NCAA: Vox on the Rox: Kentucky's scholar-athletes

From Vox

Ezra Klein's much-touted new website Vox's top story tonight is 

UConn Basketball's Dirty Secret 

by Libby Nelson 

The University of Connecticut Huskies made a triumphant return to the NCAA tournament this year — winning the national championship Monday night — after the school was barred from competition in 2013 for poor academic performance.

But UConn's graduation rate for male basketball players is still the worst of any team in the 2014 tournament.

UConn graduates 8 percent of its players, according to the most recent NCAA statistics. To put it another way: of the 12 players who started as freshmen eight years ago, exactly one managed to finish a college degree or leave UConn in good academic standing. 

The University of Florida, whom the Huskies beat to advance to the championship, has a graduation success rate of 60 percent; the University of Kentucky, playing UConn tonight, has a graduation rate of 82 percent.

Okay, but are you really, really sure that Kentucky graduates 82% of its male basketball players? Isn't Kentucky coach John Calipari's whole strategy to recruit one-and-done NBA prospects, who have to spend exactly one year in college before they are eligible for the pros?

"If you recruit guys who you know are going to be there for four years, you'll probably be in the NIT, and that's not a good thing at Kentucky," [Calipari] said. "You recruit the best players you can, and if someone is going to take them in the first round, I tell them to go."

Didn't Kentucky win the NCAA in 2012 and immediately have two freshmen get drafted #1 and #2 by the NBA? Didn't Calipari start five freshmen this year? Doesn't Calipari have one white senior who is still at Kentucky while all his other recruits are in pro ball or long gone? Yes, Jon Hood:

... [Hood] has many friends who are former teammates that have gone on to the NBA while he remained for a five-year career. By Hood’s count, he has 17 numbers in his phone for former Wildcats now in the pros, with whom he at least semi-regularly connects. A good deal of them are the one-and-doners and the early departers, who took leave of Lexington not long after they took a college class for the first time. Hood stayed, the only player on the current Final Four roster remaining from the 2009-10 season, John Calipari’s first in Lexington.

Coach Calipari makes $5.2 million per year. He doesn't get paid that for having a benchwarmer graduate, he gets paid that for recruiting superstars who have no intention of finishing their second semester at UK.

Eventually, the Vox article gets around to admitting that its statistics are from 2003-2006, back in the Tubby Smith Era of recruiting. Kentucky's starting five tonight were mostly under ten years old in 2003-2006. The past is a different country ...

This kind of dumb miscue is normal in the news biz where the goal is to churn out crud fast. But, Ezra Klein has spent three months explaining how he's going to revolutionize journalism by providing Deep Context.

Oh, well, that appears to have lasted about 24 hours ...

Part of what Dead Tree Newspapers provide is institutional memory -- old codgers in the newsroom who have been around long enough to remember things like that Kentucky is different than it was ten years ago, that in fact it's now the most extreme example of one-and-done.

Also, when making a bar chart, there's no need to make each bar a separate color.
    

Jeb Bush's wife was an illegal alien

There's been much discussion of Jeb Bush's speech announcing that illegally entering America is an "act of love" (Mike Tyson should have used that "act of love" defense in his rape trial), but little awareness that Columba Bush, Mrs. Jeb, was likely an illegal alien herself for part of her childhood.

And, yet, illegal immigration seemed to dissipate love within her family, since Mrs. Bush is notably unloving toward her own illegal immigrant father. Here's an AP news story that appeared in the Jacksonville News on 2/14/2001:

Jeb Bush's father-in-law hopes to reconcile with daughter 

By TRACI CARL  

Associated Press Writer 

SILAO, Mexico - Jose Maria Garnica has newspaper photos of his daughter Columba and her husband, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, along with articles on his grandson [George P. Bush], who lobbied for the Latino vote during his uncle's presidential campaign. 

But that's about the only information he has on his daughter's family. Garnica says he hopes President Bush's visit to Mexico on Friday may help him make peace with his 47-year-old daughter. 

Garnica said he hopes to catch a glimpse of Bush. He has gained the support of several local leaders and has a framed poster of Jesus he wants to give the president. 

Local broadcasters and newspapers have portrayed Garnica as the victim of an ungrateful daughter, but Columba Bush has said her father left the family when she was 3. 

Reforma, one of Mexico's leading newspapers, accused Columba of "forgetting her roots." She hasn't publicly responded to the reports, and declined to speak directly with The Associated Press. 

Families divided by a border are common in Mexico. Garnica said he traveled to California in 1960 - when Columba was about 7 years old - got construction work and brought his family north four years later. By then, he and his wife had grown apart and they soon separated, the father said, adding that Columba continued to visit him in California. 

Garnica said their three children - Columba, Francisco and Lucila - spent time with both parents in Mexico and California. 

He said he last saw Columba in 1973, when she told him she was going to the post office in La Puente, Calif. They haven't talked since. 

"That was so many years ago," the 77-year-old Garnica said. "Twenty-seven years isn't just a little bit. It's almost a lifetime." 

Gov. Jeb Bush refused Tuesday to comment on Jose Garnica's account of his relationship with Bush's wife, Columba. A member of the Bush's staff, speaking only on background, said there was no truth to the story that Mrs. Bush went to the post office and never returned. 

Garnica said his daughter Lucila called him this week and told him to stop talking to the media, saying he was "hurting Columba." 

"I don't want to hurt her, but everything I say is true," he said. 

A spokeswoman for Jeb Bush, Katie Baur, said it was a "personal, family issue" and Columba Bush wouldn't comment. 

Columba Bush has kept a relatively low profile. One of the few times she has been in the news was when she failed to declare $19,000 worth of clothing at customs after a Paris shopping spree. She paid a $4,100 fine. 

Garnica receives pension and Social Security checks from the United States - money that lets him live comfortably in Silao. The town is 200 miles northwest of Mexico City and a few miles from the ranch where President Vicente Fox and Bush will meet Friday. 

Garnica said he met Jeb Bush once, in California, when Bush and Columba were dating. The couple met when she was 17 and Bush was on an exchange program in Mexico. 

 

Golf in the Rio Olympics

The Rio de Janeiro Olympics in August 2016 will feature golf for the first time since the early 20th Century. Professional golfers traditionally have not been enthusiastic about Olympic golf since the Olympics just gives you a shiny medal instead of what tour pros really like: one those four foot wide novelty checks with your name written in the "Pay to the Order of" space in Magic Marker 9 inches high.

A quarter of a century ago, there was big talk about holding an Olympic golf tournament at Augusta National during the 1996 Atlanta games, but the tour pros weren't interested and Augusta is closed in August, anyway, because -- although this seemed to come as a surprise to the International Olympic Committee -- it's hot and humid in Georgia in August.

But the golf industry wants to be in the Olympics now. And Brazil might conceivably be a good market someday for golf, since, unlike China, the country has a reasonable amount of land per person. But Brazil has almost zero golf tradition, so a new course is supposed to be built in Rio to host the men's and women's Olympic tournaments.

The Rio Olympic course is the the highest profile golf course commission of the decade. The surprise winner over Jack Nicklaus's and Greg Norman's firms was Gil Hanse, head of a tiny but excellent design firm, who promised to move to Rio for two years and drive the bulldozer himself.

The problem so far has been that exactly who owns the land where the golf course is supposed to go wasn't exactly nailed down. (Economist Hernando de Soto, who has frequently noted Latin America's less than clear-cut property rights, wouldn't be surprised.)

So far, Hanse has roughly shaped the golf course in the dirt, but he's visibly nervous in interviews about having the grass ready in 28 months.

Pete Dye's 1979 island green at TPC

Assuming it gets finished in time, the Olympic course will be a test of the mass appeal of trends in elite golf course design thought away from spectacular and expensive do-or-die holes and toward cheap, complex, and baffling, back to much like St. Andrews in Scotland, which more or less evolved over hundreds of years of play.

A couple of decades ago, Tom Doak pointed out that pros don't fear water hazards anymore, they only fear wind and gravity. In other words, they don't worry about being able to hit the ball far enough to cross a water hazard, they worry about being unable to stop the ball on the fairway or green. Hanse, along with Doak and the Ben Crenshaw-Bill Coore team are the leaders of this generation of architects who have thought hardest about reproducing the subtle challenges of St. Andrews in the 21st Century.

When asked which existing course his Rio course will most resemble, Hanse says, "I think Rustic Canyon (in Los Angeles) would be the closest. It’s set on a similarly sandy site, and, like Rustic, it feels very indigenous to the area."

Rustic Canyon: Now what?

I played Hanse's Rustic Canyon on Wednesday for $36. I don't play much golf these days, but when I do it's almost always at Rustic because the quality to price ratio is so much higher than anywhere else in the greater L.A. area. And now, after Rustic has been open for a dozen years, the grounds crew has the greens in close to US Open quality. (A British Open would be more than pleased with how Rustic's greens played yesterday.) I hit quite a few greens yesterday with my irons, but typically the ball would then slowly, slowly trickle off the green because I hadn't hit the perfect part of the green. And even if I could execute shots perfectly, are my 3-d cognitive skills strong enough to plan shots perfectly?

Yet, Rustic is not a punishing course. The fairways are immensely wide, there are no ponds, streams, or waterfalls. The chief penalty for hitting an indifferent shot is that your ball keeps rolling until it reaches a spot disadvantageous for your next shot. Your score keeps mounting without anything spectacularly bad happening to you.

In theory, Rustic Canyon style courses have a lot going for them: they can be built cheaply on unexciting terrain and they challenge good golfers while not beating up bad golfers. Thus, Rustic Canyon is held in the highest regard by golf course architecture aficionados. On the other hand, you can play Rustic Canyon for $36, so it's not as if it has overwhelmed the golfing public.

It will be interesting to see if Hanse's Olympic course televises well to an even less sophisticated audience.
   

Zara

The 3rd richest man in the world at $64 billion is Amancio Ortega, a low-key Spaniard who owns the lady's clothing brand and retail outlet Zara. I understand how you can get really rich owning Facebook or DOS or most of the the telephone business in Mexico. But how great of a businessman do you have to be to get insanely rich in moderately priced women's clothes? Is there a more competitive business on Earth? What are the defensible barriers to entry? I could see getting rich in clothes if you could trademark, say, blue, and be the only guy allowed to sell blue clothes. Even I could make money doing that. But what's his secret?
  

Ezra Klein's Vox

From the New York Times, a hint as to what the secret sauce of Ezra Klein's much touted Vox.com will be: content repurposification recyclement.

In this high-tech universe, Vox Media’s content management system — which even has its own name, Chorus, and is used to publish all the company’s websites — has earned recognition. ... 

Mr. Klein, hoping to avoid incrementalism — “the biggest source of waste is everything the journalist has written before today,” he said — instead wants his journalists responsible for constantly updating pages that are the ultimate resource on a topic. 

“It would be like a wiki page written by one person with a little attitude,” Ms. Bell explained. 

To help accomplish this, the developers have been building a tool they call the card stack. The cards, trimmed in brilliant canary yellow, contain definitions of essential terms that a reader can turn to if they require more context. For example, a story updating the battle over the Affordable Care Act might include cards explaining the term “insurance exchange.”

Isn't that Bill Atkinson's HyperCard that was released on the Apple Mac in 1987?

Here's an example of Vox: on Ukraine.

Vox is like a cross between 1987-style HyperCards and 1992-style Frequently Asked Question lists. That's not a criticism: those were pretty good formats and it's especially a shame that the FAQ went out of fashion. So, maybe they will come back into fashion?

As for Ezra's idea that journalists should just reuse their old stuff, well, I'm all for doing less work. Personally, I think you people should stop demanding new stuff from me -- I'm still working on my opinion on Paul Walker's death and now you want my Mickey Rooney, too?!? -- and just go mull over my old stuff until you have it memorized. For example, is Monday the 20th anniversary of the beginning of the Rwanda genocide? Well, if you want to understand the fundamental Tutsi v. Hutu issues that will be trotted out misleadingly tomorrow, I wrote a movie review in 2005 offering a new anthropological theory that explains them perhaps better than anything anybody had come up with before (and definitely better than anything I've come up with on the topic since).

But readers seem to draw a fundamental distinction between “yesterday’s news” and “news" thus requiring constant Feeding of the Beast. Is great content management software really going to make that distinction go away for Vox and allow Klein to lavishly monetize yesterday’s news? He seems to think so, although Jeff Bezos apparently didn't agree with him.

Well, best of luck to him.

       

Does this ever work?

From the NYT:

Business Titans Seek to Ease Fears in Ukraine 

By ANDREW HIGGINS 8:53 PM ET 

Kiev is hoping that naming businessmen too rich to bribe to positions of power will help allay fears in the east.

"Too rich to bribe:" this seems to be a common bit of wishful thinking, but how often does it turn out that the guys best at clawing for money suddenly stop clawing? I have the impression that basically this worked with 19th Century Downton Abbey-style English landed aristocrats but nobody else. It certainly didn't work with the ancestors of 19th Century English aristocrats -- you don't get Downton Abbey in the first place by being scrupulous.

More from the NYT:

DNIPROPETROVSK, Ukraine — Two months ago, Hennadiy Korban, a millionaire businessman, fled to Israel to escape retribution for siding with opponents of Ukraine’s president, Viktor F. Yanukovych. After Mr. Yanukovych’s ouster, he flew home in triumph aboard a private plane to begin a new life — as a harried civil servant. 

Mr. Korban, 44, now works 14 hours a day in a drab Soviet-era office block here for a meager salary that he does not bother to take. Business, he said, was more enjoyable and far less stressful than trying to keep Ukraine together. 

But since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in March, and with tens of thousands of Russian troops now massed on Ukraine’s border, to the east of this sprawling industrial city, men like Mr. Korban have become part of a frantic, all-hands-on-deck struggle against President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. 

Unable to throw money at the many problems besieging Ukraine’s bitterly divided east, the fragile and nearly bankrupt government in Kiev, the capital, has instead thrown rich people into a drive to convince the country’s Russian-speaking regions that their future lies not with Russia, but with Ukraine.

Mr. Korban’s boss is Ihor Kolomoysky, who was recently appointed governor of the Dnipropetrovsk region by officials in Kiev. Mr. Kolomoysky, a billionaire involved in banking, oil, metals and the media, ranks as the second- or third-wealthiest man in Ukraine, depending on who is counting. He said he has not counted his fortune himself, noting that “a real rich person is someone who does not know how much he has.”

Actually, I find that pretty unlikely, too.

Another of Mr. Kolomoysky’s deputies is Boris Filatov, Mr. Korban’s business partner in luxury shopping malls and other ventures. ...

The naming of wealthy businessmen to positions of power marks a curious twist in the Ukrainian revolution, which was driven in a large part by public fury at the extensive wealth of a tiny group of plutocrats who prospered under Mr. Yanukovych and, with a few exceptions, stayed on the sidelines throughout three months of protests against him. 

Mr. Kolomoysky, who was mostly outside the country during the protests, said he came up with the idea not as a way to entrench himself and other businessmen in power, but as an emergency response to the fears of Russian speakers in the east, terrified by a revolution they saw as dominated by Ukrainian nationalists from the west.

“This is a signal to society,” Mr. Kolomoysky said. “If oligarchs are in power, feel at ease and view their future as being in Ukraine, then ordinary people will feel even more that they are not under threat.” He conceded, however, that average people “might not respect oligarchs or like them.”

But after being bombarded with Russian claims that fascists had seized power, he said, people in the east were heartened to see a move into government by multimillionaires with no interest in extremist turmoil or a neo-Nazi revival, “particularly when they are of Jewish origin.” 

Mr. Kolomoysky, a Russian-speaking citizen of both Israel and Ukraine, lived until recently in Switzerland, where his wife and son still live. Mr. Kolomoysky and his deputy, Mr. Korban, are both Jewish. 

Mr. Filatov describes himself as “100 percent Russian without a drop of Ukrainian blood.” He, too, fled to Israel in late January.

 
The traditional feudal solution is to make these regional ruling jobs hereditary to encourage the oligarchs to be "stationary bandits" with a long term interest in not despoiling the place too badly because their heirs will inherit it. That doesn't seem like a terribly great solution, but it seems to be better than having "roving bandits" expecting to get their's while the getting's good and fleeing when things get a little too hot for them.
        

Forbes 400 analyzed

The Forbes 400 list of the richest people in America has been published annually since 1982. You might think that economists would find it an attractive resource for analyzing the world, but that rarely happens. Here are excerpts from one of the few papers to do so:

Family, Education, and Sources of Wealth Among the Richest Americans, 1982-2012 

Steven N. Kaplan
University of Chicago Booth School of Business and NBER

Joshua D. Rauh
Stanford University Graduate School of Business, NBER, and the Hoover Institution

Abstract
We examine characteristics of the 400 wealthiest individuals in the U.S. over the past three  decades as tabulated by Forbes Magazine, and analyze which theories of increasing inequality are most consistent with these data. The Forbes 400 in recent years did not grow up as advantaged as in decades past. They are more likely to have started their businesses and to have grown up upper-middle class, not wealthy. Today’s Forbes 400 were able to access education while young, and apply their skills to the most scalable industries: technology, finance, and mass retail. Most of the change occurred by 2001. ... We find that the Forbes 400 in recent years did not grow up as advantaged as in decades past. Those in the Forbes 400 today are less likely to have inherited their wealth or to have grown up wealthy. They are equally likely to have grown up with no wealth as in the 1980s The biggest change is that they are more likely to have started their businesses having grown up with some wealth, what we consider to be the equivalent of upper middle class. The Forbes 400 of today also are those who were able to access education while young and apply their skills to  the most scalable industries: technology, finance, and mass retail.

... We collected these lists approximately every ten years, in 1982, 1992, 2001, and 2011. ... 

The generation is usually an integer but if the individual inherited a relatively small business and built it into a much larger one we coded it as a 1.5, as for example David and Charles Koch of Koch Industries. ... 

We separately code the extent to which the individual grew up wealthy, defining three categories: little or no wealth in the family, some wealth in the family, or wealthy. For example, the Koch Brothers grew up wealthy. Bill Gates, whose father co-founded a successful law firm, grew up with some wealth, as did, for example, sons and daughters of U.S. Congressmen (Warren Buffet), factory owners (James Simons), newspaper publishers (Philip Knight), retail owners (Stephen Schwarzman), and psychiatrists (Dustin Moskovitz). We view the “some wealth” category as the equivalent of an upper middle class upbringing. ... 

The Forbes 400 represent $92 billion of wealth in 1982, $301 billion in 1992, $943  billion in 2001, and $1.525 trillion in 2011. In constant 2011 dollars, the wealth amounted to $214 billion in 1982, $483 billion in 1992, $1.197 trillion in 2001, and $1.525 trillion in 2011. ... 

Figure 1 shows that in the U.S., the share of Forbes 400 individuals who are the first generation in their family to run their businesses has risen dramatically from 40% in 1982 to 69% in 2011. Figure 2 illustrates that the percent that grew up wealthy fell from 60% to 32% while the percent that grew up with some money in the family rose by a similar amount. The share that grew up poor remained constant at roughly 20%. The Forbes 400 of recent years therefore did not grow up nearly as advantaged as those in decades past.

I'm going to raise the methodological quibble that their starting point of the first Forbes 400 in 1982 may have been overly biased toward famous Old Family Money names like Rockefeller and Ford. It would have been natural for the Forbes researchers to first check off all the scions whom readers would expect to find on the list, and then over the years find more obscure self-made men.

After all these years, the media is still stumbling upon zillionaires who haven't been in the public eye before because they keep a low profile and mind their own business (very, very well). For example, not until August 2013 did the press discover New Hampshire grocery wholesaler Richard B. Cohen, who may be about as rich as Mark Zuckerberg, but who hasn't had a hit movie made about his life, and probably doesn't feel an aching hole in his soul over that fact, either.

So, it's not all that unlikely that the very first Forbes 400 simply missed some self-made rich guys.

But, overall, there weren't all that many great fortunes made in the 1930-1982 era, so the descendants of the pre-1929 rich remained more significant among the richest than they are today. For example, the only sizable personal golf course I can recall being built in that time was Walter Annenberg's Sunnylands in Palm Springs that Obama now uses to meet foreign dignitaries.

By the way, this would predict that heirs will increasingly fill up the Forbes 400 in the future as the big money makers of the late 20th Century die off and leave their money to their descendants. Right now we're in a lull period when most of the guys who made it hugely rich in the last quarter of the 20th Century are still alive. But they'll be dying off in increasing numbers and being replaced by their heirs as time goes by. For example, the various Waltons take up a lot of space on the Forbes 400 ever since Sam Walton died in 1992, and there will be more such heirs on the list in the future.

In general, I think it's likely that more of the new fortunes today come out of the upper middle class than in the past, but it should be investigated carefully.

Those who grew up with some wealth in the family were far more likely to start their own businesses rather than inherit family businesses. Furthermore, these findings about generation and wealth in the family are very similar when the results are weighted by wealth. These results suggest that there has been an increase, not a decrease, in wealth mobility at the very top. ... 

As we show in Kaplan and Rauh (2013), some of these patterns are reflected globally but others are not. The share of global billionaires who are first-generation in the business rose by a similar amount abroad as in the US. The technology component has become more important globally, but nowhere has it become as important as in the US. Computer technology and money management are increasingly represented among billionaires globally, but the category that gained the most is mining/metals. Energy also saw substantial gains globally, whereas it fell in the US.

The 1982 Forbes 400 was full of J.R. Ewing-type oilmen, but many were gone by the mid-1980s, when the list was suddenly full of Donald Trump-types who had bought Manhattan office buildings in the 1970s. By picking only one year per decade, it's a little hard for the researchers to disentangle short term swings like that from the long-term trends (finance and tech uber alles).

This paper makes no mention of the ethnicity of the billionaires, but here's an estimate.

There is clearly a greater increase in wealth being derived from natural resources outside than within the U.S.  

Perhaps the most striking difference between the wealthiest individuals in the US and around the world is that the share of non-US billionaires who grew up without any wealth at all has risen from under 30% in 1987 to over 50% in 2012. The share that grew up with some but not large wealth has hovered around 20%, whereas the share that grew up wealthy plummeted.

A large fraction of these global billionaires grew up under communism (China, Russia, Ukraine) or socialism (India, etc.).

   

Pax Dickinson on World War G

From Twitter last summer:

at least if we end up getting into a nuclear standoff with Russia over gay rights we'll know this universe is just a satirical simulation 

— Pax Dickinson (@paxdickinson) July 31, 2013

"Technology's Man Problem" and H-1B

Yesterday I posted about the huge article, "Technology's Man Problem," in which the New York Times got itself pranked by a funny lady pornographer into taking seriously her complaints about how the white male nerd, Pax Dickinson, she had hired to build her sexting app was sexist.

The comments from NYT readers are depressingly obtuse, but here are a couple of interest:

JULIA Albuquerque 18 hours ago 

After 18 years in product engineering for a household name technology company, I took a buyout package during a recent force reduction. I am not planning to look for a pure engineering job, not because I do not love computer engineering, but because I am tired of not being valued for all of the things I bring to the table, both tech skills and soft skills. 

The elephant in the room that no one talks about is the difference in the way different ethnic cultures value (or don't value) women. While American mid-level managers occasionally needed to be reminded that women were part of the org too, most of the patronizing behavior and discounting of women's accomplishments came from Asian-born managers. (I did not observe this from American-born managers who were of Asian ethnicity.) They truly do not see that they are doing anything wrong. It is how they were raised. As companies go global, we have to have that piece of the conversation.
Flag79Recommended 

Margaret Atlanta 17 hours ago 

What I find is that increasingly the men in my office simply shut out the women - from socializing, work opportunities, recognition - the boys club effect is intensified when having to work with people from southern Asia. Sorry, but the men (and frequently the women) don't work well with American women - it is not in their upbringing and there are few ways to deal with this. I'm sure this will bring a host of complaints, but this is what I am experiencing and it is hard to see the sexism and racism on a daily basis.
Flag44Recommended 

Of course, nobody is connecting the dots to the H-1B visa program beloved by "immigration reform activists" like Mark Zuckerberg, which allows tech firms to hire foreign men instead of American women.

   

Books? "I already have one"

From the New York Times:

Books, and Compassion, From Birth

By GINIA BELLAFANTE 

Last year, when I was visiting a public school in Sunset Park in Brooklyn for teenagers with boundless difficulties, my host, a poet who teaches at various city schools, mentioned a student who had become pregnant. Hoping to start a library for the child soon to arrive, the poet told the young woman embarking on motherhood that she would like to give her some books — books of the kind her own grandchildren growing up in a very different Brooklyn had by the dozens. 

The offer was met skeptically. “I already have one,” the girl said.

That punchline sounds a little too good to be true, but I can't find evidence online that it's lifted from an old joke, so maybe it's for real.

The successful fight for universal prekindergarten in New York City, a feat the White House called remarkable last week, will allow the city to add 21,440 classroom seats for 4-year-olds this fall and 20,000 more in the fall of 2015, according to the Education Department. As ambitious and important as this initiative is, it cannot, by design, solve the problem of the high school student who thinks one book is enough, and does not yet understand the extent to which parents are obliged to serve as instructors and educators, expanding vocabularies through talking and reading — through exposition and illumination — long before the advent of formal schooling.

... we should concentrate our energies on helping the most vulnerable parents and children beginning at, or before, birth. 

How about 9 months and 1 day before birth, as in: Don't Get Pregnant!

Programs for 4-year-olds and even 3-year-olds, as Mr. Whitehurst put it, “come too late.” 

Indeed.

This is hardly a revelation, and yet there has been a squeamishness on the left to create sweeping policy out of the kind of intimate intervention implied, a fear of the judgment and condescension ferried in exporting the habits of West End Avenue to Central Brooklyn or the South Bronx. No one wants to live in a world in which social workers are marching through apartments mandating the use of colorful, laminated place mats emblazoned with pictures of tiny kangaroos and the periodic table. 

No, it's much better if the Central Brooklyn teenage mom drops her child off at Mayor De Blasio's pre-K and then heads home for a nap so she'll have the energy to hit the clubs again tonight to make another baby.
   

NYT: White male nerds - Can't live with 'em, can't get rich without 'em

"Glimpse is the most fun, private way to send disappearing photo and video messages."

From the New York Times, the story of a woman who shut down her MakeOut Labs startup to start a sexting app called Glimpse (modeled upon Snatchsnap).

But she quit because of all the sexists in the sexting biz. (Or at least she got the NYT to believe that.)

Stop snickering. It's a national crisis.

Technology’s Man Problem 

By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER   APRIL 5, 2014

Elissa Shevinsky can pinpoint the moment when she felt that she no longer belonged. 

She was at a friend’s house last Sept. 8, watching the live stream of the TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon on her laptop and iPhone. Entrepreneurs were showing off their products, and two young Australian men, David Boulton and Jethro Batts, stood behind the podium to give their presentation. “Titstare is an app where you take photos of yourself staring at tits,” Mr. Boulton began, as photographs of women’s chests on a cellphone flashed on the screen behind him. 

After some banter, Mr. Batts concluded, “This is the breast hack ever.” 

The crowd — overwhelmingly young, white, hoodie-wearing men — guffawed. 

Something in Ms. Shevinsky’s mind clicked. If ever there was proof that the tech industry needed more women, she thought, this was it. ...

Ms. Shevinsky felt pushed to the edge. Women who enter fields dominated by men often feel this way. They love the work and want to fit in. But then something happens — a slight or a major offense — and they suddenly feel like outsiders. The question for newcomers to a field has always been when to play along and when to push back. 

Uh, New York Times, in reality Ms. Shevinsky is not your maiden aunt, she's the CEO of Glimpse Labs. From her FAQ for her quasi-pornographic Glimpse App:

Q. "So, like, this is for pictures of my weenie?" 

A. "Um. Uh. Wut?" 

Q. "You know. SEXTING. I have this little dance I like to do...." 

A. "Oh, right. That. So, yeah - we’re great for photos and videos that you want to share with someone special. We’re excited about all the different things we can express to each other when we know we’re not being overheard. ..."

If I'd used Glimpse, I'd be Mayor!

As a commenter noted, although she may be getting tons of coverage in the New York Times for objecting to an app called TitStare, her own app could be called TitShow.

In other words, Ms. Shevinsky is a veteran promoter of semi-pornographic businesses who just exploited the clueless humorless feminism of the NYT to get a huge dose of free national publicity as the latest victim of the Rich White Man, Silicon Valley edition.

Well played, Ms. Shevinsky!

Back to the NYT's lamentation over the insensitivity shown to the blushing Ms. Shevinsky:

Today, even as so many barriers have fallen — whether at elite universities, where women outnumber men, or in running for the presidency, where polls show that fewer people think gender makes a difference — computer engineering, the most innovative sector of the economy, remains behind. Many women who want to be engineers encounter a field where they not only are significantly underrepresented but also feel pushed away. 

Tech executives often fault schools, parents or society in general for failing to encourage girls to pursue computer science. But something else is at play in the industry: Among the women who join the field, 52 percent leave by midcareer, a startling attrition rate that is double that for men, according to research from the Harvard Business School. 

A culprit, many people in the field say, is a sexist, alpha-male culture that can make women and other people who don’t fit the mold feel unwelcome, demeaned or even endangered.

And / or they quit the tech industry to be the wife and homemaker for one of those alpha males. It's like that giant hub-bub last year about how women students at Harvard Business School weren't getting as good grades as men, and it finally turned out to be because they were going out on so many dates with future captains of industry.

“It’s a thousand tiny paper cuts,” is how Ashe Dryden, a programmer who now consults on increasing diversity in technology, described working in tech. “I’ve been a programmer for 13 years, and I’ve always been one of the only women and queer people in the room. I’ve been harassed, I’ve had people make suggestive comments to me, I’ve had people basically dismiss my expertise. I’ve gotten rape and death threats just for speaking out about this stuff.” ...

Ms. Shevinsky never received death threats, but she experienced her share of come-ons and slights. A few days after Mr. Dickinson’s “It is not misogyny” tweet, she quit Glimpse. She had been aware of earlier cringe-making tweets in which her business partner had joked about rape or questioned even the most basic feminist precepts. (“Women’s suffrage and individual freedom are incompatible. How’s that for an unpopular truth?”) Still, she admired Mr. Dickinson’s technical skills and work ethic. Married and then 40, he was more experienced and serious about work than many other tech types she knew, and she said he always treated her with respect. 

But after the Twitter controversy, she decided that she just couldn’t work with him anymore. 

Ms. Shevinsky’s epiphany, however, wasn’t just about Mr. Dickinson or a couple of engineers. It was about computer-engineering culture and her relationship with it. She had enjoyed being “one of the bros” — throwing back whiskey and rubbing shoulders with M.I.T. graduates. And if that sometimes meant fake-laughing as her colleagues cracked jokes about porn, so be it. 

Uh, you're starting a sexting business ...

Two days after the TechCrunch show, Business Insider forced Mr. Dickinson to resign. The Australian entrepreneurs and TechCrunch each apologized. But incidents like these aren’t exceptional. 

“We see these stories, ‘Why aren’t there more women in computer science and engineering?’ and there’s all these complicated answers like, ‘School advisers don’t have them take math and physics,’ and it’s probably true,” said Lauren Weinstein, a man who has spent his four-decade career in tech working mostly with other men, and is currently a consultant for Google. 

“But I think there’s probably a simpler reason,” he said, “which is these guys are just jerks, and women know it.” 

The choice for people who are uncomfortable with the “bro” culture is to try to change it or to leave — and even women who are fed up don’t always agree on how to go about making a change. But leaving can be hard too. 

“There was only one thing I wanted to do,” Ms. Shevinsky said. “Be the C.E.O. of Glimpse.” 

When Ms. Shevinsky was introduced to engineering culture at Williams College, she got no hint of sexism. A political theory major, she learned to code from a boyfriend, and she described their engineer friends as “forward-thinking feminists.” 

She worked in product development for a number of start-ups and was a co-founder of a dating site.

MakeOut Labs

She settled in New York, where she got to know Mr. Dickinson at tech meet-ups. When she had a new business idea — a kind of Snapchat for adults that prevents people from taking screen shots of private pictures — she sought out his advice.

Last spring, they decided to build the app together. At first, they conceived it as a sexting product,

Uh ...

but later they shifted to a service that could be used by anyone concerned about keeping their messages safe from prying eyes. They called it Glimpse. 

That sounds totally non-sexting: "Glimpse."

By August, Ms. Shevinsky had closed her dating site to work on Glimpse. Mr. Dickinson, who had his full-time job at Business Insider, helped when he could. 

“I remember thinking just that I was so lucky that Pax was going to work with me,” Ms. Shevinsky said. “At the time I was still relatively unknown, and he was one of the best technologists I’d met.” 

Computer science wasn’t always dominated by men. “In the beginning, the word ‘computers’ meant ‘women,’ ” says Ruth Oldenziel, a professor at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands who studies history, gender and technology. Six women programmed one of the most famous computers in history — the 30-ton Eniac — for the United States Army during World War II. 

But as with many professions, Dr. Oldenziel said, once programming gained prestige, women were pushed out. Over the decades, the share of women in computing has continued to decline. In 2012, just 18 percent of computer-science college graduates were women, down from 37 percent in 1985, according to the National Center for Women & Information Technology. ...

Tech’s biggest companies say that recruiting women is a priority. “If we do that, there’s no question we’ll more than double the rate of technology output in the world,” Larry Page, the chief executive of Google, said last spring. Yet at Google, less than a fifth of the engineers are women.

In other words, Larry's lying.

That’s a typical figure. Twenty percent of software developers are women, according to the Labor Department, and fewer than 6 percent of engineers are black or Hispanic. Comparatively, 56 percent of people in business and financial-operations jobs are women, as are 36 percent of physicians and surgeons and one-third of lawyers.

At tech start-ups, often considered the most desirable places to work, the number of women appears to be even lower. The companies generally don’t release these numbers publicly, but an engineer at Pinterest has collected data from people at 133 start-ups and found that an average of 12 percent of the engineers are women. 

Sexism exists in many places, but start-up companies have particular qualities that can allow problems to go unchecked. The lines between work and social life are often blurry, because people tend to be young and to work long hours, and the founders and first employees are often friends. And start-ups pride themselves on a lack of bureaucracy, forgoing big-company layers like human resources departments. They say they can move faster that way, without becoming bogged down in protocol. 

But a result can be an anything-goes atmosphere, said Julie Ann Horvath, a software designer and developer who publicly quit her job last month at GitHub, the coding website, saying that there was a culture of intimidation and disrespect of women. GitHub, founded in 2008, hired a senior H.R. executive only in January. 

“If there is no structure, that’s actually more harmful to marginalized people,” Ms. Horvath said in an interview while she still worked at GitHub. “It’s just unprofessional. Tech needs to grow up in a lot of ways.” ...

“In engineering, whoever owns the code, they have the power,” said Ana Redmond, a software engineer. When she worked as a senior engineer at a big company, Expedia, she said she was constantly underestimated by male colleagues and suffered because she was not willing to leave her children to work the hours needed to “own the code.”

Uh ...

Social media, where people carefully build their public personas, often become bullhorns for offensive comments. 

After the Titstare presentation, a commenter calling himself White_N_Nerdy wrote on Reddit, “I’m honestly trying to understand why anyone says that females are ‘needed’ in the tech industry.” He continued: “The tech community works fine without females, just like any other mostly male industry. Feminists probably just want women making more money.” 

Uh ...

That sense of being targeted as a minority happens at the office, too. That is part of the reason nearly a third of the women who leave technology jobs move to nontechnical ones, according to the Harvard study.

Or maybe because they discover they don't like technical jobs and shouldn't have listened to the feminist hype in the first place?

In summary, I'm shocked, shocked to hear of sexism in the sexting business. Have we no shame?

P.S. At the end of the article, Ms. Shevinsky gets a suitably chastened and sensitized Pax Dickinson back working for her, having gotten thousands of words of free publicity in the New York Times for their sexting app startup because it illustrates a grave societal crisis. Or something.

A cynic might wonder if the whole thing is a publicity stunt.

A general pattern is that as public discourse gets more bogged down by crimestop stupidity, it becomes easier for clever promoters like the amusing Ms. Shevinsky to put one over on even the bright people at the New York Times by pressing all the right ideological buttons.
   

Olde tymes at iSteve ...

Judging from today's Google searches, the whole world is suddenly interested in my 2001 UPI article on how the Nabisco ladies' golf tournament in Palm Springs functions as a national Lesbian Spring Break:

Lesbians Turn Out for Ladies Golf Championship
by Steve Sailer
March 26, 2001

 

UKIP winning hearts and minds of Brits

A major global political trend is the rise of immigration restrictionism wherever it is allowed to participate in an even footing in the national debate. For example, in Britain the fourth party United Kingdom Independence Party's Nigel Farage has been allowed to hold two televised debates with the deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, leader of the third party Liberal Democrats. Here are some video highlights.

From The Guardian:

Even Lib Dem voters thought Farage won the debate against Clegg 

Guardian/ICM poll finds 69% of viewers giving victory to the Ukip frontman, while just 31% think that Liberal Democrat leader won 

Nick Clegg suffered a resounding defeat in Wednesday's televised Europe debate with Nigel Farage, according to an instant Guardian/ICM poll. Of viewers giving a verdict, 69% said Ukip's frontman had won, with just 31% giving victory to the Liberal Democrat leader. 

Viewers also judged, by 49% to 39%, that Nigel Farage came across as having the "more appealing personality". By an emphatic 64% to 30% margin viewers thought he had the better arguments. 

Farage was judged the victor with ICM across all age groups and regions, and even among viewers who had been Lib Dem voters in 2010 – only 41% of those who had backed Clegg in the last election thought he came out on top, as against 59% who thought Farage did. 

Whereas only 7% of viewers say they are now more likely to vote Lib Dem in next month's Euro election, 38% say the same of Ukip.

     

"The Grand Budapest Hotel"

Wes Anderson movies, such as 2012's Moonrise Kingdom, generally get on my nerves quickly, but I quite enjoyed almost all of this one. 

Granted, this movie about the concierge (Ralph Fiennes as Monsieur Gustave) at a pre-WWII Austrian luxury hotel is almost entirely made out of frosting -- Viennese pastries and other desserts provide much of Anderson's inspiration for his extravagant art direction. There really isn't much else in the movie besides endless riffs on what the Austro-Hungarian Empire would have had the budget to look like if the unfortunate events of 1914-18 had not transpired. But, old-time Austria and Wes Anderson are made for each other. Anderson has the worldview of a talented, refined, wealthy, and spoiled 12-year-old boy, and for whatever reason Habsburgian styles are an excellent fit for him.

Granted, the movie's plot is just an excuse for Anderson to indulge his cinematic sweet tooth for all things visually mitteleuropäisch. As usual, Anderson mostly just squares up the camera head on like he's making 2001. Anderson's constant dead center framing of shots -- And now look what I've dreamed up this time! -- gives the impression of a child who must have been endlessly praised for his creativity. But in The Grand Budapest Hotel his imagination almost lives up to the smugness of his cinematography.

And the constant guest appearances by Anderson's movie star friends, most of whom have discordantly American accents, start to get tiresome. (Is that Alan Arkin or Harvey Keitel as the con boss in the prison Monsieur Gustave gets sentenced to?) 

And, as in most Wes Anderson movies, there are remarkably few jokes. His movies always look like they are going to be extremely funny, but they almost never are, especially now that the careers of Anderson and his old college buddy, the genuinely amusing Owen Wilson, have diverged since their 1996 debut Bottle Rocket.

Fortunately, all the guest appearances really work just as a setup for the final cameo, in which Wilson, with his Texan accent, steps in temporarily at concierge for Monsieur Gustave as Monsieur Chuck. The joke is more or less: "Now you may be thinking that I, Owen Wilson, don't seem that culturally appropriate as the concierge of an Austrian hotel in 1932, and you may have a point; but, still, you gotta admit I would have been a great concierge and you would have given me a huge tip."

     

Thinking like a Russian about Croatia 1995 and Georgia 2008

I hadn't realized before how much the American-encouraged attack by Georgia on Russian-backed South Ossetia in 2008 looks to the Kremlin like the same playbook as the two American-planned Croat offensives against the Serb breakaway Krajina republic in Croatia in 1995. The second American-planned offensive by the Croats, Operation Storm, was the biggest land battle in Europe since 1945.

It's hard for Americans to remember all the times our side has militarily pushed around other sides. But the Russians remember, so it's worth it to recall how similar Croatia in 1995 and Georgia in 2008 look to the Kremlin.

Slavic Orthodox Serbia is a sort of mini-Russia that was at the core of a sort of mini-Soviet Union called Yugoslavia. So, Russians paid a lot of attention to what happened to Serbia in the 1990s, just as they did in 1914 when the Czar destroyed his dynasty in defense of Serbia.

Serbia is kind of a cultural outpost of Russia, the way Afghanistan is oddly like Arabia. Just as the Afghans have all the backwardness of the Arabs but without any oil, the Serbs have managed to make themselves highly unpopular without ever permanently achieving the defensive depth of the Russians.

The test run for Croatia's American-nurtured offensive capability was Operation Flash in May 1995. It was followed by the big Operation Storm in August 1995 that ethnically cleansed 150,000 or more Serbs from Croat territory. This was the largest European land battle since 1945.

I can recall an NPR war correspondent explaining at the time that US military men had been training the Croats for months in how to fight like a modern Operation Desert Storm army, so it was going to be a pushover, which it was: four days of fighting and then it was all over except for the refugees. When people say violence never solves anything, well, Operation Storm pretty much solved Croatia's problems with having a large, violent Serbian minority.

Since then, however, a lot of opacity has been dumped on American involvement in preparing the groundwork for Operation Storm. Although it was the best executed military operation in a war that generally resembled an extended gang fight, not surprisingly some Croats ran amok and committed war crimes -- not as bad as what the Serbs did, in between the two Croat offensives, to Muslim men at Srebrenica in Bosnia in July 1995, but still not nice.

Also, parts of the U.S. government didn't tell other parts what they were up to. The U.S. Ambassador to Croatia, for example, appears to have been sincerely appalled by the huge ethnic cleansing by Croatia, but he wasn't kept in the loop of planning the offensive. Or something.

There was a UN ban on arms shipments to participants in the Yugoslav wars, so with official U.S. military involvement blocked from active involvement, the Croat government hired Military Professional Resources, Inc. of Alexandria, VA, which employs retired U.S. military officials to advise countries okayed by the U.S. government. Most notably, MPRI employed General Carl Vuono, who had been U.S. Army Chief of Staff from 1987-1991 (i.e., during Desert Storm; i.e., he knows what he's doing). Supposedly, Gen. Vuono was just in Croatia in 1995 to advise the Croatian army on how to "transition to democracy" and subjects like how to fight AirLand Battle 2000 never came up. I mean, if you were a Croatian general intending to open a front 390 miles long, why would you ask one of the main architects of Operation Desert Storm for tips and pointers on how to fight Operation Storm? You'd ask him for advice on democratic transitioningness instead. And the similarity of names of the operations is just a coincidence.

MPRI, interestingly enough, was in Georgia in 2008 training Georgian commandos. But, US involvement with the Georgian Army didn't have to be limited to deep state connections: because Georgia had just been put on the first rung for admission to NATO, 1,000 U.S. troops were in Georgia conducting military exercises with Georgian troops in July 2008: the Immediate Response training exercise. Within 10 days of the American troops leaving, 10,000 Georgian troops surged across the internationally established and peacekeeper maintained line of control into South Ossetia. But the Georgian commandos failed to take out the Roki Tunnel, and the Georgian army was defeated by Russian reinforcements. (Note that neither army performed terribly well.)

So, from the Kremlin's perspective, the Georgian 2008 attack looks a lot like the Croatian 1995 attacks. A major difference in the outcome was that the Yugoslav national army didn't come to the defense of the Serb breakaway republic of Krajina in 1995 the way the Russian national army came to the defense of the breakaway republic of South Ossetia in 2008.
    

Turkish PM supported by plastic surgery cult

Back on New Year's Day, I reported on the Gulenist cult that has taken over the Turkish police and is trying to overthrow prime minister Erdogan by bugging his phone calls while he discusses where to stash all the millions in cash he's skimmed. But to the surprise of Western analysts, Erdogan more or less won the recent municipal elections.

Although the business / test prep Gulen cult headquartered in the Poconos is out to get him, Erdogan is supported by the Adnan Oktar / Harun Yahya cult of Islamic creationists / plastic surgery addicts. I can't begin to understand what the Oktar weirdness is all about, but he seems to do verbal battle with Richard Dawkins on his television talk show in which he talks and talks while babes in heavy makeup laugh at his witticisms. There's something kind of Japanese about his TV shows.
     

Do Ivy League schools collude on admissions?

From The Wire:

Why the All-Ivy League Story Stirs Up Tensions Between African Immigrants and Black Americans 

By Arit John

The story of the first-generation Ghanian-American student accepted by all eight Ivy league schools is wonderful, but it also stirs up the tension between black Americans and recent African immigrants — especially when you describe him as "not a typical African-American kid." That's been the reaction to USA Today's profile on Kwasi Enin, a Long Island high schooler who got into the nation's most competitive schools through hard work and, according to IvyWise CEO Katherine Cohen, being African (and being male).

Here's a semi-off-topic question. Leaving aside affirmative action and all that, how unusual is it for a high school student to be accepted at all eight Ivy League schools?

Top colleges would have at least a couple of self-interested reasons for sharing information with each other on who they want to admit and agreeing not to make offers to their peers' favorites. They don't want to get into a scholarship bidding war over the best students; and they don't want their "yield" percentage to be driven down because they make offers to kids who get offers from everybody.

Into the early 1990s, the Ivies, MIT, and some other famous colleges had a price-fixing ring that met every year called the Overlap Group to make sure they didn't compete very hard over individual students.

The Elder Bush administration accused the cartel of violating the Sherman Anti-Trust. The Ivies shamefacedly denied wrongdoing but promised not to do it anymore. MIT, however, went to court, arguing that laws don't apply to elite colleges because, well, we're special. MIT lost in court in 1992, appealed, and then, as so often happens, the incoming Clinton Administration dropped the case they were winning on the ground that elite colleges are on their side.

Then Congress passed a 568 law that provides an anti-trust exemption. The 568 cartel was formed, but, notably, it doesn't currently include the four richest colleges: Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Princeton. (Their lavish financial aid perhaps explains a little about why Harvard has gotten so good in basketball and Stanford in football.)

Okay, that's the background. Now can anybody answer: do top colleges get together and collude on who will make offers to the most desirable students? Obviously, all Ivies will want the black male who averages 750 on the SAT, but if they all make him offers, 7 out 8 will get their "yield" percentage dinged on the USNWR charts because he can only accept one acceptance.

So, do top colleges typically pre-arrange that they won't all offer acceptances to all the top candidates, but somehow the cartel broke down here? Or is the Overlap Group completely a thing of the past these days?

At one point the piece reads: 

Being a first-generation American from Ghana also helps him stand out, Cohen says. "He's not a typical African-American kid." 

"Not a typical African-American kid" is being read as an allusion to the lazy black American stereotype. The tension comes from the fact that some African immigrants buy into that stereotype, which gets turned into "Africans don't like black people." This has almost nothing to do with Enin, who is obviously a remarkable young man, and everything to do with how America perceives and portrays black Americans and African immigrants.  

In January, Luvvie Ajayi, a Nigerian-born immigrant, tried to explain "akata," a word some Nigerians use to refer to black Americans that translates into wild animal. (Note: A lot of Nigerians use akata to mean "ghetto" as well. My mom once told me I was dressed like an akata girl because I wanted to wear sweatpants in public.) She argued in a series of tweets, collected by Clutch, that the reason some Africans believe black Americans should be doing better is because they don't know about the history of black Americans but see their own success as a reason blacks should excel as well. "Africans who come to the U.S. are statistically more successful than African Americans and they think 'if I could do it, why not them?'" she wrote.  

American society holds that same view as well. A 2007 study covered by the Washington Post found that a quarter of black students admitted to elite colleges were African immigrants, though they only represented 13 percent of America's college-age black population. The study's authors several theories on why black immigrants do better, including "to white observers black immigrants seem more polite, less hostile, more solicitous and 'easier to get along with.' Native blacks are perceived in precisely the opposite fashion."  

Lani Guinier, a Harvard professor, argued instead that schools were attempting to "resolve historic wrongs against native black Americans by enrolling immigrants who look like them" but had different experiences. "In part, it has to do with coming from a country ... where blacks were in the majority and did not experience the stigma that black children did in the United States," Guinier said. Either explanation creates a divide — as if Africans can only succeed at the expense of black Americans, or vice versa.

     

One example of an affirmative action beneficiary who isn't actually descended from American slaves is the President of the United States.

    

The Illinois Central theory of black dysfunction

The Annie E. Casey Foundation has a decent website of social statistics by state. Above is their map of % of black children living in two parent families, with stronger colors being better. Not surprisingly, the best percentages are found in states that blacks get to mostly through the military. Hawaii and North Dakota are tied for best at 65%. 

Wisconsin and Illinois are worst at 30%. It's kind of the Illinois Central Railroad ("I'm the train they call 'The City of New Orleans'") theory of the geographic distribution of black dysfunction.