ago, most of what was going to change had changed.

Nate Silver and Small Data

Colby Cosh writes on prognosticator Nate Silver's move from the New York Times to ESPN
It is amusing to me, and I bet it is pretty amusing to him, that Nate Silver has become so venerated even as the popular understanding of what he does remains so impoverished. ... Silver went to the trouble of writing a whole book about what he does, but it is in the nature of such books to be bought more than they are read and read more than they are understood. The proof is that Silver’s name has become inextricably linked with one of the oppressive buzzwords of 2013: “big data”. 
People know “big data” has something to do with statistics, and, hey, who’s the most famous statistics guy on the planet? I’ll let you in on a bluffer’s secret: what “big data” denotes are massive realtime streams of ever-changing information, such as web traffic or the Twitter “firehose”, that can potentially be bent to commercial purposes using powerful and bleeding-edge computational techniques. Silver has always worked exclusively, at least in public, with what might be called “small data”: sets of a few hundred political polls or ballplayers’ statistical lines. He is living proof that there is money to be made applying 50- or 100-year old statistical nostrums and exploratory techniques to such small data. 

As for why Silver moved from a newspaper to a TV network, why wouldn't an ambitious young media figure want to be with a powerful TV network? What makes you money is getting your name and face recognized, and TV is a lot better for the latter.

Arches National Park's five languages

At the visitor's center in Arches National Park, just outside Moab, Utah, there are touch screens to help you plan your visit. 

The first question that comes up on the screen is which of five languages do you want to work in. Can you guess which four languages are offered to tourists besides English?

Answers after the break:

Testing going out of fashion

Oh, wait ... despite all the articles I've read asserting that over the last 40 years, that isn't actually happening. Instead, the test business is booming. For example, the number of students taking the ACT (the Iowa-based college admissions exam has gone up 128% since 1986).

More and more high school students are taking both the ACT and the SAT.

Because you can't test prep enough.

In general, we live in a world where increasingly more people behave like devout readers of iSteve, while everybody swears they don't believe in what they are doing.

Robert Mugabe wins again

Robert Mugabe, age 89, won a reported 61% of the vote in Zimbabwe last week, propelling him into his second third-of-a-century as ruler of the former Rhodesia. While he had to nominally share power with a rival for the last five years, his new 3/4th majority in parliament allows him to now govern alone.

Here are some music videos of what Zimbabwe looked like, despite international economic boycotts, when it was called Rhodesia in the mid-1970s.

It's a land blessed by nature. For example, the capital city is at 4,865 elevation, which makes for a pleasant climate.

Here's Theodore Dalrymple's 2003 City Journal article on his years in Rhodesia:
After Empire

As soon as I qualified as a doctor, I went to Rhodesia, which was to transform itself into Zimbabwe five years or so later. In the next decade, I worked and traveled a great deal in Africa and couldn’t help but reflect upon such matters as the clash of cultures, the legacy of colonialism, and the practical effects of good intentions unadulterated by any grasp of reality. I gradually came to the conclusion that the rich and powerful can indeed have an effect upon the poor and powerless—perhaps can even remake them—but not necessarily (in fact, necessarily not) in the way they wanted or anticipated. The law of unintended consequences is stronger than the most absolute power. 
I went to Rhodesia because I wanted to see the last true outpost of colonialism in Africa, the final gasp of the British Empire that had done so much to shape the modern world. True, it had now rebelled against the mother country and was a pariah state: but it was still recognizably British in all but name. As Sir Roy Welensky, the prime minister of the short-lived and ill-fated Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, once described himself, he was “half-Polish, half-Jewish, one hundred percent British.” 
Until my arrival at Bulawayo Airport, the British Empire had been for me principally a philatelic phenomenon. ... And my father—a communist by conviction—also encouraged me to read the works of G. A. Henty, late-nineteenth-century adventure stories, extolling the exploits of empire builders, who by bravery, sterling character, superior intelligence, and force majeure overcame the resistance of such spirited but doomed peoples as the Zulu and the Fuzzy-Wuzzies. Henty might seem an odd choice for a communist to give his son, but Marx himself was an imperialist of a kind, believing that European colonialism was an instrument of progress toward History’s happy denouement; only at a later stage, after it had performed its progressive work, was empire to be condemned. 
And condemned Rhodesia most certainly was, loudly and insistently, as if it were the greatest threat to world peace and the security of the planet. By the time I arrived, it had no friends, only enemies. Even South Africa, the regional colossus, with which Rhodesia shared a long border and which might have been expected to be sympathetic, was highly ambivalent toward it: ... 
I expected to find on my arrival, therefore, a country in crisis and decay. Instead, I found a country that was, to all appearances, thriving: its roads were well maintained, its transport system functioning, its towns and cities clean and manifesting a municipal pride long gone from England. There were no electricity cuts or shortages of basic food commodities. The large hospital in which I was to work, while stark and somewhat lacking in comforts, was extremely clean and ran with exemplary efficiency. The staff, mostly black except for its most senior members, had a vibrant esprit de corps, and the hospital, as I discovered, had a reputation for miles around for the best of medical care. The rural poor would make immense and touching efforts to reach it: they arrived covered in the dust of their long journeys. The African nationalist leader and foe of the government, Joshua Nkomo, was a patient there and trusted the care implicitly: for medical ethics transcended all political antagonisms. 
The surgeon for whom I worked, who came from England, was the best I have ever known ... Within a short time of the political handover in 1980, however, he returned to England—not because of any racial feeling or political antagonism but simply because the swift degeneration of standards in the hospital made the high-level practice of surgery impossible. The institution that had seemed to me on my arrival to be so solid and well founded fell apart in the historical twinkling of an eye. 
... I, whose salary was by other standards small, lived at a level that I have scarcely equaled since. It is true that Rhodesia lacked many consumer goods at that time, due to the economic sanctions imposed upon it: but what I learned from this lack is how little consumer goods add to the quality of life, at least in an equable climate such as Rhodesia’s. Life was no poorer for being lived without them. 
The real luxuries were space and beauty—and the time to enjoy them. ... The luxury of our life was this: that, our work once done, we never had to perform a single chore for ourselves. The rest of our time, in our most beautiful surroundings, was given over to friendship, sport, study, hunting—whatever we wished. 
Of course, our leisure rested upon a pyramid of startling inequality and social difference. The staff who freed us of life’s little inconveniences lived an existence that was opaque to us, though they had quarters only a few yards from where we lived. Their hopes, wishes, fears, and aspirations were not ours; their beliefs, tastes, and customs were alien to us. 
Our very distance, socially and psychologically, made our relations with them unproblematical and easy. ...
By contrast, our relations with our African medical colleagues were harder-edged, because the social, intellectual, and cultural distance between us was far reduced. Rhodesia was still a white-dominated society, but for reasons of practical necessity, and in a vain attempt to convince the world that it was not as monstrous as made out, it had produced a growing cadre of educated Africans, doctors prominent among them. Unsurprisingly, they were not content to remain subalterns under the permanent tutelage of whites, so that our relations with them were superficially polite and collegial, but human warmth was difficult or impossible. Many belonged secretly to the African nationalist movement that was soon to take power; and two were to serve (if that is the word to describe their depredations) as ministers of health. 
Unlike in South Africa, where salaries were paid according to a racial hierarchy (whites first, Indians and coloured second, Africans last), salaries in Rhodesia were equal for blacks and whites doing the same job, so that a black junior doctor received the same salary as mine. But there remained a vast gulf in our standards of living, the significance of which at first escaped me; but it was crucial in explaining the disasters that befell the newly independent countries that enjoyed what Byron called, and eagerly anticipated as, the first dance of freedom. 
The young black doctors who earned the same salary as we whites could not achieve the same standard of living for a very simple reason: they had an immense number of social obligations to fulfill. They were expected to provide for an ever expanding circle of family members (some of whom may have invested in their education) and people from their village, tribe, and province. 
An income that allowed a white to live like a lord because of a lack of such obligations scarcely raised a black above the level of his family. Mere equality of salary, therefore, was quite insufficient to procure for them the standard of living that they saw the whites had and that it was only human nature for them to desire—and believe themselves entitled to, on account of the superior talent that had allowed them to raise themselves above their fellows. In fact, a salary a thousand times as great would hardly have been sufficient to procure it: for their social obligations increased pari passu with their incomes. 
These obligations also explain the fact, often disdainfully remarked upon by former colonials, that when Africans moved into the beautiful and well-appointed villas of their former colonial masters, the houses swiftly degenerated into a species of superior, more spacious slum. Just as African doctors were perfectly equal to their medical tasks, technically speaking, so the degeneration of colonial villas had nothing to do with the intellectual inability of Africans to maintain them. Rather, the fortunate inheritor of such a villa was soon overwhelmed by relatives and others who had a social claim upon him. They brought even their goats with them; and one goat can undo in an afternoon what it has taken decades to establish. 
It is easy to see why a civil service, controlled and manned in its upper reaches by whites, could remain efficient and uncorrupt but could not long do so when manned by Africans who were supposed to follow the same rules and procedures. The same is true, of course, for every other administrative activity, public or private. The thick network of social obligations explains why, while it would have been out of the question to bribe most Rhodesian bureaucrats, yet in only a few years it would have been out of the question not to try to bribe most Zimbabwean ones, whose relatives would have condemned them for failing to obtain on their behalf all the advantages their official opportunities might provide. ... 
Of course, the solidarity and inescapable social obligations that corrupted public and private administration in Africa also gave a unique charm and humanity to life there and served to protect people from the worst consequences of the misfortunes that buffeted them. There were always relatives whose unquestioned duty it was to help and protect them if they could, so that no one had to face the world entirely alone. Africans tend to find our lack of such obligations puzzling and unfeeling—and they are not entirely wrong. 
These considerations help to explain the paradox that strikes so many visitors to Africa: the evident decency, kindness, and dignity of the ordinary people, and the fathomless iniquity, dishonesty, and ruthlessness of the politicians and administrators. 

Noblesse oblige in the 21st Century

From MondoWeiss:
Jewish success– is it ever a story? 
Philip Weiss on July 30, 2013 38 
This morning National Public Radio aired a story on the rivalry between Lawrence Summers and Janet Yellen to be the next Fed chairperson, succeeding Ben Bernanke. All three of these economists are Jewish.

Besides Summers and Yellen, Obama is also interviewing for the job a third economist, Donald Kohn.
It is plain evidence of the fact that Jews make up a large segment of the new Establishment, if not the leading segment. 
I had the same impression Friday night, when the nightly news was also filled with Jews. The sex scandals involving San Diego mayor Bob Filner and would-be New York Mayor Anthony Weiner-- their pictures opened the NBC news. Then the lead story was food safety, and Nancy Snyderman was interviewing FDA head Margaret Hamburg, then Andrea Mitchell, who is married to a former chair of the Fed, was interviewing Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post about the sex scandals, and at the end of the broadcast they teased David Gregory's interview on Meet the Press of Jack Lew, Treasury Secretary. All these folks are Jewish or have some Jewish background. They're all in the center ring. 
In recent months, I've heard Peter Beinart, Lester Crown, Jane Eisner, and Jeffrey Goldberg exclaim over Jewish success. Crown said that the acceptance of Jews "in almost everything is unbelievable, just remarkable, every place." But it seems to me that Jews in the media have largely avoided dealing with the implications of our success. They're embarrassed about it. Or they fear anti-Semitic riots if they say openly what everyone knows. The exception is Marc Ellis, who writes openly about Empire Jews.  
This lack of reflection is unacceptable. Elites are traditionally criticized in the American discourse. It's the price. David Brooks's book about the "new upper class" is filled with slams of the previous order, the "WASPs," but has nothing to say about Jews. Nick Lemann wrote a highly-acclaimed book on the meritocracy that described the last ruling elite in religious terms-- as "the Episcopacy"-- and said that the folks in it got there by birth. It seems to me that the Jewish presence in the establishment merits some scrutiny: what is the role of birth in awarding place in the U.S.? What is the role of social kinship networks? What is the extent of Zionist ideology in the Jewish establishment? And how do successful Zionist Jews justify adherence to an ideology based on separation/colonization when they have done so well here? I'm a liberal and I trust Americans to have this conversation. I don't remember pogroms against the WASPs.

I've written several times about the valuable old concept of noblesse oblige. In essence, it meant that in feudal times, it meant that those on the top of a social order were honor-bound to personally fight to defend the social order, including those lower down in society, in which their privileged position depends. 

Clearly, that concept needs to be updated for a 21st Century in which leading cavalry charges is no longer the most important manifestation of defense of the nation, but a public discussion over what exactly are the responsibilities of the people who have benefited most from living in America, and who they are, is long overdue.

As I wrote in 2008:
American Jews should start thinking of themselves less as oppressed outcasts who need to go for whatever they can get while the getting is good, and start more accurately thinking of themselves as belonging to the best-connected inner circle of the contemporary American Establishment. 
Thus, American Jews should realize that, like the Protestant elite of yore, their privileged position as a de facto leadership caste bestows upon themselves corresponding duties to conserve the long-term well-being of the United States—rather than to indulge in personal and ethnic profit and power maximization. 
But that's unlikely to happen until the Jewish elite to begin to tolerate non-Jewish criticism, rather than to continue to try to destroy the careers of critics—or even just honest observers—in what seems to be an instinctive reaction intended to encourage the others. 
A group self-image of victimization, combined with a penchant for ideological intensity and powerful ethnocentric lobbies, can lead to bizarre political manifestations—such as the dominant Jewish assumption that proper veneration of their Ellis Island ancestors requires opposition to patriotic immigration reform today. 
In contrast, Italian-Americans, who lack institutions such as the ADL, appear to feel themselves freer to make up their own minds about what immigration policy will be best for their American posterity.

August 3, 2013

Oregon v. Alabama football palaces

Since college football teams aren't supposed to pay their players, they spend vast sums to wow beefy boys with practice facilities that 17-year-olds will consider awesome. Oregon recently revealed its new Phil Knight of Nike-funded palace, complete with barbershop:
Not to be outdone, Alabama countered the next day. Here's the football players' video arcade:
Wouldn't it be simpler just to pay the players?

Israel tests some would-be immigrants' DNA for Jewishness

From The Times of Israel:
A number of people from the former Soviet Union wishing to immigrate to Israel could be subjected to DNA testing to prove their Jewishness, the Prime Minister’s Office said Sunday. 
The policy was reported in Maariv on Monday, one day after the Israeli paper revealed that a 19-year-old woman from the former Soviet Union was required to take the test to qualify for a Birthright Israel trip.

The Prime Minister’s Office confirmed that many Jews from the FSU who were born out-of-wedlock can be required to bring DNA confirmation of Jewish heritage in order to be allowed to immigrate as a Jew. 
A source in the PMO told Maariv that the consul’s procedure, approved by the legal department of the Interior Ministry, states that a Russian-speaking child born out-of-wedlock is eligible to receive an Israeli immigration visa if the birth was registered before the child turned 3. Otherwise a DNA test to prove Jewish parentage is necessary.

This seems not unreasonable. Going back to Sen. Henry Jackson's legislation to give special rights to immigrate to Israel (and America) to Soviet Jews, a lot of fairly random Russians have claimed to be Jewish to cash in. For example, I knew a lady from Leningrad in the early 1990s who wasn't noticeably Jewish in looks, demeanor, culture, or family ties, but her Plan C for staying in America (she wanted to be blackjack dealer in Las Vegas) was to assiduously pull together a stack of genealogical paperwork (of who knows what authenticity) to prove she was Jewish enough to attain refugee status.

August 2, 2013

Want to get into UC Berkeley? Lie

Back in 1996, Proposition 209 outlawing racial preferences was passed by California voters and became part of the state Constitution. State officials have ever since pursued a strategy of "massive resistance" to this unwelcome demand for equal treatment of the law, such as by switching the evaluation of University of California admissions from a cheap, mechanical system to an expensive, subjective "holistic" system. After all, the Latino lobby in the state legislature could cut UC's budget if they don't get more of their people into UC.

Ruth Starkman took a job as a reader of applications to Berkeley, and writes in the NYT:
Admissions officials were careful not to mention gender, ethnicity and race during our training sessions.  
Privately, I asked an officer point-blank: “What are we doing about race?” 
She nodded sympathetically at my confusion but warned that it would be illegal to consider: we’re looking at — again, that phrase — the “bigger picture” of the applicant’s life. 
After the next training session, when I asked about an Asian student who I thought was a 2 but had only received a 3, the officer noted: “Oh, you’ll get a lot of them.” She said the same when I asked why a low-income student with top grades and scores, and who had served in the Israeli army, was a 3. 
Which them? I had wondered. Did she mean I’d see a lot of 4.0 G.P.A.’s, or a lot of applicants whose bigger picture would fail to advance them, or a lot of Jewish and Asian applicants (Berkeley is 43 percent Asian, 11 percent Latino and 3 percent black)? 
... In a second e-mail, I was told I needed more 1’s and referrals. A referral is a flag that a student’s grades and scores do not make the cut but the application merits a special read because of “stressors” — socioeconomic disadvantages that admissions offices can use to increase diversity. 
Officially, like all readers, I was to exclude minority background from my consideration. I was simply to notice whether the student came from a non-English-speaking household. I was not told what to do with this information — except that it may be a stressor if the personal statement revealed the student was having trouble adjusting to coursework in English. In such a case, I could refer the applicant for a special read. 
Why did I hear so many times from the assistant director? I think I got lost in the unspoken directives. Some things can’t be spelled out, but they have to be known. Application readers must simply pick it up by osmosis, so that the process of detecting objective factors of disadvantage becomes tricky.
It’s an extreme version of the American non-conversation about race. 
I scoured applications for stressors. 
To better understand stressors, I was trained to look for the “helpful” personal statement that elevates a candidate. Here I encountered through-the-looking-glass moments: an inspiring account of achievements may be less “helpful” than a report of the hardships that prevented the student from achieving better grades, test scores and honors. 
Should I value consistent excellence or better results at the end of a personal struggle? I applied both, depending on race. An underrepresented minority could be the phoenix, I decided. 
We were not to hold a lack of Advanced Placement courses against applicants. Highest attention was to be paid to the unweighted G.P.A., as schools in low-income neighborhoods may not offer A.P. courses, which are given more weight in G.P.A. calculation. Yet readers also want to know if a student has taken challenging courses, and will consider A.P.’s along with key college-prep subjects, known as a-g courses, required by the U.C. system. ...
Another reader thinks the student is “good” but we have so many of “these kids.” ...
IN personal statements, we had been told to read for the “authentic” voice over students whose writing bragged of volunteer trips to exotic places or anything that “smacks of privilege.” 
Fortunately, that authentic voice articulated itself abundantly. Many essays lucidly expressed a sense of self and character — no small task in a sea of applicants. Less happily, many betrayed the handiwork of pricey application packagers, whose cloying, pompous style was instantly detectable, as were canny attempts to catch some sympathy with a personal story of generalized misery. 
The torrent of woe could make a reader numb: not another student suffering from parents’ divorce, a learning difference, a rare disease, even dandruff! 
As I developed the hard eye of a slush pile reader at a popular-fiction agency, I asked my lead readers whether some of these stressors might even be credible. I was told not to second-guess the essays but simply to pick the most worthy candidate. Still, I couldn’t help but ask questions that were not part of my reader job. 
The assistant director’s words — look for “evidence a student can succeed at Berkeley” — echoed in my ears when I wanted to give a disadvantaged applicant a leg up in the world. I wanted to help. Surely, if these students got to Berkeley they would be exposed to all sorts of test-taking and studying techniques. 
But would they be able to compete with the engineering applicant with the 3.95 G.P.A. and 2300 SATs? Does Berkeley have sufficient support services to bridge gaps and ensure success? Could this student with a story full of stressors and remedial-level writing skills survive in a college writing course? 
I wanted every freshman walking through Sather Gate to succeed. 
Underrepresented minorities still lag behind: about 92 percent of whites and Asians at Berkeley graduate within six years, compared with 81 percent of Hispanics and 71 percent of blacks. A study of the University of California system shows that 17 percent of underrepresented minority students who express interest in the sciences graduate with a science degree within five years, compared with 31 percent of white students.
When the invitation came to sign up for the next application cycle, I wavered. My job as an application reader — evaluating the potential success of so many hopeful students — had been one of the most serious endeavors of my academic career. But the opaque and secretive nature of the process had made me queasy. Wouldn’t better disclosure of how decisions are made help families better position their children? Does Proposition 209 serve merely to push race underground? Can the playing field of admissions ever be level? 
For me, the process presented simply too many moral dilemmas. In the end, I chose not to participate again.

August 1, 2013

Like I've been saying ...

For a long time now, I've been suggesting that after gay marriage, the next big Civil Rights Struggle will be transgender rights. The New York Times agrees, editorializing today:
EDITORIAL
The Next Civil Rights Frontier
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
Published: July 31, 2013 
Federal civil rights officials reached an important settlement late last month with a California school district accused of discriminating against a transgender student by denying him equal access to educational programs and activities. Under the agreement, the Arcadia Unified School District in California will revise its policies and ensure that the student, who was born female but has since assumed a male name and identity, is treated fairly and like other male students. The agreement should be required reading for school officials at all levels nationally.

Profiling by NYPD: Complex issue needing more study

From the New York Times, after a decade of Mayor Bloomberg's policy of massive stop and frisk stops of blacks, Latins (and white guys waiting for their man).
More Complaints Than Proposals on Police Searches 
By JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN 8:39 PM ET 
Lawyers who brought a suit on New York City’s stop-and-frisk tactic seem to lack ideas on how to fix it.

Profiling by George Zimmerman: Unmitigated evil.

July 31, 2013

Santa Monica, here we come, right back where we started from

A large fraction of homeless people -- especially the poor bastards you find sleeping under a bridge in Chicago in January -- are lunatics to be pitied. But, then there are the kind of homeless people you find hanging out at the blufftop park along Ocean Boulevard in Santa Monica or under the amazing Moreton Bay Figtree in downtown Santa Barbara who are highly rational about their lifestyle choices. The creme de la creme of the Lifestyler homeless are the ones who have made it to Hawaii.

From The Daily Mail:
Hawaii sets aside $100,000 to offer its 17,000 homeless people one-way airfare back to their home states 
... A similar program was implemented in New York City in 2007 by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and other cities have used the tactic over the years. 
'These kinds of  programs have been used historically to ship homeless people out of town,' Michael Stoops, from the National Coalition for the Homeless told MSN. 'In the homelessness field it was once called greyhound therapy. Hawaii now goes a step higher with airplane therapy. Oftentimes local police departments run such programs offering the stark choices of going to a shelter, jail or hopping on a bus or plane home.'

Wired article on "Genetics of IQ"

John Bohannon in Wired profiles 21-year-old Chinese DNA prodigy Zhao Bowen in "Why Are Some People So Smart? The Answer Could Spawn a Generation of Superbabies."

In my experience, few things in modern medicine happen very fast.

What's the g factor of coolness?

Let me toss out an undeveloped idea: that the closest thing to a general factor in coolness is having a good sense of rhythm.  

July 29, 2013

Yellen v. Summers: What is and what should never be respectable identity politics

From the NYT:
In Tug of War Over New Fed Leader, Some Gender Undertones

By BINYAMIN APPELBAUM and ANNIE LOWREY

WASHINGTON — President Obama’s choice of a replacement for the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, is coming down to a battle between the California girls and the Rubin boys.

Janet L. Yellen, the Fed’s vice chairwoman, is one of three female friends, all former or current professors at the University of California, Berkeley, who have broken into the male-dominated business of advising presidents on economic policy. Her career has been intertwined with those of Christina D. Romer, who led Mr. Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers at the beginning of his first term, and Laura D’Andrea Tyson, who held the same job under President Clinton and later served as the director of the White House economic policy committee. But no woman has climbed to the very top of the hierarchy to serve as Fed chairwoman or Treasury secretary. 
Ms. Yellen’s chief rival for Mr. Bernanke’s job, Lawrence H. Summers, is a member of a close-knit group of men, protégés of the former Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin, who have dominated economic policy-making in both the Clinton and the Obama administrations. Those men, including the former Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner and Gene B. Sperling, the president’s chief economic policy adviser, are said to be quietly pressing Mr. Obama to nominate Mr. Summers. 
The choice of a Fed chair is perhaps the single most important economic policy decision that Mr. Obama will make in his second term. Mr. Bernanke’s successor must lead the Fed’s fractious policy-making committee in deciding how much longer and how much harder it should push to stimulate growth and seek to drive down the unemployment rate. 
Ms. Yellen’s selection would be a vote for continuity: she is an architect of the Fed’s stimulus campaign and shares with Mr. Bernanke a low-key, collaborative style. Mr. Summers, by contrast, has said that he doubts the effectiveness of some of the Fed’s efforts, and his self-assured leadership style has more in common with past chairmen like Alan Greenspan and Paul A. Volcker. 
But the choice also is roiling Washington because it is reviving longstanding and sensitive questions about the insularity of the Obama White House and the dearth of women in its top economic policy positions. Even as three different women have served as secretary of state under various presidents and growing numbers have taken other high-ranking government jobs, there has been little diversity among Mr. Obama’s top economic advisers. 
“Are we moving forward? It’s hard to see it,” said Ms. Romer, herself a late addition to Mr. Obama’s original economic team, chosen partly because the president wanted a woman. 
She said she viewed the choice of the next leader of the Fed as a test of the administration’s commitment to inclusiveness. “Within the administration there have been many successful women,” she said. “There are lots of areas where women are front and center, where women are succeeding and doing very well. Economic policy is one where they’re not.”

This controversy is an illuminating example of 

- What is encouraged to be treated as legitimate identity politics: e.g., gender. There's never been a female Fed chairman, so Janet Yellen's supporters are praised in our culture for trumpeting her candidacy as promoting women.

- What is uncomfortable as an identity politics issue: age. Summers is 58 and Yellen is 66. The latter seems troublesome for an extremely demanding four-year term in a job where two terms (or more is common) to avoid "roiling the markets." As Baby Boomers (currently ages 49 to 67) age, they become less tolerant of anybody attempting to, in effect, foreclose their career prospects due to advancing age.

- What should never be tolerable identity politics: anybody mentioning that if either Summers or Yellen gets the post, then the 98% gentile majority of America won't have held the Fed Chairman's post from 1987 through 2018. Noticing that is simply beyond the pale, even though the Fed Chairman post is not simply a technocratic macroeconomic position, but is also a major regulator of financiers. 

I don't know much about Yellen, but Larry has been a big personality for a long time. I've written four articles defending him in the 2005 evolutionary psychology brouhaha. But, as a regulator, Larry is representative of the dominant tendency of the last generation in both parties (such as Larry's mentor Robert E. Rubin for the Democrats and Greenspan/Bernanke for the Republicans): pro-Wall Street economists or operators who tend to see attempts to regulate billionaires as at least subliminally anti-Semitic. 

There's a lot to be said for this dominant standpoint, but let's also be clear that it has been dominant, and that it might well be time to try somebody, at least for a change, who doesn't suspect effective regulation of financiers is the first step to Nazism.

But of course we can't even mention this, so forget I ever said it.

Cuban hidalgo rallies rich Republicans to back Rubio bill

From the NYT:
Big-Name G.O.P. Donors Urge Members of Congress to Back Immigration Overhaul

WASHINGTON — More than 100 Republican donors — many of them prominent names in their party’s establishment — sent a letter to Republican members of Congress on Tuesday urging them to support an overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws. 
The letter, which calls for “legal status” for the 11 million immigrants here illegally, begins with a simple appeal: “We write to urge you to take action to fix our broken immigration system.” 
The effort was organized by Carlos Gutierrez, who was secretary of commerce under President George W. Bush and was a founder of a “super PAC,” Republicans for Immigration Reform. The letter is the beginning of a campaign to lobby Republican lawmakers in favor of a broad immigration bill as they return to their districts for the August break.
A cross-section of Republican donors and fund-raisers signed the letter. They include Karl Rove, a deputy chief of staff in Mr. Bush’s White House; former Vice President Dan Quayle; Tom Stemberg, a founder of Staples; and Frank VanderSloot, the founder of Melaleuca Inc.

Frank VanderSloot, CEO of Melanoma Inc., sounds like the name of the rich Republican villain in a movie. But, he's in favor of more immigration, so he's cool.