Joanne Jacobs offers this as a reason why teachers quit:

Smart, motivated people — the sort we want teaching — won’t stay in jobs if they can’t make a difference.

Except it isn’t just teachers. Everyone wants to make a difference in their job, and millennials twice as much so. Your employees will be successful if you let them and empower them, and they’ll leave if you don’t.

Categories: Careers, Education, Employee Engagement
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The NYTimes Magazine teaches you about the farm bill, agricultural subsidies, and obesity:

The reason the least healthful calories in the supermarket are the cheapest is that those are the ones the farm bill encourages farmers to grow.

Via Tyler Cowen

Categories: America, Business and Economics, Food, Incentive Centered Design
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“There was not anybody that I can remember that was black,” she said. “The white people have theirs, and the black people have theirs. It’s nothing racial at all.”

Not a joke, a school in rural Georgia is holding their first integrated prom this year, and that quote above is from a real live student.

Via the Volokh Conspiracy.

Categories: America, Education
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Visualizing economics has a graph of where the top .01% gets their income, excluding capital gains. Looking at the time-series data, there’s a pretty clear story that dividend income has gotten much less important while wage income has grown significantly in importance.

What this means is that the richest of the rich are now earning their money through wages (whether as CEOs, lawyers, or bankers), rather than just collecting bank interest. It says something huge about wealth distribution. There will always be a top .01%, but would we rather the top .01% be filled with those who make their money by working for it and getting paid for it, or by sitting on their couch and letting the bank interest on their billions finance their luxury? I’m especially curious about the left-wing response, as the left is generally more concerned with issues of income equity.

Excluding capital gains does change the data some, as many of the capital-intensive wealthy are seeing income through more active capital (investments) rather than interest.

Categories: America, Business and Economics, Politics
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Some valuable advice from Microsoft recruiters over on the SI Career Services Blog:

1. Students over-emphasized their skills with regard to methodology/techniques. It’s very important for students to convey and demonstrate that they are well-trained and experienced in the core research techniques/tools. But students should keep in mind that this only meets our expectations. We have such respect for the SI program that we would expect all students to be well-trained. What students also need to convey is how they have applied the skills/techniques, how they used them to achieve some benefit, and their insights and lessons learned from their application to real-world problems.

2. Students over-emphasized group work. Working with teams is a critical part of ‘real-world skills’ and we recognize that many classes emphasize group projects. But students should always be prepared to articulate what their individual contribution was to any project. We (as interviewers) recognize the value of the group project, but we hire individuals. We can only make a positive hiring decision when we get a strong sense of who the individual is (their individual skills, strengths, expertise, passions, and insight/perspectives). (SI Careers Note: We strongly emphasize that demonstrated teamwork is important in interviewing, but that while discussing your group work, students should specifically talk about the role they played in the project (less “we” and more “me”).

More in the full post. Most job hunters don’t realize how much those little things really matter.

Categories: Careers
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There may be some among us who can imagine 20 days in captivity; perhaps a fraction of those can imagine a full year deprived of liberty and most human contact. But 20 years? Downey and Fecteau have consistently sought to downplay their period of imprisonment; and neither has done what arguably too many former CIA officers do these days with far less justification: write a book. Downey has said that such a book would contain “500 blank pages,” and Fecteau says the whole experience could be summed up by the word “boring.”

This story of two CIA agents held prisoner in China for two decades is anything but boring.

Categories: America
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On Geekdad:

My sense is that blogs work best when they’ve got a tight focus and a distinct niche.

“Things David Dworin is interested in” might be too narrow. By any other measure, this blog is way too broad. Welcome to my brain.

Categories: Ephemera, Social Software
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Via ConfessionsofaCommunityCollegeDean, a Chronicle article on the importance of shared governance in universities:

Shared governance, especially in the context of a search for a top administrator, means that professors, staff members, and sometimes students get to participate in the process — unlike the bad old days when a university official could hire whomever he (and it was invariably a male) wanted without any input. “Shared” means that everyone has a role…
…
“Shared” doesn’t mean that every constituency gets to participate at every stage.
…
Clearly, the main reason why a search — especially for an administrator — cannot be a simple matter of a popular vote is that someone must remain accountable for the final decision, and committees cannot be held accountable.

Many governance institutions break down because they are a committee structure that is charged with decision making, rather than oversight, and no single individual is responsible for outcomes. At the same time, individual committee members will invariably cry foul when their own brilliance is dismissed by the group or the decision maker.

Categories: Careers, Governance, The Academy
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In an interview, Tim O’Reilly points out the big deal of Web 2.0 – it’s about the information:

That goes back to a major theme of web 2.0 that people haven’t yet tweaked to. It’s really about data and who owns and controls, or gives the best access to, a class of data. Amazon is now the definitive source for data about whole sets of products — fungible consumer products. EBay is the authoritative source for the secondary market of those products. Google is the authority for information about facts, but they’re relatively undifferentiated.

Information is the oil/gold/guns of the twentieth century.

Categories: Business and Economics, Distribution, Information Economics, Information Markets, Social Software, Technology
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Slate has announced a guide to political futures markets for the 2008 US Presidential Election. Political futures generally predict outcomes better than polls for a number of reason. Slate is going to track the big prediction markets along the big races and report along.

For a snapshot, the Iowa Electronic Market, the Big Daddy of prediction markets, shows Clinton and Obama neck and neck for the Dems, and the Field Candidate (anyone but McCain, Romney, and Guiliani) taking the republicans. Guiliani leads among those candidates with their own futures. The dems are also predicted to win by a slim margin.

Also, I haven’t investigated the differences between contracts in the markets, but the wide price differences between the Iowa Electronic Market and Intrade seem like an arbitrage opportunity for those who can trade in both.

Categories: America, Information Markets, Politics, Polling, Social Software, Technology
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New York Magazine has an excellent piece on organizational psychology, fitting the right personalities with the right roles, and what makes managers successful. One nugget:

In the same vein, another researcher reports that one law firm deconstructs its HR needs by personality traits. It insists on extremely bright employees who are also extremely insecure. “They want them to think that working really hard matters,” he explains.

Here’s the short version: managers shouldn’t be narcissistic assholes, except when they should.

As an aside, New York Magazine seems to have one or two awesome pieces a month, and then the rest is only OK. Once they get up to 3 or 4, I’m going to become a regular reader (and maybe a subscriber).

Categories: Business and Economics, Careers, Employee Engagement, Law, Managing, Matching Mechanisms
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Another bit of down to earth wisdom for the masses from Tycho at Penny Arcade:

People seem to think that by posting in threads and agreeing with other people they are changing the world. They are not. They are posting in threads online. The universe will not be altered by forum threads, even those which are very wry. Being outraged online is a form of entertainment, and refreshing a thread to receive a hit of consensus packs the thrill of genuine activism without requiring any sweat. I’m afraid this test may require more from the community than a sardonic jpeg.

One day, hopefully before I go back, I’ll get to a write up about my impressions from their PAX convention. The short version: there are real people behind lots of the stuff you see written online, and most of them are exactly like you’d expect, and don’t behave that differently offline.

Categories: Information Economics, Politics, Social Software, Technology
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From the second best Jewlicious post I’ve read this year:

The Jews, the perennial fly in history’s ointment, have never been able to resist the impulse to sabotage a good thing. We ruined a rich Egyptian tradition of public works projects by letting a hallucinating second-rate magician with a speech impediment lead us, as one might expect from a hallucinating second-rate magician with a speech impediment, straight into freedom at the heart of one of the world’s most inhospitable deserts. We managed to improve on that enormous step sideways by sticking around for forty years because the whirling column of flames we were worshiping at the time didn’t appreciate artistic self-expression. We managed to let two perfectly good commonwealths get destroyed, the second time by a gang of sheet-wearing bathhouse enthusiasts. We nailed someone who was by all accounts a pretty nice guy to a stick. We called in a few favors from the countries we owned through our control of global banking and brought the proud German Empire to its knees – which, I remind you, did not turn out well for us.

The next paragraph is even better. After that, it degrades into an announcement for a blog that’s all about Humus. If he had quit at paragraph 2, it might be my favorite post of the year.

And for those who don’t know, Fuul is one of the most disgusting things on earth. It’s an Egyptian dish that resembles shit and tastes only slightly better, eaten for breakfast and every other meal. Why any rational human being with a choice would subject themselves to it is beyond me.

Categories: Food, Funny, Jewishness
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Joanna Jacobs passes along Barry Schwartz’s recommendation that elite universities use a lottery for admissions (I couldn’t find the whole article):

There is probably a right answer to the questions “Whom should we admit?” or “Which college should I select?” But we won’t know until after the fact. Chance factors (roommate assignment, romantic successes or failures, or which English professor evaluates your first papers) might have a bigger effect on success and satisfaction than the tiny differences among applicants (or schools) within the range of acceptability. So once a set of “good enough” students or “good enough” schools has been identified, it probably doesn’t matter much which one you choose; or if it does matter, there is no way to know in advance what the right choice is.

College admissions is a crap shoot, and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. Let colleges admit the all-stars, reject the losers, and show the people in the middle just how much randomness is involved. As long as students are using the Common Application to apply to multiple schools, though, the application becomes even more like a lotto ticket. Is this applicant applying to Cornell to hedge in case they don’t get into Columbia, or do they really want to go there?

The solution? Use a bidding market. Give each student who fills out the common application 1000 points and allow them to allocate them among schools they apply to. Weight students in the lottery based on the number of points they bid, so that students who bid more get more of a chance. People will still get into college – being in the “middle” group of Harvard applicants still makes you in the top group of many other great schools.

Bidding systems solve another problem as well. A friend of mine used to work in an admissions office, and she said they would look at other schools a candidate applied to and reject those who seemed highly qualified and applied to top tier schools because the office thought they weren’t likely to accept the admissions offer in the first place. Restricting the number of bidding points lets universities measure not only a student’s binary desire to attend signaled by applying (yes/no), but also the strength of their desire to attend the school (number of points bid).

Most people overestimate the role of going to a good college on life outcomes. They also overestimate how good admissions offices are at picking which people get in and which don’t. Exposing just how random it is, as Schwartz notes, will expose just how much “luck” is involved. Does that mean that a Harvard student and a Community College student are on the same intellectual level? Doubtful, but it will show the Princeton student that they could just as easily be at Duke, if only the lottery had been different.

Categories: Education, Incentive Centered Design, Information Economics, Information Markets, Matching Mechanisms, The Academy
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Go White!

Categories: Ephemera, The Academy
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