Make Work Homework

A few years ago my son who is now in middle school got some vocabulary homework for English. It was a pretty long list of words. He was supposed to write the meaning of each word and then use it in a sentence. And then, get this, draw or download a picture from the internet that illustrates the word. The homework took thrice as long as it would have without the illustrations.

Now if you think about it, if the child has learnt to use the word in a sentence, there is little value in an illustration. Especially, since most of the words pertained to intangible things like “blatant”. If it were an art class I can still see some value in an exercise where students reflect and then draw a picture depicting “blatant”. But not for 50 such words and not for an English class.

There is a phrase for this kind of work. Its called “Make Work”. Basically teachers are giving homework just to make up the 3 hours or whatever of homework they need to give per day. Like many issues, there is economics behind Make Work Homework.

Public schools and most private schools in the US have a student-teacher ratio that has gotten higher and higher over time. Obviously, there are cost reasons for this. The primary driver of cost efficiencies in a school is the average number of students in a class.

A teacher spends time on preparing for class, grading homework and other small activities. The time required for preparing for class does not vary by the number of students in class. It also goes down with experience. But grading homework varies directly with the number of students. And it can add up to quite a lot of work. If the teacher is hard pressed for time, she can’t reduce the amount of homework given to students. But she can give the kind of homework that takes less time to check. The example I cite above is exactly that kind of homework – with asymmetric workloads for student and teacher.

I believe this is the root cause of Make Work Homework. It takes a lot of time for the student to draw an illustration and very little to eyeball it while grading. This asymmetry works in favor of the teacher. She can give the prescribed amount of homework and still keep her grading workload low.

This is not to say that anything requiring an illustration is Make Work. Not at all. Sometimes it is absolutely necessary. Visual learning can be very powerful. And sometimes it can be justified with the argument that children learn in different ways and at different paces. What may seem like gratuitous drawing and coloring to one student may be essential reinforcement of what is being taught in class for another student.

But a lot of what passes as homework for our children, is the product of a teacher trying to reduce his workload.

Copenhagen – the Mother of all Negotiations

Who hasn’t been in a tough negotiation? If nothing else, negotiating with your kids can often be most difficult. But the negotiations at Copenhagen summit and next year on climate change are going to be the hairiest negotiations you can ever imagine.

An FT article [pay wall] shines some light on why the negotiations were so difficult. The biggest reason is of course that these are multi-lateral negotiations. And different groups have different interests. Developed countries want developing countries to make commitments on emission reductions while not over committing themselves. They also want transparency in developing country emission measurement.

Developing countries don’t want emission reductions to get in the way of development. They want developed countries to pay for clean technology.

There are a also a whole bunch of developing countries in Africa who are not significant emitters but will feel the brunt of climate change. They have nothing to give in the negotiations but a lot is at stake for them.

And then there are also a few heads of state like Chavez, Morales and Ahmadinejad, who simply use the stage to take potshots at the US and the West. But they still have to be invited to party.

Obviously, 170 independent actors can never achieve any consensus. So groups were formed. US, UK, Germany, France as representatives of the developed countries and China, India, Brazil and South Africa as representatives of the developing world. But this still wasn’t enough to get an agreement. The bulk of the world’s emission in the next 20 years is going to come out of the US and China. If only these two countries had sat down and thrashed it out, we would have had a deal.

The world is not going to be happy with their leaders if they don’t put their shoulders to the wheel and get a deal together soon in the new year.

Ideas from the New York Times

The NY Times Magazine’s latest issue is on “ideas”. The ideas are of mixed standards, probably because they were force fitted into an alphabetical list as much as possible (“hey, we don’t have any ideas for X Y Z. We can’t discriminate against the bottom three so can you go and find any old idea.”). But here are some that I thought were great. Go read the whole thing if you can.

Here goes (alphabetically, of course):

Drunken Ultimatums. Revenge trumps rationality. An experiment with drunks shows how.

Empty Beer Bottles Make Better Weapons. The fizz in the full ones causes them to break at lower impacts.

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More English and More Non-English

Chetan Bhagat has a recent post on his blog which is a transcript of a speech that he gave at the British Council in Delhi. He defines two groups in India. One, which he calls E1, is proficient in English and gets all the good jobs. The other, E2, is familiar with the language but is not proficient. E2 is ten times the size of E1. He would like to see effort being made, by the likes of the British Council, to shift more people from E2 to E1.

It’s hard to argue against this point of view. Expanding E1 or for that matter E2 as well is good. Spoken English skills are what have enabled India to create the huge offshore services sector. English is also the common language that links India and is therefore the de facto language of big business. Better English skills – spoken, written or really at any level – enhances a person’s employability and opens higher paying job opportunities.

But is more and better English the only dimension there is to language in education? I see two problems with this.

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Coevolution in Telemarketing

Coevolution in species (predator-prey, for example) is a commonly occurring phenomenon. The same thing, loosely, can apply to many other things like criminal behavior and how it coevolves with law enforcement techniques.

An interesting place where you see coevolution at work is in telemarketing. If you think about it, they are the predator and you are the prey. Their objective is to get you to pick up the phone and then not put it down. Your objective is to not pick up the phone.

Before Caller ID, you were losing the battle. You had to pick up the phone. You didn’t know who was calling.

After Caller ID, it was better, but not if you were prepared to ignore every call except the numbers that you recognized. Also, the telemarketers adapted and started blocking Caller ID. But then you started avoiding calls with no Caller ID. And then they switched back to numbers but no names or innocuous names. And so on.

Then came the National Do Not Call Registry in the US. That tilted the balance decisively in your favour. It still left the non-profits who are exempted from the DNC stipulations. You were still having to walk up to the phone when the local charity called and you didn’t want to donate this year. But then you got that new phone which can read out the name on the Caller ID. And that was that. End of the telemarketing nuisance.

Not quite. Last year I started getting robo calls on my mobile phone from a company selling extended warranties for cars. I pick up most calls to my cellphone, even if I don’t recognize the number. It was very irritating. I actually lodged a complaint with the FTC about these guys. Apparently many others did too. Thankfully its been turned off. The people behind it must have figured that whatever they were doing was worth flirting with FTC for. Or maybe they don’t even live in the US. Who knows.

I still get a moderate number of telemarketing calls. If you are of Indian origin, like me, you may still be getting calls from India. With telecom costs between India and the US dropping sharply in recent years, the call activity is going up as well. We regularly get calls from DirectTV and Airtel. The latter in fact has been calling from a Delhi cell phone to my cell phone (where did they get my mobile number?).

The companies that call from India use Caller IDs in different ways. Some of them send out a US number which I think is a losing strategy (one of them sends out a toll free number). Some of them block Caller ID, which, I believe is a better strategy. With almost no calls from telemarketers in the US, you are probably losing your old aversion of picking up a call with no Caller ID. Or maybe, I have a special situation. A friend of ours we regularly talk to had blocked her Caller ID at one time.

This is known to occur even in predator-prey coevolution where a defence that the prey had developed in response to a certain predatory tactic is lost through the millenia. When the predator evolves the same trait again, the prey has no defence against it.

Callers from India seem to have the ability to put just any old number in the Caller ID. Like say “2222”. Or use an Indian number. I will pick up any call with an Indian number on it. Which is why I get snagged often.

But it doesn’t end at Caller ID and getting you to pick up the phone. Since the dialing out is typically done by a dialer which connects an agent only after you pick up the phone, there is a lag before someone starts speaking at the other end. Most people will realize it’s a telemarketing agency and put the phone down. This must cost a lot in agent time at the other end.

Which probably explains, in a crazy way, the latest Caller ID tactic. Yesterday someone called us. The Caller ID name said “Telemarketer”. We didn’t pick up the phone. But if someone does, you can be sure they want to talk. And it could be the beginning of an honest, trusting relationship.

The Numbers Behind the Numbers

This week’s big news was that the US economy lost the fewest jobs in a month since the beginning of the recession. There were reams and reams of news and opinion on the matter. Quotes from the White House, Republicans, Democrats, Wall Street and Economists. But I got stuck on the third paragraph of the first news item that I read on the matter on NYT

In the best report since the recession began two years ago, only 11,000 jobs disappeared last month, the government said on Friday, and the unemployment rate actually dipped, to 10 percent, from 10.2 percent the previous month.

What’s the math that allows the unemployment to go down when 11,000 jobs were lost? Did the denominator suddenly go up? Did all the returning Indians suddenly decide to go back to the US like Shiva Ayyadurai?

The answer seems to be

Not only did the rate of job losses drop to 11,000 but losses in the previous two months were revised down by 159,000.

which is not really offered as an explanation but as an aside by FT. But the numbers look like they should be able to explain the drop in unemployment. Does anybody have the official explanation?

Economics by its nature is complex. Good reporting should make it more accessible. Not leaving obvious questions unanswered would be a start.

Open Toolbox

Ever since I moved to a Mac, the tools I use have changed. Also my work and life patterns have changed. I thought I’d share what I have found useful.

Email, Calendar, Contacts

My personal email is on Gmail. I moved from Yahoo Mail after many years and have never regretted it. Gmail totally rocks. For work related email, I first tried Mac Mail. The integration with Exchange was supposed to be better with Snow Leopard which is why I thought I’d give it a spin. But it is surprisingly clunky. I was constantly battling authentication errors which were clearly a problem with the email client not Exchange. Google Calendar sync with Mail didn’t work for me. Also Mac Mail has other irritants like saving drafts even after one has sent out the email. Eventually I gave up and moved to Thunderbird. The email client is trouble free although the performance is a little sluggish compared to Mac Mail. The Lightning add-on for calendar functionality within Thunderbird now works quite well for me, though it took a couple of tries to get it going. Another add-on called Provider for Google Calendar, takes care of the calendar sync. And a third one gContactSynch handles the sync with Google Contacts.

Lightning and the other two add-ons are still in beta. And my move to Thunderbird on Mac is still less than a month old, but it’s working well so far.

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Wall Street Bonuses are Not the Real Issue

This month the biggest Wall Street companies reported their quarterly earnings. JP Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs reported bumper earnings, Citgroup and Bank of America, not so good. But if you leave out write downs on debt, everyone had a great quarter in their capital markets businesses. Billions have been budgeted for year end bonuses.

As could be expected, the issue of Wall Street compensation raised its head again. And this time there is the weight of the federal government behind it. Banks that have taken TARP money will see their executive compensation capped. And the Federal Reserve has suggested that all large banks that fall under its jurisdiction will be reviewed on on going basis to ensure that executive bonuses do not produce risk taking behavior that could put the banking system at risk.

There are several memes that get mixed up in any discussion about Wall Street compensation in the media. Add a lot of emotion from a distraught public and it becomes for a tangled mess where the media feeds the furore but there’s no real understanding of the underlying issues. Let’s see if we can parse the issues out.

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