Good enough: How many experts does it take to get the job done?

There is a real number of how many people are actually needed for most tasks. To keep kids’ attention, you need a person for every 4-8 kids at certain ages, but it gets easier with older  or more mature kids.  It helps if that person is pretty smart, so they can handle the flow of events and make effective decisions from moment to moment. It is not as relevant whether that person has specialized training.

There are three areas where this question applies.

Teaching
Health Care
Finance

It should be that way with the law, but there are many vulnerabilities about the law that make it risky for the layperson. However, we don’t consult lawyers to help us navigate our behavior with respect to the law from day to day.  And, once we do need legal advice, it does not necessarily need to be from a highly trained lawyer. If the system were more simple and there were protections for self -advocates, advice from a paralegal or other less-trained person would be enough.

Google Flu Activity Tracking: Fears versus Symptoms

A genius at Google noticed you could map flu outbreaks quite early because of searches people do about flu symptoms and related terms.  Here is the graph of flu activity so far for this year.  Because of the swine flu, people are a bit more keyed up about flu and are search more, as shown in the graph. That’s one theory.  Or, there is going to be a big outbreak.  Are the searches based on symptoms, as the likely were in the past, or are they about fear because of the new strain?

Change.gov; my small contribution to a vision: synergy.

Doing more than one thing at once. Synergy.

I’d like to play off this theme that came up during the financial crisis and offer some ideas.

a. The agenda is not full of separate and unrelated items. Why not build health care infrastructure with an emphasis on sustainability? This is stimulating to jobs, helps advance health care reform, and helps advance energy reform all at the same time.  Build hospitals, build schools of nursing, build clinics.

b. Build a system of public debate that is non-partisan and has a path to influence. Include community and educational segments of the population. This advances the agenda of changing politics and also can develop support for policies that get adopted. It also provides leverage on school reform since speech and debate are democratic AND academic, and they are not controlled by schools of education or any other particular authority. Debate has great academic outcomes, even better when it is about real public issues. If we funded teachers to take the lead on debating societies, that would be another path to job creation that also advances other important agenda items.

There’s my $.02.

Ride to the South and East (Parking on Willoughby)

Here is a ride Dylan and I did the other day. It’s real pretty down south and it’s nice not to have to ride all the way down Hagadorn or College.

http://www.mapmyride.com/route/us/mi/okemos/802274959772

Three Minor Repairs for the Rhetoric of the Financial Crisis

The talk about finance during crises tends to be categorical and sensational. Sacred principles refuse question. Humility holds fast to its oxymoronic position (Oh, I couldn’t possibly understand that!?). Experts start to look silly. Confidence drops.  Or tanks.  Here are a few prompts for revised thinking and increased financial confidence.

#1 Simple and complex. A mortgage is a simple financial device. Pooled mortgage-backed securities are not so simple. The Giant Pool of Money (term from This American Life episode) may not be happy with the sketchy instruments (the old simple path), but at some point it will realize the new simple path: invest in simple mortgages. If you are part of the giant pool of money (e.g. you have cash), consider lending it to someone buying a newly low priced house. Just be careful the first time or two so you don’t neglect to put in place normal protections like sufficiently low LTVs and sufficiently high income. If companies engaging in complex finance are struggling then stop giving money to them and invest in simple things. If you are an institutional investor, this can still be done.

#2 Real business versus financial finesse.  Companies are making money, selling products and services, and paying workers (except for the 6% unemployed). Many of them have little involvement with financial finesse or risky debt of any kind. Money should head for these companies and probably will. I suggest putting your energy into finding out what companies you believe in and then putting your money there. Think in simple terms: does the money making story make sense? Mortgage loan officers making huge commissions never did and that story got even more incoherent as time went on. A lot of commission-based compensation schemes make sense, but sometimes we just have to face that the service provided is not that complex and not worth that much. Don’t hire a consultant to mop your floors. Of course, the move to make everything complicated (from finance to teaching) creates blinders that encourage overspending on unnecessary complexity.

Here’s a relevant quotation from an NYT article, “Bubblenomics“: “Nonetheless, a significant portion of the finance boom also seems to have been unrelated to economic performance and thus unsustainable. Benjamin M. Friedman, author of “The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth,” recalled that when he worked at Morgan Stanley in the early 1970s, the firm’s annual reports were filled with photographs of factories and other tangible businesses. More recently, Wall Street’s annual reports tend to highlight not the businesses that firms were advising so much as finance for the sake of finance, showing upward-sloping graphs and photographs of traders. “I have the sense that in many of these firms,” Mr. Friedman said, “the activity has become further and further divorced from actual economic activity.”-end

Of course, this implies there is not actual economic activity, when in fact there is. It’s just that the real activity does not need sophisticated financial input.

#3 Diversification can be done without using mutual funds. The dominant view is to use funds and the like to avoid facing the fact that you don’t know what to do with your money. This protects from a big loss on a single company but does less to protect from systemic crises like this one. But funds have rules requiring only very small percentages allocated to each investment. Choose the companies yourself and you can pick 10 companies you believe in instead of leaving it to a fund to choose 20, 50, or more.  It’s tough to avoid funds in retirement accounts of course. In that case, it wasn’t that hard to see a drop in stocks coming up this year. Now the question is when to get back in.

McCain Chooses Clinton for VP

How would that be? This week, everyone’s talking about how Obama is going “typical Democrat” on us, and how Clinton’s supporters still can’t get over it. If McCain is such a maverick, why not really stir it up?

Zotero Tip: Newspaper articles

I am taking up Zotero and so will gather the tips I come across here.

Zotero can allow you to archive great NY Times articles for use and reference later. NYT generally offers a permalink for articles. If you want the whole article in Zotero, not just the permalink and not just the first page (since NYT articles are broken up that way), one Zotero forum post suggested you find the “print” option in the article and then take that page into Zotero since it won’t be broken up. If you do bring in the whole article as a page “snapshot,” you will be able to annotate (’nuff said).

Don’t forget to tag it a few times when you first bring it in; when are you really going to go back and re-tag? Now or never.

Picking up Zotero

This is a sweet Firefox add-on that has some pretty compelling reviews. This may be the way out of Endnote for some people and definitely might be the thing to save others from investing in Endnote or other clunky alternatives.

Here is the site.

Here are some reviews:

http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/09/26/mclemee

http://www.devangoldstein.com/93/zotero-vs-endnote-for-fall-of-07/

Ending Famine, Simply by Ignoring the Experts – New York Times

Ending Famine, Simply by Ignoring the Experts – New York Times

Do anti-subsidy advocates count as experts? Since subsidies are a hotly debated subject, it seems the article is confounding a debate winner with an expert. The gist is that fertilizer subsidies (vital to American farming) have been discouraged in Africa under an ideal of free trade and privatization, arguably exacerbating famine risk as indicated by the huge success of Malawi when they decided to embrace subsidies last year.

The “experts” in the title simply represent a journalistic attempt at adding excitement to a tired old storyline. There is no evidence in the article that the issue was anything but a political problem. Those advocates may have been experts on free trade, but they were not experts on farming, fertilizers, or famine prevention. If there was debate, the winner was not decided by any neutral third party.

As much as I would like an article that illustrated a big gaff from the experts, this is not one of them. It raises a question however; how much of the social construction of expertise turns on the same political process?

Adding a civic engagement element to your class: Dubious?

Overview:

I recently came up against a need to persuade others of the viability and to some degree even the desirability of incorporating a service learning element into a lower division Writing, Research, and Technologies class. Here are my thoughts, organized around the main issues of need, plan, and practicality.

Need:

For a long time now, there has been increasing attention to the need for the academic world to be socially and morally engaged. My college is currently participating in a grant program specifically devoted to fostering a culture of social and moral responsibility. We also have a large component of our curriculum already devoted to civic engagement, including 8 units of required work in what we call “Engagement and Reflection Circles.” For us, it may be good to introduce a modest first-year requirement to get students’ feet wet, so to speak, and introduce them to the culture and practice of community engagement at our University. For other programs service learning may be a good idea simply as a stand alone element or with the idea in mind that it can provide a basis for later experiential learning. Such experiences outside the classroom are highly valued in many if not most employment or graduate education settings. An early service learning assignment can prepare students for more involved experiences later on and for telling a more meaningful narrative of personal development to future collaborators, partners, or employers. I won’t even develop at length the obvious interpersonal and related skills developed in real world settings.

Plan:

My idea here is for a very simple service learning component attached to a first-year writing and research course. It will be to require a specific number of hours working with a community partner and a specific integration of other class writing and research assignments with content relevant to the community partner(s). There should also be some oral and written reflections about the experience and the issues it raises for students. There are many models that can be found for those who need direction on more complex approaches.

The standards for placements will be as follows:

• The community partner is doing work in an area related to social and moral responsibility and affected by issues of sustainability.
• Student research paired with advocacy can make a difference to the partner and in the community more broadly construed.
• The work involves a significant element of interaction with others in the community.
• The placement is arranged through our CSLCE.
• The student can participate for a minimum of 8-10 hours in an ongoing project of the community partner without putting the success of the project at risk by want of sufficient student time.

Practicality:

Benefits in our case are substantial, including interpersonal skills development, preparing students both for choosing and participating in more substantial and already required work in future semesters, providing a mechanism for more engaged participation in our public dialogues project, providing a mechanism for our stated goal of making their writing and thinking relevant to other audiences, providing a way of benefiting from the work done by UOE on learning modules for community engagement, and providing a way to engage with emerging community partners working on relevant projects. Similar benefits can be gained by others not in our particular situation.

There is sufficient support for this in our case and I suspect most teachers interested in this at the college level will find they are equally flush with possible help. I worked at the University of the Pacific where a service learning component has been an option for many of the sections of almost this exact course for a number of years. In the past year, I have also worked on this topic extensively, learning about available resources on our campus, starting an outreach program of my own that incorporates service learning students, and making some connections with community partners. We have a well-staffed office on campus specifically devoted to helping facilitate service learning and civic engagement opportunities that places 12K+ students in the community every year.

One objection I have heard is that we may not have time to do this right. Time intensive designs are not the way to do this right in my opinion. I put the standards for placements above to try and address this concern as well. I think service learning is partly about taking some risk and being open to surprises too. Spoma Jovanovic has a short and very interesting article defending this notion of surprises and generally making a good case for service learning from a communication ethics perspective. Service learning represents a high quality learning experience that, while taking some time to implement, is not more costly in this regard than the parallel time that we would spend on lesson plans not related to community engagement.

Service learning is no longer a new thing. It’s not particularly risky or cutting edge. It can be done right with simple care and diligence; it is not time intensive when campus support is considered.

What are your thoughts? Put them in the comments and I will appreciate your input.