Isn’t that amazing? The institution of a way to monitor and quantify information ended up leading to the saving of millions (over the years) of lives. Develop a metric that truly measures what you need and then follow its advice.

Digging around in her archives, I found the Evil HR Lady discussing the Apgar score for infants, and why we don’t have something similar for students, despite the fact that most of them have quantifiable and comparable performance metrics.

Categories: Education, Managing, Metrics
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Categories: Funny, Metrics
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An article on workforce.com says we need to ditch the HR Generalist:

They resist measurement. If you look within your firm, you’ll find that your generalists have no output or results metrics of any kind. They resist corporate-wide HR metrics and technology because once those are instituted, they’ll no longer be allowed to hide in their well-protected enclaves.

Most of the complaints seem to revolve around the same thing: Generalists protect information. Never mind the importance of transparency for governance in general, within a company, it is paramount. By hiding information, HR Generalists become the siloed barriers to change. At the same time, the more their role becomes “information conduit,” the easier it is to replace them with technology.

In all fairness to the HR generalist, people in all sorts of roles try to protect information and serve as barriers to change. I’ve seen companies where every single one of those complaints can describe anyone there, including senior management. It just so happens that HR generalists have these problems structurally built into their role.

Categories: Business and Economics, Careers, Information Asymmetries, Managing, Metrics
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The one thing each donor had in common? Recognition of KIPP’s past performance. Like it or not, this is what donors are after: an assurance that their donation will produce results. And school choice critics can bash KIPP until they’re blue in the face, but KIPP has produced results that are not merely outstanding and quantifiable, but predictable. These donors clearly believe that KIPP can expand and retain its same high standards. Could they be wrong? Sure. But it’s a calculated risk they’re willing to take.

Donors are funding the Knowledge is Power Program because they measure and deliver results.

via Joanne Jacobs

Categories: Education, Governance, Metrics, Philanthropy
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From the Donor Power Blog:

You can’t go wrong if you think of your donors as your owners. They’ve invested in you, and demand some kind of return for their investment. Not money, but a better world. It’s something you need to deliver — and clearly let them know you’ve delivered.

I’d go one further - think of your donors as shareholders. They have lots of choices about where they can invest their donations, and they’ve chosen to invest it with you. That means you have to treat them like you would shareholders by delivering results, measuring them, and communicating information about your organization. At the same time, your service recipients are your customers, and you need to treat them as such by providing value for them, because that’s what your shareholders demand of you.

If you’re going to be responsive to your donors as shareholders, you need to run like a business, by determining what your objectives are, measuring performance and outcomes, and then communicating that information to your donors so they’re motivated to invest in you again.

Update: Duh! If I had read further in the post, I would have noticed he already advocated Donors as Shareholders. Donor Power Blog, you are so empowering!

Categories: Business and Economics, Marketing, Metrics, Philanthropy, Strategy
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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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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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Googling around I found this Jewish Week article on why Jewish mega-philanthropists aren’t donating to Jewish causes:

Our annual research of mega-gifts — gifts above $1 million — turns up at least 50 people who could match or exceed Stanton’s generosity. Typically, these are wealthy Jewish business leaders who give only relatively modest gifts to Jewish causes.

It’s tempting to write these people off as uncommitted Jews, but it would be wrong.

If Jewish causes want to receive mega-gifts, they have to prove themselves worthy. They have to compete on equal ground with the secular hospitals, symphonies, museums and universities, all of which court and inspire Jewish donors.

The money-paragraph at the end:

Look at it this way: Today’s philanthropists think like investors, because that’s how they got wealthy. They want their money to achieve a return; they want results.

That means Jewish causes need to change the way they run their businesses.  Want to attract investment?  You need a clear definition of what you hope to accomplish, a strategy for accomplishing it, and clear metrics that demonstrate your progress.  Even more importantly, those metrics have to reflect your goals, not your activities.  Non-profits, especially in the Jewish community, need to treat their donors like corporations treat their shareholders, and start to demonstrate real, measurable results.

Categories: America, Community, Governance, Jewishness, Metrics, Philanthropy, Strategy
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Rosner’s domain interviewed Jewish demography expert Dr. Ira Sheskin:

Where the lowering of the numbers will have an impact is on small Jewish communities. A Jewish community of 10,000 which now supports, say, 3 synagogues, a JCC, a kosher butcher, and several Jewish agencies and organizations, may very well lose some of this infrastructure if, say 20 years from now, the population is down to 5,000. So the impact of the lowering of the Jewish population will be at the local level more than at the national level.

Many resources in the Jewish community are being applied now by Jewish Federations and Foundations throughout the country to assure the Jewish future. Sheldon Adelson just started a foundation which will provide $200-$250 million per year in grants to Jewish communities. The challenge is to devise programs and services that will provide a quality of life within Jewish communities that will keep people wanting to be Jewish.

Dr. Sheskin also addresses intermarriage later on, though he tacks differently than i would. For those interested in Jewish demographics, most research studies are available for free online from the Jewish Databank. There, you can find the summary reports of most community and national studies, as well as the raw data for many of them, including the National Jewish Population Survey.

Categories: America, Community, Jewishness, Metrics, Philanthropy, Polling
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Newly elected New York governor Elliot Spitzer is going to tie school funding to performance metrics:

Schools that do not perform well, he said, would be shut down. Educators who do not meet performance goals would be dismissed. A new accountability system would monitor how schools are performing academically and whether they are making the best use of their money, he said. Also, the schools will be judged on whether their academic programming is helping students perform better.

Categories: Education, Governance, Incentive Centered Design, Metrics, Politics
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The GapMinder foundation has a cool tool hosted by Google that lets you compare graphs of development variables against each other over time.  It defaults to Life Expectancy vs. Income per capita, but you can chart other variables as well.  You can see some very interesting movements when you play with the time slider.  Genocides show up as major dips in life expectancy - look at Cambodia in the 70s, Rwanda in the 90s.  To see the impact of AIDS, look at Zimbabwe or South Africa more recently.  A fun tool to play with, though it doesn’t have nearly as much data as some other visualization sties out there.

Categories: Business and Economics, Metrics, Philanthropy, Politics, Science, Technology
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The most important cause of the increase in autism diagnoses was the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, a federal law that required states to provide suitable education to autistics and to create registries for them. Autism has become a trendy diagnosis, and at times a useful one to stretch. “I am incredibly disciplined in the diagnostic classifications in my research,” Judy Rapoport, a senior child psychiatrist at the National Institutes of Health, tells Grinker, “but in my private practice, I’ll call a kid a zebra if it will get him the educational services I think he needs.”

Why there’s no autism epidemic in Slate.

Categories: Books, Education, Incentive Centered Design, Metrics, Science
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A study conducted last year for the Partnership for New York City, a business group, cited 2000 census data that showed about 35 percent of government workers in Manhattan drive to work, compared with 14 percent for those who work in finance. Kathryn S. Wylde, the president of the group, said that many city workers drive because they can park at no charge using parking placards obtained through their agencies.

From the NYTimes, via the Freakonomics Blog. Talk about an Incentive Centered Design problem. Unlike Detroiters, however, at least New Yorkers have public transportation as a viable option.

Categories: Community, Incentive Centered Design, Metrics, Travel
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In contrast to The Simpsons, Futurama permitted the writers to let their mathematical fancies run wild and to cram in math references for their personal delectation, Keeler says. “That’s why it’s not on the air any more,” he jokes.

The Simpsons writers are math nerds!

Futurama, which had even more math nerds as writers, along with Al Gore’s daughter Kristen Gore, remains one of my favorite TV shows, even in reruns.  That’s why I’m psyched it’s coming back.

Categories: Entertainment Media, Metrics, Science, Television
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The Washington Post notes that the Fairfax libraries are purging their collections to save on space:

So librarians are making hard decisions and struggling with a new issue: whether the data-driven library of the future should cater to popular tastes or set a cultural standard, even as the demand for the classics wanes.

Library officials say they will always stock Shakespeare’s plays, “The Great Gatsby” and other venerable titles. And many of the books pulled from one Fairfax library can be found at another branch and delivered to a patron within a week.

But in the effort to stay relevant in an age in which reference materials and novels can be found on the Internet and Oprah’s Book Club helps set standards of popularity, libraries are not the cultural repositories they once were.

Later in the article,

To do more with less, Fairfax library officials have started running like businesses. Clay bought state-of-the art software that spits out data on each of the 3.1 million books in the county system — including age, number of times checked out and when. There are also statistics on the percentages of shelf space taken up by mysteries, biographies and kids’ books.

A few observations of my own:

1. It’s about time libraries started running themselves like a business. In many ways, they’re actually (sadly) one of the first government agencies to do so. Libraries face direct competition on a number of fronts, from coffee houses, book stores, the internet, and other cultural institutions. They need to adapt to stay relevant, and in doing so, they need to adopt the management practices that have made their competitors so effective. On the flipside, libraries also need to get over themselves and realize that, with all this competition, they can’t continue to see themselves the same way they did fifteen or twenty years ago.
2. The computer system only uses circulation data, but the best use I get out of a library is when I go there for breadth, rather than depth, and don’t check books out. Instead, I’ll pull a number of relevant books off the shelf and read a chapter or so of each, often because it’s all I need or all that’s relevant. I use the library as a reference service, not a lending service (in part because I’m not capable of returning anything on time). A more accurate measure of reference use would be how often a book is reshelved, and even that metric is flawed - was the book reshelved because people found it useful but didn’t need to check it out, or because they took it off the shelf and then weren’t interested? Gathering the metric with the computer system wouldn’t be difficult - add a reshelf table to the database, and before books are reshelved, scan the whole cart. I also imagine this would work better for non-fiction than fiction.
3. As the article points out, libraries aren’t nearly as much about books anymore. Fiction is exceptionally cheap relative to incomes, to the point where owning books is much easier and much more common. Books also take a long time to bring to market, so for many subjects, they can’t stay timely and accurate very long. I remember going to the library when I was little and finding two decade old current events books, or books about computers from the 60’s. At some point, these just take up space. Most of my friends who consistently use the library see it as a cheaper form of Blockbuster (but with harsher late fees). Others use it as a meeting place. The only people I know who depend on it for books are my grandparents, and even they’re starting to buy more.

Categories: Books, Business and Economics, Community, Distribution, Governance, Information Economics, Libraries, Metrics, Strategy
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