The dramatic effects of kindergarten education: A controlled (!) experiment

The NY Times ("The Case for $320,000 Kindergarten Teachers", 27 July 2010) has just published an article about a very interesting controlled (!) experiment. The Harvard economists that conducted this unusual study (how many controlled experiments in education do you know about?) conclude that "a standout kindergarten teacher is worth about $320,000 a year. That’s the present value of the additional money that a full class of students can expect to earn over their careers. This estimate doesn’t take into account social gains, like better health and less crime."

If this is true, deciding on a kindergarten suddenly becomes a lot more significant that you may have imagined...

Some interesting excerpts:

How much do your kindergarten teacher and classmates affect the rest of your life?

Economists have generally thought that the answer was not much. Great teachers and early childhood programs can have a big short-term effect. But the impact tends to fade. By junior high and high school, children who had excellent early schooling do little better on tests than similar children who did not — which raises the demoralizing question of how much of a difference schools and teachers can make.
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Just as in other studies, the Tennessee experiment found that some teachers were able to help students learn vastly more than other teachers. ... Students who had learned much more in kindergarten were more likely to go to college than students with otherwise similar backgrounds. Students who learned more were also less likely to become single parents. As adults, they were more likely to be saving for retirement. Perhaps most striking, they were earning more.

All else equal, they were making about an extra $100 a year at age 27 for every percentile they had moved up the test-score distribution over the course of kindergarten. A student who went from average to the 60th percentile — a typical jump for a 5-year-old with a good teacher — could expect to make about $1,000 more a year at age 27 than a student who remained at the average. Over time, the effect seems to grow, too.
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The crucial problem the study had to solve was the old causation-correlation problem. Are children who do well on kindergarten tests destined to do better in life, based on who they are? Or are their teacher and classmates changing them?
The Tennessee experiment, known as Project Star, offered a chance to answer these questions because it randomly assigned students to a kindergarten class. As a result, the classes had fairly similar socioeconomic mixes of students and could be expected to perform similarly on the tests given at the end of kindergarten.

Yet they didn’t. Some classes did far better than others. The differences were too big to be explained by randomness. (Similarly, when the researchers looked at entering and exiting test scores in first, second and third grades, they found that some classes made much more progress than others.)

Class size — which was the impetus of Project Star — evidently played some role. Classes with 13 to 17 students did better than classes with 22 to 25. Peers also seem to matter. In classes with a somewhat higher average socioeconomic status, all the students tended to do a little better.

But neither of these factors came close to explaining the variation in class performance. So another cause seemed to be the explanation: teachers.

Some are highly effective. Some are not. And the differences can affect students for years to come.

Dirac: Elegance is more important than empirical fit

Scientific American has re-printed a 1963 article by Paul Dirac, The Evolution of the Physicist's Picture of Nature, in which he says: "It is more important to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit experiment." The sentiment expressed here by Paul Dirac, the celebrated quantum physicist, isn't that surprising to those who recall Einstein's famous quote:

Reporter: What would you do if the measurements of bending starlight at the 1919 eclipse contradicted his general theory of relativity?

Einstein: Then I would feel sorry for the good Lord. The theory is correct.

In all, the article provides an enjoyable glimpse into the mind of a great scientist, showing that scientists do not always think and operate the way we expect them.

Michael Hawley: Sheet music piracy is okay (NYTimes.com)

DAVID POGUE: "No Easy Answers in the Copyright Debate" (NYTimes.com 8 July 2010)

Michael Hawley, formerly of the M.I.T. Media Lab, now a digital-media researcher, award-winning pianist and polymath, ... wrote to explain why he thinks sheet-music pirating is O.K., or even necessary:

I play the piano. Over the years, I have collected 15,000 piano scores in PDF form, covering about 400 years of classical keyboard works.

It's like lint in the drier of the Internet. Much of it is not available anywhere for purchase, or even findable in libraries for circulation. Max Reger's arrangement for two pianos of Wagner's overture, for instance? Well, the Max Reger Institute in Karlsruhe, Germany has a copy...

The last classical sheet music store in New York, Patelson's, went out of business recently. The recession finished them off. It was THE place to go to buy piano music. When I was in high school, I used to go there for hard-to-find scores by Granados or Medtner, and then hit the Carnegie Deli for some pastrami. Amazing, isn't it? New York City doesn't have an independent store that sells classical music scores.

Fortunately, over the last ten or fifteen years, amateur pianists have been scanning the contents of their grandmother's piano benches, and... voilà. A million monkeys typing don't get you Shakespeare, but a million monkeys scanning -- that makes a dent. I began collecting this stuff as a hobby. One day, I looked at my pile of music score bits. In those days, 15 gigabytes was most of my hard drive. But it was all there. All of Bach. All of Scriabin. All of Rachmaninoff.

At the Van Cliburn piano competition, a couple years ago, I gave tiny thumb drives to some of the winners and said, "Enjoy." Each thumb drive was smaller than my pinky but contained was the whole 15 GB trove. It blew their minds. Basically, every significant piano piece is in the pile.

What happened is, the classical piano sheet music publishing world plotzed a long time ago. But thanks to the monkeys, a lot of DNA has been preserved and is more available now than ever before. The monkeys aren't as well organized as the Wikipedia minions, but someday they will be.

When the publishers, composers, music stores have long since gone out of business, when the libraries don't have the stuff, the internet quickly becomes the Sargasso sea for catching this stuff. Not saying that your songwriter friend's points aren't completely valid -- of course they are. As slippery as digital rights are, the fact is that digital publishing probably gives people more ways to make more money and reach far wider audiences than the paper-based music publishing racket ever did.

But copyright, like the people who originate the material and the industries that promulgate it, has a lifespan. I think the classical piano sheet music world gives a glimpse of the end state -- out of the ashes of the music business, comes the rebirth of the musician business (as John Perry Barlow once said). It also, more importantly, shows what happens when a society does a poor, random job of preserving their cultural heritage to nurture future generations.

Generally, I side with the teenagers.

Fair Trade

From: Fair Trade and the Food Movement - Freakonomics Blog - NYTimes.com

The problem with Fair Trade coffee is that as the program scales up, the alternative market ethics it wants to sustain collapse. Inevitably, the Fair Trade market becomes subject to the same laws that drive the conventional commodities market. When the price of coffee drops, the appeal of Fair Trade’s price support lures growers into the cooperatives that sell coffee under the Fair Trade label. As poor growers rush into Fair Trade agreements, the supply of Fair Trade coffee rises. Protected by the price floor, the Fair Trade coffee remains inflated despite flagging demand. What Fair Trade importers thus end up doing with the excess Fair Trade coffee is dumping it—upwards of 75 percent of it!—on the conventional market.

US Supreme Court Rules: Religious Group Can’t Demand Funding while Violating Non-Discrimination Policies

The case concerns a student chapter of the Christian Legal Society (CLS), which sued the school after being denied official recognition and funding because the student group violated the school's non-discrimination policy. That policy requires that student groups must be open to all students in order to receive funding and official recognition. The federal appellate court below ruled unanimously against CLS because the school's policy prohibited every student group, whether religious or secular, from excluding students that disagree with the group's mission. For example, if the school's Democratic club cannot access school funding while excluding Republicans from its membership, a conservative Christian group cannot demand funds while excluding gay, non-Christian, or non-conservative Christian students. CLS appealed, claiming that it had a constitutional right - not enjoyed by any secular organizations - to receive state funding while discriminating against students on the basis of religion and sexual orientation.

Israel: Fundamentalist Judaism's Culture War

Yossi Sarid / The great Haredi rebellion is raging on several fronts (Haaretz, 17 June 2010)

For many years the culture war has hung over us like a dark cloud... Now it is happening; the war has erupted. The great Haredi [ultra-orthodox] rebellion has begun and is raging on several fronts... and no place is safe. The ultra-Orthodox public, which has always been cutting down our trees, is now uprooting them. It will destroy basic values, without which a democratic, developed state cannot exist. It will be lost unless it fights back.
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The Haredim have declared a rebellion now for an obvious reason. ... In every other country they obey the state authorities. Only here, in the state they made no effort to establish and make no effort to maintain, are they a law unto themselves.
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We have brought this calamity upon ourselves with our own hands, with our weakness and concessions. While every country worthy of the name makes efforts to separate state from religion, here they are mixed together, wallowing in the same mud, both getting soiled.
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Only in Israel are they such heroes. Everywhere else they are submissive and docile. It wouldn't occur to them to curse judges in America or attack policemen in Europe.
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This is a war that has been forced upon us, a war we cannot afford to lose. The rebellious Haredim must be put in their place, so that we, too, have a place in which to live.

In origin:

שנים רבות היתה מלחמת התרבויות תלוייה מעלינו כחשרת עננים, כאיום. עכשיו הוא מתממש; המלחמה פרצה. מרד החרדים הגדול התחיל, והוא מתחולל בחזיתות רבות: בירושלים, באשקלון, ביפו, בעמנואל, בבאר שבע, אין מקום בטוח. הציבור החרדי, שמאז ומתמיד קיצץ בנטיעות שלנו, עכשיו הוא עוקר אותן משורש. הוא ישמיד ויאבד ערכים בסיסיים, שבלעדיהם אין למדינה מפותחת ודמוקרטית תקומה; היא אבודה, אם לא תשיב מלחמה שערה.
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רדים הכריזו על מרד עכשיו מסיבה ברורה: הם יודעים שיש להם סיכויים טובים לנצח... בכל מדינה אחרת הם מצייתים בהרכנת ראש לשלטונות, כי דינא דמלכותא דינא. רק כאן, במדינה שלא טרחו בהקמתה, ואינם עמלים על קיומה, רק בישראל דינא לא דינא, והם עושים דין לעצמם.
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רק בישראל מותר להם להשתגע, כי מתירים להם. הנה, רק לפני כשנה אסר בית משפט בלונדון על בית ספר חרדי פרטי לבדוק בציציות יהדותם של מועמדים לקבלה. וראה זה פלא - לא פרץ ולא צווחה. שלומי-אמוני נשקו על פיו של השופט, ואולי גם באברי גוף אחרים.
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את הפורענות הזאת הבאנו על עצמנו במו ידינו, בקוצר ידינו; הרווחנו אותה בהפסדים חוזרים ובוויתורים נשנים. אם בכל מדינה ראוייה לשמה עושים ככל שניתן כדי להפריד בין פוליטיקה לדת, אצלנו הן משמשות בערבוביה, משתמשות בכתר אחד, משתכשכות באותו בוץ, ושתיהן מתלכלכות.
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המלחמה הזאת, שלא ביקשנו ונכפתה עלינו, אסור להפסיד. את החרדים, במריים, חייבים להעמיד במקומם, כדי שגם לנו יהיה מקום לחיות.

Call for papers: Philosophy of Computer Science

Track in:

8th European conference on Computing And Philosophy — ECAP 2010
Technische Universität München
4–6 October 2010

Submission deadline of extended abstracts): 7 May 2010 (submission form)

The Philosophy of Computer Science (PCS) is concerned with philosophical issues that arise from reflection upon the nature and practice of the academic discipline of Computer Science. Below we indicate a few of the central questions.

I. How is a programming language determined? What role does a semantic definition play? Does it have to be a formal abstract specification?

II. What sense is to be made of the notion that a programming language has an ontology? What is the role of such an ontology? How is it linked to the type structure of the language?

III. What does it mean to say that a program is correct? What role do specifications play in correctness? How does the nature and use of theorem checkers and verifiers inform the debate? What are formal methods? What is the difference between a formal method and informal one?

IV. Is there a distinctive form of reasoning that might be called computational reasoning? How, if at all, does it differ from mathematical reasoning?

V. What kinds of things are digital objects?

VI. What is abstraction in computer science? How is it related to abstraction in mathematics?

VII. Does the Church-Turing thesis apply to physical machines? Does it make sense to say that the universe computes?

Among others, papers that address issues that the concern the methodology of the discipline, the status and nature of its claims to knowledge, the nature of its artefacts, the nature and form of computational reasoning and the philosophical basis of computational modelling are welcome.

Track chair: Raymond Turner
Philosophy of Computer Science (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)