Two Cool Websites

http://tools.google.com/gapminder

The high information density here just blows me away. Click the ‘Play’ button to see the data progress over the years. The radius of a circle is by default proportional to the population of the country, although you can change that indicator. You can also change the x- and y- variables. I’m very impressed.

http://memory.loc.gov - The American Memory section of the Library of Congress. You can go here - http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/fsowhome.html - for the online collection of 164,000 photographs shot by New Deal photographers during the Great Depression. This includes 1600 color photographs:

http://memory.loc.gov/service/pnp/fsac/1a34000/1a34100/1a34135v.jpg

http://memory.loc.gov/service/pnp/fsac/1a35000/1a35000/1a35022v.jpg

It’s very strange looking at color photos from that time period; something I’m not used to seeing. I enjoyed seeing pictures of my grandparents’ generation in color – very cool.

Norton Shenanigans / Indian Technical Support

So my Norton Anti-virus program has been squawking the last few weeks saying that my subscription is running out and do I want to renew it. I’m actually not too satisfied with the program, so no, I don’t want to renew it, and dutifully click so.

Well, we got an email yesterday from Norton saying that they had automatically renewed us for the next year and charged our credit card $40. The email had some fine print:

As a reminder, during the original purchase, you authorized Symantec to use the contact and billing information provided during purchase activity to charge each renewal. You also authorized Digital River, Symantec's authorized online reseller, to transfer the contact and billing information you provided for your purchase today to Symantec for this purpose.

Must have been in some fine print/EULA thing when we bought it, since that’s not the sort of thing that my wife or I would ever approve.

So their audacity is pretty funny; I mean if they really believed that I was down with them automatically resubscribing me, they wouldn’t have bothered asking me if I wanted to renew; they just would have done it. Or, they could have “reminded” me that I already said it was ok, but wanted me to confirm anyways. No, they did the sneaky thing of trying to get me to do it, then when I wouldn’t, they did it for me and told me I already told them they could.

Of course, while I see the humor in the situation, there’s no way I’m going to take sh*t like that from a company that I’m paying money to. Not to mention that there’s no way I want such a shady company in charge of the security on my computer. So not much question that I was going to cancel and get my money back. Of course, the email didn’t say anything about how to do that (another sign that they don’t have the strength of their convictions, and that they know they’re being shady). So I went to their support website to see how to cancel, and they kindly put me in an infinite loop:

- Go to tech support page A

- What do you want to do?

- Cancel? Go to tech support page B

- What product do you have?

- Norton AV 2006. What do you want to do?

- Cancel? Ok, go to tech support page A

I went through that loop three times, and tried a number of other things before breaking down and calling tech support. Waited on the phone for thirty minutes. Spoke with a gentleman with a heavy Indian accent who called himself “Michael”. He helped me out very efficiently, and hopefully the sorry affair is done with now.

Which gets me to the point of this post (other than that fact that I now hate Norton): what’s the deal with foreign tech support people going by American names? Who ever thought this was a good idea?

Let’s break this down. You’re probably in a bad mood, or you wouldn’t be calling tech support. This is probably the first human contact you have with the company, and the very first thing out of the company representative’s mouth is a lie. Not just any lie; they’re lying about their name. Who does that? Is that really the best way to start off a conversation? For me, it makes it hard to respect either them or their company after that.

Now I understand that people in India and other foreign countries have names that are unusual to Americans, and that might be off-putting to someone calling tech support. It shouldn’t be, but maybe it is. I’m not sure why this needs explanation, but if you’re going to outsource support to India, one consequence of this is that Indians will be taking people’s calls. If you don’t think your customers can deal with that, then maybe you should rethink your outsourcing decision.

Super Bowl XLI

Just a few quick comments on the Colts-Bears Super Bowl.

I’m kind of glad the Colts won, because it ended the ridiculous pre-arguments of whether Peyton Manning would be considered a great quarterback in the future if he ended up never having won a Super Bowl. I’m just not fond of that sort of the idea that you need to win a Super Bowl to be considered great, since football is a team sport. To be the champions, your team also needs to have good offensive players around you, good defense, good coaching, and luck; most of which are outside the quarterbacks sphere of influence. Although what’s funny is that the debate is over, even though Manning’s body of work this postseason has been significantly less than stellar. Reminds me of how the knock on Steve Young was that he couldn’t win the big one, and people stopped saying that once he threw six touchdown passes in his winning Super Bowl. Of course, that was against the 1994 Chargers, one of the weakest Super Bowl contenders ever, so the game technically proved much less than it might have, but nobody cared about that. I’ll end by saying I’m a big Steve Young fan, and the pre-Super Bowl debate over whether he was great without having won a championship was just as silly as it was this time around.

The game was certainly sloppy from a technical, pure football standpoint. But I thought it was compelling emotionally. After the first quarter it definitely looked like the Colts were imposing their will on the Bears. And yet the Bears bent, bent, bent, but didn’t break until the very end. So the tension of not knowing who would win was maintained until well into the fourth quarter. The other thing I liked about the game (and the playoff games last month) was that the Colts won it by accomplishing the things they lacked in years past that had kept them from being champions. They were physical. They responded to adversity, keeping their composure and mounting comebacks in their last two games. And they played a complete game, with Peyton Manning sublimating his ego (or maybe Tony Dungy sublimating it for him) and winning the game by throwing short passes that the defense allowed him, rather than trying to be a hero and bombing away. It showed a maturation on his (and the whole team’s part), which was rewarding to watch.

Last point. Did Manning deserve to win the MVP? I was kind of disappointed that he did, since it really seemed to be a team win, and it was the Colts’ running game that broke the back of the Bears. On the other hand, the award had to go to somebody, and you could argue that Manning really was the hero because for once he didn’t need to be the hero, and played a role that was lesser, but one the team needed more. Naaah, too convoluted. Give it to someone else.

Watered-down Courses? Part II

That last post didn’t really come out the way I originally intended. I spent my time wondering whether it’s better to learn on qualitative concepts or lower-level calculations, or if it’s even possible to do the former without doing the latter. Which is a fun thing to debate, but it leaves out one part of the puzzle, which is, ok, maybe you learn some stuff in the course, but what do you actually take away with you when the course is done and gone? What resides in your memory a year later, and is it worth anything?

When you look at things this way, I would argue that it’s easier to learn and remember concepts instead of calculations. I don’t get the sense that most people retain calculation techniques all that long without intensive drilling, especially if they don’t understand the underlying concepts. So from that perspective, a watered-down curriculum can work out just fine, if – if – the material is presented in a way that makes it easy to understand and remember down the road.

This line of thinking leads to something I’ve always wondered about. Is there any point in taking a course if you’re going to forget it all a few months down the road? Ditto for reading non-fiction books – if you read it and the contents vanish from your head soon thereafter, should you have bothered? If you don’t remember anything about it, was there anything to make the experience worthwhile?

I can come up with some reasons why taking a course and subsequently forgetting it completely can still have value:

1. Most obviously, if there is some short-term goal that has passing the course as a prerequisite. Like, for example, a college degree.
2. You don’t know anything about a subject, but want to explore it to see if it’s interesting or valuable. If not – forget it.
3. The experience at the time is fun (more applicable to reading books than taking courses).
4. You might need the subject matter in the future. Even if you forget it all, learning it once will make it easier to re-learn it on demand.

Am I missing any? Obviously, reason #1 is the most compelling, and the reason why most people take courses, but it’s not very satisfying from a philosophical standpoint.

I’m a bit more uptight on the subject than most people – I hate the idea of wasting my time, so if I spend it on a course, or reading a book, I’m damn well going to try to get something lasting out of it. This is where my habit of trying to write down notes after I read a book comes from. I hate to spend time reading a book only to realize down the road that I remember next to nothing from the experience. At the same time, this attitude can be a drawback in that if a book is boring or otherwise pointless for my interests, I’m not good at cutting my losses and not caring whether I forget things or not.

I’ll end this on a cynical note. I always wonder about how valuable college is, in the sense of how much you actually learn. (Aside from the question of how much you learn and remember, there’s the issue of how much of that is applicable to anything in the real world, but we won’t go into that now.) I get the sense that most students don’t remember much from a course a year down the road, especially if they haven’t reinforced the material somehow. Seems like the overall process is pretty inefficient for most people.

Watered-down Courses?

I’m now a little over half-way through Mankiw’s Econ 101 book. One thing that stands out is that the text presents very little quantitative math. There is qualitative math in the way of supply curves and the like, but there are very few calculations going on. The exercises at the end of each chapter are trivial, mathematically speaking.

Even granting the lack of math, the book does seem to be a bit light on content for its size. Each chapter presents one main idea, with some motivation and a few examples. I have no grounds for knowing whether that’s normal or not for an econ book, but I do remember people in college saying that Econ 101 was harder than this seems to be.

I poked around the web for reviews of the book, and they seemed to be consistent with my experience. People who liked the book were impressed by the clarity and freshness of the exposition. Critics thought it was watered-down, sometimes severely so.

It’s interesting to ponder whether this style is a good thing or not.

Again, I’m don’t know enough about the subject matter to judge what’s important or not in the long run. So I thought about the same issue in a subject that I do understand, calculus. I can summarize fairly quickly what I would want a student to get out of their Calc 101 class:

1. There is a mathematical operation called the derivative, which tells how fast a function is changing at a given point in time.
2. There is another mathematical operation called the integral, which can sum the values of a function between two points.
3. The derivative and integral operations are inverses. You get an A+ if you can explain why this makes sense.
4. A smooth function takes on its extreme values where the derivative is zero. This gives you a way to calculate the maximum/minimum values of a function.
5. In general, high-school algebra and trig give you tools for analyzing linear functions. Calculus gives you the power to analyze more arbitrary, curved functions.

Wow, that’s pretty brief. But extremely few students who passed Calc 101 could tell you this a year later, especially if they haven’t taken additional math courses to drive the points home.

Note that I didn’t include anything about the actual techniques to take a derivative or integral – which is most of what the calculus curriculum is all about. Quite frankly, I don’t know how important that is. If you ever needed to differentiate a function on the job and didn’t know how … well, calculators and computers can do that sort of thing; not to mention that you can hire a starving grad student for cheap.

Of course, you will need to know how to do calculations if you take additional math or engineering courses, just to be able to do the calculations in those classes. But I don’t really know important being able to do those calculations are in the long run, either.

But anyways, it’s the concepts that are important, and yet when I taught the course, most of the homework I gave involved just drilling students on techniques. I guess the philosophy was that you hope that somehow the drilling will give people a foundation that they can then rise above to get a better perspective with? Or, more likely, that it’s easier to teach, learn, and grade technique, so everyone’s happier, rather than trying to focus on the more intangible fundamentals. On the other hand, it sounds quite challenging to teach the concepts to people without strong quantitative skills.

Getting back to Mankiw’s book, I guess my current thinking is that it works just fine for me. I have good enough quantitative skills that I can pick up the high-level points fairly well, and I can see how to map them into tangible calculations if I ever needed to. But it’s less clear whether the “watered-down” approach is better or worse for students without good math skills.