Crime and punishment ... is less of both possible?

The subheading to this piece in the Economist says it all, eh:

Spending more on education and private security are cost-effective ways of cutting crime

Of course, we want details:

Why is private security apparently so cost-effective? One reason, says Mr Cook, is simply that guards are paid less than police officers. Another is they are dedicated to a single district and are directly responsible for making it safe. Guards can specialise. They know which shifty characters to look out for and which policing works best in their area. Unlike policemen, they are not called away to supervise a parade or protect a dignitary.

How about the role of education?

Are there ways to prevent people from becoming criminals in the first place? In principle, a lengthier education ought to reduce crime by raising people’s future earning power from legitimate work, making a criminal career less attractive. School also keeps would-be criminals in touch with the right sort of peers and social attitudes. There is plenty of evidence that a lack of education goes hand in hand with criminal behaviour. Studies of America’s jail population in the 1990s showed that most inmates had not finished high school. But few studies have established that less education is actually a cause of crime.

Which is why I joke around that it is better to house people in institutions of higher education than in penal institutions :)  And if we didn't have faculty jobs, some of us would be in yet another type of institution--the mental institutions .... ha ha

But, wait, how my state spends on education versus on corrections is no joke :(

State per capita spending on the Oregon University System has declined 44 percent in the past 15 years while spending for prisons has climbed by 50 percent ...

"Hard" sciences, indeed ...

Reading the autobiographical essay by the recent Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, V. Ramakrishnan, was educational, informative, and humbling in so many ways. 
His sheer dedication and perseverance is simply awesome .... To be awarded a Nobel in the sciences at a "young" age of 57 means that he has packed in those years experiences that would take me more than a couple of lifetimes!!!
For starters, here is one paragraph:

After my marriage at the age of 23, I was suddenly no longer alone but had a wife and a five-year-old stepdaughter, Tanya Kapka. This sudden change in my responsibilities made me realize that I had to get on with my career. I produced a passable thesis in the next year and obtained a Ph.D. in physics in 1976 just a month before our son Raman was born. But by that time I had already decided I was going to switch to biology.

Let me see ... he has a PhD in physics by the age of 24, is married with two children and decides to switch to biology and then goes to grad school on that .... and does that, and more ...
Ramakrishnan ends the essay with:

On my return to Cambridge in early January, things slowly began returning to normal after the euphoria of the autumn. I began to realize that the Nobel Prize could be seen not just as an affirmation of my past work but also as an encouragement to continue to work on interesting problems. Certainly, it seems to have fired up people in my laboratory, and I look forward to the struggles ahead as we try to answer some of the hard questions in our field and beyond. Looking back on my life so far, I feel a deep sense of gratitude for having been able to lead such a rich life both intellectually and personally.

Read the entire essay here

Taxes make government services available to all

April 15 is Tax Day, the deadline to file taxes on incomes earned.

Speaking for myself, I can't imagine a better time than now to thank my fellow Oregonians for making possible through these and other taxes, a wide range of services including the university where I teach.

The rationale for government provision of a wide range of services is varied as well. Sometimes the nature of the service requires a collective provision such as policing. One can imagine the complications if we expect people to privately pay for state troopers in order to ensure safety on the highways, and then travelled with their own posse.

In a different category of services like education, one of the goals is to ensure that children and youths are provided opportunities that might otherwise not be accessible to them for sheer lack of money. Of course, public support for higher education has decreased significantly over the last two decades, and this has made college education that much less affordable and accessible.

These, and many other compelling arguments for government, have resulted in a problem that we have come to understand very well over the past few years: a widening gap between what we would like the government to provide versus the funding available for all those services. Hence, the perpetual problem of budget deficit and the need to balance it all over again.

We ought to recognize that the budget deficits will not go away even as we slowly come out of this Great Recession, which we eventually will. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, "budget pressures have not abated and, in fact, are increasing. Because unemployment rates remain high — and are projected to stay high well into next year — revenues are likely to remain at or near their current depressed levels. This is likely to cause a new round of cuts."

In Oregon, the near-consensus opinion is that we will experience a jobless economic recovery. It is quite possible that unemployment levels, currently at about 10.5 percent, may just about barely dip down into single-digits even by the end of this biennium. We can, therefore, expect the state budget issues to get complicated — even more than they already are. Thus, it is no surprise that the state's economist is projecting a deficit of $2.5 billion in the next biennial budget. All these mean that it will require Oregonians getting together to figure out what our spending priorities ought to be, not only at the state level, but at county and city governments too.

But it was disheartening to read that 37 percent of the 500 voters who were randomly polled recently did not even know that Oregon, like all the states, sends two senators to the Congress. Making tough choices during bad times requires our collective involvement through a basic understanding of, and involvement in, the civic processes of the state and country.

To that effect, here is a suggestion: Maybe "Tax Day" is a good opportunity to brush up on our civics knowledge, starting with a note of thanks to taxpayers.

Published in the Statesman Journal, April 9, 2010

iPad: packaging + marketing = $$$?

Outsourced

I'm sure you've heard about reverse engineering and industrial espionage -- they are the bread and butter of a competitive tech industry! -- but I had no idea there were firms, such as Chipworks, that specialize in the process. They've just released glorious, revealing details of the Apple iPad's hardware, and a complete breakdown of the new, top-secret A4 processor. For the less-technically-minded, iFixit has a walkthrough for the reverse engineering, too.

The pictures and details are juicy -- you can even order a bunch of die photos! -- but ultimately, there isn't anything exciting under the hood. The iPad is merely a large iPod Touch, with almost identical hardware in places. Chipworks calls the iPad 'a giant battery with a tiny [circuit] board attached to it' -- and looking at the picture above, you can see why!

So, no real news here I'm afraid, unless you're trying to mollify a Mac fanatic. What you're paying for is a large touch-screen and a giant battery -- you are not buying a piece of 'magic', but simply a large iPod Touch. The devil, as always, is in the software. It would not be the first time that Apple has shoehorned some fantastic software into a shiny, but otherwise lackluster hardware package.

In my opinion, the coolest part of this story is that Chipworks tears apart of bleeding-edge technology to produce full, reproducible schematics of a device's circuitry. Nothing is sacred!

More on admissions at the elite universities

In an earlier post, I remarked at the craziness of 93 percent of applicants being rejected at Harvard and Stanford.  Greg Mankiw posts this graphic from another source:

I am all the more convinced that it is not about the education itself, but is about the "brand name" ...

But, what was the story even ten years ago?  Mankiw adds this:

This is part of a longer-term trend.  Here are the admission rates from about 10 years before this graph begins:

Harvard: 12 %
Princeton: 14 %
Yale: 20 %
MIT: 27 %
Stanford: 19 %

Blue sky, white clouds. Yes, even in Oregon ...

Guam tips over, and McCain is not a maverick ...

I think there is something in the water that many politicians are drinking these days.  It is old news that  the internet was described as a series of tubes, or that science itself is routinely debunked.  Now, they are on the social sciences too; Gail Collins summarizes some of the recent developments when she writes:

It’s been a tough time lately for those of us who take social studies seriously.

Examples?

The governor of Virginia has decided to bring slavery into his overview of the history of the Confederacy. Good news, or is this setting the bar a wee bit too low?
...
History took a hit in Texas, where the state Board of Education tried to demote Thomas Jefferson, presumably because of his enthusiasm for separation of church and state. This week, John McCain rewrote his own political biography, telling Newsweek: “I never considered myself a maverick.” And on the geography front, Representative Hank Johnson of Georgia took time during a recent Congressional hearing to express his concern that stationing additional Marines on Guam would make the island “so overly populated that it will tip over and capsize.”

If you remotely thought that the Guam tipping over comment is an exaggeration, well, it is not.  Watch this absolutely surreal pontification by Johnson and, if you are like me, you will wonder how the admiral kept a straight face!

I didn't know Al Sharpton can be this funny ...

It was a hysterically funny Colbert interview

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The Daily Show does sports ... and, yes, Tiger Woods

Tiger Woods' return provides more than enough fodder to comedians; never a dull day in America :)

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Quote of the day

The modern American typically relates warmly to the use of English to the extent that it summons the oral — “You betcha,” “Yes we can!” -- while passing from indifference to discomfort to the extent that its use leans towards the stringent artifice of written language. As such, Sarah Palin can talk, basically, like a child and be lionized by a robust number of perfectly intelligent people as an avatar of American culture. And linguistically, let’s face it: she is.

Complete essay here.  ht

Image of the day: a paradox

Outsourcing comes to academia: grading in Bangalore!

I have often joked that maybe I can outsource many of my responsibilities to India, where there is a surplus of college graduates, with more expected in the coming years.
Ahem, a joke no more.
No, I did not outsource anything ... but, here is the Chronicle  of Higher Education's report on a director of business law and ethics studies at the University of Houston who came up with

a novel solution last fall. She outsourced assignment grading to a company whose employees are mostly in Asia.
Virtual-TA, a service of a company called EduMetry Inc., took over. The goal of the service is to relieve professors and teaching assistants of a traditional and sometimes tiresome task—and even, the company says, to do it better than TA's can.

The graders working for EduMetry, based in a Virginia suburb of Washington, are concentrated in India, Singapore, and Malaysia, along with some in the United States and elsewhere. They do their work online and communicate with professors via e-mail. The company advertises that its graders hold advanced degrees and can quickly turn around assignments with sophisticated commentary, because they are not juggling their own course work, too.

Was daily life always this fascinating with new developments all the time?  I am glad I live now.
The Chronicle also notes that:

The assessors use technology that allows them to embed comments in each document; professors can review the results (and edit them if they choose) before passing assignments back to students. In addition, professors receive a summary of comments from each assignment, designed to show common "trouble spots" among students' answers, among other things. The assessors have no contact with students, and the assignments they grade are stripped of identifying information. Ms. Sherman says most papers are returned in three or four days, which can be key when it comes to how students learn.

No Classroom Insight

Critics of outsourced grading, however, say the lack of a personal relationship is a problem.
"An outside grader has no insight into how classroom discussion may have played into what a student wrote in their paper," says Marilyn Valentino, chair of the board of the Conference on College Composition and Communication and a veteran professor of English at Lorain County Community College. "Are they able to say, 'Oh, I understand where that came from' or 'I understand why they thought that, because Mary said that in class'?"

A rarely discussed topic in academe: the senior-citizen faculty

A few years ago, when I was in California, a friend retired the moment he became eligible for the reason that he did not want to stand in the way of a younger person hoping for a teaching career.  And, yes, his replacement was fresh out of grad school.
It is quite a tough challenge: on the one hand, we gain from the immense knowledge-base that a senior faculty brings.  On the other hand, every single day past retirement is another day that a PhD remains off the tenure-track.  Further, the compensation package of a senior faculty typically is far more than that of a new hire. 

The slowing of retirement since the end of mandatory retirement under federal law, in 1994, has added another growing problem to the job-market mix. At the University of Pennsylvania—the only place for which I can get more or less exact and timely data—we have gone from having no faculty members over 70 in the School of Arts and Sciences, 15 years ago, to 28, or 7.3 percent of the 383 tenured faculty members, in 2010. And the median age of tenured faculty members has risen to 55.
Seven-plus percent is a substantial proportion, especially since each of those senior citizens is arguably blocking at least two assistant-professor slots. Penn could probably add upward of 40 new assistant professors in the School of Arts and Sciences, without significantly increasing its instructional budget, if everyone over 70 retired. (Whether Penn's administrators would actually do that much hiring is, of course, an entirely different matter.)

Anyway, the author, a professor of English and Education at Penn, notes that in the context of the harsh realities of (un)employment in the humanities.  Yes, not a new topic to this blog! And, I should note that the retirement factor is simply one of the many issues that are discussed in that essay. 
The essayist concludes on the following note:

I would much prefer to define our current job-market difficulties as a problem in underdemand rather than oversupply. The facts, however, cannot be denied. After a generation of dithering, we need to act decisively to minimize the damage that our practices are inflicting on thousands of talented young women and men whose aspirations and idealism are jeopardized by our institutional inertia as well as by our laissez-faire, wishful thinking that the job market will simply take care of itself. If we should have learned one lesson from the current financial crisis, it is that all markets need vigilant oversight.

Poem of the day: The Waking

April is National Poetry Month.  So, no better time than now to read up a few poems ... I came across this one, by  Theodore Roethke, titled "The Waking" .... written a long time ago, in 1953, if I understand it correctly

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me, so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

Liberal education under (economic) attack ...

My undergraduate degree is in electrical engineering, but since then my academic life has been tilting far away from "applied science" with immense practical utility to the fascinating liberal arts, whose utility is not immediately calculable.

So, I can truly appreciate the news that liberal education might go through a serious transformation as a result of this Great Recession.   Newsweek has gone one step more (or maybe a few steps?) and titled the article ..."The Death of Liberal Arts" ... Well, the usage of "death" is probably hasty, and reminds me of Mark Twain's quip on reports of his death having been exaggerated.

But, yes, there will be immense consequences for the liberal arts.  For a while now I have blogged about the crisis in the humanities , higher education, and the falling value of the college degree.  If any of my colleagues were willing to listen to me (editor: there are colleagues who talk to you? hmmm!) I have bugged them about how we need to be on the leading edge to reform liberal education from within.  But, as I often joke around, even my dog never listened to me, so why should people, eh! :)
 
Over at the Chronicle, debates and discussions have picked up quite some pace over the state of the Humanities--including in the recent issue.  And, yes, I have blogged about many of them, too, including the essays by Thomas Benton ... This essay by Benton set off quite a raging debate ...  Martha Nussbaum jumped in with her own take on how liberal education is not elitist.

Yes, we are at those metaphorical crossroads.  I am glad that the Newsweek essay ends on a constructive note:

regardless of where students chose to go to school, they still need to get good grades, network, and complete goal-specific internships. "If you don't know that in advance and you major in philosophy, you're in major trouble," says Ceniza-Levine. "You can be Harvard philosophy major, but you'd better have worked at a bank during the summer."
While the tradition of the liberal-arts education may be on the wane nationwide, the most elite schools, such as Harvard, Swarthmore, Middlebury, and Williams, remain committed to its ideal. These top schools are not tweaking their curriculums to add any pre-professional undergraduate programs. Thanks to their hefty endowments, they don't have to. As the economy rebounds, their students, ironically, may be in the best spot. While studying the humanities has become unfashionable and seemingly impractical, the liberal arts also teaches students to think big thoughts—big enough to see beyond specific college majors and adapt to the broader job market.

May we live in interesting times, indeed.

America's energy policy and .... China

The dollar, Renminbi, Geithner, and India

Yes, those four belong in the same context because the US Treasury Secretary is in India, even as the world is getting more and more interested in the tensions over the US' concerns that China is holding its currency down at an artificially lower exchange rate.

First, these tidbits about Geithner and Obama:

During the early 1980s, Geithner's father Peter Geithner oversaw Ford Foundation's microfinance programs in Indonesia developed by Ann Dunham Soetoro, President Barack Obama's mother. Prior to that, Geithner Sr headed the Ford Foundation operations in India, which led to a toddler Tim spending his early years in New Delhi, where he had a crack at cricket but remained true to baseball.

So, tidbits aside, what is the Secretary thinking about these days with the China report due in less than a fortnight?

Geithner suggests, it is the level of comfort US has with India's transparency and fairness, compared with China, with whom Washington has been on the verge of an ugly spat over currency exchange rate manipulation. "The differences are mostly defined by the differences in our economies," Geithner said cautiously, reluctant to be drawn into a discussion on China. "We're not going to be talking in India about the exchange rate regime." India, he says, is "becoming more open, runs a flexible exchange rate regime. Its basic pattern in growth has been less export dependent, oriented over time. Different economy, different structure, different choices."

But, wait, the report on whether China is a currency manipulator is now delayed--it will not come out on the 15th after all ....
Meanwhile, according to the Financial Times:

In its latest estimate, the World Bank has predicted a growth rate of 9.5 per cent for 2010, but many analysts predict even faster expansion of the Chinese economy this year.
Growth in the first quarter alone is estimated at between 11 and 12 per cent.
...
But China’s trading partners, particularly the US, fear that its policy of holding down its exchange rate relative to the dollar is driving overseas demand for its exports which, in turn, is fuelling rapid economic expansion and inflation.

The Economist says that even if the April report does not cite China as a currency manipulator, then it will be only to give China one last chance:

The administration’s best hope is that China moves of its own accord before events in Congress or elsewhere force a confrontation. Tim Geithner, the treasury secretary, is surprisingly confident that China will act. Sander Levin, the usually interventionist-minded chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee which oversees trade matters, advocates multilateral rather than unilateral pressure. So perhaps the administration will give China one last chance and seek a multilateral remedy at the G20 in June. If China still fails to respond, the Treasury, by the time of its autumn report, will no longer be able to deny the obvious.

I tell you, we live in interesting times :)

Admissions at Elite Universities

The undergraduate stratosphere gets further rarer with every passing year.

Take Stanford University's recent announcement about the class of 2014: The university reviewed 32,022 applications from "the largest number of candidates in its history," and sent offers to "just 7.2 percent" of applicants—an admission rate that "sets a university record."

Hmmm .... that means the number of students who received rejection letters from Stanford is .... aaaahhh, who cares!

I recall reading in Nicholas Lehman's article, back some time ago in the Atlantic, that the SAT score remains forever in the student's memory.  It is such a defining number of one's life at a critical fork in the road--where to after high school? I mean, think about the "Stanford rejects" given this piece of data from its class of 2013:

nearly 20 percent of the Class of 2013 posted perfect scores in the SAT Critical Reading and Math exams, and two-thirds of the class earned a GPA of 4.0 and above.

And this was the case when Stanford's admit rate was 7.9%, compared to this year's 7.2%.  Ouch!

Of course, Standford's 7.2% admit rate is bested, ahem, by that old school on the east coast: Harvard

For the first time in Harvard’s history, more than 30,000 students applied to the College, leading to an admission rate of 6.9 percent for the Class of 2014. Letters of admission (and e-mail notifications) were sent on April 1 to 2,110 of the 30,489 applicants....
... more than 3,000 applicants scored a perfect 800 on the SAT Critical Reading Test; 4,100 scored 800 on the SAT Math Test; and nearly 3,600 were ranked first in their high school classes.

93.1 percent of the applicants were rejected .... how many of them knew even beforehand that they didn't stand a chance, but applied anyway?  According to The Daily Beast, Stanford leads the way in being the most stressful environment for students :(

BTW, the average SAT scores at the "flagship" university of the system where I teach ...

Traffic at my blog!

So, after a long time I checked the site traffic report, and nearly fell off the chair with the numbers.  Turns out that one blog post was one hell of an attractor:

This report is for a month span ending on April 3rd.
On April 1st, I had blogged about Google's April Fool joke. Interesting how that attracted so many visitors.  99.14% of them landed at my posting thanks to their search for "april fool."

Even more interesting that 928 of these visitors came here from Google's own googleblog.blogspot.com.  So, why would they come here if they had already read the news there?  That simply stumps me.

BTW, all these are reminders that the web is way better than Santa Claus--it has an excellent memory of what you have been up to and whether you have been naughty or nice :)

Also, did you notice that 172 visitors to my blog came there because of their interest in Tina Munim and Anil Ambani? He he!!!

Incidentally, this is the report about the traffic at my blog.  And then there is the data on RSS subscriptions to my blog.  More on that some other time.  But, while nowhere any big time data these are, the data do answer the question of a tree falling in a forest :)

How much would you pay for the universe?

Earlier this morning, NPR had a segment on the final remaining space shuttle rides.  I recalled how my high school friend, Srikumar, and I were excited to hear about a space shuttle program--yes, we were back in India, in a small town.  It sounded absolutely beyond my imagination that there would be this spacecraft to take astronauts back and forth.  All the more wild it was given that I hadn't seen the inside of an airplane up until then--actually, it was quite a few more years after all this that I actually stepped into an airplane.

Over the last few years, the US has not been able to figure out what its space policy ought to be.  It was bizarre when in the middle of two wars, one day, President Bush jumped up and said that we are going to Mars.  That sounded so hollow.  And now President Obama's comments are far from encouraging when it comes to NASA and space exploration.

I suppose we need a Carl "billions and billions" Sagan to get us all pumped up .... Neil deGrasse Tyson does his part ...

Why is the math "pi" named so?

Yes, π, that ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter ...
That puzzle has now been solved thanks to this puzzle investigator :)

Colbert comments on the David Frum episode :)

A few days ago, I blogged about David Frum's problems with his fellow Republicans .... The best way to follow-up to that ... is from Colbert :)

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Exploring South India in a .... autorickshaw? :)

The Hindu reports that:

That's what a team of adventurers who will be making an epic 2,000-km autorickshaw rally through Tamil Nadu and Kerala believe.
The rally, flagged off here on Sunday, features participants from the U.K., Egypt, Austria, Singapore and Hungary. ...

The 14-day rally will give the participants an opportunity to see the entirely unknown parts of India. It will offer them a chance to observe how the fishing industry works in the idyllic costal villages of Kerala and to sleep under the stars on the coffee plantations on the Yercaud hills. Adrianna Tan, who runs a Singapore-based start-up, said “The autorickshaw is iconic and symbolic of India. People of all classes identify with it. Besides, there are villages where even buses won't stop. With an autorickshaw, you can go anywhere.” 

The team on this "Malabar Rampage" ...?

Tips on driving an autorickshaw?

First, sit comfortably in the driver’s seat.
Prepare to expend an inordinate amount of energy from your left arm. Now yank the stick on the side of your rickshaw really, really hard. It needs to be hard and smooth at the same time - smooth, even past its jerking.
That should get the engine going.
Position yourself comfortably at the driver’s seat again. Put both hands on the handlebars. On your left, the clutch and gears. On your right, the accelerator. At your right foot, the brake.
The gears work, downwards, in this order: first, neutral, second, third, fourth. Clutch to first gear. Release clutch halfway - your rickshaw will move forward. “Give gas” with your right hand (as the Indians say), and simultaneously release the clutch.
Change to whatever gear is appropriate, and don’t tip over while turning.

P.S. You can use your arms and feet in place of indicators.

Note that this group is different from the one that did the Chennai-Mumbai autorickshaw challenge last year :)