Even after JetBlue screwed up big time, people are still going back:

Because JetBlue worked hard to acknowledge the importance of customer satisfaction early, the carrier has, in effect, built in a forgiveness contingency in it’s implied agreements with its customers.

Categories: Business and Economics, Incentive Centered Design, Marketing, Strategy, Travel
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Chris Anderson has noticed that risk aversion and a lack of imagination are making CIOs irrelevant:

The consequence of this is that many CIOs are now just one step above Building Maintenance. They have the unpleasant job of mopping up data spills when they happen, along with enforcing draconian data retention policies sent down from the legal department. They respond to trouble tickets and disable user permissions. They practice saying “No”, not “What if…” And they block the ports used by the most popular services, from Skype to Second Life, which always reminds me of the old joke about the English shopkeeper who, when asked what happened to a certain product, answered “We don’t stock it anymore. It kept selling out.”

Later on he notes that this is the biggest problem at universities:

The life of a university CIO is like the life of a telco CEO, fast forwarded by about five years. The users want a dumb pipe, preferably at gigabit speed. They neither need or want the university to administer their email, wikis, blogs, video storage or discussion groups. They want it to simply get out of their way.

From what I know, universities didn’t create CIOs until recently, and they don’t really have much function. Most departments manage there own IT. In the liberal arts, this just means faculty and administrator desktops, but in the hard sciences it usually involves research equipment that goes over the central service’s head. Yes, there are certain shared services that the university needs - most importantly single sign-on, but I’d argue mail and file storage as well - but then get out of the way. With the price of storage as low as it is, I can’t imagine why universities have such low quotas, which is one of the things that drives engineering and art colleges to run their own parallel systems. If your job is keeping the lights on, that’s where you need to innovate - give people the tools they need to do what they want to do better, don’t blow money on tools that other people do better, cheaper.

And, as in all cases, if you’re having discussions about whether or not you’re relevant anymore, it means you’re already irrelevant. It’s time to either reinvent what you do, or stop wasting resources.

Categories: Business and Economics, Governance, Information Economics, Libraries, The Academy
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Greg Mankiw has discovered the unofficial translation of his textbook by Stand Up Economist Yoram Bauman:

Categories: Business and Economics, Funny, The Academy
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A team of computer scientists at Tel Aviv University have developed an algorithm that makes people in pictures more attractive:

This sketch presents a novel method for digital face beautification: given a frontal photograph of a face (a portrait), our method automatically increases the predicted attractiveness rating of the face. The main challenge is to achieve this goal while introducing only minute, subtle modifications to the original image, such that the resulting “beautified” face maintains a strong, unmistakable similarity to the original, as demonstrated by the pair of faces shown in Figure 1.

The algorithm makes minor adjustments so that the picture is more attractive, but still recognizable as the original subject.

Pseudo-scientifically, it works by taking the original picture and comparing it to optimal hotness (also called the Dave Dworin Point), and then makes minor adjustments to reconcile the two. Or something else involving math.

Categories: Israel, Photos, Science, Technology
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The article isn’t that interesting (police providing anecdotal evidence about increases in female crime, and an enlarged female cell at the ELPD), but I love the lede:

Beer-drenched heels, slurred speech and tear-streaked mascara paths.

This is a common scene Friday night.

Categories: Ephemera, Law
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BusinessWeek.com looks at unmet expectations in summer internships:

The largest areas of disappointment for “decliners” were related to job content and manager behavior, Scott says. The study’s conclusion is that interns’ assignment managers are the “deal makers/breakers” in whether a student will accept a full-time job, “because they themselves model ‘what’s it’s really like’ to work for the company.”

Conversations with recent student interns reinforce the idea that they come into interships with high expectations. “I want to feel worthy, that I’m not just an intern. I want to show what I can do, what I’ve learned over the past four years,” says Chelsea Culver, a senior at the University of Washington Business School and an intern at H2 Marketing in Seattle. (For more students’ views of internship expectations and reality, see the slide show.)

Categories: Business and Economics, Careers, Education, Matching Mechanisms
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Rosner’s Domain has an interview with another Jewish demographer (I noted his talk with Ira Sheskin here). This time, he questions

There is no question that intermarriage is changing the face of American Jewry (and Jewish communities throughout the Diaspora). But the evidence suggests that intermarriage is not the cause of the problem. The underlying issue is that many Jews do not grow up experiencing a rich Jewish home life and their Jewish education is ineffective and, too often, distancing. A colleague who is a Jew-by-choice recently joked that it was easy for him to embrace Judaism - he didn’t have the baggage that born Jews did of a having had to “suffer” in Hebrew school as children.

Dr. Saxe heads up the Steinhardt Social Research Institute, which conducted the meta-analysis counting project I mentioned here. As far as I can tell, the institute is fairly new and hasn’t really put out much research yet, though other scholars at Brandeis working on similar matters certainly have.

One thing to note is that Dr. Saxe extrapolates a lot from his Boston Community Survey, despite the fact that there’s no evidence that trends in Boston apply nationally or globally, and there are a number of reasons to expect otherwise. Nevertheless, I tend to agree that the problem isn’t intermarriage, no matter how the numbers line up, but a lack of engagement on the part of the Jewish community.

Categories: Community, Jewishness, Metrics, Polling
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Searching around, my little brother found out that my favorite restaurant in DC may be shutting down:

Though the restaurant has been allowed to go a bit to seed — there’s dirt everywhere, the ceiling is a mess, and the facade’s original plate glass is patched and seamed — its great bones survive unchanged. With not much more than a splash of paint, some elbow grease and a modestly tweaked menu, one of the city’s more artistic restaurateurs could restore the Waffle Shop to its former glory.

DC has a strong waffle culture, but not much in the way of pancakes (I’m yet to find any outside of a chain). Luckily, the Waffle Shop makes waffles good enough that I don’t mind. I introduced my siblings to it during Dworins4Darfur, and now they’re hooked on the place too. If you’re in DC, get over yourself and visit one of the city’s best hole-in-the wall eateries before the last vestige of good breakfast disappears from the city forever.

Categories: America, Ephemera, Food
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Taking a short break from sunny, geriatric Weston Florida (winds around 18 mpg, gusting to 27), I give you a technique for scoring your think tank panelists:

In times dominated by momentous questions of war and foreign policy, a particular kind of Washingtonian is bound to thrive: the think-tank pundit. But competition is relentless. Good judgment and extensive research may help advance a career, but what really matters in Washington is an elusive quality known as “Say-sO Superiority,” or SOS. Staffers at Asia Policy Point, a Washington foreign policy research center, devised the following highly scientific measure to calculate a speaker’s SOS score (and to keep themselves awake during luncheon talks).

Categories: Funny, Politics, The Academy
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Is the Central Time Zone now the coolest one on the planet? My move to Chicago, completed today, would seem to indicate so. Some advantages of Central time:

1. The Daily Show is now on at 10:00, rather than 11, allowing for earlier bedtimes or trips to the bar.
2. I live in it.
3. It looks like I’m going to bed later to people in Eastern time.
4. Less Jet Lag when traveling to Vegas, not that sleep schedules really matter in vegas anyways.

Those interested in Chicago-style hangouts should get in touch, david@dworin.net, especially people I’ve lost touch with who stumble onto this blog.

Categories: Ephemera, Travel, Winter of Dave
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Blogging will be light for the next few weeks as I move to Chicago (this weekend) and then take a week and a half in Florida.  I should still be checking e-mail for those who want to reach me.  Chicago-ites (?) interested in meeting up once i move should feel free to contact me, I’m always interested in a new audience.

Categories: Ephemera, Travel
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A new study from the Steinhardt Social Research Institute says there could be over seven million Jews. Why are there so many different numbers, and why are Jews so hard to count.

One of the biggest reasons is that it’s hard to determine just who is a Jew. People identify as Jewish on religious, ethnic, and cultural grounds, while others identify by birth, and still others were clearly born to Jews but do not personally identify as Jewish. This makes picking out who is Jewish in a survey extremely difficult. You have to ask the right questions, the right ways, and then figure out which answers mean someone is a Jew. Changes in how you define a Jew can cause swings of literally millions of people.

But once you come up with a definition for who’s Jewish and who isn’t, you’ve still got trouble counting people. That’s because no matter how you define it, there just aren’t that many Jews in the population. Think of a jar with 1000 marbles in it. Of those, somewhere between 975 and 985 are yellow, while the rest are green. The green marbles, between 15 and 25, represent the size of the Jewish population. Now imagine that you have to count them by taking a small sample, say 100 marbles, out of the jar. If the jar were half green and half yellow, this would work pretty well, but with only a small number of green marbles, your sample of 100 could give you one, two, or three, each of which would give you radically different estimate of the number of green marbles in the whole jar. Counting Jews works the same way - the statistical sampling methods used in normal social science break down when trying to reach a very broad but very small group.

Further, Jews are less likely than the population at large to respond to random digit dial phone surveys. In other words, when you try to take the marbles out of the jar and count them, some marbles won’t let you, and the green marbles are less likely to let you. Given the huge swings a few marbles can give you, this makes them even more difficult to count. Because Jews won’t talk to the survey interviewers, we don’t really know how much less likely they are to answer the phone, so we don’t really know how to weight things. We also don’t know the characteristics that make one person more likely to answer than another.

Each of these caveats makes counting Jews extremely difficult, and leads to the controversy around the numbers given by Jewish demographers. So what are the different techniques that are used? Random digit dial surveys, like the massive National Jewish Population Survey use a weighting technique, similar to what political pollsters use, to try and bring the numbers in line with what they know to be true about the population as a whole. These can be controversial, whether for counting Jews or voters, as they start to tinker with the underlying science of public opinion research in ways that not all social scientists or statisticians agree. The NJPS also needs an extremely large sample to cover the whole country, and this means it’s prohibitively expensive to conduct accurately.

Another technique, used by Dr. Ira Sheskin at the University of Miami, takes a collection of community studies and combines them all together to get a national account. Since most Jews live in urban areas, Dr. Sheskin’s community studies, of which he has done many, are more likely to target those numbers where Jews are concentrated. He also over-samples in “core” Jewish areas, increasing his response rate. However, this method has its own shortfalls. For instance, many elderly Jews are “snow birds,” with summer homes in the Midwest or Northeast and winter residences in southern areas like Florida and Arizona, making it likely that they’ll be double counted. The same thing happens with younger Jews who may go to college in one city while claiming residence in another. And finally, it ignores the “long tail” of Jewish communities, smaller cities that still have Jewish populations.

Researchers at Brandeis’s Steinhardt Social Research Institute used a third method. They took publicly available survey data, rather than data specific studies on the Jewish community, and conducted a “meta-analysis,” trying to merge it all together to come up with a good accounting. In other words, instead of taking 100 marbles out of the jar, they found twenty people who had each taken 100 marbles out of the jar for different reasons, and used their counting. Not only does this give them more samples, but it also allowed them to save money for expensive polls with large samples that are required for the other two techniques. Unfortunately, there are a number of risks here. Different studies use different samples, questions, methodology, making it complex to determine how to weight any specific data point, and restricting the available data to what those other studies are interested in. Nevertheless, it provides an innovative, and significantly more cost effective, technique for gathering data not only about how many Jews there are, but information about them as well.

So which of these methods works the best, and how many Jews are there? Because of the problems described above, there’s no way to really know. The best answer is that it’s somewhere between four and eight million, and that whatever number you pick is probably off by a million. And like with most things Jewish, there’s going to be a healthy debate around the issue so that any two Jewish demographers will probably give you three different numbers.

Categories: America, Community, Information Asymmetries, Jewishness, Metrics, Polling
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The Headhunter (who commented on my blog here!) has a blog of his own, where his latest post outlines his interview strategy:

No one can fake a discussion about the work that needs to be done. Either you can demonstrate motivation, enthusiasm and smarts, or you can’t. To me, that’s what a job interview is all about.

Consulting firms have used these case interviews for years, though they often meander outside the realm of “can you do the job” and into the realm of brain teasers.  I’m not sure who ever came up with the behavioral interview, but it was one of the most annoying parts of my job search, to the point where I didn’t participate in a single one this past year.  The worst was when an unnamed manufacturing company started asking me questions about my experience doing something completely unrelated to the open position they had just described.

Categories: Business and Economics, Careers, Matching Mechanisms, Strategy
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Prudie has gotten interesting again, tackling a number of great dating issues (rather than crazy divorcees), meaning my favorite advice columnist is back. A reader asks her:

Dear Prudence,
My son is 21, a junior in college, and seriously dating an 18-year-old freshman. He brought her to our house for Thanksgiving, and she is attractive and charming. The problem is that we are Jewish and have mandated to our three sons that they must marry a Jewish woman. We are heartbroken that he is dating a non-Jewish woman. We are not sure if we should forbid him from dating her or if we should leave them alone and hope that they break up and he finds a nice Jewish woman to marry. Please don’t tell me that I should get over this and accept whoever he wants to marry. My wife and I cannot accept a daughter-in-law of a different faith. I don’t want to over- or underreact, and don’t know what to do.

—Heartbroken

Prudie’s answer nails it, the best way to encourage your child to have a Jewish home and marriage is to make Judaism appealing.

Categories: Community, Dating, Jewishness, Matching Mechanisms
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The signs are all there: The technological superiority. The ruthless march to galactic domination. The musical devices that from a fashion standpoint would be the perfect accessory for any Stormtrooper uniform. Once but the student (see their classic 1984 ad, their PC vs. Mac ads and oh, everything else that’s ever come out of their mouth), it seems that little ol’ Apple finally could be turning into the Master.

An article in Rolling Stone wonders if Apple is the new Microsoft. Good thing the guys over at Rolling Stone are reading David Dworin Online.

Categories: Business and Economics, Entertainment Media, Technology
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