1. Justin Fox on West Virginia and the limits of its comeback.
2. The new Hypermind NGDP futures market.
3. Should the federal government cap the research grant indirect cost rate at 10 percent?
4. The blind baseball announcer.
5. NYT update on the weakening of IRBs for the social sciences.
6. “Reports said her job is herding goats and cattle, walking some 10-15km every day.“
#1 seems to be broken.
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-05-22/the-limits-of-west-virginia-s-recent-comeback
West Virginia needs more universities.
BTW, California broke an energy record with 80% of state’s power generated using “renewable” and large hydro sources. Some details on the non-hydro portions here (pdf): http://content.caiso.com/green/renewrpt/20170513_DailyRenewablesWatch.pdf
It probably needs more rigorous universities, not just more universities in general.
Indiana is similar to West Virginia in that Hoosiers are very poorly educated. Unlike West Virginia, Indiana has some fine universities (Purdue, Indiana University, etc.) that have a hard time finding new students from Indiana, and they fill their rolls with out of staters.
At some point, you have the population that you have, and it is not infinitely moldable. More universities in West Virginia won’t change anything.
Filling tech universities with foreigners is the plan, said the Californian.
We are constantly losing educated workers in WV. Students that excel in K-12 hop across state lines for better post-secondary education and opportunity in better job markets. Even if good students go to WVU or Marshall, they are likely to leave the state when joining the workforce. There is no industry to keep residents around. The natural resource businesses are waning, despite whatever temporary uptick coal might experience. Without a comparative advantage compared to surrounding states it is hard to imagine what will attract employers.
Indiana is similar to West Virginia in that Hoosiers are very poorly educated.
Compared to whom?
I think it is well accepted that universities spin off local businesses in general. Saying some leave, or even most leave, doesn’t negate that.
All it takes is for some grads to join, or better start, new businesses.
” California broke an energy record with 80% of state’s power generated using “renewable”…”
Nonsense. At least half of California’s annual electricity generation comes from coal and natural gas.
Tree-huggers recently claimed a highly contrived “record” for renewables-generation …. based on a cherry-picked few hours ‘snapshot’ estimate of a ‘portion’ of the California electric grid.
California government forces utility companies to buy solar/wind/etc electricity… even if those companies don’t need it, and have adequate conventional power available at any given time.
I hope we all understood that 80% was a daily peak, a record. That’s what the headline and the supporting pdf say.
In other news, solar panels don’t work at night.
West Virginia needs more universities.
What are you talking about? Its higher education is bloated bloated bloated. If their public colleges and universities had a census (given their population) like New York’s or Illinois’ you’d have to shutter every extant institution but West Virginia University. If they had the average state’s (per capita) census, you’d still need to cut global enrollments by about 40%. This is a state wherein 90% of the population is exurban, small town, and rural and there are no concentrated urban populations with more than about 100,000 people present. If they were sensible, they’d have scholarship programs for their residents to attend graduate and professional schools in neighboring states and just have state colleges domestically, or perhaps negotiate an interstate compact with Ohio or Pennsylvania which would allow West Virginians to attend state schools in one or the other and be treated as if they were state residents (in return for a tribute payment from the WVa state government).
You can send them to California if you want, but that is likely to spur less local job creation.
Something that could play a big role in WV, with some changes to the state, would be increased adventure tourism. I’m a white water kayaker who lives in PA, so I spend a fair amount of time in WV. There is huge potential there, only barely tapped, for more kayaking, white water rafting, skiing, hiking, rock climbing, cross-country skiing, etc. But, this will take developing infrastructure (many of the best areas have very poor roads getting to the rivers, inadequate lodging, few or no decent places to eat, etc.), cleaning up and restoring the area – including just cleaning up the huge amounts of trash people throw everywhere, and changing the culture of doing that, but also not polluting ever stream and river for short term gain, etc., being open to outsiders a bit more, and, importantly, cutting down on the explicit racism. (In near-by Ohiopyle PA, lots of the white water rafting tourists are Asian. If you’re flying Confederate flags everywhere and being explicitly racists, this limits the tourist trade a pretty fair amount.)
This obviously won’t solve all of the problems – but, with a bit of will and energy, it would contribute to growth both short term (including infrastructure work) and long term, and greatly improve the quality and reputation of the state.
Flying Confederate flags everywhere in WV?! WV seceded from Virginia because it didn’t want to be part of the Confederacy.
Well, maybe they fought for the Union. Maybe they even split the state to fight for the Union.
But they’re icky Scots descended from the borderer trash. They drink whiskey and shoot at animals with guns!! Guns that murder people! Guns! They vote democrat but iiiicky democrat. Like coal? Like forestry? Like small towns ? Like voted for Obama but still icky whites without college degrees and an appreciation for privilege?
Surprise surprise, descendants of the English puritans and landed gentry in the south both have no time for them.
Don’t worry, they’ll fight your wars, man your ambulances and fire trucks, and when you call 911 in a panic they’ll rush over to assist. They’ll mine your coal or work your gas plant. They’ll vote democrat. But they’re so….low status?
So like, they’re bad? And privilege?
+1000
Yes, but a lot of things have changed since the 1860s. My friends who live in WV have commented on the large number of Confederate flags they see.
Meanwhile, Black Americans now favor the Democratic party over the Republican. Southern states tend to vote Republican rather than Democratic. As do the Jayhawks in what used to be Bleeding Kansas.
And West Virginia was the state that had the largest proportion of voters vote for Trump.
I doubt these Asian tourists even know what a confederate flag is. And my racist self also wonders how much they litter.
Maybe what West Virginians need is for cities like San Fransisco and New York to allow much more building.
That’s a good attempt at deflection, Potato, but you’ll note I didn’t say anything about most of those points, and some are completely irrelevant, or even go the other way: small towns are part of the attraction, and hunting might well be part of the adventure tourism stuff, too, if done right. Won’t won’t work, though, is being explicitly racists and having racists and white supremacist symbols all over the place, as is common now. That’s just bad for business, and will have to be cleaned up if tourism is going to play an important role in the future of West Virginia. (The same, of course, goes for not throwing trash into the rivers and country side, and for realizing there is no future for coal, but those are to the benefit of the people there in any case.)
#6 Unless there’s a typo in the piece, 31 miles in 7 hours isn’t too difficult. If it was a race for paraplegics it might be good for 1st.
Guess you didn’t see the mountainous/hilly terrain in the background of the picture. With 1000s of feet of up and down, 31 miles in 7 hours is pretty impressive.
You’ve really run out of things to complain about if you’re resorting to critiquing ultramarathon runners.
Top male finished in 05:07:51.
Trail running is hard. Foot placement takes constant attention. Path takes constant assessment. As someone said, climbs are hard, but so are downhills .. run or wreck.
All good points, I hang my head in shame and retract my previous comment.
2. If one presidential candidate supported a 6% inflation target, the howls of laughter would be deafening. If another presidential candidate supported a 6% targeted growth rate, he’d win the election. I suppose it’s all in the framing. Which is why I find Sumner’s idea for a NGDP prediction market coupled “guard rails” so interesting. Same for Roger Farmer’s very similar idea. Inflation, growth, it’s all in the framing. Of course, “freedom”, like growth, has a nice ring to it, while “poverty” doesn’t. If I’m a smart politician, I’d support “growth” and “freedom”, not “inflation” and “poverty”. People will believe anything, as long as it’s properly framed.
Obama called for 4.5% and you are his Colbert holster
#4. I grew up listening to “wire re-creation” of away baseball games in a AAA market. The announcer stayed in the studio and made up play-by-play based on teletype from the game. With sound effects, too.
6. I am reminded of Abebe Bikila winning the 1960 Rome Olympic marathon running barefoot and setting a world record.
I’ve wondered why “running sandals” have never been a thing. More sensible than FiveFingers(TM).
I find that huaraches are more difficult in uneven terrain where your foot may slip from side to side. Also, small debris is more likely to get caught under your foot when the toe is open. So I actually prefer FiveFingers for the type of race she won.
Not much of a trail runner, but I like ASICs. Light but with a bit of structure. YMMV!
(I meant “a thing” more as a business opportunity than something I’d wear)
Of course Abebe Bikila is a good reference point to show that there is nothing really surprising about winning a foot race without “proper” footwear. Zola Budd is even better. Bikila generally ran with shoes but when he landed in Rome he found the custom shoes from his sponsor did not fit quite right. Budd ran barefoot all the time and set a number of records.
For most people good running shoes do improve performance but the difference is not earth-shattering for runners like Bikila who are used to training barefoot.
5. It’s a short piece and cannot cover all the angles of IRB of course. The Chronicle story had some great examples of absurd IRB behavior. In one case an experiment involved repeating consonants to subjects. The IRB board wanted to know which consonants would be used before giving permission!
Yes, IRB’s sometimes do ridiculous things. But I served a total of 21 years on the IRB’s of two different institutions, and I’m sure I can match you anecdote for anecdote with obviously dangerous study protocols submitted by investigators, or protocols where the associated consent documents were blatantly misleading or so confusing that even professionals couldn’t understand them. It’s a small minority of submissions, to be sure, but it’s a recurring problem.
In my experience, most protocol delays in IRB review boiled down to issues of clarifying ambiguous language or providing additional background information so that the appropriateness of the proposal can be better assessed. I suspect that much of that could be avoided with better training of investigators on how to write their submissions. At one of the institutions where I served, my Department encouraged junior investigators to “pre-clear” their IRB submissions with me or another Department member who also served on the IRB. We were often able to spot the things that would likely catch the IRB’s attention and help those investigators revise their protocols before submitting them so that they would sail through approval without delays on the first try.
In my view, no person should ever be the judge of his/her own cause. There is nothing in the earlier rules, nor in the modified ones, that prevents an IRB from expediting the review of social science projects that plainly involves little or no risk. Such protocols can be turned around by a staff member in a day or two. But it should never be left to the investigators to make those assessments on their own.
I enjoyed #4. He doesn’t do much of the play-by-play, but does the color commentary. And for radio, this is fine. The person at home cannot see the game either, so it’s like having a really good commentator there with you.
#3. Yes. More like this please.
Money is fungible. Trump proposing cutting $6 billion from research, but now he gets to say “We just cut overhead – waste fraud and abuse”
Private sector finance types outsmart government finance types every time. I predict indirect costs magically become direct costs.
“I predict indirect costs magically become direct costs.”
Which are subject to much greater scrutiny. I’ve known a couple of researchers who bought matching $2,000 office chairs with left over Federal grant money at the end of the year. With indirect costs set at 50% in some cases, I’m sure there is plenty of pure pork spending.
The problem of “left over money” in a budget is ubiquitous in public and private organizations and has nothing to do with setting the rate of indirect costs. Tom Hynes is right; this is just a way of selling a big cut in research dollars that have traditionally had bipartisan support.
“The problem of “left over money” in a budget is ubiquitous in public and private organizations and has nothing to do with setting the rate of indirect costs. ”
That’s a poor argument The issues are related. If you have a large rate of indirect costs, then you have a large expense budget to buy miscellaneous items that certainly wouldn’t pass scrutiny as a “direct” research cost.
No — indirects do lot of good, from paying a grad student to write the next research grant based on the data from the current grant to buying copy paper to paying for the conference when unanticipated costs suddenly arise.
Indirects is what helps build the infrastructure keeps research rolling. And I guess that not a single rep around a university campus will vote for it.
If one institution can do research for a 10% indirect budget and another wants a 50% indirect budget, then it seems fiscally prudent to direct money towards the first and not the second.
I don’t know of any institution that has a 10% rate. The standard is 50%. Besides, you get what you pay for. Quality of research counts too. As a matter of fact, one can plausibly argue that quality overwhelms quantity when it comes to the production of research papers.
Another point… You also have to consider who is spending what money. Indirect cost is taken by the university, not spent by the PI. So administrators spend indirect costs, not researchers. Researchers generally only have control over direct costs. (This is a little muddled as indirect costs come back to departments in budgets, but to first order, the previous is right.) So, no, I don’t think my argument is poor; I just don’t think you understand how the system works. (See comment by RM).
IRB’s are pure evil. There has never been any comparably destructive restriction on academic freedom in America.
How very like an academic to fancy he’s entitled to Other People’s Money.
#3: Why not cut research grants to $0? Have federal agencies conduct their own research in-house and hire university-based researchers on salary with term-fellowships which include an indemnity for the researcher’s home institution. If college and university faculty continue to insist they have to have public money, scribble the address of their state legislature on a scrap of paper and tell them to get lost.
Why not cut research grants to $0? Because it would destroy every graduate program in the hard sciences in the nation and all of the basic science that is done along with it. The research university system works as follows: Principle investigators (professors) come up with the ideas and write proposals to various funding agencies (private and public, but mostly public). The proposals are evaluated based on agency priorities and with peer review from other scientists (e.g. more professors). When funded, this pays for research with a significant fraction of research dollars being the tuition, stipend and benefits of graduate students and post-docs. Even 10% overhead would be a huge shock. (It would probably mean graduate tuition would skyrocket, which is a direct cost, which would then substitute for indirect costs.) I personally think it is a terrible idea to destroy basic science in the US — it seems like a truly valuable public good — but I guess that could be your hoped for policy position. Also, your stated position would lead to a much more top-down system, relative to the bottom up basic science approach we have used since WWII.
I’ve never worked in an academic capacity. So I hesitate to comment in an area I know little about, as that rarely ends well.
However, what about line item-Ing expenses for all public entities and things funded with taxpayer dollars and requiring them to be published?
It’s 2017, require all of these budgets to be line item-ed and published publicly.
The internet will do the rest. 5 million dollar grant for gender studies, lets see the money
Give them a card for the amounts, and we want to see every dime spent.
If there’s no waste, then no worries. I can say that in R&D in the private sector we are very careful with our money.
I think all public money should be accounted for by cent.
It’s a lot of worry for not much gain. There is already a lot of oversight on spending (budgets, reports, University compliance offices, etc.). You want more bureaucracy? More University administrators? And there are no 5 million dollar gender studies grants. More like 300K over 3 years for the most serious, rigorous work. Barely enough to cover one grad student and supplies. It’s just ideology. And by the way, it’s not any cheaper or better run when the funding comes from industry or private foundations.
You are arguing for receiving taxpayer money without oversight. Shall we deposit it directly to your checking?
Why not cut research grants to $0? Because it would destroy every graduate program in the hard sciences in the nation and all of the basic science that is done along with it.
Cry me a river. Complain to your state legislature and, before you do, ask yourself how we managed to train researchers prior to the 2d World War.
No one’s crying here; just explaining the way the system works. And you’re right that we would revert to a pre-WWII system, which was very different than the current one. In that case, science was a hobby of the landed gentry and a few academics, not the profession we have today. (If you think today’s academics are eliteist, try giving that system a whirl.) Note that prior to WWII, Europe — not the US — had the superior scientific establishment. So, without a doubt, basic STEM research would still go on, but it would massively contract. And while its clear you don’t care, I think this is a bad thing, since there is a strong case to be made that basic research is a true public good and has massive returns to society over the long run (anecdotal example: semiconductors). (PS, since you brought up WWII, Michael Hiltzik wrote an interesting book about Ernest Lawrence called “Big Science” that shows how the scientific establishment changed with massive government spending during and following WWII.)
1. Appalachia, where prevailing economic theories go to die.
I am continually baffled by the promise of coal. Kentucky provided the capital for the burgeoning America of the 19th and 20th centuries. Yet we are among the poorest states. If coal was going to bring prosperity it would have already done so. Trump came in like JFK before him and sold these people a pack of lies. I see you. You matter. Vote for me and I will stand up for the little guy. Ha!
In Kentucky, roughly 80% of employers are struggling to fill jobs because the applicants lack experience and skill. Some workers cannot pass drug tests or have criminal records. The lucky go to college and either move to the cities or leave the state. Those left behind have fewer options so they either join the military or turn to government assistance to fill the gaps.
A derogatory term for those on SSI is ‘checker’. Deviant lawyers like Eric Conn prey on the indigent by promising them a steady paycheck. With no other resources they make a devil’s bargain. I would propose a different solution, a refugee resettlement program for native citizens. Republicans are determined to remove the safety net. The jobs will never come to remote areas of Appalachia. Many cannot afford the cost of relocation. So why not invest in relocating them to areas where low skill workers are needed.
4. What a beautiful and tenacious mind.
6. Skirt and sandals. You go girl!
You just diagnosed the problem. In today’s risk assessment/mitigation world, an ex addict or convict, or whatever has no chance. In a pre lawsuit/no min wage world they’d be hired and paid shit at first. Over time, they could prove themselves and earn their way back
Not nearly enough has been written in economics journals about the life paths of people that are intemperate in their youth and their life outcomes in different types of societies. Litigious societies favor temperance, obedience, unquestioning loyalty to authority, etc. frontier societies favor people willing to take risks and seek improvement when they fail.
🤔
#3 Academic research is, and has long been, mainly a jobs program for highly credentialed but remarkably unintelligent workers. Now that it turns out they can’t even dig straight ditches (see e.g. the reproducibility crisis) the question becomes: “So, what do we do with all these Sad Sacks?”
Like the military base closings of a generation ago it’s going to be tough to let these overeducated (IYI) a$$clowns go without causing great pain in the college towns in which they rule. One of Trump’s thankless jobs will be to ensure that it happens; thereby unleashing the next great wave of American ingenuity.
What a remarkably substantive critique of American higher education… As ignorant as it is offensive.
How so? The vast majority of academic discoveries based on statistical inference (the commonest kind by far) are likely to be, and have repeatedly been confirmed to be, false. The scales fell from my eyes years ago when I heard a Harvard professor tell a class “here’s a pile of data you can build a career on”. Was he lying?
Ad hominem attacks on people who work in academia isn’t the same as claiming that there is a reproduciblity crisis in some fields (i.e. psychology).
Furthermore your statement
“The vast majority of academic discoveries based on statistical inference (the commonest kind by far)”
is a completely unsubstantiated claim. I am a scientist in the physical sciences. I’ve never once published a paper based on statistical inference. As a matter of fact, I don’t recall a single journal article in any of the leading journals in my field with such methods. You’re making a false equivalence between social and physical sciences. I don’t trust psychology research either, but it doesn’t mean that we should tank the greatest university system on the planet (and one of the major engines for innovation in our economy) for a rounding error in the federal budget.
#3 The overhead costs discussion is good but there are more interesting details in Trump’s proposal.
There are funding cuts to USGS, NOAA, NASA, NSF, DOE. These agencies produce results and with direct commercial applications.
When was the last time NASA produced “results”?
For scientists that work focused on Earth, this is one of the most important ongoing projects since 1972, agriculture, water resources management, mining, etc. https://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/how_landsat_helps/ A new one was launched on 2013 https://landsat.usgs.gov/landsat-8
The SWOT mission scheduled for 2021 will revolutionize geoscience https://swot.jpl.nasa.gov/applications/
That’s the cool side NASA, f*ck Mars.
#3: I have multiple NIH grants. So I’d like to clarify exactly what goes into direct vs indirect costs, because some of the comments above are a bit confused on this:
— Direct:
My salary and benefits
My postdocs’, students’, and technicians’ salary and benefits
Any equipment I buy that is for my lab alone
Any reagents
Any contract services I use from outside companies
Any travel/conferences I or my lab members attend
— Indirect:
Facilities services (building maintenance, lights, A/C, structural repairs, anything that would penetrate a wall)
All grant support (regulatory compliance and some of the paperwork associated with submitting or receiving grants; in some cases internal reviewers)
Equipment shared across labs (really fancy microscopes, some freezers, NMR, Mass spec, other “core facilities”)
Research animal housing and veterinary services (but some of this is payed by grantees in direct costs)
Oversight/regulatory people (animal welfare, research ethics officials, other research compliance)
General department staff (department administrators or all sorts, our business office, payroll people)
Sometimes funding a researcher who is temporarily without funding (often they must prove they have upcoming support starting in a few months).
A tiny fraction (about 1% of the direct costs) that goes into an unrestricted account that I can use for things like unbudgeted computers, books, etc.
Some fraction of the rest of what the university does, which is paid in many cases by tuition but is probably coming at least partly from indirect costs
Indirect costs are mostly calculated based on a formula involving the amount of research space that a university has, as a fraction of total space. The idea is that non-research space should be funded by tuition. A research-heavy institution will thus have high indirect costs, and a undergrad-teaching -heavy institution will have low ones. There is no distinction made between grants that are research-space-intensive (i.e. wet lab stuff, or especially lab stuff with primates) and ones that aren’t (e.g. most computational stuff); all are assessed the same indirect costs. So a grant for statistical modeling where most of the work is done by a grad student working from home has the same indirects (per dollar of directs) as one that requires lots of core facilities at the university. The direct costs are explicitly budgeted by line item in the grant.
With all this said, here is my (biased) opinion. Holding the total pool of money fixed, I would prefer to have a higher ratio of direct/indirect costs. At least some of what indirect costs are paying for is unnecessary, or is necessary only because of dumb regulatory requirements. On the other hand, there are definitely some poor spending decisions by PIs with direct costs, especially near the end of a grant period. At least indirect costs are pooled over a larger number of researchers so there is less of a problem with an instantaneous imbalance between costs and needs.
But if “cutting indirect costs” is just a ploy to cut NIH funding in general, then it will certainly reduce research output, even with reduced regulatory burden.
I truly valued your article. I’m not one to ever comment,
but I felt really motivated to let you know. I even ended up sharing this on my facebook!
No, I’m arguing for not *increasing* oversight. Big difference there. Of course there should be some oversight. My point is that the marginal value of increasing oversight is zero or negative. On the other hand, if you’re writing checks…