Nov 2, 2012 0
A german reporter came to the barkley marathons this spring, writing a freelance piece for GQ (german edition). It was published recently, and although I can’t find an online version (?), a scanned copy is here – please don’t sue. I am quoted briefly on p.148 (p.5 of the file), but the pictures – not of me - are the highlight.
Oct 16, 2012 0
Hat tip to Chris Blattman for pointing me to the Royal Observatory’s best astronomy photos of 2012 – they are really cool!
And don’t forget the always-reliable astronomy picture of the day from NASA…
But what caused me to actually post here was a reminder of Carl Sagan’s “pale blue dot” speech, in which he discusses our place in the universe. It is both humbling and inspiring at the same time. See this youtube video version. I vividly remember watching Carl Sagan and “Cosmos” (among other things) on PBS when I was a kid. He truly left a deep impact on me and many others.
Aug 23, 2012 1
In january I wrote a post describing why I don’t vote, and it got several interesting responses in various fora. I am belatedly following up now, seeing as how one can’t go more than about 8 seconds nowadays without being exposed to politics and electoral discussions. One friend (in a private email, so to be safe I won’t quote him) pointed out that compulsary voting would decrease PP as well as WG, so such a system is probably even more annoying in practice than it would appear to be on first consideration.
My friend Doug responded thoughtfully and at length in a post on his own [worthy] blog. After generously calling me generous, he basically says that even if my actions in this domain are rationally defensible, that doesn’t make them morally right. Within my model, this is something like saying that WG ought to be augmented so much by the fact that it corresponds to doing the right thing that it is always sufficiently high to incur voting. Or one can avoid the model and just argue directly that it is morally right. I disagree with Doug that voting – a rather artificial behavior - has much to do with morality, which I reserve for (imo) more important and fundamental slices of life, but it’s not something that one can really argue about… unless you’re a moral philosopher, which neither of us is. We’ll just have to agree to disagree, and I can certainly respect his position that if it has moral overtones, it goes beyond my type of model.
Doug also compares not voting to free-riding on others’ behavior, which to me is a somewhat separate issue. I similarly free-ride on the fact that other people check their credit card and utility statements carefully for errors; some of them actually read the facebook privacy clauses; they comparison shop online; and so on. Meanwhile I aggressively enforce pedestrian rights by walking in front of cars that are trying to cut me off in a crosswalk, stopping and staring down the drivers, and occasionally smacking their vehicles if I’m particularly annoyed. As my grandfather used to say, de gustibus non est disputandum. It strikes me as highly inefficient for all of us to do everything that in some sense we ‘ought’ to, and I prefer a system where we each take on a few herculean (hopefully not sisyphean) labors that speak to us. Voting just doesn’t cut it for me.
That being said, I think David Reinstein (in the comments to my previous column) gives the best rational defense of voting that I have heard. He basically points out that PP is not all that matters; so does the vote share. If the margin of victory makes a difference, which it must, then we need to add that in. On the one hand, one more vote out of millions for (say) a republican is only going to make a miniscule difference. On the other hand, if billions or even trillions of dollars are at stake, that might be enough. Maybe your one vote will cause defense spending to go up [probabilistically] by a couple of hundred dollars (can someone do the math for me here? I’m too lazy), and maybe that’s a good enough reason for you to vote. In fact, this could even apply to PP: a tiny probability of being pivotal could be enough, if the effective ME is large enough. To be honest this still isn’t sufficient for me: I have clear feelings about whether we spend too much or too little on defense, but I don’t care if total defense spending is $1000 higher…
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Aug 13, 2012 1
I was recently describing my liberia project to a former colleague, a very well-educated fellow. He immediately made an interesting connection to Pygmalion, the Shaw play that became famous as the musical My Fair Lady. He even went on to fairly accurately quote a couple of extremely apposite lines, which I must admit impressed me. The project is about trying to help street youth escape poverty in two different ways: a psycho-social transformation to become more patient and think more seriously about their future selves; and an unconditional infusion of cash.
Toward the end of Act II in the play, a poor londoner named Doolittle (coincidence?) is trying to convince two gentlemen to give him some money for a service that he believes he is rendering them (which is irrelevant here, although not to the play: read it!). They are hesitant and unconvinced. He makes quite an eloquent argument, first admitting to being entirely undeserving…
But my needs is as great as the most deserving widow’s that ever got money out of six different charities in one week for the death of the same husband. I don’t need less than a deserving man: I need more. I don’t eat less hearty than him; and I drink a lot more. I want a bit of amusement, cause I’m a thinking man. I want cheerfulness and a song and a band when I feel low. Well, they charge me just the same for everything as they charge the deserving.
Now I’m certainly not implying that our respondents are all undeserving, although some of them surely are. But we, like the gentlemen in the play, were certainly very curious about what they would do with a sudden transfer of cash, and we (along with some of our donors and partners) were a bit worried. One of the gentlemen shares the worry that Doolittle will make bad use of it aloud, to which the response is
Not me, Governor, so help me I won’t. Don’t you be afraid that I’ll save it and spare it and live idle on it. There wont be a penny of it left by Monday; I’ll have to go to work same as if I’d never had it… Just one good spree for myself and the missus, giving pleasure to ourselves and employment to others, and satisfaction to you to think it’s not been throwed away. You couldn’t spend it better.
Fabulous! But it gets better. Doolittle had asked for five pounds (which was of course a nontrivial amount of money a hundred years ago). The gentlemen are so taken by his rhetorical skills, and indeed by the sheer inescapable logic of his argument, that they decide to offer him ten:
No, Governor. [The missus] wouldn’t have the heart to spend ten; and perhaps I shouldn’t neither. Ten pounds is a lot of money: it makes a man feel prudent like; and then goodbye to happiness. You give me what I ask you, Governor: not a penny more, and not a penny less.
This is simply perfect for our project, since we are in part exactly trying to test the hypothesis that giving people a sufficiently large chunk of money to change their lives, even without any mentoring or training or encouragement (note that a random subset receive the cash but not the transformation program), will in itself cause them to think more about the future. Of course we also hope that it will make them happier, but we’re testing that as well. In any case, it’s good to see that the idea…
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Jul 31, 2012 1
Almost eight months ago I listed the business cards that I had on my desk at that point. Below is what I have received since then; as you can see I don’t get a lot of business cards. Interestingly, the list is fairly similar to last time, at least in terms of categories. I also think it reflects at least as much on who are the type of people to hand out business cards as it does on who are the type of people that I interact with.
Jul 30, 2012 1
And which type of post would that be? A blog post, or a wooden post, or a foreign office post, or a mail post, or a guard post? All will be explained in due course.
I am currently at the brussels airport (enjoying internet connectivity that does not occasion reminiscences of the “how many baud do you have?” variety), returning from work on my project in liberia. I realized just before leaving that it may be my last time there, depending on how things go. Although to be quite frank it is pretty low on the list of countries I’d recommend visiting, it’s still a sad thought after five or six trips during the last several years, meeting people and getting to know monrovia.
This time around did not start auspiciously: my multiple entry visa from last year was due to expire the day after I arrived, and it wasn’t clear to me whether that was legal or not — in some countries it is and in some it isn’t, but naturally nobody could tell me about liberia. Thankfully our staff in country secured me an airport visa to be waiting upon arrival, and given that the immigration folks were not inclined to let me into the country until I mentioned it, this was fortuitous. Of course I had to exit security and the airport (unaccompanied, sans paperwork) to pick up the actual visa from our driver, which somehow didn’t seem to bother anyone. Ah, liberia.
My luggage, alas, had not made the tight connection in dulles and therefore wasn’t on my flight to brussels nor the flight to monrovia. Fortunately they were on the next flight. Which was two days later. I was able to pick them up the day after that. Since my entire stay was only four days, this was also the day before I left. Hence I found myself in the air brussels office in downtown monrovia, both picking up my delayed bags and simultaneously checking in for my return flight! I had called the local air brussels baggage phone number a day earlier to make sure that everything was on track, and the woman who answered agreed that it was, after apologizing for her child crying in the background, since this was apparently a mobile phone that she simply had with her. I said it was no problem, really. Ah, liberia.
Driving along we passed Alfred’s business center and then the competing God is Good business center. One also notices a lot of public service messages, on billboards but also stenciled onto walls. These range from “Please pay your taxes to Mama Liberia” to “Only dogs can pepe here” to (less-than-reassuring, and illustrated) “Rape is very serious – You will be prosecuted – Don’t do it”. My new personal favorite, which I hadn’t seen before, is: “Don’t bury dirt”. Dirt, it seems, connotes trash. Ah, liberia.
Meanwhile our office also has some interesting reading material: “Introductory Econometrics” on the shelf next to “Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book” next to “Just Give Money to the Poor” next to “Constructing Grounded Theory”. Since some of the admin staff apparently did not find these sufficiently compelling, they spent quite a bit of time surfing the web. In order to cut down on this, our office managers had to block facebook as well as several search keywords… such as “sports” and (wait for it) “church”. That’s right: they were frittering away time not on porn but on religion. Ah, liberia.
One afternoon I had a meeting with the deputy minister for youth and sports. After discussing youth employment…
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Jul 7, 2012 2
[Er... finally back to blogging! Apologies for the delay. This first post back is appropriate, given the circumstances.]
Since I will be running the Hardrock 100 mile endurance run in less than a week, I figured it was about time to post a report from last year’s race. Pathetic, I realize, but better late than never? Naturally this will be an incomplete report, more a pastiche of a few salient memories.
Getting in to the run is difficult enough to begin with; see info here (which is actually changing for next year). I have now (2012) tried to get in with each number of lottery tickets between 0 (using the “equivalent mountaineering experience” standard, which was unsuccessful) and 5. I failed with 0, 1, and 4 tickets but succeeded with 2 (off the waitlist), 3, and 5 tickets. In 2011 I had 3 tickets and was very happy to be directly accepted.
And so the training started, although I only did three longish runs leading up to hardrock: the TARC spring classic (a mostly flat trail 50k; finished in just over 5 hours), an informal group running of the Nipmuck Trail Marathon (somewhat hilly), and my first time around the pemi loop, an extremely hilly / rocky ~50k circuit in the white mountains of NH — perfect training for hardrock. I also tried to exercise my hill muscles by doing shorter runs in the local blue hills, as well as going up and down (and up and down) the 117 steps in the porter square T station. I hadn’t done lots of mileage (even by my modest standards) or vertical, but it was fairly consistent and I felt about as strong as at just about any time in the past.
I flew to denver on the monday 11 days before the race and drove out to boulder. Tuesday I went rock climbing in eldorado canyon with guide and friend Peter Doucette, where one route was called Icarus and (I kid you not) we were trying to finish it before the sun hit that side of the canyon and caused our fingers to become too slippery.
The next day we did the keyhole route on Long’s Peak in rocky mountain national park, with beautiful views of the Diamond and much of the colorado rockies. That got me over 14,000 ft and started the acclimatization well, although it was slow going and a long day – beginning with a true alpine start at about 2am. Somehow we managed to add some easy (5.5ish?) technical climbing as well, since whatever we did definitely wasn’t class 3. Note the stone ‘house’ on the left side of the first picture…
Toward the end of the week I drove down to silverton and checked in to my usual place, the friendly Prospector Motel (where I am also at this very moment). Enjoyed the amazing 4th of July fireworks display (fantastic in the natural amphitheater of the mountains surrounding the town, which made the thunderous claps even louder). Here are a couple of pictures I took my first time there in 2009:
I also did the two days of trailwork, which was a good chance to get outside, get a bit more altitude (though not much), catch up with some hardrockers and meet new people, earn an extra lottery ticket for this year, and see some of the…
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Mar 14, 2012 1
I just got back from california, and the trip was relatively more enjoyable for being able to sit at the front of the cabin. I don’t often fly up there, but it’s nice when it happens. In this case I was using a mileage ticket, but they didn’t have any saver economy awards (25,000 miles for a domestic round trip), and the standard awards are 50k. But the saver first class awards are also 50k (or business class in a 3-cabin aircraft), so frequent flier tip of the day: if you are going to have to fork over the higher amount anyway, always check to see if you can fly first for the same rate! [This all also applies to each half of the trip separately; sometime you can get a saver award in one direction only, but mixing and matching works fine.]
One of my father’s favorite stories from flying first class back in the day (which he used to do regularly when he worked at the world bank) is that they once gave out a free bottle of champagne to anyone who had a hole in their socks… which naturally he did. But I now have a great story from my LAX-ORD flight today. I was boarding near the beginning, but after most of first class. My seat was 5E, which is an aisle (AB_EF was the configuration). There was an older balding man just in front of me, who was putting his things in 6B. Another man wearing a vest was just in front of him and was rather desperately looking around.
As I enter the scene, I hear Vest say to the flight attendant that he’s willing to pay for that (whatever that is). She tells him to at least start by asking and then we can see. It slowly becomes clear that Vest is supposed to be in 6A but wants an aisle seat instead. He tries to verbally offer $200 to Baldy for 6B, who makes a noncommittal response. The flight attendant presses, asking Baldy if he’s willing to give up his seat, but Baldy says he wants an aisle. Not clear if Baldy didn’t understand the offer, or didn’t believe it, or just wasn’t interested.
I helpfully say that I’m happy to give up 5E for 6A, and I am indeed happy to do so. Vest is very pleased and accepts immediately. He offers me the $200. I say it’s really fine, no thanks (and I’m being sincere). He says it would only be fair, given that that was the offer on the table to Baldy. I think he also says something at some point about being willing to pay $1000 but only having $200 on him at the moment. I hesitate, admitting that it would make a pretty good story. He takes a money clip out of his pocket and peels off two hundreds. I ask if he’s sure. Yes. Is he truly positive? Yes, he can afford it. Okay then. I take the cash and slip it in my pocket, settling in to 6A. Only in first class?
Additional random thoughts: the flight attendant claimed that she arranged the deal and should get a cut, although I’m not convinced. She seemed to be mostly joking but not entirely. I think Vest offered her $50 but neither knew how seriously to take the endeavor and nothing happened. It occurs to me that Vest thinks almost nothing of $200; I’m quite pleased with $200 in the circumstances but frankly it doesn’t change my expected lifetime wealth too much, and I’m not liquidity constrained,…
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Feb 25, 2012 1
I’ve already discussed this briefly on facebook and on the ultrarunning email list, but might as well make it formal: I had a guaranteed entry to UTMB (the race which circumnavigates Mont Blanc) if I wanted it, from having not gotten in last year… and I made it through the hardrock lottery, which is getting rarer and rarer… and I convinced Laz to let me in to the barkley again… so I figured why not go all out this year? In addition to those three, I signed up for the Plain 100, which I’ve wanted to try ever since getting into this game. And at some point during the year I’ll go back and try the maine 100-mile wilderness section of the appalachian trail (which I failed last year) with a couple of other guys.
First up is barkley in a little over a month; then hardrock in early july; UTMB at the end of august; Plain one week later (!); and the informal maine wilderness adventure at our discretion. The maine run is the easiest on paper (certainly the least elevation change, and follows a fairly well-marked trail throughout), but it’s pretty remote and my goal is to do it completely self-supported (i.e. only taking water from natural sources; no other aid). Plain and barkley are mostly self-supported (aid only every 10-15 hours), while hardrock is, well, hard (but incredibly beautiful). UTMB has by far the most support of all these (and over 2000 runners! an order of magnitude more than hardrock and two orders of magnitude more than the other three), but plenty of elevation change and fun trails and great scenery. Since I have no chance of actually finishing barkley (maybe a fun run??), I’m calling the other four my ‘Mountain Wilderness Slam’ for 2012. Barkley is a warm-up, or a bonus, or crazy, or something. Wish me luck.
To get the year started, I thought I’d share my current collection of running shoes, Imelda Marcos style. This is a bit misleading, because I just got two new pairs and am about to get rid of at least one old one, but to be honest it’s not too far off of steady state. Do you think I have enough?
Five of these are 3-5 years old, so it’s not like I’m going through a pair of shoes every month, but I realize it’s still a lot. Each actually has its place in my rotation: casual road running shoes; casual trail shoes; lightweight shoes for short races; shoes for long races; minimalist shoes for strengthening my feet; etc etc. In the middle row on the far left (new balance MR790, tragically no longer available) and far right (inov-8 flyroc 310) are my two most trusted pairs, which have been through a lot with me. Others are still on probation…
Feb 16, 2012 8
My friends Berk Özler and Sarah Baird (and coauthors) just published a very nice paper in The Lancet. They study adolescent girls in malawi, where the randomized intervention is cash transfers, either unconditional or condition on school attendance. They find that, compared to a control group which received nothing, the cash transfer group (whether conditional or not) had significantly lower rates of both HIV and HSV-2 (i.e. herpes). See also a nice write-up in The Economist.
In the meantime, I and many coauthors have a new paper in BMJ Open, an open access spin-off of the british medical journal. We study both male and female young adults in tanzania. The intervention is a conditional cash transfer, where participants only receive the money if they test negative on a suite of STIs (chlamydia, gonorrhea, trichomonas, etc). Anyone who tested positive received free treatment and was eligible for the reward at the next testing four months later, which is one reason (along with low incidence rates) that we did not concentrate on HIV as an outcome. We find lower incidence of the suite of STIs in the treatment group as compared to a control, but only at 12 months (not at 4 or 8 months) and only for the high-reward arm ($20 per round vs. $10 in the low-reward arm). The fact that we only see an effect at 12 months is not particularly surprising or problematic, since it may have taken some time for participants to trust the fidelity of the intervention. However, it was quite surprising to me that we only saw an effect with high rewards, since my guess would have been that any non-trivial amount would be both incentivizing and (probably more importantly) salience-enhancing.
Note on publishing: we had submitted the paper to the BMJ itself, who gave it guarded reviews and asked for a revision. We responded and were hopeful that it would be accepted, but sadly the further reviews were not sufficiently positive and the editor rejected it. Fortunately, they immediately solicited it for BMJ Open, where it was accepted on the basis of the existing reviews. What makes this all somewhat unusually interesting is that everything is public: the reviews (including names) and our response. See the full history here. One amusing critique that particularly caught my eye is in the second-round review:
Calculation of P-values between randomized groups at baseline is illogical – the P-values indicate the probability that differences have occurred by chance – as all differences are created by randomization, they must have occurred by chance, so why calculate a probability? What is important is the magnitude of the differences, not the P-values. Please remove the P-values from Table 1 and the baseline data section of the results.
Most readers here probably won’t care, but this was jarring to read since the practice is quite standard. On the one hand, he’s right that it’s a bit silly to calculate p-values when we know full well that assignment to treatment was perfectly random. And some of you will remember that I am the first to implore folks to focus on magnitudes rather than p-values.
But even I think this reviewer may be asking a bit much. Technically he’s wrong, despite being a professor of biostatistics: the p-value tells us the probability that a distribution of numbers at least this far apart would be observed via random draws conditional on the null hypothesis that the treatment and control groups have the same mean. It is only a property of the numbers, not of how they…
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