Bill James has a fun and interesting excerpt arguing that we are very good at developing sports talent, and saying that's a good thing. This has attracted some interesting commentary. We have Alan Jacobs, who says James got the math wrong, and Ross Douthat who basically just agrees with Jacobs. Most interesting is Ta-Nehisi Coates, who highlights what sports has to do with race and opportunity.

But the thing that struck me was one throwaway sentence that we in the United State are very very good at teaching people to drive automobiles.

It's true. Driving is not a trivial skill. It's moderately hard. As hard as learning calculus, I would say. But yet, pretty much everybody learns to drive, but not everybody learns calculus.

You want to sell some carrots. Problem is, they're healthy:

The truth about baby carrots is they possess many of the defining characteristics of our favorite junk food. They're neon orange, they're crunchy, they're dippable, they're kind of addictive.
[...]
What a silly use of advertising dollars to tell people that vegetables are healthy.

Want to make your drive to work easier? Build bike lanes.

If driving is to remain half as pleasant as Cassidy wants it to, it will only be because most New Yorkers decide against purchasing cars. And they’re only going to do that if the other options seem attractive.

Want to make your power supply safer? Go nuclear.

If Japan, the United States, or Europe retreats from nuclear power in the face of the current panic, the most likely alternative energy source is fossil fuel. And by any measure, fossil fuel is more dangerous. The sole fatal nuclear power accident of the last 40 years, Chernobyl, directly killed 31 people. By comparison, Switzerland's Paul Scherrer Institute calculates that from 1969 to 2000, more than 20,000 people died in severe accidents in the oil supply chain. More than 15,000 people died in severe accidents in the coal supply chain—11,000 in China alone. The rate of direct fatalities per unit of energy production is 18 times worse for oil than it is for nuclear power.

I say this knowing full well there is a nuclear power plant just a few miles upstream.

Cyclists strike back.

Just remember, if you can record them, they can record you. Which is fair enough.

Good news:

The U.N. Millennium Development Goals established the target of halving the rate of global poverty between 1990 and 2015; this was probably achieved by 2008, some seven years ahead of schedule. Moreover, using forecasts of per capita consumption growth, we predict that by 2015, fewer than 600 million people will remain poor. At that point, the 1990 poverty rate will have been halved and then halved again.

Maybe poverty doesn't get the whole picture:

Experimental games are wonderful tools for studying the propensity to cooperate in social interactions. The results showed that students from the highest quality neighborhoods were most likely to cooperate in an experimental game, but that median income had a negative effect. The most cooperative kids came from high quality low income neighborhoods.

The big missing point is what he means by a "high quality" neighborhood.

Most college students aren't learning very much:

The rest—most college students—start underprepared, and go to colleges that ask little of them and provide little in return. Their learning gains are minimal or nonexistent. Among them, those with a reasonable facility for getting out of bed in the morning and navigating a bureaucracy receive a credential that falsely certifies learning.

A lot of this commentary rings true. But there's always a crisis. That's how you sell books and get page views and attract attention - "Universities chugging along basically as they always have" is not a headline that gets noticed.

Too many prisoners, says Michael Gerson, not enough opportunities for them when they reenter society:

While human beings are capable of great horrors that merit justice, they do not become trash to be thrown away. Even the least sympathetic - heroin addicts and jailed criminals and gang members - remain part of the American community, the human community.

Slate has a series called The Wrong Stuff, about mistakes. Two recent interviews in the series have been very interesting, one from Josh Stieber and one from Chuck Colson.

Almost two years ago on this blog we heard a prediction from mathematician Keith Devlin:

Within my lifetime I fully expect almost every living human adult, and most children, in the world to own [a mobile phone].

Now The Economist reports that we're halfway there:

Sometime in the next few months, the number of mobile phones in use will exceed 3.3 billion, or half the world's population.

"Halfway there" is also the theme of a recent funny post from another mathematician.

Neal Wu is one of the best competitive programmers in the world:

He has competed in six coding contests run by Kolstad’s organization, the USA Computing Olympiad; he won three of them with perfect scores. Wu has the relaxed disposition of a star athlete; he’s confident without ever letting on that he is America’s Great Nerd Hope. “I hate to say he’s the Tiger Woods of computer programming,” Kolstad says, “but he shares the properties of cool, calm under pressure, and consistent, consistent performance.”

Probably went to some fancy-schmancy private school in the Northeast...

He just graduated from Baton Rouge Magnet High School in Louisiana.

...or maybe a public high school in a below-average district in the state ranked 46th in the country for math education.

I had almost given up on blogging, but these two sentences inspired me to write at least one more post:

It is possible today to grow up in an American home with a 40-inch flat-screen television and a daily caloric intake so high that it actually becomes detrimental to health, but to lack access to basic medical and dental care, to run a material daily risk of rape or other profound physical violence, and to leave school functionally illiterate. Poverty today means something very different than it did in Dickens’ day, but it has not been abolished.

Confessions of a professional paper writer:

I work at an online company that generates tens of thousands of dollars a month by creating original essays based on specific instructions provided by cheating students. I've worked there full time since 2004. On any day of the academic year, I am working on upward of 20 assignments.

Hmmm. Maybe I could hire this guy to lighten my load?

As long as it doesn't require me to do any math or video-documented animal husbandry, I will write anything.

Oh well. Back to writing my own papers, I guess.

Alan Jacobs on education:

That so many universities put star lecturers online for free suggests that they don't think those lectures are central to what they provide. So what is central, then? To that question there's a cynical answer and an idealistic one, and both of them are true.

Abstract of the day:

Two useless but true theorems are proved.

Two! My papers are lucky to have one useless but true theorem.

The paper is from Paul Krugman. Steven Levitt has some cutting remarks about the paper and its author.

How we fight crime in Baton Rouge:

Both Evans and Thibodeaux are alleged by prosecutors to have accepted money or other things of value from St. Pierre in return for steering no-bid business to St. Pierre’s technology and crime-camera company, NetMethods.

Chester told the judge that Evans steered crime-camera work to NetMethods after he received gifts that included “tickets to approximately four New Orleans Saints football games; a 50th birthday party … and overnight trips at various hotels in New Orleans.”

NetMethods later was awarded approximately $3.5 million from the city-parish to establish a wireless network of surveillance cameras and a gunshot detection system in high crime areas in Baton Rouge.

According to a 2010 report from the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies, the wireless system is not robust enough for officers to consistently use while in the field.

Maintenance fees for the security canopy cost the Baton Rouge Police Department more than $400,000 annually and system failures appear to be frequent, based on a review of numerous e-mail exchanges and other written reports.

I'm not sure what to say.

Slow it down:

“Talk about the number 1 for 45 minutes?” said Chris Covello, who teaches 16 students ages 5 and 6. “I was like, I don’t know. But then I found you really could. Before, we had a lot of ground to cover, and now it’s more open-ended and gets kids thinking.”

Apparently the latest fad in elementary education is "Singapore math", which takes its sweet time. I don't know anything about kindergarten, but my number one wish for my college students is that I could teach less material, and do it more slowly and thoroughly.