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View 761 Thursday, February 07, 2013

Bill Gates’ Measurements

I read a description of Gates’ ideas in the Wall Street Journal. Assuming the Journal quoted him correctly, much of what he wants to "measure" consists of inputs rather than outputs. Counting the number of vaccinations is measuring an input. What really matters is the reduction in illness. That’s an output, and is the thing which should be measured. All too often people assume a connection between an input and some desired output, and then measure the input. That’s a measure of effort, not a measure of results. During the Vietnam War the Air Force used to measure effort like number of sorties and tons of bombs dropped, not what effect it had on the enemy. This attention to measures of effort rather than measures of results seems to prevail throughout government.

Joseph P. Martino

I once had this conversation with Bill Gates, back about the time he had the first big conference on the CD-ROM, so I think he understands the difference, but I agree that the Wall Street Journal article doesn’t make that very clear. A better example is measuring the effectiveness of schools by the amount of money spent per pupil: nearly everyone knows that throwing money into a school system seldom improves it, and often by rewarding existing (bad) practices has the opposite effect from improving education. So has it been in the past, and so shall it be in future. Numerous studies have confirmed that. Neither more money nor smaller classes are reliable means of improving education.

The first and most important problem in public education is to understand what the goal is. It may be that the best way to do that is to ask why someone without children should pay for the education of other people’s children. Education is not a Constitutional right or entitlement, and even the aggressive federal courts don’t assert that.

The usual argument in favor of compulsory education is that an educated electorate is necessary to the health of a republic. A secondary one is that an educated public is a good investment since it promotes economic growth and a wealthier nation.

You will note that the militant egalitarianism that insists that education is an entitlement and everyone is entitled not only to an education but the same education as anyone else gets does not in fact promote the goals stated in the above paragraph and often makes achieving them impossible. It may be very good for a 15 year old retarded girl to be mainstreamed and kept in age appropriate classes, but it is demonstrably a heavy tax on the other students, who get fewer teacher resources – and this assumes that there are no order and behavior problems, which always absorb teacher and learning time without much positive return. When entitlement rights get involved in education, the educational results generally are worse, and often are far worse. Of course some will argue that it is good for the children of normal and above normal intelligence to be exposed to the sub-normal because there is something inherently good about Diversity, but there don’t seem to be any valid studies showing that you learn algebra better if your class includes someone who never will learn it.

It should be clear that mere exposure to high quality education does not inevitably produce positive results. Actually, trying to teach a high level of understanding to a class that includes low intelligence students is a grueling task, and impossible for all but the best teachers. Yet that is what we seem to be insisting on.

Counting input as a measure of output can be useful if you know the relationship between the input and the output, which is to say, if you have an accurate and testable and tested theory. But in education we don’t generally have that.

And yet. Just about every study yet conducted finds that simply eliminating the worst 10% of teachers in a school – chosen by almost any rational common sense definition of ‘worst’ – results in a great rise in ‘output’ under nearly any rational definition of educational success. I put it that way because many of the studies aren’t meticulous; they’re case histories and observations, not carefully designed experiments.

More another time.

I will note that the main requirement for getting an education is the ability to read. An astonishing number of children reach fourth grade unable to read.  They pass the tests for ‘reading at grade level’ but the ‘grade level’ is itself a clue.  If you can only read ‘at grade level’ then you can’t read.  There’s a simple test. If your fourth grade child has any trouble at all with “big words’ like Constantinople and Timbuktu, or polyethylene, it is likely he can’t read.  That is:  if he can read he can ‘sound out’ those words, and he is likely to have heard them before.  Of course if you can read you can also read words you have never heard before like diethyltrinitroethylene, but you will have trouble with the word, because never having heard it before you not only have to sound it out but get past some ambiguities of pronunciation.  And you certainly won’t know what it means since it’s not a real word.  But you can read it.

For more on this go to Mrs. Pournelle’s reading program, which you can find under The Literacy Connection. http://www.readingtlc.com/

Los Angeles is under a state of siege but it may end soon. We are learning on a very small scale and over a brief period of time something of what the people of Iraq learned during the US occupation. The LA Police are under threat from a terrorist – a former LAPD officer with a grievance – who has already killed the daughter of one former LAPD captain and her fiancé, and has shot three other police officers. He has fired at others. He is a trained sniper.

As a result LAPD officers on protective detail guarding someone believed to be a potential victim of the former policeman turned terrorist fired without warning at two elderly Asian women in a pickup truck resembling the truck believed to be owned by the suspect. They slowed down in front of the house, and they were driving a pickup truck resembling that of the terrorist, and the police opened fire wounding both of the women – who were delivering newspapers including to the house under watch.

Other news reports are that police are questioning traffic stop suspects with drawn weapons.

We now know how people in occupied territories feel although in our case it won’t last long.

Now of course the police (or the US soldiers in Iraq) are concerned and want to protect themselves. They are afraid. They are nervous. They are targets, and specifically targeted by the terrorist – as were the soldiers in Iraq.

The news says that a truck resembling that wanted is on fire high in the mountains. No one knows how it got there or whether it is really the truck. More later. Meanwhile, we enjoy a tiny taste of Civil War in Los Angeles County although only one armed man has declared war on the authorities here. Interestingly the response has been to turn out every officer, without regard to cost or overtime obligations or much else. A bigger response than to riots in which shopkeepers were beaten, burned out, or even killed. He rioters didn’t declare war. They merely burned out stores and shops and looted anything in sight. But this chap declared war on the police.

I am not as unsympathetic to the police as the above may seem; but there are some obvious inferences here. One does not protect a population by putting one’s personal safety first.  That’s a harsh truth, but good cops have always known it.

With luck the chap has been driven to ground in the snow topped mountains above LA and this will end. The skies above Big Bear are filled with aircraft (it’s pretty high for helicopters so fixed wing craft are up there too) and hundreds – literally hundreds – of police, sheriff, Highway Patrol, FBI, BATF, and other vehicles. SWAT teams cover every crossroad. K9 units are on the way. Thousands of police. To hunt down one man who declared war on the police.  I suspect that petty criminals all over the county are rejoicing and smart ones make hay while the sun shines, but I may be presuming too much intelligence on their part.

In any even our terrorist is supposed to be up there in the mountains. Of course that would be a rather stupid thing for him to have done to himself, but when you are one man it is difficult to conduct a civil war.

It’s lunch time.

View 761 Wednesday, February 06, 2013

I’ll be doing a Triangulation interview with Leo Laporte at 1530 today, so I am not up in the monk’s cell working on Anvil. Actually that is the only reason. I seem to have got over a month and more of pure funk that kept me from doing much work on fiction and for that matter on much else. I’ve been doing a lot of good work lately.

It may be just recovery from a long term winter bronchitis. I used to get that every winter and it was an effort to keep working. Hardly matters. I’ve done a few thousand words in the last few days, and I know where I want to go next and which character I want to develop and how to advance the plot as I do, so I’m sure I’ll be able to start again without problems.

The secret to success in writing is what Elizabeth George calls ‘bum glue’. Ms. George is an American writer of British mysteries – the Inspector Lynley series – who says she got the phrase from Australian fans. My own phrase was butt in chair, but bum glue is pithy and quite exact.

I’m still working on a reaction to Bill Gates’s article on fixing all the world’s problems by measuring them.

Bill Gates: My Plan to Fix The World’s Biggest Problems

From the fight against polio to fixing education, what’s missing is often good measurement and a commitment to follow the data. We can do better. We have the tools at hand.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323539804578261780648285770.html

I’ve mentioned It before, and I thought I’d have been able to write something more about it, but it turns out to be worth more than a few words. A lot more than a few words. There’s nothing much new in what Gates says. The essence of it is

We can learn a lot about improving the 21st-century world from an icon of the industrial era: the steam engine.

Harnessing steam power required many innovations, as William Rosen chronicles in the book "The Most Powerful Idea in the World." Among the most important were a new way to measure the energy output of engines and a micrometer dubbed the "Lord Chancellor" that could gauge tiny distances.

Such measuring tools, Mr. Rosen writes, allowed inventors to see if their incremental design changes led to the improvements—such as higher power and less coal consumption—needed to build better engines. There’s a larger lesson here: Without feedback from precise measurement, Mr. Rosen writes, invention is "doomed to be rare and erratic." With it, invention becomes "commonplace."

In the past year, I have been struck by how important measurement is to improving the human condition. You can achieve incredible progress if you set a clear goal and find a measure that will drive progress toward that goal—in a feedback loop similar to the one Mr. Rosen describes.

This may seem basic, but it is amazing how often it is not done and how hard it is to get right.

In The Strategy of Technology (by Stefan Possony, Jerry Pournelle, and Francis X. Kane) we tried to explain how to create and develop new technology as part of a systematic military strategy. The book was intended for military systems developers and tried to explain a process called Systems Analysis by Herman Kahn, but which was very similar to what had long been known as operations research. If I can be said to have had a specialty skill in aerospace it would have to be that I was an OR man, as operations research people were known in those days, and for a while when I was at Boeing I was among a very small group whose job title was Systems Analyst. It was said that unlike specialists who tended to know more and more about less and less until they knew everything about nothing at all, OR people and Systems Analysts knew less and less about more and more until they knew nothing about everything. Think of those statements as vectors rather than quantitative estimates and they’re not far off the mark. The main tool of the OR people was an ability to tool up to where you could understand the experts well enough to come up with some models of what they were doing. The idea was to quantify operations, then figure out what moves you might make to maximize results.

And the problem there – particularly before the development of large scale integrated circuit architecture leading to small computers – was that if you couldn’t measure something you couldn’t do much about it. This led to the temptation to study what you could quantify and measure. Often that was a good way to go, but sometimes it led to exactly the opposite result of what you wanted – if you chose to optimize on the wrong objective. This was known in the trade as sub-optimization, and one case of that nearly led to disaster.

In the early days of World War II, the OR boffins were aimed at the problem of the Battle of the Atlantic. England’s survival depended on getting convoys through to the island nation. The Germans rightly believed that England could be blockaded and starved into submission. After all, Britain had done that to France in the Napoleonic wars. Germany had no surface fleet to challenge the British – and later American – fleets, but they did have submarines, and some very effective submarine tactics.

The OR boffins studied the situation and came up with optimum techniques for the escorts to use to sink submarines. In particular the trick was not to attack too early after an air sighting of a surfaces sub. Hang on until you vector an escort ship to the scene then have a coordinate air-sea attack. That gave the best probability for sinking the sub. It worked, too. The number of subs sunk went up. The problem was that the number of cargo ships sunk by the subs went up, too.

The problem was that they had chosen the wrong measure to optimize. After all, the goal was not to sink subs. The real goal was to get cargo ships through the submarine wolf packs.

That, as it turned out, required entirely different tactics. The best tactic to get the convoy through was to attack immediately, and once the enemy sub was submerged forget about it and look for others. Make them stay under water, because by far the most effective attacks were done from the surface, particularly at night. A sub firing a torpedo from the surface had a far higher chance of hitting the target than it did from a submerged release.

And once the boffins figured this out and applied the new strategy, the number of submarines sunk went down and down, but the tonnage of cargo that got through grew. And the battle was won.

I

It’s getting towards time when I have to do the Triangulation interview with Leo so I’ll continue this another time. My point is that we need to choose the proper goals for education before we start changing the system. If the goal is to expose the maximum number of young people to a curriculum you get one result. If the goal is, as Gates once thought, to give every young person in America “a world class university prep education” you get a different result, and indeed, since achieving the goal is demonstrably impossible no matter how many severely challenged children you “mainstream”, you may in fact achieve the result of fewer people receiving a world class university prep education, and fewer receiving a world class college prep education, and fewer learning any skills they can actually use to do jobs they are capable of doing, and — but you get the idea.

The magic of measurement and small feed back loops must not be neglected. It’s terribly important. But what you measure and what you optimize depends on many factors. Taken as a call to find real measures of progress in the education system Gates’s essay is important; but it is all to easy to suboptimize and sometimes suboptimization can be disastrous.

View 761 Tuesday, February 05, 2013

I met Michael Dell at an Atlanta Comdex when his company was just becoming a major player in the PC community. We had dinner at one of the major Atlanta hotels with perhaps half a dozen other CEO’s, and I was impressed with him.

Possibly inspired by Amazon’s example of forgoing immediate profit for longer term goals, Dell, with the aid of a $2 Billion loan from Microsoft, is going private. One advantage of that is a considerable saving in paperwork – cubicle workers who do quarterly reports, regulation compliance reports, stockholder relations, minority stockholder relations, that sort of thing. An even greater advantage comes from not having to worry about analysts and the stock market going into panic mode if Dell choses to do long term investment and allow the price to earnings ratio to fall. There is also greater freedom from SEC supervision, and that’s worth a lot.

Like Steve Jobs, Mike Dell left the company he founded for a while, then came back. Perhaps he has ideas for the next new thing, and wants the flexibility to bet the company on them.

It’s also possible that he simply wants out of the growth expectations rat race, and wants to build a sound and stable company that will continue to make profits for a long time. That’s not glamorous, but it is what a major economy needs – job stability over the long haul without ups and downs. The market lives on growth expectations, and if you don’t meet them you get hammered. That will continue over on Wall Street, whose horizons go out a year at most. Analysts tend to see quarterly reports and compare actual earnings to those the analyst community expected; woe to the company that falls short of what the models said they should be making. “Flat earning” – which is to say steady profits – are a curse in the Wall Street community. After all, with price to earnings ratios of 10 an more, if you aren’t growing the investors are doomed. This can make for growth in aggregate but it’s sure hard on those who were merely flat.

Of course even achieving the goal of long term stability in the PC market and this economy will be very difficult. When Bill Gates set out to see that there was a computer in every office, and in every house, and in every classroom, few thought he or they would live to see that goal effectively accomplished. Thanks to competitors like Mike Dell it was achieved long before even they thought it would happen. As Possony and I postulated in The Strategy of Technology, technology grows in S curves, slow at first so that linear projections are always smaller than you thought, then steeply rising, before the rate of growth slows again and we reach the top knee of the S. Exponentials are hard to maintain because the high rates of growth get increasingly more difficult to accomplish. Small computer technology benefitted from a number of interacting growths, stemming at bottom from Moore’s Law on how many transistor you could put on a wafer. That resulted in faster computers, which facilitated better designs of mass storage devices, cheaper memory, better machines for lower costs – and more demand for small computers.

That trend is slowing. New Growth will need a new S curve. Finding those in this complicated world requires flexibility.

Companies under the SEC have the flexibility drained out of them by regulations.

It will be interesting to see what comes next. Steve Jobs came to a failing Apple and brought in the iPhone, iPod, iStore, and the lot, turning a doomed company into the largest company on the market.

Now Mike Dell is arranging to have the same flexibility.

Government sues Standard and Poor.  Now there’s a story.  How much of the economic mess we are in is due to the ‘ratings’ of of those real estate based complex “products” the same as government bonds?  With those ratings you could sell that junk as if it were worth something.  And the commissions flowed, and the good times rolled. All doomed of course, but putting that much new money into the real estate market had the predictable effect.  A Ponzi Scheme rated AAA. And those who said this was madness were told they were mad.

It’s lunch time, and then I have to go write.

My wife just got what looks like a notice from EarthLink that her account is being suspended. It’s a phishing expedition of course. Apparently there a a bunch of them floating around now.  Be careful out there.

“If you believe the President has the power to order U.S. citizens executed far from any battlefield with no charges or trial, then it’s truly hard to conceive of any asserted power you would find objectionable.”

<http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/02/05/16855539-judge-jury-and-executioner-legal-experts-fear-implications-of-white-house-drone-memo>

Roland Dobbins

There is a great deal to be said on this subject. Clearly those who have levied war on the United States are enemies and legitimate targets of executive action.   The problem comes when it is American Citizens not on a battlefield.  It is not illegal to be in Yemin so far as I know.

At least one proposal would require the equivalent of an indictment either by a grand jury or by a special court. And it really gets sticky if we are talking about straight out assassination on neutral territory, or even more extreme, on US territory.  What makes someone subject to instant deadly attack as opposed to subject to arrest?  And if you don’t nave enough evidence to get an indictment, do you have enough for an execution order? 

View 761 Monday, February 04, 2013

It’s official. The bones found in a parking lot in Leicester are those of Richard III. http://www.latimes.com/news/world/worldnow/la-fg-wn-richard-iii-remains-20130204,0,7667709.story

Richard III is mostly known to us from Shakespeare, who had strong reasons to portray that last of the Plantagenets as an evil usurper since the descendants of Henry Tudor (Henry VII) ruled in that turbulent time. As did just about anyone in England after Bosworth Field. Henry was an insecure king, and thus unforgiving of those he thought his enemies – a tendency that passed along to all his Tudor descendants.

Thomas Costain in his magnificent four volume history of England from the Conqueror to Richard III made the case that Richard was what many of his subjects thought he was, a great king defeated by a usurper, but the rehabilitation of Richard in modern times was sparked by the detective novelist Josephine Tey (she’s very good if you don’t know her works) when she did a fiction novel involving her modern Scotland Yard detective Alan Grant looking into Richard III’s death. The novel is The Daughter of Time and if you haven’t read it you will like it, whatever your opinion of Richard III.

And as I indicated above, the four volume history of the kings of England after the Conquest, THE CONQUERING FAMILY, THE MAGNIFICENT CENTURY, THE THREE EDWARDS, and THE LAST PLANTAGENETS are a very readable way to become familiar with an important period of history that has had an effect on United States history ever since. The Canadian author Thomas Costain was better known for best selling history novels such as THE BLACK ROSE, but his histories were Book of the Month Club selections and became best sellers also, and once were very well known among book-reading Americans.

As to why you ought to know more about the Wars of the Roses, which began with the deposition of the weak king Richard II son of Henry III who had his own problems, those were the times in which the English people who colonized America learned the political principles that settled America. Richard III was killed at Bosworth and followed by Henry VII. His son was Henry VIII. Mark Twain wrote a popular novel about Henry VIII’s short lived son. And after Edward VI (the time of Cranmer and The Book of Common Prayer) came Queen Mary I, Bloody Mary, who burned Archbishop Cranmer alive, and instilled in the people of England a distaste for religious wars that is reflected in the First Amendment. And that bring us to Elizabeth I, James VI and First, and Charles I. Jamestown, Charleston. And perhaps that’s enough.

The history of England is firmly behind much of the US Constitution. The members of the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 were firmly aware of both the attractions and detriments of monarchy. They were all thoroughly aware that their Chairman, General George Washington, could have assumed the throne of the United States at the behest of the officers of the Continental Army, and there was no power that could resist him; indeed it looked as if he would have great popular support. We are accustomed to the notion that one becomes the ruler by winning an election, but that was not the common practice of the world at the time – and isn’t now, for that matter, outside Europe and North America.

But the study of history isn’t very common now, and what is taught as history in the schools bears little relationship to what most of those reading this were taught. That is a matter for another time. What is important is to note that a republican form of government, with the peaceful succession of those who have won an election and the departure of those who lost it, is fairly rare in human history. I think it has happened precisely twice in the history of Venezuela, whose constitution pretty well copies ours. I could continue with examples but surely there is no need.

To the Framers, democracy was as risky as monarchy. Indeed, riskier because they knew where they could get a good king who might be induced to take the throne. But Washington didn’t want it, and there was no obvious successor.

Yet the usual product of democracy has been an Emperor. So said Roman history, and although the Framers of 1787 did not know what would happen in France not long afterwards, there were plenty of precedents throughout history. Leaving the selection of the monarch up to the momentary whim of the people was a very dangerous thing to do.

But they weren’t kidding when they said on the founding of this new republic that a new age now begins.

This started as a ramble about finding the remains of Richard III, and hinting that the popular view of King Richard III as learned from Shakespeare may not be correct.

“A horse! My kingdom for a horse!”

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

One could write a pretty good alternate history novel on the premise that Richard III found a horse.