The Best, The Brightest, The Bonuses

March 15, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

The headline today is about the $165 in bonus money going to AIG executives.

I guess don’t understand the concept of a bonus. I thought it was extra money you got for actually doing something. Something good.


Athletes have bonuses written into their contracts. ARod gets $1.5 M if he wins the MVP; $6M if he equals Ruth’s home run total. Steinbrenner figures that these achievements will also bring more money to the Yankees.

AIG is a sort of bizarro ARod, the worst of the worst in the economic collapse. The insurance company leverage rate of 11:1 was about three times that of other firms. But when it came to the really risky stuff – the credit default swaps and derivatives – they were leveraged at 35:1 (my source here is Jon Stewart in his tête-à-tête with Jim Cramer). So guess who’s getting most of the $165 million.

Edward Liddy, chairman of AIG, had two reasons the bonuses had to be paid. One is that AIG was contractually obligated. They had promised the money “early in 2008, before the company’s near collapse, when problems stemming from the mortgage crisis were becoming clear.” To me, this sounds as though the insiders at AIG, when they saw that the company was heading for a heavy fall, stuffed their pockets with as much of the cash as they could.

The second argument for paying the bonuses is even better.

The best and the brightest. Either Mr. Liddy has a wonderfully understated sense of irony or he does not remember the history of that phrase. The Best and the Brightest was the title of David Halberstam’s book about the people who brought us Vietnam. The architects of that debacle, like the financial geniuses responsible for the current meltdown, were men of high IQ and fancy education. Yet their ideas and theories took the US into the most disastrous foreign policy debacle in its history, at the time.

Update: Judith Warner, in her New York Times blog today, discusses the phrase, with references to Halberstam, but also to Shelley and Henry Adams, whose use of if beat Halberstam by roughly 100 and 50 years, respectively.

To Turnitin or Not to Turnitin

March 13, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Turnitin.com, scourge of plagiarizing students, might be just a little bit too picky. And those student claims of innocence might just be true.

Inside Higher Ed reports on a study of Turnitin and SafeAssign (a part of Blackboard I didn’t know about) done at Texas Tech. The researchers submitted 400 papers to both services. Turnitin pointed its accusing finger 2-3 times as often as did SafeAssign.

The big problem is that Turnitin is just too damned suspicious.

detect / 13 / 03 / 2009 / News / Home - Inside Higher Ed via kwout

Thanks Ed (Inside Higher Ed and I are on a last-name basis), but I figured this out by myself a couple of weeks ago. We don’t have Turnitin at Montclair, but one of our adjuncts uses it, and he failed a student for plagiarizing a paper. She protested. So the matter was referred to the department chair – me. The teacher sent me the Turnitin report, and there it was in black and white: Her 1400-word paper on Filipino Americans had a “similarity index” of 69%.

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

I’d never seen a Turnitin report, so I checked out some of the sources. The first flagged item was the following.

The Philippines is located in the southeastern portion of Asia. Her neighbor on the north is the republic of China (Taiwan of Formosa), while on the west is Communist Vietnam.

I entered the URL of the source (#2 in the summary sheet in the picture above. In case the print is too small for you to read, it’s filipinamates.com. Turnitin was hot on the scent, and I followed. This was the first screen I found.

Not wanting to let a clear case of plagiarism slip by, I had to click on Enter. I found myself with this menu.

I won’t bore you with the details of my further searches for the sources of plagiarism offered by this menu except to say that Trekkie Monster from “Avenue Q” was right.

The other sources listed by Turnitin were equally non-inculpatory though not nearly so interesting. If you write in your paper that the area of Mindanao is 36,670 square miles, and someone else put that fact in their paper or on their website, you’re toast in Turnitin’s book. It even flagged passages the student had put in quotation marks.

To quote Ed again, “All of the members of the Texas Tech team said that they emerged from their study with serious reservations about using the services.”

So did I.

You Can't Make This Stuff Up -- Or Can You?

March 12, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Getting data is hard. It’s time consuming and laborious and often, truth be told, not all that interesting. On top of that, you worry about validity – does the data set really tap what I say I’m studying? And in the end, it may turn out that the results are disappointing; you wind up with something reviewers won’t think is worth reporting.

It’s not like medical science, with its strict and precise definitions and measurements – those doctors in white lab coats carefully testing the effects of drugs and coming up with results that help humanity.

But now medical science shows us the way to get convincing data, data that shows results: make the stuff up.

Doctor Admits Pain Studies Were Frauds, Hospital Says - NYTimes.com via kwout

Concocted. That’s the word they use (in case you have trouble reading the print in the boxes – the full story is here). Dr. Reuben concocted data. Why didn’t I think of that? Maybe because no huge drug company like Pfizer is underwriting my “research” that shows their pain drugs to be so highly effective.

I’m going to repeat a quote I posted a couple of months ago. It’s from a former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine written well before this latest bit of news about Dr. Reuben:

It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.

More Guns, More Killing

March 11, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

You know what the responses will be even before you read them. The anti-gun side will point to the shootings in Alabama and say, “Look what happens in a place where any nut can get his hands on two AK-47s or M-16s and a .38.” The pro-gun faction will point to the shootings in
Germany and say, “See, even strict gun laws can’t prevent this sort of thing.”

Either way, it’s hard to make the “more guns, less crime” argument, though I’m sure John Lott will try. If only everyone in those Alabama towns had been carrying a handgun, so goes this line of reasoning, someone would have shot the guy after he’d killed only a few people. Given the circumstances of the killings, that seems unlikely. And given Alabama’s gun laws, quite possibly some of those victims or people nearby did have guns. The police officers who chased him certainly did, though as far as their own safety is concerned, their bullet-proof vests were far more important than their weapons.

In both these cases, the killings were possible only because the killer had access to very lethal weapons. Yes Germany has strict gun laws, but the killer’s father had eighteen guns in the house, and they were probably all legal. He was what some people would call a “gun nut.” Others use the term “gun enthusiast.” (We like enthusiasm, so it’s O.K. to have your own private arsenal just so long as you’re enthusiastic about it.)

Here’s my prediction for what will happen. Some European countries, maybe even Germany, will make their gun laws even tighter. In the US, people will shake their heads, cry, pray, and focus on the personal stories of the killer and victims. Will Alabama or any of the easy-gun states change their laws? Of course not.

Here in the US, we will focus on individual explanations. “Authorities Search For a Motive,” says the CNN headline. Gee, it’s a shame what happened, but what can you do? There’s just no way to predict when someone will snap.

European authorities will think in situational terms: how can we change the situation so that no matter how angry or deranged someone is, he can’t commit this level of slaughter?”