Ivory Tower

Thanks to the Utah Film Center and all its generous supporters, I just saw a free screening of Ivory Tower, the 2014 documentary about the problems facing American higher education.

For the most part I thought the film was excellent. It focused on the crisis of rising tuition and student loan debt, and touched on most of the reasons why this crisis has arisen: growing enrollments, shrinking state subsidies, and increased overhead costs for bloated administrations and frivolous amenities. The film also explored a variety of innovative variations on higher education, ranging from massive open online courses to the tiny Deep Springs College. It came down heavily against impersonal, one-size-fits-all solutions, and emphasized the importance of one-on-one human interaction.

The film fell short, though, in its inadequate attention to profit motives. It didn’t even mention the for-profit college sector, which has played a disproportionate role in the student debt crisis. It seemed to blame the federal government for pushing loans on students, when in fact it’s private banks and investors who are profiting from those loans. And although it highlighted the for-profit MOOC startups Udacity and Coursera (and the much-publicized collaboration between Udacity and San Jose State University), it failed to mention the lower-profile infiltration of software for canned courses that’s coming from traditional textbook publishers.

To get to the bottom of a scandal, you need to follow the money.

The Probability of Zero

Good news: Ogden has had zero homicides so far in 2011 (probably).

Bad news: Journalists don’t understand statistics (still).

“Killings down in Ogden,” proclaimed the headline across the top of Sunday’s front page, with a great big zero on one side. Pending a final ruling on whether a fatal July shooting was accidental, Ogden has probably gone for nine months without a murder or automobile homicide. This isn’t just great news; it’s historic.

The article falls short, though, in discussing the possible causes of this unprecedented drop in killings. Relying entirely on statements from the police chief and the county attorney, the article mentions three possible contributing factors: a new police “Crime Reduction Unit” created four years ago; a year-old injunction against the city’s oldest street gang; and a shift over the last several years toward handling gun-related crimes in federal court.

Of course, all of these factors could very well be contributing to a long-term reduction in crime, and the lack of recent homicides could very well be part of that long-term trend. But statistically, you just can’t tell.

You see, Ogden’s homicide rate was already pretty low. According to a data table printed on page 5, Ogden hasn’t had more than four homicides in a calendar year since 2001. During the last nine years, the average number in any nine-month period was only two and a half.

With this data and a simple formula from elementary statistics, we can answer the obvious question: Given this average rate of homicides, what’s the probability of getting zero homicides in any given nine-month period? The answer is one in e^2.5, where e is the famous mathematical constant 2.718 (approximately). Do the math and you find that the probability is about one in 12. (Note that e^2.5 means e times e times the square root of e, or about 2.7 times 2.7 times 1.6.)

I’m assuming, though, that each homicide is an independent event. In fact, some homicides occur in related groups. If the average number of independent homicide groups during any nine-month period is only 2.0, then the probability of getting zero in such a period is one in e², or about one in 7.

If these probabilities still seem rather low, remember that the zero didn’t have to occur this year. Now that the average homicide rate has been at this level for about a decade, we’ve had ten one-in-seven chances so far to get zero homicides during the first nine months of a year. In other words, we were over-due.

It’s understandable that the police chief and county attorney would attribute the lack of homicides to their own efforts. It’s also human nature to look for simple cause-effect relationships. But at this point, the most natural explanation for Ogden’s zero homicides in 2011 (so far) is a mere statistical fluctuation. The article doesn’t even mention this possibility, and it should.

What can’t be explained by mere statistics is the long-term trend. Homicide rates across the U.S. have steadily declined for the last two decades, and Ogden appears to be following this trend. Social scientists have proposed a host of possible reasons for the decline, including better policing and increased incarceration rates, but also including our aging population, changes in immigration, shifts in the illegal drug trade, and availability of abortions (resulting in fewer unwanted children). The even more striking decline over the very long term is probably a result of improving economic conditions, gradually changing attitudes toward killing, and/or increased acceptance of government as the enforcer of laws.

Let’s hope these long-term trends continue, but let’s not jump to conclusions based on local short-term fluctuations.

The Space Shuttle: Inspiration or Distraction?

The news sites are devoting quite a bit of space to this Friday’s final launch of the Shuttle. Perhaps the best discussion I’ve seen is Dennis Overbye’s essay in the New York Times.

The Salt Lake Tribune, understandably, is covering the story from more of a local perspective, emphasizing the Utah jobs and educational opportunities that have depended on the Shuttle over the years.

One of the quotes in the Tribune, though, was over the top. A Utah State University student, whose research has been tied to the shuttle program, said the following:

“Without having a space shuttle or have something that America can send Americans up in, we don’t have anything that can inspire the next generation. I’ve been watching a lot about the Apollo program, and it was awesome that we could build that and then the space shuttle. But now, we have nothing.”

Upon reading this, I left a comment suggesting that this student become just a tad more open-minded about what he considers inspiring. And as an example, I picked NASA’s most important scientific mission: the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

Most Americans have never heard of the JWST, because no humans will be flying on the rocket that launches it. But it will be an immensely powerful instrument, probing the early stages of the formation of planets and galaxies, peering billions of years back in time. Anyone who can think for even ten seconds should find that far more inspiring than a publicly funded billion-dollar amusement park ride, only a couple hundred miles above earth’s surface, repeated 135 times.

Then, a few hours later, I saw something on Cosmic Variance about the JWST now being in jeopardy. I won’t try to defend the cost overruns and mismanagement, which are rightly being compared to the SSC. But if JWST gets canceled it will be a genuine tragedy for this generation and the next.

I’ll be watching to see if the Utah newspapers even cover the story.

Detecting Bad Data

Political numbers geeks learned yesterday that Research 2000, one of the most prolific national political pollsters in recent years, may have been manipulating or even fabricating much of its data. This news comes less than a year after another national pollster, Strategic Vision, was exposed for probable fraud.

The evidence against these pollsters has come mainly from statistical scrutiny of their published results, performed by heroes like Nate Silver and Michael Weissman. But in most cases, you don’t have to be an accomplished sports statistician or a PhD physicist to detect bad data. You just have to care about numbers, and spend some time with them, and use a lot of common sense.

The sad thing is that in America today, hardly anybody cares about numbers except professional scientists and sports enthusiasts. Journalists, in particular, seem to think that their only job is to report both sides of the story--as if there’s no such thing as a fact. Except sports reporters, of course, who have to be extremely careful with facts and figures.

The good news, at the national level, is that the traditional media usually pick up the fraud stories after the bloggers do the actual work. The New York Times wasted no time reporting the Research 2000 accusations on its Caucus blog. If the accusations hold up, we’ll undoubtedly hear more. (Nate Silver will soon be assimilated into the New York Times. Let’s hope these kinds of stories don’t get suppressed in the process.)

Also, at the national level, there’s often enough honest fact-gathering that the frauds don’t make much difference. No single pollster had much impact on Silver’s bottom-line prediction of the outcome of the 2008 presidential election. The danger arises when everyone is relying on a single primary source, like the military or the White House.

At the local level, relying on a single authority is the rule rather than the exception. The Ogden Standard-Examiner almost always prints the word of local government officials as if it were fact, with no questions asked. Despite the detailed exposés on Weber County Forum, the Standard-Examiner has yet to report that the Ogden government manipulated its crime statistics, or that the government’s revenue projections for the Junction development were fraudulently overblown.

In science, fabricating data is the most serious of all crimes. I’ve given failing grades to astronomy students for fabricating their observations (which is usually easy to detect). There are continual allegations of fraud in medical research, where the financial stakes are incredibly high. Fortunately, the list of significant and documented cases of fraud in the physical sciences is extremely short. Although we physical scientists are just as human as everyone else, we know that our peers will tear our work apart if it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

The Fourth Estate?

Today Utah woke up to the news that House Majority Leader Kevin Garn has been keeping a secret.

It seems that 25 years ago he had a little naked hot-tubbing encounter with a young woman. That’s no big deal in itself, but it seems that this woman was a 15-year-old girl at the time, and that Garn was approximately 30, and that she was also his employee, and that he was also married, and that when she threatened to go public during his 2002 campaign for Congress, he paid her $150,000 in hush money. Oh, and after he confessed all this to the Legislature last night, they gave him a standing ovation.

But among all the juicy details of this still-unfolding story, the one that interests me most is this: The Deseret News knew all about it 8 years ago, and never printed a word.

Their excuse is that they learned Garn’s secret shortly before the primary election in which he was defeated. They didn’t want to print something so inflammatory right before the election, when voters might not have time to hear and absorb all sides of the story. And after the election it wasn’t newsworthy because he was no longer a candidate or office holder.

They may have been right about not publishing before the election. Depends on how close to Election Day it was, and exactly how much information they had at that time. But there’s no excuse for their suppressing the story even after the election. Garn had then served in the Legislature for 12 years, and a story like this is newsworthy even when it’s about a former legislator or former candidate (just as the John Edwards scandal was newsworthy when it broke). And when Garn joined the Legislature again in 2007, the story became even more newsworthy.

Makes you wonder what else the Deseret News knows that it isn’t telling us.

The behavior of the Deseret News reminds me a lot of how our local Standard-Examiner treats Mayor Godfrey. In his case there have been no sex scandals, but there’s been plenty of lying, cheating, and illegal activity that the Standard-Examiner has done its best to ignore.

When the Press is part of the cover-up, there’s something seriously wrong with our democracy.

Rockets in the News

It’s been a big week for NASA in the Ogden Standard-Examiner. Tuesday’s top front-page story was about the imminent test launch of the Ares I rocket, whose booster stage is manufactured locally at ATK. Then on Wednesday, the business section ran a wire-service article on the same subject, complete with photos and graphics--plus a teaser headline at the top of the front page with a picture of the rocket stretching all the way across. The launch is scheduled for next Tuesday, so I suppose we can look forward to at least one more big article.

Meanwhile, buried inside Friday’s paper was another article, with no illustrations, about the release of the Augustine Committee report. This appointed committee of experts has concluded that NASA’s ambitious plans for human space flight are unrealistic unless its budget is increased by $3 billion per year. Even then, the most glamorous mission we can afford within 15 years is to land on a passing asteroid or comet, or perhaps fly past Mars without landing. Oh, and the Ares I rocket is too small for such a mission.

Even Friday’s article devoted only one sentence to the question of why NASA should do these things. At least according to one committee member, the reason is “to interest the American public in new destinations.” I suppose that’s more or less equivalent to “because it’s there.”

The article gave far more space to Congressman Rob Bishop’s reaction to the report, which focuses entirely on what’s in it for his district: jobs at ATK producing Ares and Space Shuttle booster rockets.

I have to congratulate the PR folks at NASA and ATK for playing-up this test launch enough to push the Augustine report off the front page. And I can hardly blame the paper for caring more about jobs in Utah than vague long-term goals.

But I find it sad that human space flight, which once represented humanity’s loftiest goals, is now viewed as little more than another jobs program.

Innumeracy at the Standard-Examiner

Today's Standard-Examiner has an article about a small hydroelectric unit that Ogden will be installing at its water treatment plant. According to the article:

• The unit is being funded by a $169,000 grant;
• It will generate 131,400 kilowatts of electricity;
• It will save the city about $10,000 each year.

Can you see that there's something wrong here? A kilowatt of electricity is enough to power an average home, so 131,400 kilowatts would probably power the entire city of Ogden. There's no way such a plant could be built for the cost of a single home, or that the energy delivered annually would be worth less than a new car.

It isn't hard to guess what the "131,400" figure really means: It's actually the number of kilowatt-hours per year. This is a unit of power that would make my physics students groan in dismay, but it's legitimate and even useful when you're thinking about annual budgets. Divide $10,000 by 131,400 and you get an average cost of 7.6 cents per kilowatt-hour, which is about what we pay for electricity here in Ogden.

So what's the plant's output in more conventional units? Divide 131,400 by 365 (days in a year) and by 24 (hours in a day) and you get exactly 15 kilowatt-hours per hour, that is, 15 plain old kilowatts. That's comparable to what your house would use if you turned on all the big appliances at once. And it's reasonable that a water treatment plant would use that much power on a continuous basis.

This isn't rocket science--it's something every educated person can and should understand. Everyone knows what a 100-watt lightbulb is, and most people know that "kilo" means 1000. A typical toaster or hairdryer uses about a kilowatt. A kilowatt-hour is the amount of energy that such an appliance uses when it's turned on for one hour. You need to know this to understand your monthly electricity bill, but few people bother to try.

Why don't newspapers expect their reporters and editors to know what a kilowatt is? Why don't universities expect every graduate to know this? Have we really decided, as a society, that thinking about numbers is only for specialists?

A Case Study in Blogging vs. Traditional Journalism

One reason I haven’t posted anything here in a while is because I’ve been working on a series of three long articles for Weber County Forum, about Ogden’s Junction development. This personal blog was never intended as a substitute for WCF, and most of my writing on local politics will continue to go over there.

But I’d like to comment here on how this episode illustrates the tense-yet-fruitful relationship between blogs and the traditional media. In Ogden the situation is extra simple, because the town has only one daily newspaper (the Standard-Examiner) and only one active political blog (Weber County Forum).

This particular story started as a rumor that I heard about a Taxing Entity Committee meeting that was held on June 25. I could have simply passed this rumor on to a reporter at the S-E, but I’ve learned through experience that they follow up on such things less than half the time. So I got a copy of the meeting minutes from the city recorder and forwarded them to blogmeister RudiZink, who broke the story on WCF on July 14.

During the ensuing discussion in the comment thread under that story, I got curious enough to look up some tax information on the county’s web site. That information made me even more curious.

The S-E finally printed its own story on July 19, and by then I was hooked. So I contacted several city and county officials over the next two weeks, asking question after question until I was satisfied with the answers. My three long-winded articles describe what I learned.

Meanwhile, the S-E has chimed in with three articles of its own that complement mine nicely, taking a closer look at the progress toward finally opening the Earnshaw building, the status of the Junction apartment leases, and the city’s continuing hopes to lure a hotel developer.

So how do the roles of the traditional news source (S-E) and the blog (WCF) differ? In this case, the S-E did a much better job of finding and quoting multiple authorities with different perspectives on the issue. On the other hand, WCF focused on hard evidence (meeting minutes and tax records), in-depth analysis (with tables and graphs), and connecting the dots together. The S-E articles were mostly up-beat, with hopeful promises for the future. WCF documented the broken promises of the past.

In many respects these roles were typical. The S-E hardly ever looks at actual documents or does any arithmetic or produces an original graph or even reminds readers of what was said in its own articles a year or two ago. And WCF hardly ever seeks out a diversity of viewpoints.

In one respect, though, this episode wasn’t typical. Usually the S-E will break a news story, and WCF will follow-up with detailed analysis and commentary. In this case WCF is way out ahead, and the S-E is playing catch-up.

No matter what your opinion of the newspaper and the blog, it’s clear that this city needs both.

Update, 20 August 2009:  The Standard-Examiner has continued its coverage of the Junction financial situation with an especially sloppy article that is misleading in several ways and omits some key information. My comment under the article points out several of its shortcomings.