British investment bankers gone wild

"Do we really need to ban much-needed stress-defusing banter and jolly outings to strip clubs from an industry already under immense pressure, and whose workers we are relying upon to get our economy out of the mess it is currently in?"

How is it that the British write so well?

Warning: not politically correct and may be challenging for some readers. Includes words such as "arse". My linking to this or any other article, picture, song, movie and so on does not necessarily constitute an endorsement of any or all of the contents; please do not click through if you are prone to lawsuits; do keep in mind that the memory of free speech lingers on, even at universities.

Iron Man

Lisa and I saw Iron Man last night. We had seen three very serious movies in a row - two of them about Nazis - and needed a break. It is exactly that. Conditional on genre it is excellent (with a wonderful surpise / setting up the sequel ending). I do have two minor complaints.

First, near the beginning of the movie our hero, Mr. Stark, spends three months in a cave in Afghanistan. When he comes back, he wants only two things: an American hamburger and to hold a press conference, in that order. What hamburger does his highly paid staff obtain for him? Burger King! After three months in a cave! It is true that in 1979 after two weeks in the USSR and communist Poland, most all of our high school tour group made a beeline for Burger King in West Berlin (ein Whopper mit Kase bitte!). But that is because we did not know (and indeed there may not have been) better burger places in West Berlin in 1979. There most certainly are better burger places in Los Angeles in 2008. I have no objections to product placement per se, but it should not fight against the coherence of the movie. The Maxim product placement works a lot better.

Second, at one point Stark's trusty computer butler tells him not to do something in his newly constructed Iron Man suit because "terrabytes of calclations" remain undone. Now, I recognize that in some broad sense the whole point of Iron Man is ignoring the realities of physics and engineering. At the same time, it seem like in a movie of this sort, if there are details that can be handled correctly, they should be. If you can spend 100 million plus to make the movie, then you can afford to have some actual technical person look at the script. A terrabyte is a unit of computer memory; a gigaflop is a unit of calculation. Jeez!

Mr. Foucault: please call your office

Things work differently in other departments: here is a report on how things work in the English department at Dartmouth.

Hat tip: reason.com

Ken Troske: elitist?

Ken offers his views on the gas tax holiday proposed by Senators Clinton and McCain in the Cincinnati Enquirer.

In case you find the statement in the article too subtle, I'll give it away and say he does not much like it.

SES != socio-economic status

I was in DC on Monday to talk about an evaluation of the SES program. SES stands for supplemental educational services. It is a program I had not even heard of before but it turns out to be quite an interesting one. Under No Child Left Behind (NCLB) schools that fail to meet their performance standards (AYP in the jargon, for adequate yearly performance as I recall) for three years running must spend some of their Title I federal funds (or an equivalent amount from other sources) on what are essentially vouchers for after-school tutoring. Districts can re-capture the vouchers by attracting students to their own after-school programs but they must offer parents a choice among all state-approved providers, which includes both non-profits (both faith-based and whatever the opposite of faith-based is) and for-profits such as Sylvan learning centers. The money is pretty big here - the providers can make around $40 per hour of tutoring provided.

One important feature of this program is that spillovers are built in, as Title I funds devoted to SES are not spent on other things. This paper, which one of our ace graduate students pointed me to, is by a student of Caroline Hoxby's at Harvard and emphasizes the spillover issue.

The program raises other interesting issues as well. If vouchers for tutoring are okay, why not vouchers for the school day itself? Is it a good idea to create a new set of private sector actors who depend on federal funding? There is, apparently, a K street lobbying organization for providers of SES services, who will now fight tooth-and-nail to keep the program in place regardless of any evaluation results that might come forth. How do parents choose among alternative tutoring providers? My sense is that the information they have to go on is modest, though it may include recommendations from other parents with students in the various programs. Much of the competition may be on convenience in terms of timing and location. What determines the "dosage" of tutoring that students who do take up the services receive? That is, some students go only once, others go all year and others somewhere in between. What factors lead to this variation? What is the optimal dosage and how does it vary among students? As always, there are more interesting research questions than time to address them.

Hat tip: Alex Resch

Serious graduation advice

P.J. O'Rourke, humorist extraordinaire and one of my favorite writers, returns to peak form with this advice to those newly graduated from college.

Hat tip: Nat Wilcox

Reading First

The Reading First evaluation performed by Abt and MDRC (and a cast of thousands) for the Institute of Education Sciences was finally released today. The executive summary is on the IES website here (as is the entire report for readers with a weekend to kill) and the NYT description is here.

The evaluation is a regression discontinuity design that relies on the use of a deterministic rule based on a single index to assign reading first grants. Of course, that means that the impacts really apply only to schools near the discontinuity rather than all schools, though this fact appears not to be (amazingly) mentioned in the executive summary. The overall impacts on teacher practice are in the expected direction and the overall impacts on reading comprehension are not statistically different from zero. A subgroup analysis does find some positive and statistically significant impacts on later adopting sites.

Some remarks:

1. The study is pretty well done. I participated in one conference call about it and read some material and was impressed with the level of care. Full disclosure: as a result of that one day of activity, my name appears in the executive summary as an external advisor along with the names of a large number of my friends and acquaintances.

2. One of the four main researchers is Robin Jacob, now at Michigan. Perhaps not surprisingly, the local paper - the Ann Arbor News - reprints the NYT piece with no mention of the local angle. For reasons that are not clear to me, even their locally written stories often completely ignore the subject area expertise available at the university.

3. The NYT treats the study as estimating the mean impact of the program everywhere, even though it actually estimates the mean impact only at the study sites, which were selected not at random, to allow external validity, but because they had allocation processes that fit into the RD framework, and even though at those sites it estimates the impact only for schools near the discontinuity. It also ignores the subgroup analysis and neglects to mention who actually performed the study. Remind me, once again, why anyone takes the NYT seriously?