Bagels, Yogurt, and Granola

I have never made Bagels, Yogurt, or Granola. Thanks to this article I just may have to try. I made butter last night which was also quite exciting so I may as well keep going with this type of cooking.

Supreme court

I have decided that I agree with the Supreme Court every time it tells the government it can't do something, and disagree with it every time it tells the government it can do something. So I guess I should be happy about this case restricting the right of police to search cars. If they actually uphold school strip searches for drugs based on hearsay than they lose all the points they earned for that case though.

Predicting Performance

Malcolm Gladwell had an interesting article from a few months back that is about predicting performance of quarterbacks, and teachers. Essentially the take home message was that in a great many professions you simply can't predict in advance who will be good at the job. That leads to interesting predictions about how we should bring people into the field.

"Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year's worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half's worth of material. That difference amounts to a year's worth of learning in a single year. Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a "bad" school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects. You'd have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you'd get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile. And remember that a good teacher costs as much as an average one, whereas halving class size would require that you build twice as many classrooms and hire twice as many teachers."

"Douglas Staiger, an economist at Dartmouth; and Robert Gordon, a policy analyst at the Center for American Progress—have investigated whether it helps to have a teacher who has earned a teaching certification or a master's degree. Both are expensive, time-consuming credentials that almost every district expects teachers to acquire; neither makes a difference in the classroom. Test scores, graduate degrees, and certifications—as much as they appear related to teaching prowess—turn out to be about as useful in predicting success as having a quarterback throw footballs into a bunch of garbage cans."


"In teaching, the implications are even more profound. They suggest that we shouldn't be raising standards. We should be lowering them, because there is no point in raising standards if standards don't track with what we care about. Teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree—and teachers should be judged after they have started their jobs, not before."

"Similarly, all quarterbacks drafted into the pros are required to take an I.Q. test—the Wonderlic Personnel Test. The theory behind the test is that the pro game is so much more cognitively demanding than the college game that high intelligence should be a good predictor of success. But when the economists David Berri and Rob Simmons analyzed the scores—which are routinely leaked to the press—they found that Wonderlic scores are all but useless as predictors. Of the five quarterbacks taken in round one of the 1999 draft, Donovan McNabb, the only one of the five with a shot at the Hall of Fame, had the lowest Wonderlic score. And who else had I.Q. scores in the same range as McNabb? Dan Marino and Terry Bradshaw, two of the greatest quarterbacks ever to play the game."

Cause of Death

Since I got into an argument over how dangerous guns are, I thought I would estimate my risk of death from a whole bunch of sources. I found a good list of causes of death by a whole bunch of sources separated by race and sex. This is the white male top causes of death in number of deaths per 100 000 men per year:

1. Malignant Neoplasms(cancer) 222.3
2. Heart Disease 258.0
3. Chronic Lower Respiratory Disease 52.8
4. Cerebrovascular disease 44.7
5. Diabetes 26.5
6. Pneumonia 23.0
7. Motor Vehicle Accidents 22.2
8. Suicide 19.6(11.5 by firearm)
9. Alzheimers 19.4
10. Renal Failure 15.8
11. Accidental Poisoning/exposure to noxious substance 11.3
12. Septicemia 11.2
13. Parkinson's 10.4
14. Falls 8.6
15. Pneumonitis 7.6
16. Alcoholic Liver Disease 6.6
17. Aortic Aneurysm 6.6
18. Hypertension and hypertensive renal disease 6.6
19. Homicide 5.3(3.5 by firearm)
20. HIV 3.6


I didn't include several sources as they seemed to be a bunch of unrelated diseases, and I lumped together heart disease and cancer. If I had included each individual type of cancer, 16 types of cancer each would have been higher on the list than HIV.

Interesting things I ran into: As a white male my risk of death from homicide is low. It is in fact much much lower than this table suggests. In New York City for example 70% of murder victims had a previous arrest history. Quite interesting though is to compare the white male, and black male number though. The black male number is 37, nearly eight times as high. If you are white and around a reasonably good crowd worrying about whether you will get murdered is silly, your risk is so low there is nothing you can do to lower it more. If you are a black male however it probably is something you should worry about. Still not as risky as smoking (I didn't include the lung cancer death rate but for a white male 68.7 it is and for a black male it is 86.4), but as far as preventable causes of death go it is something you should probably work on.

The male-Female gap on accidents and murder is pretty much what you would expect. As a white female you are half as likely to die of an accident than a male, and your risk of being murdered is something like 60% lower than if they were male. What is perhaps more surprising is just how much better women have it on other issues. They die less because of just about every single cause. The only exceptions I could find on the list were Pregnancy, Alzheimer's, breast cancer, and cancer for body parts males don't typically have. I guess they really do earn those extra 7 years.

Another interesting thing to note is the gap between deaths from drinking, and smoking. Smoking leads to lung cancer, as well as heart disease, various respiratory diseases, several other types of cancer such as bladder cancer and esophageal cancer. The vast majority of lung cancers however are from smoking so lets just look at that. The death rate is 52.7 averaged over all races and sexes. Now compare that to the drinking numbers. Alcoholic Liver Disease is pretty clearly the result of alcohol, that has a death rate of 4.2. Now, alcohol and cancer is a much more sticky subject than tobacco and cancer so estimating the percentage of deaths from alcohol is a real pain. However lets just go out on a limb and say all cancer of the esophagus(4.4) as well as of the lip oral cavity and pharynx(2.5) are the result of alcohol(in reality both of these can be caused by smoking too). There may be a minor component to other types of cancer, but it is so heavily argued that it clearly isn't all that big a component. Of course alcohol also leads to murders and accidents. This sounds worse than it actually is, even if as many as 80% of accidents(39.1) and murders(10.5) are the result of alcohol the death rate of alcohol is lower than that by lung cancer alone. Add in other causes of death related to smoking such as whatever percentage of cardiovascular disease it causes, chronic lower respiratory disease(42.3), bladder cancer(4.3) and emphysema(4.3) and it is pretty clear that smoking has the far greater death rate.

Raising IQ

I rather liked the Kristof article in the New York Times. It does a particularly good job of pointing out how malleable IQ scores really are:

One gauge of that is that when poor children are adopted into upper-middle-class households, their I.Q.’s rise by 12 to 18 points, depending on the study.

...Another indication of malleability is that I.Q. has risen sharply over time. Indeed, the average I.Q. of a person in 1917 would amount to only 73 on today’s I.Q. test. Half the population of 1917 would be considered mentally retarded by today’s measurements, Professor Nisbett says.

...Good schooling correlates particularly closely to higher I.Q.’s. One indication of the importance of school is that children’s I.Q.’s drop or stagnate over the summer months when they are on vacation (particularly for kids whose parents don’t inflict books or summer programs on them).

of course he also points out the genetic component when mentioning:

Identical twins raised apart, for example, have I.Q.’s that are remarkably similar. They are even closer on average than those of fraternal twins who grow up together.

but he does a pretty good job of ignoring it. Which is probably reasonable in all but the smartest and dumbest people. Even in the smartest people, IQ doesn't correlate so strongly with success that it really matters. As Malcom Gladwell points out above a certain cut-off you are smart enough to do anything. At worst the few point IQ difference will require you to practice a little more. This is why Terman's mass testing of IQ in the first half of the twentieth century failed to identify any great thinkers in advance, but ruled out two future Nobel prize winners(William Shockley and Luis Alvarez) as not being geniuses.

Ugh, more interviews

Well, it was my understanding they were supposed to have already made the decision on the position last week. However I got an email today telling me that they want me to come back Friday for a Second Interview.

I don't exactly know how to interpret it. Either they have essentially made the decision and this is going to be really easy where they tell me I am hired almost as soon as I walk in the door, or they just had too many candidates to choose from and they are looking for reasons to cut back on the number of people they are hiring. I suppose either way I am getting closer to getting a real position and have a high probability of getting the job, but I really don't want the suspense to last any longer than it has.

I am on BusinessWeek's Page

Well, it was hardly my finest writing, me rambling about how silly an article about the job market was, but a picture and comment is on the Businessweek.com page right now and will be until morning. It also got added to this blog on their site. That may well be about as famous as I will ever be.