Corrupt or Incompetent?

That’s the question the world has been asking about the authorities in Pakistan, where Osama bin Laden was living not in a remote cave, but in relative luxury in a suburban neighborhood an hour from the capital and within walking distance of the military academy. Were the government and the military protecting him on purpose, or were they so inept that they honestly didn’t know he was there?

Similar questions come up continually in politics, and also in the corporate world and wherever else humans create institutions that are capable of being corrupted:

• Did the Bush Administration lie to us about Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction, or were the intelligence reports honestly mistaken?
• Did the SEC know for over a decade that Bernie Madoff was running a massive Ponzi scheme, or were its regulators too blind to notice?
• Ogden’s mayor pulled off an audacious fraud prior to the 2007 election, but no public authority or mainstream journalist will say that it was wrong. Is the old boys’ network that corrupt, or are they all just too stupid or lazy or preoccupied with other duties?
• Tens of thousands of Utahns regularly operate off-road vehicles on public lands where motorized travel is supposed to be illegal, but only a tiny handful are ever charged. Are the Forest Service and BLM rangers willfully looking the other way, or do they just lack the resources needed for enforcement?
• Grade inflation runs rampant at America’s schools and universities, where a large fraction of the graduates lack even the most basic literacy and numeracy skills. Are the teachers and administrators incompetent, or do we maintain the status quo because all we care about is keeping our own jobs?

My answer is that these are false dichotomies.

None of these failures are completely due to corruption, and none are completely due to incompetence. Instead, individuals and institutions are typically afflicted with a mixture of both.

In Abbotabad, I would guess that local law enforcement knew about the suspiciously secretive compound but didn’t know who lived there. National-level officials must have suspected that bin Laden was in the country but they probably didn’t know where. Most information was in the form of unverified rumors, and nobody worked hard enough to sort out truth from fiction. Everyone had legitimate fears that bin Laden’s supporters would punish those who asked too many questions. As one former CIA officer put it, “Willful blindness is a survival mechanism in Pakistan.”

In Ogden, the stakes are lower but the attitudes similar. Local businesses and reporters need to stay on good terms with the mayor, so they don’t ask certain questions. Prosecutors don’t seek out evidence of government corruption, and can always rationalize that the evidence they already have isn’t quite enough to convince a jury beyond a reasonable doubt. Everyone has good reasons to choose the status quo over the risk of political turmoil.

In fact, the stability of our institutions requires that they be effectively blind to a wide range of crimes and injustices. Most of the human beings who are part of these institutions gradually learn the “rules” about what questions to ask and not to ask. Those who are too principled and too diligent rarely get promoted to positions of authority, and usually end up leaving to find other work—willingly or unwillingly.

Why, then, does justice sometimes prevail? Simply because the world is full of different institutions with different missions that can check and balance each other—and because all institutions must be somewhat responsive to public opinion. Bin Laden was held accountable because the U.S. military and CIA are more powerful than their counterparts in Pakistan (and because the U.S. ultimately decided that getting bin Laden was more important than working with our Pakistani “allies”). Madoff was held accountable when his scheme finally collapsed and too many other powerful people got hurt, triggering enforcement mechanisms that respond primarily to power. In Utah, the news media have embarrassed public land managers into taking some minor steps toward better enforcement of motorized travel restrictions.

My point is that these success stories are not business as usual. The same institutions—and even the same individual leaders—have spent far more effort maintaining the status quo than fighting it. Call it corruption or incompetence if you like, but it’s really an intricate mixture of both that has naturally evolved in the institutional ecosystem.

Back to Blogging

My time management has deteriorated to the point where personal blogging no longer fits into months when school is in session. But with grades turned in, tulips blooming, and the summer stretching ahead, it’s time for an update:

• I’m extremely proud of my Modern Physics students for their awesome final project presentations.
• Though all we have so far are tantalizing hints, I’m convinced that great discoveries in fundamental physics are just around the corner.
• The Utah Transit Authority never did give me the data I requested regarding the proposed Ogden streetcar project. Fortunately, the city council seems to be headed in the right direction.
• Our very silly mayor won’t be prosecuted for his fraudulent political fundraising, but he won’t run for reelection either, and his Wonder Dome seems to have collapsed.
• The Ogden Sierra Club’s open records lawsuit seems to be winding down.
• This year’s historic building scavenger hunt is underway.
• The buffalo grass is getting a late start on turning green this year.
• But the myrtle spurge is already blooming and ripe for uprooting.
• Made the annual pilgrimage to the Selman Ranch to see the sharp-tail grouse do their dance. The snow on the ground didn’t seem to bother them a bit.
• I don’t trust the stock market, so I’m investing some serious money in home upgrades.
• Sadly, Ogden recently lost a colorful character and dear friend.
• Also sadly, Dad is slowing down and no longer able to carry out his “ministry”. I’ll be going to see him again soon.

Molecule Sandbox

Are your children already tired of their Christmas toys and games? Or would you like to see them play with something less violent and more educational?

Vi Hart’s math doodle games can provide countless hours of fun. But another option that you may want to try is the Molecular Dynamics Applet that I created three years ago. It was originally intended for college students, but I soon discovered that small children love it.

The MD Applet is a sandbox for playing with atoms and molecules. Make up to a thousand atoms, large or small, in your favorite color. Watch them jiggle around endlessly, attracting and repelling their neighbors. Add energy to make liquid droplets boil; remove energy to make a gas condense and then freeze into a solid crystal. Start with an orderly arrangement and watch entropy increase. Connect atoms together with bonds, and even build simulated nano-scale machinery.

I don’t spend much time around small children, but Christmas is often an exception. This year I found myself entertaining (and being entertained by) a delightful seven-year-old who kept coming back, asking to play some more with the MD Applet. She asked her deepest question almost immediately: Why don’t they all just fall down and stop?

And in between molecular dynamics sessions, she learned how to draw stars with seven, eight, and even ten points!

Math Doodles

If you haven’t seen them already, you must watch Vi Hart’s fantastic math doodle videos on stars, squiggles, fractals, and infinite elephants. Browse the rest of her web site too, and be awe-struck at how accomplished she is at having fun.

I’m not much of a doodler, but Hart’s masterpieces reminded me of this modest Escheresque MacPaint doodle that I made soon after buying my first (original!) Macintosh computer in 1985. That was during my first year of grad school, when I should have been putting every effort into those problem sets on quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics, and solid state physics. Why are we most creative when we’re avoiding what we’re supposed to do?

(By the way, isn’t it cool that I can still open that MacPaint file in Preview? Thanks, Apple! Now please tell me how to open my old MacWrite files...)

Thanks to Charlie Trentelman for pointing me, via Facebook, to a blog post on Hart’s videos by NPR’s Robert Krulwich. And thanks to my old grad school friend Ned Gulley, whose venerable blog featured an entry last year about Hart’s Möbius music box. It’s become trendy to gripe about the Internet and Facebook, but this is the sort of thing I love about both.

Krulwich also quotes from Paul Lockhart’s magnificent tirade about math education, “A Mathematician’s Lament.” It’s not new, but I don’t think I’d ever seen it before. Read it and weep.

Uncertainties in Science and Politics

Nate Silver is currently predicting that Republicans will gain 47 House seats in the upcoming election—plus or minus 30. In other words, he’s fairly sure that Republicans will gain between 17 and 77 seats, although there’s a slight chance the gain will be even less, or even more.

What good is a prediction when it carries such a wide margin of error? Answer: Far, far better than a prediction with no stated margin of error at all.

Understanding uncertainties, and learning to live with uncertainties, and stubbornly insisting on knowing the uncertainties, is the hallmark of a good scientist. A constant awareness of uncertainties may be the most important thinking pattern that distinguishes the two cultures (“techies” and “fuzzies”, we called them at Stanford) from each other.

If you study physics, we try to teach you about uncertainties through lab exercises. Suppose someone predicts that “g” (the acceleration of a freely flying projectile) should equal 9.8 meters per second squared. You measure its value and get 9.6. Have you confirmed the prediction or not? Yes, if the uncertainty in your measurement is at least 0.2. But if your uncertainly is only 0.02, you’ve disproved the prediction (and perhaps discovered a local gravitational anomaly).

Our introductory physics lab students think they’ll be graded on how close they get to the “right” answer, but they’re wrong. We actually grade them on whether they make a good uncertainty estimate, and on whether they interpret their results correctly in light of this uncertainty.

Perhaps I learned this lesson in undergraduate lab courses myself; I can’t remember. What I do remember, vividly, is my graduate school days at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, when I must have sat through hundreds of seminars on experimental results and their theoretical interpretation. Each speaker would spend a major portion of the talk meticulously explaining how the uncertainties had been estimated. Most of the after-talk discussion would center on whether these estimates were accurate and whether the speaker had, given the uncertainties, drawn the right conclusion. In elementary particle physics, where the experiments cost hundreds of millions of dollars and the data are inherently statistical, you had better interpret your results correctly.

But uncertainties don’t play well in politics. Whenever a climatologist admits that there’s any uncertainty at all in the predicted rise in earth’s average temperature, global warming deniers loudly yell “See! The scientists admit they don’t know what will happen!” Or to take another example from the not-so-distant past: Imagine that President Bush had said in 2002 that he actually wasn’t sure whether Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction, but there seemed to be a 50/50 chance of it. Would Congress still have authorized the war?

Nate Silver is a hero (and an anomaly) because he’s able to look at all the data, make his best prediction, and still be honest about his uncertainties—even when the subject is politics.

I’ll end (once again) with a local political example. A respected economic consultant recently predicted that the middle segment of Ogden’s proposed streetcar system will stimulate $8.5 million of investment if it follows one proposed alignment, but only $1.5 million if it follows an alternate alignment. Ten days ago I asked her what the uncertainty range is on those numbers, and she replied, “Well, you can see that we rounded them to the nearest half million.” I’m afraid I laughed at that point, and tried unsuccessfully to convince her that the uncertainties were many times larger. I knew the numbers had been calculated from property value assessments, and that these assessments can be systematically off by 50% or even more. Worse, I knew that the lists of properties to be included in the calculations had been compiled through a subjective, undocumented process. After our conversation I looked up some of the property assessments and quickly saw that you could increase the $1.5 million prediction to over $9 million by excluding just two properties (out of several dozen) from the list. A fair estimate of the uncertainty would be much higher still.

But economic consultants apparently aren’t in the habit of thinking about uncertainty. Undoubtedly this is because their clients don’t want to hear about it; they just want simple answers. In this case the client was the Utah Transit Authority—a government agency that supposedly represents the people. Ultimately, it is the citizens at large who need to learn to think like scientists.

The Fight Over NASA Continues

The fight in Washington over NASA’s future has gotten complicated and ugly, like any other legislative battle. I can’t keep up with the details, but the latest development is noteworthy.

The voices of reason have just sent an open letter to the chairman of the House Committee on Science and Technology, pleading for more support for new technology, commercial spaceflight, robotic precursor missions, and student research. These are some of the programs that our government has been scaling back in recent years, and may continue to scale back, in order to divert every available dollar to the entrenched Constellation Program contractors.

The letter is signed by 14 Nobel laureates and a list of eminent former NASA officials and astronauts. Will anyone listen to them? I have no idea.

Meanwhile, our local entrenched contractor test-fired a rocket motor yesterday, resulting in yet another article (and yet another cool photo) in the local paper. Of course, the article reminds us yet again of how many local jobs hang in the balance as Congress debates NASA’s future. And what is the purpose of this new rocket motor? All we’re told is this: “ATK hopes its motor will boost a rocket into low Earth orbit, or maybe space.”

Textbook Prices

Today, on the eve of the start of fall semester classes, Mark Saal’s column in the Ogden Standard-Examiner appropriately takes aim at astronomical textbook prices. And although many of his examples are books for economics courses, he also lists the price of an introductory astronomy textbook!

(Feynman joke: “There are 10¹¹ stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it’s only a hundred billion. It’s less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.”)

As Saal points out, high college textbook prices are mainly due to the fact that the people choosing the books (the professors) are never the same ones who are paying for the books (the students). Publishers bombard professors with free copies of textbooks and in fact, I doubt that most professors even know what their assigned books cost. (The sales reps certainly don’t volunteer this information.) Under this system, textbook prices have been creeping upward considerably faster than inflation for the last 25 years.

One force that tries to counteract this trend is the used book market. Students have been selling their used books to each other for a very long time. College bookstores take an “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” attitude, buying back used books for half price and then reselling them at 75% of the price of a new book. (The difference, 25% of the new price, happens to be the same as the bookstores’ profit margin on new books.) Students who don’t wish to keep their books can save a lot of money under this system, buying a used book for 75% of the new price and then selling it back at 50%, for a net cost of only 25%. Students who want to keep their books, though, still pay 75% of the new price.

Fighting back, publishers do everything they can to suppress the used book market. Mass-produced introductory books are now revised every three or four years, thereby making all used copies of the previous edition worthless. The revisions rarely add anything of value to the content. If publishers could revise books even more often, I’m sure they would—but that’s pretty much impossible. So they now publish most books in paperback, designed to self-destruct after a semester of use (while saving almost nothing in production cost). Another trick is to shrink-wrap a single-use student workbook with the main book, hoping that professors will require their students to have both. More recently, publishers have started providing online extras such as self-grading homework assignments, protected by a password that students have to pay for unless they buy a new book. The password expires after a year, and cannot be transferred to another student.

Being the half-assed crusader that I am, I’ve been fighting this system, in my own small ways, since 1990. I’ve written angry letters to publishers, posted a web article documenting the alarming trend in prices, and even made my own publisher put a clause in our contract to limit the price of my thermal physics textbook. I’ve never required my students to use the shrink-wrapped workbooks or online homework systems. For my own astronomy section, I’ve started writing a free online text (emphasis on started).

But of all the ways that professors can save money for their students, the most promising by far is simply this: Turn the publishers’ tactic against them and let your students use an earlier edition of the book. College bookstores won’t stock superseded editions, because they can’t be returned to the warehouse if they don’t sell. But the Internet makes it extremely easy for students to obtain used older editions, and the prices are rock-bottom.