Category: Eddication

Correlation & Causality: Why Money Won’t Drive an Economist, Exactly

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In 1992, the beautiful notion that a bunch of disparate countries could get together and form an Economic Union came to pass: the Maastricht Treaty. Like a giddy young couple (well, this would be technically a plural marriage, but anyways…), the countries went to the altar, ’til death do they part.

Because, as is widely touted now, there was no exit clause.

This on its own is enough to give me pause: how, in this litigious, finance-driven society, can ANYONE go to the altar and not have a pre-nup? (No, I didn’t last time — there was nothing to ‘nup, to quote Kirstie Alley — but I will next time).  I get that it’s extremely unattractive to go into a marriage acknowledging the prospect of divorce, but the odds are not in your favor for success. (Nor are they in your favor for combined economies — see “Austria-Hungarian Empire”.)

Lack of forethought aside, someone has come up with a way to arrive at the solution: Simon Wolfson has created a $400k ($250 pounds sterling, 300 Euro) prize to the first person (likely Economist) to come up with a successful, practical way to exit the Euro. (He has a nifty title in addition to the money: Baron Wolfson of Aspley Guise). It’s the second largest economics prize in the world, behind the Nobel.

And here’s where things get interesting: if you read Drive by Dan Pink (or check out the RSA Animate if you’re averse to reading too much), you’ll know that heuristic tasks/jobs cannot, beyond a sustainable living salary, be rewarded via income.  That is to say, if you take someone and you give them an algorithmic task — follow process “A”, exactly — then you can monetarily incentivize them. If their task requires innovation, or creative thinking, though, a monetary incentive will backfire: their solution will be less creative and delivered under greater duress (and likely late).

So why offer a large monetary reward for what is absolutely certain to be an incredibly heuristic task? Clearly they will not be incentivized by the cash.

Best answer? Because they are incentivized by recognition — and this prize is, as stated, second only to the Nobel (one could argue you may win BOTH if you figure out how to do it elegantly). The money itself buys the recognition from people who would otherwise not ordinarily care *who* solved the problem. Think about it: if, some six months from now, someone in a government building figured out how to make this process work, you won’t care — if there’s no prize. The very existence of the prize, by virtue of its sum, is what drives the recognition, and in turn drives the Economist, or Economists, that figure this out.

Here’s hoping it works.

This is Why Physicists Are So Chill

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If you are like me, and have a BS in Zoology you don’t use but cherish because for two years you got to cram your head with facts that come up in truly inappropriate moments at cocktail parties, you’ll know about monkeys.

Specifically, about monkey studies. Psychologists and animal behavioralists LOVE to do studies on monkeys, specifically chimps but also other species, because it’s a close enough derivative to humans that we feel we can draw conclusions but not so close that it will put people in uproar. (The fact that it isn’t technically humans gives some people the license to treat these studies like their horoscope: fully acknowledging those that conform to their ideas of appropriate and discarding the rest like a Tootsie Roll out of one’s Halloween stash).

I accidentally enrolled in an animal behavior class once and had such a good time I enrolled in a few more, this is why despite a declared major in Zoology with what was supposed to be an emphasis in Marine Biology I actually took things like Cellular Mollecular Botany and Evolutionary Genetics: the last two years of college are a smorgasbord and I was an ideal candidate for Overeaters Anonymous. I digress…

One study I’m reminded of constantly was done with (surprise!) monkeys: the effect of a routine, a schedule, on their daily lives. That is to say, your Control group (the group you aren’t fucking with, as it were) gets awoke at a certain time. They get to play at a certain time. They get fed at a certain time. They go to sleep at a certain time. Day in and day out, this schedule does not vary. The Test group (that would be the group you’re fucking with) has a supremely erratic schedule: they never awake at the same time, the time and distance from one activity to another (and, indeed, the order) changes around a lot, etc. Both groups get adequate sleep time and proper diet…. the only thing different is the time at which these things are allowed to happen.

The Test Group will go insane (in a self-or-others injuring way). Every. Time.

One of my mottos is to Encourage Entropy. This is with tongue placed firmly in cheek to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that Entropy Always Increases. (The first is the Law of the Conservation of Energy: Energy can neither be created nor destroyed). But basically the second law states that disorder/chaos, or Entropy, in a system will always increase. Chaoticians love this because that is the sort of butterfly flapping its wings in China that brings the stock market down theory they love to tout (see Jeff Goldblum, Jurassic Park). I like it on the ‘If You Can’t Beat Them, Join Them’ method: left to my own devices I will create an environment so rigid for myself that any disruption therein will send me into a fit of OCD cleaning or some other expression of discomfiture. If I remind myself that there’s a LAW that says it’s supposed to happen, well, then, I’m just obeying the law. And as the Male Person says, I’m a total goody two shoes and will obey the law. In this case, I’ll encourage it along. While cleaning.

Lately the entropy in my life has been increasing at a rate I’m a little less comfortable with. The schedule was set, was changed, was messed with, was righted, was slightly shifted, was slightly shifted back, and is now in some form of stasis for a couple of months until the next round of shift negotiations occurs. The good news is any potential upcoming shifts are likely to be suitably telegraphed, the bad news is I have no idea what they are as of yet (there are, of course, reasonable assumptions and contingency plans).

The Entropy Erratic is furthered by an upcoming change in profession, for which I am very excited, proud, and honored, and totally will talk about it once it’s final. Trust me when I say it’s a move up, and over, and I’m full of technical squee, but we’re not there yet. I think, however, we can all agree that shifting jobs within a company means for a very weird transition period, one I am in currently, where I am leaving job A (and having to download all of my stuff to someone(s) else(s)), and arriving at job B (where I am no longer hot shit, I am not even a lukewarm fart, and I need to learn everything anew). Entropy, in effect, is getting a dopamine rush.

While I do have a reasonable confidence level (about 95%, plus minus 3%) that this will all calm down around mid-December, I am in turn reminded of the Third Law of Thermodynamics: basically, you can’t freeze anything to a total stop. You can slow it down a lot (a total lot!) but the Entropy will always be there, even if you get all Kelvin on its ass. There’s a certain peace in that.

For those of you wondering: there are actually FOUR laws of Thermodynamics. The Zeroth one — yes, it goes 0,1,2,3; like I said, physicists — basically states if you have 2 systems in thermal equilibrium with a third, they are in equilibrium with one another. The practical application of this in terms of my life is that if things are cool at work and things are cool at home then things are cool with me; I continue reminding myself that this law comes *before* the one about entropy increasing.

Show Your Work

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I’m sitting at the dining room table with my son, answering work emails and working on a power point, while he does the 3rd grade equivalent: Math homework. Right now they’re making change (e.g.,” Jose walks into a store with $5 and buys a yo-yo for $2.58, how much change should he get? What’s the fewest coins he could receive?”) (My personal take is Jose shouldn’t be ripped off $2.58 for a yo-yo, that he could probably get a tall latte for that, but that’s another matter).

The problem we are currently facing is the predisposition to guess and/or intuit the answer. Whilst this works about 75% of the time — well, more like 83% of the time — the remaining 25-or-17% of the time it doesn’t. And he marks a wrong answer, and it gets caught in the check (read, Mom review).

Then begins the inexplicable cascade of numbers, Rainman-style, that come from my son: “42! 13! 79! No mom it’s really 12!”. And then I utter the dreaded phrase: “Show your work.”

My brother and I were raised by engineers — Gandalf help us — and thusly hated this phrase ourselves. We *knew* the answers, to sully the page with scribblings that were really academic — literally — to the proceedings seemed poorly required. Oftentimes we’d get grades come back with a B — A for accuracy, but alas we hadn’t shown our work. A deep and abiding distaste for the phrase “Show your work” started. To us, the ANSWER was the beautiful thing. Why show the bones of your effort?

As I progressed up the math chain — I can’t speak for my brother, as I wasn’t around much in his advanced schooling and he would have found me unbearable had I been — I discovered the grade value of “Show your work”. In calculus, and especially differential equations, showing your work can show how you were totally on the right track until step 34, when you saw a deer. Or something. All of a sudden your “C” becomes a “B” and when your GPA is riding on it, this becomes a Big Thing.

When you’re in grad school and you’re funding your GPA it becomes a Really Big Thing. The only class where “Show your work” was a detractant was the Legal Environment of Business, in which I kept confusing what was Right with what was Legal, and I got ding’d for “irrelevant ancillary notes” (true story). On the flip side, I’ve noted that the mark of a really, truly excellent lawyer is one who has the “Brief”, briefly, but with a million annotated facts and appendices, clearly marked, at the ready.

I sit here with my son, nagging him to show his work. He will totally thank me some day when he’s a lawyer.

Editing

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As part of that non-work, non-home, non-PTA poo I previously referenced, I’m knee-deep in documents: big documents, little documents, documents that climb on rocks. Documents that must be scanned, annotated, pdf’d, and emailed. As a result of this — which, I must note, has lasted four weeks now and shows zero signs of letting up — I have learned many things:

1. People who have presumably gone through enough college to acquire a JD are still susceptible to amazingly huge gaffes in grammar, logic, and facts. This is not my person, but someone else’s person, and the fact that this person makes as much as he does makes me weep for the MFA’s of the world. Those sorts of leaps of logic/creative spellings should reside firmly with unicorns, fairies, and unpronounceable pseudo-worlds.

2. My boyfriend’s bulimic cat can immediately sense these, and will puke in disgust (I’d totally join her, but the carpet cleaner couldn’t handle it).

3. The household HP Scanner will lovingly scan each document as an INDIVIDUAL jpeg, to be hand-converted to pdf, and oh you have to rotate them 180 degrees (sure, you could try to feed your documents 180 degrees differently — and discover the HP Scanner then becomes bulimic of its own accord).

4. There is no easy (read: free) software for annotation, so I must send my [descriptive noun redacted] a detailed, bulleted email about the scanned documents. She loves this (at slightly under $300 an hour), but it goes against my norm of power-point “SmartArt”, and I end up involuntarily twitching.

5. The household Scanner is not on the network (still), and so I must do the weird braille method of re-attaching its USB connection to the male person’s machine.

6. Waiting for the aforementioned household scanner will cause you to read your Facebook feed with more interest than you have had in a few weeks, and you will therefore discover Wil Wheaton Collating, making your mind both euphoric and in danger of its own personal Warp Core Breach.

7. All of those people? Who you kinda told but didn’t really about the poo, and the stress, and the non-eating-sleeping-and-general-bowel-dysfunction (oh, wait, TMI)? They totally meant it when they said they were pulling for you, as evidenced by the forty-two customized email messages through various media inquiring as to status of poo and whether poo was in fact, gone.

For the record:

The poo is kinda gone…the stench lingers… and after October 19th I’ll officially hope the fan has kicked in. Really could’ve used a courtesy flush, but it didn’t happen.

In other news, it’s 16 days to my birthday, can I get a pony?

School Daze

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I calculated today that my son comes home with, on average, 1/4 tsp of sand in each shoe from his school. Extrapolated to the pair, that’s 1/2tsp per day, and extrapolated to a school year (roughly 180 days), so that’s roughly 90tsp of sand per year or just under 2 cups of sand.

I wonder if they’ll add that to the back to school supplies.

Review

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Today was my son’s “mid year review” — at school.

There is something nerve-wracking about sitting down and hearing someone evaluate your child. You evaluate your child on a regular basis — yes, you do, it may not be on the quality of their schoolwork, but you do — but it’s different when someone else does it. It’s different when you are evaluated by someone who hasn’t known you your whole life and only in a certain silo of qualities and accomplishments.

Let the record state: I think my son’s teacher is awesome. I think she does a great job. I think she has her hands full with her class load, and I think that if you are reading this and you’re in the Lake Washington School District you should totally vote YES on the levy measure on the February 8th ballot.

As we went through the report card and talked about challenges and how we’d address them, it occurs to me that my annual review is coming up, too. Next Tuesday I will be evaluated by someone who hasn’t known me my whole life on a certain silo of my qualities and accomplishments.

I’m going to have that nightmare about being at school without having studied again, right?

Getting it in Gear

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I have this list of things I think I really ought to learn to do, or should change in my habits. For example, some of the latter include an average of one “me” night per week, or healthier eating habits. The former include things like “learn to ski” and “learn to drive a stick shift”.

Today was my first driving lesson: stick shift. It was in a Subaru which was fancier than any other Subaru I’d been in, and the car itself had been driven to the arctic circle. It had a good deal more computers and junk in it one would expect of a Subaru.

It also had a stick. On the stick was a little diagram, like the three-man Henkel’s diagram, except this one had little numbers (1-5) and an R. We didn’t mess much with that. Instead, there is this other thing it had: a clutch. I can understand the physics of a clutch just fine.

Practical application, however, found me lacking. Safely nestled in the semi-empty parking area in the back of Bellevue Square, my instructor (hm, let’s call him G, to protect the innocent) had me, before starting the car, have my left foot fully extended to fully depress the clutch. Then, my right foot fully extended to depress the brake. Then, and only then, could I start the car. The image you should get here is of someone trying desperately to force their feet through the floorboards, white knuckling the wheel.

At this point, I should note, I hadn’t moved or done anything, except for starting the car.

With the car started, there was oration on how I would carefully lift my foot off of the brake, carefully put said foot (the right foot – Dexter) on the gas so as to get to 1,500 RPM, and then carefully remove my foot (left foot – Sinister) from the clutch, and roll forward.

This I did, but in no way shape or form was it elegant. It was a bit lurchy, although I didn’t stall the car there. I stalled it on the next go, and then at the turn I had to do, and then a third time. The total of stalls were about 3, the total of start/stop practices were roughly 12 (4 laps, 3 each) plus some extra little ones at the end. I learned many things, including:

  • Wearing high-heeled boots is not an intelligent driving choice when dealing with a stick.
  • That little wiggly thing people do with the stick actually has purpose.
  • You can tell if you are revving the car up too much because it sounds different.
  • You can tell if you are at the point where you will not stall because it sounds different.
  • Mall security will wait patiently behind you while you practice driving until your instructor waves them by, whereupon they will rev past you at 40 mph, to illustrate their point.
  • Thirty minutes go fast when you are clenching every muscle below your waist and at the end of your arms.

Tail End of a Wagon

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Remember that part in Indiana Jones, where he’s being dragged behind the truck, through gravelly road, hanging on by his whip?

Harrison Ford actually did that stunt, although he was given extra clothing and they pre-dug a ditch for him to “ride” in. Somehow gravel down the front of your shirt at however many miles per hour doesn’t sound like a good idea, though.

I feel like that lately. Halloween came and went way too quickly, and I am inundated with Christmas decorations throughout Target and any other retail outlet (except, comfortingly, Trader Joes). Folks, it’s not even Thanksgiving yet.

At work, the machine is inexorably charging to the end of the year, an amalgamation of metrics, goals, initiatives, and projects, culminating in an end-of-year event in Las Vegas in which I must present (both personally and professionally). At school, the first progress reports have come out but the schooling gets harder, the volume of new things increases and the personal responsibility the boy must have increases — making the winter break a fantastical respite not only for the holidays (for he celebrates both Hanukkah and Christmas) but for the break from seven hours of daily seating and applying oneself. At home, we are contending with the recent passing of a beloved grand (and great grand)mother as well as the imminent passing of the family pooch; it’s very unlikely she’ll make it to her 10th birthday (Christmas Eve).

Let’s not even get into my sporadic ability to get to the gym — four times last week, but it’s becoming a real project to get it in this week.

I’m attempting to slow down the truck — or at least add speed bumps — by putting new and interesting things here and there. For example, Thursday evening I am going to the Pacific Northwest Ballet to see the All Tharp programme. I have no idea if I’ll like it, the idea hit while listening to Twyla Tharp being interviewed on KUOW’s Weekday with Marcie Sillman.  I have a front-row, far right of stage seat. I will be able to see the dancers up close and personally, but at a hyper angle.

I’ve gone through my annual list of things I planned to do and learn this year — I still do not know how to drive a stick shift, I still do not know how to ski or snowboard (I think I’ll change that to snowshoeing or cross-country ski).  I’m not sure if adding these things is going to slow the wagon down enough for me to get on, or speed it up so I fall off.

Either way, I will still be contending with accelerated gravel a bit longer.

How to Lobby the PTA Way

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The title of this blog is also the title of this morning’s presentation here at the PTA Legislative Assembly.  I am watching a very nicely suited and clear-voiced young man telling me how lobbying isn’t a bad thing. He is reassuring me that nonprofits are allowed to lobby on issues, and that the PTA can take a stance on them (the PTA cannot lobby for or against a candidate).

The film is also telling us how to lobby our congressman. As in, don’t go in with cookies and act all reverent, don’t pitch on things other than the PTA. Show up, act professional, have strategy. Introduce yourself and represent your PTA, get into your agenda, and don’t expect more than 15-20 minutes with your congressional member.

To demonstrate this (including how to prepare), they have a sampling of people to show how PTA people act “wrongly”, and then “correctly”. This sample of people is the same people and includes the Scooby-Doo swirly effect to back up and show the “right” way after showing the “wrong” way. The sampling of people reminds me of the bridge of Star Trek – every creed and color accounted for. I wish I could say that about today’s attendees, who are 75/25 female to male, and 95/5 white to nonwhite.

I find this a bit patronizing, but useful. Do I see myself meeting with my local representatives? Yes. Do I see myself going to Olympia? Quite possibly. Do I see myself dressing in a navy blue power suit to do so? No. (But I won’t be wearing jeans and Doc Martens, either).

The Advocate

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About a month ago I volunteered (again) for something in my son’s PTSA (again). This time, it was Legislative Advocacy. 

To put this into perspective – every PTA/PTSA in Washington State is encouraged to have a Legislative Advocate to present and appear for their school at state events.  There are thousands of schools in the state of Washington. There are not thousands of Legislative Advocates here at the Sea-Tac Marriott, perhaps there is a thousand but I estimate it’s more like 700.

I’m at the Sea-Tac Marriott for the annual PTSA Platform Conference. For two days we go through all of the issues – getting funding, teacher tenure vs. performance, quality of food in the schools, math and science emphasis, literacy, etc. – and then vote on behalf of our school. The larger your PTSA constituency, the more votes you get. I get three this year.

The agenda for today starts with breakout sessions on the variety of topics – in the case of my school, according to the survey we provided to our members, we’re interested in Math & Science, Literacy, and Funding Schools First. Ergo, to these sessions I will go (am going…) in the next three hours. Then there’s Advocacy Training—how to look at the issues, how to get people fired up, why advocacy is important – and caucusing.

The polls open at 9:30pm and are open for 1 hour, 15 minutes.

That’s right. My day as the Advocate started at 7:30 and will end slightly over fourteen hours later. As unpleased as I am with this – and largely it’s because the original agenda I saw released us for the day at 5:45 – I am already finding this a pleasant surprise in other areas. I didn’t honestly expect to be vociferous today; you’d think everyone else thinks the way you do. But when the man in front of our Issue Education Session on Math & Science got up in front of the “class” and asked what was wrong with Math and Science in schools, this is what I heard:

·         I’m worried that kids that like math and science are unfairly labeled as nerds in school

·         My kid only got xyz grade in science last year

·         I’m worried that kids with math majors can’t do anything for a job but teach

Hearing this I thought it prudent to speak up. We need consistency in math and science education, both between schools and through the grade process. We need to start science in our classes earlier – the scientific process (hypothesis – method – experiment – results – review) can be used in not just science but a variety of other fields, even within the purview of schoolwork itself.  To my way of thinking, what children are labeled as – whether it be as a result of what subjects they enjoy, how they dress, or other affinities they have – is not a fault of the subject. It is a fault of the parents, who need to educate their children on how to deal with discrimination and rejection; it is a fault of the school for allowing an environment where such discrimination and rejection is tolerated. It is not a fault of the math curriculum.

Likewise, your child’s score is not a fault of the curriculum – if most of the other kids are scoring within the norm. There’s this thing called statistical analysis (we’ll get into that later) which has this concept called a “bell curve”. It looks like a bell and if most of the kids are in the bulb of the bell and your kid is not, they’re either super-succeeding or failing.  If they’re super-succeeding, get them into an honors class. If they’re failing, help them with their homework (or find someone who can). As to the ability to get a job with a math degree beyond teaching: there are many successful statisticians who seem to be doing just fine with their 150k/year jobs, thanks.

The definition of an Advocate is a person who speaks or writes in support or defense of a person, cause, etc. There is a difference in being an advocate for your child (which is your responsibility within the context of your child and your child’s school, for example) and being an advocate for your school. In short: we are not here to address your individual issues with your children; we are here to address our collective issues with the educational system.