Postcode lotteries.

Martin O’Neill has a characteristically interesting piece in the New Statesman, this time on QALYs (Quality Adjusted Life Years) and their role in the National Health Service decision to provide or deny expensive drugs to patients. Read the whole thing, as they say.

I had one quibble with Martin’s analysis. He writes:

Littlejohns [the clinical director of NICE] has released a preliminary ruling, denying access to the drugs Sutent, Avastin, Nexavar and Torisel to patients with advanced metastatic kidney cancer. These patients will, on average, die months earlier than those with the same condition in other countries in Europe where such drugs are available.

But then later in the same piece:

… if such decisions are made locally rather than nationally, we are thrown into the familiar problems of the ‘post-code lottery’. A patient in Nottingham may find herself denied treatment that is provided to someone in Newcastle. Allowing matters of life and death to depend on the good or bad luck of geographical location seems like the very opposite of finding justifiable policies.

Hmm. So in the first-quoted paragraph, Martin presents the supra-national geographical variation as a troubling datum, to which the adoption of a sensible national drug-evaulation policy is a response, whereas in the second, he presents sub-national geographical variation as a decisive reason for rejecting local discretion. But why not say that local variation is OK, just so long as it is backed up by good reasons, or, alternatively, that we should have European (or even global) standards that treat like cases alike?

The spread and tweaking (?) of misinformation.

UPDATE (8/13/08 11:04am CST): Google’s cache of the original Information Age piece makes it clear that the report had been altered considerably without any indication of this. (See screen shot here in case link no longer works.) Take-away: Information Age made considerable changes to its piece without indicating this anywhere in the post. That seems problematic. [Thanks to Bigcitylib for finding the cached page.]

Have you heard?! Google removed cities in Georgia from Google Maps! Or so were the claims that started making rounds on the Interwebs yesterday so you may well have heard it. But did you believe it? This incident has been a fascinating example of how quickly some folks will believe and spread something without further reflection. To be fair, random tweets were not the only means by which this information started spreading, more established outlets posted about it as well (see some links below with additional context). Still, how likely was it that Google would do something like this?

When I saw the post about it on the social news site Reddit yesterday (a post supported enough by readers of that site to make it onto a top page), I clicked through to look at the map. While interesting to note that the amount of information on Georgia was much less than many other countries, looking around on Google Maps made it clear that some parts of the map are simply less detailed than others. I also thought about the assertion for a moment. It didn’t sound very plausible. While Google may do all sorts of things that annoy various constituencies, it has been quite consistent in not wanting to block information even when people’s preference is that it would do so suggesting the claims to be unlikely. (Yes, I’m fully aware of some blocking in some specific cases on search engine results pages depending on local laws across the globe. Those are not incidents of this type though.) Short wrap-up: the details from the maps hadn’t been removed, they were never there to begin with. Interestingly, that idea did not occur to the many folks who reposted the information.

Here is an additional intriguing aspect to all this that I came across as I was looking at sites while writing this blog post. Might one of the reports about the incident been updated without any indication of an edit to the original report? I’m not making any accusations (it would be pretty ironic to do so in this post in particular), I’ll just post what I have found and welcome feedback. This Foreign Policy blog post about the Google Maps Georgia depiction references this piece in Information Age about the incident as follows:

As if Georgia didn’t have enough to deal with, yesterday the country’s cities and transportation routes completely disappeared from Google Maps. Reportedly wanting to keep its cyber territory conflict-neutral, Google removed all of Georgia’s details from its maps, making the war-torn nation look like a ghostly white blob flanked by Russia and Turkey. Georgia, though, isn’t the only country going blank on Google: neighboring Armenia and Azerbaijan—who have their own ongoing terrorital dispute over the Nagorno-Karabakh region—are coming up empty too.

An NYTimes Bits post also links to that IA piece. [UPDATE: Just to clarify so people don’t misunderstand, NYTimes Bits linked to this as an example of incorrect reports.] (So you can see what these sites looked like when I linked to them, I have posted screenshots of the FP post, IA piece and NYTimes Bits post.)

However, curiously, the IA piece doesn’t refer to tinkering with the maps, rather, it suggests that such reports were incorrect:

Meanwhile, reports that the company removed details of Georgian civil infrastructure from its Google Maps were inaccurate, it said today.

“We have never had local data for those countries and that is why local details such as landmarks and cities do not appear,” a company statement said.

But would writers at both the Foreign Policy blog and the NYTimes Bits blog have linked to this piece as a source for the tweaking if all it had stated was that the reports were inaccurate? Curious. I’m left wondering if an update had been made to the IA piece without any indication of it.

In the end, the ruckus about Georgia’s depiction on Google Maps was big enough that Google decided to respond with a post not only on its LatLong blog, but also the Official Google Blog (with about half a million feed subscribers).

Big government, big IT.

Over at the Guardian website, I have another piece up about my general scepticism of both big government IT projects, and the possibility under our current political and economic system of not being deluged with big government IT projects. I filled it full of jokes because I’m not yet really sure what I believe about the underlying causal mechanism. There’s a half-joking suggestion that the business development offices of the major IT consultancies probably ought to be considered as a material interest group in any analysis of British politics; we’ve not yet reached the levels of a “consultancy/government complex” but we’re not far off.

But on the other hand, I might be committing a version of fundamental attribution error here. The sales process is an important part of the procurement of big, failed IT projects, but the proliferation of big failed IT projects isn’t really a result of successful selling – it’s a result of the fact that nearly anything new that the government does is going to require an IT element, and that government projects tend to only come in one size, “big”, and to very often come in the variety “failed”.

And a lot of the reason why these projects screw up so badly has to do with the fact that they have to reinvent a lot of wheels, duplicate data collection exercises, and integrate incompatible systems (useful rule of thumb: whenever you hear an IT person use the word “metadata”, as in the sentence “all we need to do in order to make this work is to define suitable metadata”, you can take it to the bank; this project is fucked). In Sweden, for example, they have a working education vouchers system not unlike the one I discuss in the article, but in Sweden they have a big central database linked to the national identity card system.

In the UK, we don’t have a big central identity card database, and the main reason for that is that we don’t want one. And so I find myself entertaining the hypothesis that the constant parade of halt and lame IT projects which is British administrative politics, is actually an equilibrium outcome.

I am also rather pleased that, after two years of removing my bad language, the website editors actually introduced a swear-word into this piece that I hadn’t originally put in there.

To Serve Man.

Henry has written about Wendt and Duvall’s “Sovereignty and the UFO” at The Monkey Cage. And my column yesterday lauded both the timely urgency of the paper and the aesthetically satisfying way it resists counterarguments.

But after thinking it over a little, I believe a critique from outside the poli-sci orbit is necessary.

Wendt and Duvall seem to mount a radical challenge to the anthropocentrism of contemporary ideas of sovereignty. But in so doing, they are complicit with the lingering effects of Cold War ideology—for nowhere do W&D consider the work of Juan Posadas, who proved four decades ago (to his own satisfaction anyway) that flying saucers demonstrate the existence of communism elsewhere in the galaxy.

If memory serves, my first encounter with Posadas was in the pages of Robert Alexander’s Trotskyism in Latin America, published by the Hoover Institution in 1973 and easily one of the most depressing books I have ever read. Between brutal repression and a certain fissiparousness, the odds were never good. But amidst all the gray, the story of Juan Posadas was at least…colorful.

Posadas was an Argentinian shoemaker and football star who, after many years as a fairly orthodox adherent of Bolshevik-Leninism, developed a number of rather distinctive positions. One of them was his belief that the process of world revolution might advance considerably if the Communist bloc would launch a preemptive thermonuclear war. He urged the Soviets to do so just as soon as it was convenient.

This was not, by and large, a popular idea within the Fourth International. In due course Posadas went off to found his own international movement, which was for the most part based in Latin America. Some of the Posadists were in Cuba, for example, where they ended up doing, so to speak, deep entry work in Castro’s prison system. But there were also adherents in Europe. While in London on honeymoon in 1993, I visited a store where it was possible to buy recent issues of Red Flag, the official newspaper of the Revolutionary Workers Party of Great Britain (Posadist). I did. The paper consisted mainly of translations from the extensive writings of Posadas, who died in 1981. By some accounts, Posadas spent his final years yelling into a tape recorder, so perhaps the RWP-GB(P) was just trying to catch up with the backlog of transcripts.

He was a man of many theories. But his best-known thesis (which, once you grant the premises, is perfectly reasonable) is that flying saucers were a sign of hope for the revolutionary cause. As we know, development of the forces of production eventually reaches “a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument.” It is obvious that interstellar travel would require a very, very high level of development of the forces of production. Therefore UFOs must be coming from a highly advanced communist civilization. Q.E.D.

Posadas explained all this in a brochure published in France in 1968, portions of which were translated in an issue of Red Flag that must itself be a collector’s item by now. A précis of his arguments appeared five years ago this month in The Fortean Times, in an extensive article by Matt Salusbury that, as of now, is only available in Google cache.

Here is the most pertinent excerpt:

Posadas’s Les Soucoupes Volantes (Flying Saucers) opens in the baffling, tortured, long-winded style that became his hallmark: “A new ray has been discovered in the Soviet Union which is infinitely more rapid than light… This energy must have a property and strength infinitely superior to what we know.”

The pamphlet continues to lurch from cliché to cliché, bordering on incomprehensibility: “In the same way it is conceivable that a being who raises his hand and produces light, attracts, remakes and organises energy… And the forms of the social organisation could be infinitely superior,” and continues: “Even if these reports of flying saucers are fantasies, as is possible that the majority may be, many of them, their historical basis is correct… the scientific capacity of human beings is determined by their social organisation.”

And there is a Marxist explanation for why the UFOs visit but do not stay: “Capitalism doesn’t interest the UFO pilots, which is why they do not return. Similarly, the Soviet bureaucracy (doesn’t interest them) as they don’t have perspective.”

UFOs, predicts Posadas, will show a greater interest in us “at the moment of the collapse of the bourgeoisie and the General Strike.” Star Trek fans will recognise the similarity with the film First Contact, in which Vulcans passing Earth only show an interest in humans after they have developed warp drive.

“To draw conclusions from these problems… [it is] necessary to study attentively … The answers to these mysteries would lie in a study of Marxism,” advises Posadas. Presumably, it is necessary to study attentively in order to work out what the hell he means by other mind-boggling ideas expressed in Flying Saucers, including his conviction that elephants live for 260 years; that humans will disappear to be replaced by something else; that humans will ultimately reproduce asexually like amœbæ; and the puzzling statement that the UFO phenomenon is “not an accidental, occasional concern which arises because a person two metres tall arrives, fair haired and with transparent clothes.”

Flying Saucers ends with a call to our extraterrestrial comrades: “We must call upon beings from other planets when they come to intervene, to collaborate with the inhabitants of the Earth to overcome misery. We must launch a call on them to use their resources to help us.”

One can readily see why bourgeois conceptions of sovereignty would be threatened by such ideas—and why those within the ranks of capitalist political science would refuse to consider them at all.

Special issue on ideal and non-ideal theories of justice.

Political philosophers/theorists may be interested in the latest issue of Social Theory and Practice , which is a special issue devoted to the debate on ideal and non-ideal theories of justice. This special issue is a selection of papers from a wonderful ECPR workshop which Adam Swift and I organised in Helsinki in 2007. There has been quite a bit of debate on this topic in recent years, and Harry and I have been mentioning in some of our posts that we should have that debate here too – Well, I wait till my copies have arrived. The journal sells single issues for a mere ten dollars (plus shipping for outside the USA); scroll down on the journal’s homepage for instructions in case you’re interested.

Expert knows best.

I just had a deliciously sweet cantaloupe. How did I know how to pick it? My favorite* chef, Chef Susan aka Chef Q posted some advice on the topic recently. Not only is she an amazing cook and baker, she is also an excellent photographer so her posts are illustrated with helpful images. I forgive her for all the pounds I gained last year due to her cooking (hey, at least I finally started a regular exercise regime) and thank her not just for all the great meals I’ve had the good fortune to experience, but also the helpful material she shares online.

[*] It’s actually a tie with my Mom, but she’s not officially a chef. Of course, that hasn’t stopped her from publishing a cookbook (see some of her recipes here).

Photo credit: Susan Beach

Grade Inflation.

You might want to check out my colleague Lester Hunt’s excellent new edited collection on Grade Inflation: Academic Standards in Higher Education, which is just out. It originated in a rather well-thought-out conference Lester organized back in 2004. My own contribution arose because he asked me to comment on Valen Johnson’s talk, based on his book Grade Inflation: A Crisis in College Education, and then sneakily inveigled me to contribute a self-standing chapter. The collection is great: genuinely diverse and thoughtful contributions from Clifford Adelman, David T. Beito, Mary Biggs, Richard Kamber, Alfie Kohn, Charles W. Nuckolls, Francis K. Schrag, John D. Wiley and Lester and me. Recommend it to your library, and to your Deans!

In the course of writing my own paper several things happened. I started off assuming (with no real evidence) that grade inflation was real and believing (for no real reasons) that it was bad; I discovered that there is no evidence of grade inflation (which doesn’t, of course, mean that it doesn’t exist) and that the reasons for thinking it would be bad if it did exist are pretty weak. Commenting on Johnson’s book, in other words, convinced me that his subtitle is entirely wrong (even though the book is, actually, terrifically good). It’s not the first time that I have changed my mind as the result of writing a paper, but it is the first that I’ve changed it quite so radically.

I developed, mainly through reading Valen Johnson’s book, a conviction that student evaluations are next to worthless for evaluating teachers. His book also convinced me that grade variation within departments exists and is bad, though not that there is much we can or should do about it.. Finally, I became more and more irritated with Harvey Mansfield’s piece in the Chronicle. So, below the fold, here’s a taster of the book, adapted from my chapter, and arguing specifically against Mansfield:

In 2001 Harvey Mansfield published an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education criticizing his colleagues at elite universities for giving their students high grades. To be fair he targets himself with the same criticism; he believes that he, too, participates in this bad practice, which he dubs, in the title of his piece “Grade Inflation”. This might expose him to charges of hypocrisy. But he is not necessarily wrong to give out higher grades than he thinks are generally proper. Because the assignment of grades has psychological and emotional effects on students, and those effects are influenced by the prevailing culture of grading, we should all, to some extent, make our grading practices somewhat sensitive to those that prevail around us. In my first few years of teaching I did the same as Mansfield did, and we were both right to do so.

Mansfield says that grade inflation exists, and is a serious problem. But he gives no evidence for it existing, and his reasons for thinking it a problem are poor. Let’s start with his reasons for opposing it:

Grade inflation compresses all grades at the top, making it difficult to discriminate the best from the very good, the very good from the good, the good from the mediocre. Surely a teacher wants to mark the few best students with a grade that distinguishes them from all the rest in the top quarter, but at Harvard that’s not possible.

Why is it so important to hive off a handful of students for special recognition, if the whole top quarter is doing work that is very good? In nearly 20 years of teaching in research universities I regularly—in just about every class—come across students who are smarter than I am and more promising than I was at their age, but there have only been 4 or 5 students whose work placed them unambiguously well above the rest of the top quarter, and only one whose work stunned me. Reserving an A (or A+ or A++) for them takes grades too seriously. How could the one stunning student know that he was being rewarded with a stunning grade? And why should he care? (The student in question, who is a regular CT reader, I know, would have found the very idea of reserving a grade for him absurd, laughable, arrogant, and vain). A professor can reward, or ‘mark’, those students’ work much more effectively with verbal or written praise, or with a request to meet to discuss the paper, or with frank admiration of a thought in the public forum of the classroom. Only a student unhealthily obsessed with their grades would be more motivated by a special grade than by alternative forms of recognition. I have not yet come across a student whose work is extremely good and who is sufficiently grade-obsessed that adding a reserved high grade would motivate or reward them at all in the presence of any of the alternatives I have mentioned.

There’s something else going on here. Mansfield reveals that it is not, in fact, grade inflation that he is bothered by:

Some say that Harvard students are better these days and deserve higher grades. But if they are in some measures better, the proper response is to raise our standards and demand more of our students. Cars are better-made now than they used to be. So when buying a car would you be satisfied with one that was as good as they used to be?

Mansfield, of course, does not think that the students are better these days. But his response is interesting because it specifies circumstances in which he thinks that grade deflation ought to occur. Given any starting point, he thinks that we should make high grades harder to attain as the students improve. He does not, though, seem to think that standards should be lowered as the students get worse. In other words, it is not grade inflation, but the very existence of nominally high grades, however good the work, that he objects to.

It is hard to come up with a rationale for this asymmetry. For example, a single institution’s unilaterally raising standards for the allocation of grades does nothing to help grades inform prospective employers or students themselves. It might help with the pedagogical function of grades – the way that grading prompts a student to want to learn more, or triggers the self-confidence that helps them to go deeper into a subject – but it might not; it will all depend on the students themselves and the culture they inhabit. In fact, Mansfield seems unhealthily obsessed with his own function as evaluator of students. He want to feel that he is tough and hard headed, just as we all do, and that is certainly valuable for us. But presumably the point of a grading system is not to make faculty feel good.

Ok, onto the lack of evidence for grade inflation. Mansfield offers none. He does offer anecdotes about how it arose, but nothing more. When he first raised the issue of grade inflation, he said that

when grade inflation got started, in the late 60’s and early 70’s, white professors, imbibing the spirit of affirmative action, stopped giving low or average grades to black students and, to justify or conceal it stopped giving those grades to white students as well

He excuses his lack of evidence for grade inflation and its initial triggers by pleading lack of access to the facts and figures. But his comments about what he lacks access to reveals, worryingly, that he doesn’t understand what would constitute evidence of grade inflation. This is what he says:

Because I have no access to the figures, I have to rely on what I saw and heard at the time. Although it is not so now, it was then utterly commonplace for white professors to overgrade black students…..Of course, it is better to have facts and figures when one speaks, but I am not going to be silenced by people [referring to a dean and the then-president, of Harvard] who have them, but refuse to make them available.

The problem here is that the figures he calls for tell us nothing about whether there is grade inflation, and that nobody in the administration has the facts that would tell us (or, if they do, Harvard is a more remarkable than even its greatest enthusiasts believe). Regular inflation isn’t just an increase in price, but an increase in price relative to the quality of the goods on offer: for the analogy to hold grade inflation occurs when, over time, mean grades increase faster than the mean quality of work produced by students, or mean grades decrease more slowly than the mean quality of work produced by students.

Grades probably have increased at Harvard, and if so Harvard is not alone. Stuart Rojstaczer has compiled data from selections of private and public Universities, showing mean GPAs increased by .15 in both groups between 1991 and 2001. Using data from the same universities he finds an increase in mean GPA of .68 in private universities and .5 in public universities from 1967 to 2002. But this is simply no evidence at all of grade inflation. Why?

Suppose that the mean grade has increased dramatically during the time in which Mansfield has taught at Harvard. Does this mean that students are now being given higher grades for the same quality of work, or the same grades for lower quality work, than before? No. The improved grades may reflect improved work. Perhaps Harvard now hires better teachers than it did when it hired Mansfield. Perhaps the students are more talented, or harder working, or better prepared on entry, or all three. If the first of those possibilities sounds unlikely think again: it is hard to imagine even a legacy student as weak as now-President George W Bush was at the time gaining admission to Harvard or Yale or any other elite college today, as he did (to Yale, admittedly) in 1964. In the period we are discussing the mean number of children born into elite families has declined, enabling those families to invest more in each of child; Harvard has also expanded dramatically the talent pool from which it draws, by admitting women (although the first woman was admitted in 1950, women were admitted on an equal basis with men only in 1973), and hiring professors in a much more open labour market than when Mansfield was hired; and more of those women have been socialized to be ambitious in academic and career terms over that time. The “Gentleman’s C” which both the 2004 Presidential candidates were awarded by Yale in the 1960’s is reputedly a thing of the past, and so are the gentlemen at Harvard and Yale who were awarded them.

How could we know whether there was grade inflation? To know it would require a large year-by-year database of the actual work done by Harvard students (including, presumably, evidence of their classroom participation), and the matching grades. I’d be very surprised if the administrators have such a database, access to which they are jealously guarding. Mansfield ought to know: if one existed he would have been asked to contribute to it. But he does not even seem aware that that is what would be needed.

So, onto my final quibble. Mansfield attributes putative grade inflation to the response of professors to affirmative action and the self-esteem movement. Just as he offers no evidence for the existence of grade inflation, he offers no evidence for attributing it to these factors; it appears to be mere prejudice. Quite apart from that fact that if we include legacies, athletes, and the male students who would not have been admitted if they had competed on an equal basis with women as affirmative action admissions, as we should, Harvard has in fact reduced its reliance on affirmative action in admissions over the period Mansfield has worked there, and was doing so pretty dramatically in the period when he thinks grade inflation began.

Those were the days….

If, like me, you’re not quite ready to start a new work week then I recommend YearbookYouself as an amusing distraction. [UPDATE 8/19/08 5:37am CST: I’m sorry to say that it sounds like the site has not been able to handle its current popularity and does not seem to be responding to requests. I’d try to check back later as it’s very amusing. 8/19/08 12:26CST: Seems to be working again.]

When you click upload and then choose a photo, it’ll start uploading right away (don’t click upload again). Then you can resize, move and rotate the image. Note, however, that you can also do this once the photo has been matched with a style, which is a more efficient way of tweaking the final result.

[Thanks to Techcrunch.]

Herr Professor Daddy? I didn’t think so..

Anyone who thinks male and female professors are treated equally by students is clueless. Just recently I came across a couple of examples that are very illustrative of this point. A friend of mine told me that her undergraduate advisees gave her a photo of themselves in a picture frame that says: “I love my Mommy”. (Apologies for the pathetic illustration accompanying this post, but given the time I put into it, I’m posting it.) Then just a few days later, I came across the following note on Twitter:

A friend of mine just bought this (as a gag) for her diss. director http://bit.ly/11LSdW.

Yes, click on the link. I’ll tell you where it leads, but you’ll appreciate it better if you see the image. The link is to a children’s book called “My Beautiful Mommy”. Raise your hand if you’re a male professor and students have given you similar gifts “as a gag”. No one? Shocking.

I can see the comments already: “If female profs are more caring then what’s wrong with students expressing their appreciation for that?”

First of all, students demand much more emotional work from female professors than they do of male profs. If the women don’t provide it, they are often viewed as cold bitchy profs that don’t care about students. Although I don’t know of any systematic studies of what types of topics students bring up during interactions with professors by gender, I have heard plenty of anecdotal evidence suggesting that female profs get approached much more by students wanting to talk about life issues than male profs. (More generally speaking, there is literature on how gender influences teaching evaluations, here are some older references.)

Second, there are plenty of ways to express appreciation that don’t involve putting the female prof in a mothering role, a role that certainly isn’t emphasizing her academic strengths and credentials. As my friend noted, a gift of this sort makes her feel as though her only contribution to the students’ success was in shepherding them through their projects and not in providing intellectual stimulation, helping them professionally, or contributing to the creation of new well-trained researchers. Maybe, just maybe, she’d like to be recognized for her intellectual contributions and the part of mentoring that involves the research aspects of her job. And while it would be neat if mothering was equated with all of those things, don’t kid yourself. Of course there is nothing wrong with being compassionate and caring, but it’s not what tends to be rewarded professionally in academia.

We ain’t no delinquents.

Hilzoy comments on David Brooks’ latest column about how John McCain is a decent man being forced by the sad realities of the American political system to run a negative campaign.

Compelled? No choice? I don’t think so. For one thing, there are lots of ways in which McCain could campaign without lying or impugning his opponent’s patriotism. Some of them might even win. If McCain’s advisors can’t think of a single one of them, that shows only their limited imaginations.

But let’s pretend, just for the sake of argument, that they are right to say that the only way to win, this year, is by taking the low road. Would that mean that they have to take it? Of course not. That means you have a choice between honor and ambition; between running a decent campaign and a sordid one; between being a candidate the country can be proud of and being a candidate who contributes to the degradation and trivialization of political discourse.

You would have no choice only if you assumed that your own ambitions were more important than your honor.

To enlarge on this point a little: isn’t it particularly incongruous for a self-described conservative pundit to invoke the Gee Officer Krupke defence? You know, all that honor and integrity stuff – how the choices we make reflect our innate character rather than our environment and all that. I imagine that if we saw an actual principled conservative assessment of some of the tactics that have been used by McCain in the last several weeks (flat out lies, claims that his opponent cares more about winning the election than the lives of American troops and so on), it would arrive at rather different conclusions …