the hunger games; catching fire; mockingjay

Suzanne Collins’ trilogy of novels — the first book made into an amazingly faithful-to-the-book and successful movie — is a nice exploration of post-apocalyptic themes, combined with a young adult perspective. The books start a little slowly, building to Collins’ strength: action scenes, where she maintains tension through an almost continuous onslaught of booby traps and just plain evil people. She is weaker on politics (where she displays a knee-jerk distrust of all people in power)  and sometimes strains believability in transitions from one action scene to another. But she is also able to interject some of humanity’s finer aspects (e.g., loyalty, love, strength in the face of adversity).

Relatively quick reads, I enjoyed all three books — especially a surprisingly mature conclusion to the story (no spoilers, here). Read them if you’re into great protagonists, dystopian futures, and consistent world-building.

the signal and the noise

Nate Silver has made a name for himself in recent years, largely as the founder of Five Thirty Eight, a blog that uses statistics to discuss and predict the outcome of elections and other political issues. His book, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — But Some Don’t, is an extended discussion in context of the ideas behind his methods. Whether exploring the statistics of gambling, sports, the recent housing bubble, the stock market, weather reports, hurricanes, disease, or anything else, Silver’s thoroughly researched writing is almost always approachable and compelling, more narrative than demonstration of technique.

But I think the real point of the book is to suggest that Bayesian probability is an important, perhaps the best, way to understand the world. The main Bayesian idea is to start with some assumption of how likely an event is and then, as new information is acquired, modify the chance of the event as often as necessary, coming closer and closer to the truth. This explicitly probabilistic view of the world expects you to make predictions and to test them against what happens. If you refuse to do this, you are either dishonest, don’t recognize the biases you bring to the way you see the world, don’t believe in your own assessment of the likelihood of an event, can’t or won’t see the world probabilistically, or some combination of these. One proof of Silver’s methods is that he correctly predicted the outcome for every state in the nation in the last two presidential elections.

Lest you think Silver is bombastic or trying to force an ideology on the reader, let me assure you: on the contrary, the writing is almost humble in its willingness to question itself and tries hard to present the evidence and let you decide what seems right to you — an especially good example of this is the chapter on global warming, in which Silver, who appears to believe that global warming exists and is a problem, acknowledges the strength of the skeptical arguments and responds to them respectfully.

As a math teacher, I appreciated the wealth of examples and the deep conversation about probability, statistics, assumptions, models, uncertainty, and heuristics. Any reader would enjoy the book for its careful and clear handling of complex topics.

the art of immersion

The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation Is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the Way We Tell Stories (by Frank Rose) is an interesting journalistic look at media and its interaction with humans. Whether in the context of video games, movies, education, or advertising, the book is all about blending the virtual and the real to create immersive experiences. In all cases, the goal is to establish reward systems that motivate us – or manipulate us, depending on your perspective.

As a teacher, the book was thought-provoking and stimulating. The classroom is a reward system and I’m learning to use online tools to improve the immersive educational experience. It made me think more about all the different kinds of rewards to which people respond — affirmation; recognition; artificially created game points; status – not just grades, and how I can use them to help students learn and grow.

Six of this Year’s Most Interesting Maps

These maps are just too cool to pass up: http://gislounge.com/2012-most-riveting-maps/

I especially love the wind map. Don’t miss it.

freakonomics and super freakonomics

The subtitle of Freakonomics, “a rogue econnomist explores the hidden side of everything,” reveals the ambitious of authors Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. The subtitle of the sequel, Super Freakonomics, “global cooling, patriotic prostitues, and why suicide bombers should buy life insurance,” gives a further sense of the breadth of their desire to study, understand, and explain. With dogged persistence, they dig up data and use the tools of economics to analyze it, looking for the the curious, the unexpected, and, at times, the controversial. Frequently they put the lie to ideas that are common in our culture — they find, for example, that car seats for children over 2 years old are not more effective at preventing serious injury than the regular seat belts in our cars. Levitt, an award winning professor of economics, is especially adept at finding proxy variables to study questions that aren’t easily answered directly.

You’ll enjoy the books for their statistical analysis and their cheeky tone.

pope joan

Donna Woolfork Cross’s fictionalized account of the life of a woman who lives her adult life as a man and becomes pope in the 9th century A. D. is by turns a page-turner and a bit tedious. At its best in the first half, Woolfork describes a very precocious girl, living in time when girls were little more than chattel and certainly never educated. Learning in secrecy and trying to avoid a brutal, dictatorial father, the young Joan displays courage, loyalty, and ingenuity — traits that will serve her well when she takes on her role as a man and becomes a monk. The book falters in the later half when the plot becomes predictable: Joan’s success will lead to a crisis, which Joan will (almost) always finesse to her credit.

Meticulously researched and cleanly written, Pope Joan will be enjoyed by anyone who likes a good story. Bonus fun if you like early church history, medieval history, in general, and/or if you hate sexism.

oh, and entitlement

Here’s a cartoon that, not only does nothing to refute my argument in the previous post, it also speaks to the entitlement the folks coming out of college appear to have. The not-so-subtle subtext is that getting a job and life in general after college is supposed to be free from pain and misery. Wasn’t my experience and wasn’t the experience of most people I know.

are college degrees worth less than they used to be?

About a year ago, a friend of mine told me he wondered why he had bothered to get an education. He felt that the job prospects and earning potential he had did not balance against the time and money he had invested in getting his Ph.D. He speculated more broadly that college degrees were becoming less and less valuable in our country and asked why we should continue to place such a high priority on college as a nation.

My friend’s thinking, plus the fact that I teach at a California community college, got me paying attention to some of the conversation that our society having about college degrees. In particular, over the last year I’ve been noticing more and more people questioning the value of a college degree. The script for these articles, videos, rants, complaints goes something like: 1) college costs a lot of money and finishing requires taking on significant debt, including some statistics on the amount of debt taken on by college students; and, 2) a college degree doesn’t guarantee a good job like it did in the “good old days,” followed by an anecdote about a college graduate’s job search and maybe some questionable statistics.

A recent (6/13/11) Time magazine article (“Now What? Mortarboards and diplomas don’t get you as far as they used to. These new graduates are in for a bumpy ride.”) is a good example. Along with anecdotal evidence, the author cites a Rutgers University study finding that 30% of college graduates from 2006 to 2010 didn’t find employment within six months of finishing school (there’s no comparison with unemployment for folks without a college degree during the same time). Further, a Twentysomething Inc. poll found that 85% of “graduates are taking shelter under Mom and Dad’s roof.” (The timeline for this statistic is not clear—is it within one year of graduation? Or two years? Certainly, it doesn’t mean that 85% of all college grads are still living at home for the rest of our lives.) These two stats exhaust the quantitative data supporting the article’s title and it concludes that, although science and engineering majors are more likely to find jobs than their colleagues in liberal arts (U.S. Labor Department data), the nationally high unemployment numbers are promoting choosy employers.

Belying the faux-profound conclusion, the tone of the article is decidedly alarmist, ignoring that fact that people with a college degree continue to enjoy higher employment percentages than people without degrees; more education still promotes greater employment, in general, and graduates know it—the same Rutgers study found that 62% of those with a Bachelor’s degree believe that more education is needed to be “successful.” In addition, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, more education tends to increase your income.

More thoughtful approaches to what a college degree means today include Sherry Linkon, at the Center for Working-Class Studies, who discusses the value of getting an education for people headed toward professions such as accounting, education, communications, and social work, for whom getting a college degree is a crucial step on the way to being certified to do the work. At the same time, Linkon points out that colleges force these essentially vocational students into general education classes that don’t seem to have anything to do with their chosen field of work. Importantly, she also discusses the knowledge that working class folks bring to these (and all) professions, much of which is not taught in school.

Then there is a New Yorker article by a college professor who tries to answer his students’ question: “Why do we have to read this book?” He believes that college should exist to educate citizens for democracy, but he’s not sure that’s how our society still uses higher education.

One could legitimately ask if we ever did use it that way. Indeed, self-improvement blogger Brian Kim writes:

Back in the day, everything that was said about getting a degree was true. If you had a degree, you separated yourself from the pack. Not many people were able to get degrees because not many people were able to afford college. It was normally reserved for the rich or upper middle class. And that’s precisely why the degree was so valued . . . because it was scarce. Scarcity creates value.

Like Kim, I think our society has always used college to reinforce the status quo elite, but I also think that in at least the last 50 or so years we’ve also used it for more democratic purposes. The facts are that in the last 50 years, our country has made a college education more available to women and people of color and they have taken advantage of it. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, women outnumber men in college and in degrees earned. In addition, the number of people of color earning degrees is increasing for every group.

The blog posts and articles go on and on, including a paranoia-inducing video put out by the mysteriously obscure, apparent scam organization “National Inflation Association” telling us that our education system sucks and that we should buy gold and silver to survive the coming economic apocalypse.

At the same time, College Board blissfully continues to tell us that “one of the best things about getting a college education is that you have more careers to choose from” and produces lists of the “Hottest Careers for College Graduates — Experts Predict Where the Jobs Will Be in 2018”

Trying to make sense of this cacophony, I’ve begun to think that its purpose is two-fold: to complain about the loss of privilege for those who used to be “entitled” to good-paying jobs; and, to promote the impression that by continuing to democratize college degrees for more and more segments of our society we further devalue a college degree. It’s not a big leap to think college degrees are being devalued by white men precisely because more women and people of color have them.

But beyond the more or less explicit racist, classist, and sexist agenda, these arguments ignore the issue of what happens to degree earners when they enter the job market. It would be great if jobs were equally distributed across all demographics of the degree earners — that would imply that hiring practices had improved greatly and that race, class, gender, and other forms of oppression in our society have diminished — but I don’t believe that is the case. Instead, as we all know, in most jobs white men continue to be more likely to get hired and be promoted than other people.

That means that the crying over the uncertain job market for college grads is almost entirely a tactic to protect white male privilege and entitlement; that is, it’s the same old discrimination in play. And, the people questioning the value of their degrees — whether knowingly racist, classist, and sexist or not — at least all ignore the reality of the privilege that most of them have. As a white man from an middle-class background, my friend’s analysis of his degree may be accurate for him. But for everyone else, the statistics say that a college degree remains a viable path to a better job and economic improvement.

logicomix

I don’t read a lot of graphic novels and I’ve certainly never read one about Bertrand Russell (1872 – 1970) and the project of putting mathematics on solid philosophical ground. Logicomix (2009) is exactly this. Writers Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H. Papadimitriou (art by Alecos Padatos and Annie Di Donna) give a nice telling of the story, combining social and political context, as well as personal influences on the men who developed some of these ideas. Their history is pretty good, though they do take some license with the facts (owning up to it at the end) and explore a potential relationship between mathematical genius and going insane — a cliché we seen explored uncountably many times (Pi, Good Will Hunting, A Beautiful Mind, Proof, etc.) and one I wouldn’t have missed here. Nevertheless, it’s a good, quick read, despite an ending that falls flat as it tries to use drama tries to talk about the (large amounts of) truth and wisdom outside of formal logic.

Read Logicomix if you want a quick, entertaining review of some of themes from late 19^th and early 20^th century mathematics and logic — or if you’re just tired of graphic novels by Neil Gaiman and the like.

marketplace talks about college degrees, too

Tonight on Marketplace from American Public Media, they ran a story about a couple and their struggles to make it in the current depression/recession. Part of the dialog between the show’s host, Kai Ryssdal, and one of the guests, Caitlin Shetterley, illustrates people’s expectations about a college degree and the way that is changing:

Ryssdal: So there you are, first week of January 2009, you have a brand new baby, but your husband’s jobs have all been canceled; he’s getting no contracting, no freelancing. The whole country is literally thinking that this is it, because we’ve had the crash in the fall of the previous year. What was going through your mind?

Shetterley: What was going through my mind? I mean, I was angry. I think many of us, many people in my generation anyway — I can’t speak for say, my grandparents’ generation who went through the Depression — but we’ve grown up believing that if we work hard and strive for our dreams, they will come true. And I believed that.

Ryssdal: Past tense, you’re speaking in the past tense. “I believed that.”

Shetterly: Yeah, I did believe that. Now I don’t believe it anymore. I don’t know that just hard work makes it. I don’t know, I think a lot of luck makes it.

Shetterley is critiquing the myth of the United States as a meritocracy. Of course, her comments come in the context of an economic crisis, but I maintain that even in good times, luck, connections, skin privilege, and privilege of all kinds have almost always trumped merit in our society.