The NCAA and the $$$

The NCAA's actions are becoming more and more ridiculous and inconsistent, and they only make sense if you assume the NCAA only cares about the $$$. Three recent and high-profile NCAA disciplinary actions have brought this fact into sharp clarity. The three players in question are Reggie Bush, Cam Newton, and Terrelle Pryor et al.

The NCAA threw the book at USC, and in so doing punished everyone but those who broke the rules. They cut scholarships, stripped the team of wins, and allowed players to transfer without penalties because years ago Reggie Bush (and moreso his parents) were hooked up financially in defiance of NCAA rules. Cam Newton's father shopped his son around for hundreds of thousands of dollars, which should be THE cardinal sin of amateurism if there is one, and Cam Newton was let more or less off the hook. Why? The NCAA thought there wasn't enough evidence (at the time) that Cam Newton knew or was involved. This not only stretches credibility, but it seems to be in flagrant contradiction of the NCAA's own written rules, which say in so many words that the parent and the student-athlete are one and the same.

Why are these two cases treated differently? The only reason I can think of is that Cam Newton is in the process of generating lots of buzz and making other people lots of money, while USC is a dynasty seemingly in decline. Notably, the NCAA did not declare the Cam Newton case closed and the investigation is ostensibly ongoing. Why punish Newton now when he's making the NCAA money? Why punish Newton now when you can whip your indentured servants into line later, punishing whatever innocent third parties are hanging around after Newton bolts for the NFL? The Newton decision only makes sense as a decision to protect post-season revenue, not as a decision to protect fairness, sportsmanship, or the principle of amateurism.

The recent Terrelle Pryor decision (surprise surprise) has the same stink all over it. Pryor and some of his teammates are in trouble for selling some of their Ohio State paraphernalia. The NCAA is suspending them for 5 games at the beginning of next season, but not for the upcoming Sugar Bowl. The NCAA's stated rationale is that the players were not adequately informed about the rules, but what does this have to do with the Sugar Bowl? Isn't this a reason for non- or minimal punishment? The decision makes sense only as a decision to protect post-season revenue.

I could be wrong about the $$$ and the role it plays, but its undeniable that the NCAA's decisions are increasingly inconsistent and difficult to justify.

Oddball Full-Time Jobs

I have been musing recently about a few unusual things one might be able to do for a living. I have a prepared a short list, along with some comments about feasibility, etc. Many of these are odd-jobs that people typically do in small doses for extra money, but that could conceivably be taken on in sufficient quantity to provide decent full-time work.

Given in no particular order...

Psych. Department Guinea Pig:

Psychology departments need lots of human subjects for experiments of various sorts. To bring in these subjects they typically pay around $20 per hour (this number is based on Wash. U and University of Michigan). If one were able to find these opportunities for 40 hours of the week, this would translate into an income of about $40k per year. Being a full-time psych. guinea pig would have some perks. There definitely wouldn't be any stress or pressure while at work, as your employer would record your successes and failure with equal scientific detachment. Being depressed, insomniac, addicted to drugs, neurotic, etc. would all become career boons, as they would qualify you for more studies.

The real difficulty of this career would be finding enough work. I think working one university aggressively, it might be possible to get 10+ hours a week consistently. In an area with many universities close together (Boston, New York, SF Bay Area, etc.) working full-time might be possible. These areas typically have high costs of living that might or might not be compensated by better psych study payouts than the ones I have personally seen.

Sports Ticket Arbitrage:

On a few of occasions I have bought and sold college football tickets secondhand, usually via Facebook or Craigslist. My impression is that the ticket resale market is a long long way from anything one could call efficient. There is almost always a huge spread in listed prices for tickets of very similar qualities, and many buyers and sellers seem oblivious to opportunities for a better deal. I have the impression that one could consistently make money buy purchasing tickets priced too cheaply and then reselling them at a markup.

This plan differs from scalping in that it would not require any on the street sales job. Tickets can be advertised online, most deals would go down long before the game, and buyers are generally willing to meet you wherever. Assuming the right buyers and sellers can be found on the internet, this job boils down to hanging in a coffee shop downtown and collecting money from strangers a couple of hours per day.

Doing this well would require knowing at what prices to buy and sell, and I am not sure how difficult or easy this may be. Listed prices for tickets are so widely spread as to suggest that it is easy, but I do not know for sure what the relationship between list and eventual sale prices is. I dabbled once in the past and it was pretty easy to turn a $20 profit on a ticket. However, once is not a very large sample. The difficulty is compounded by the caprices of sports: if the team does well, ticket prices go up, if the team does poorly, ticket prices go down, etc. If one could predict these things perfectly, one could simply make the money gambling, so ticket arbitrage may not always be a reliable way to make money.

The biggest difficulty would be to buy and sell tickets in sufficiently large volume. Doing a few profitable deals a week seems doable, but I don't know if its possible to find more than this. Everything would be easier if you attempted this scheme in an area with a dense interest in the sport(s) in question.

StubHub is really already executing this plan, even though they present themselves as an intermediary rather than a middle man.

Math/Science Tutoring:

I know from personal experience that calculus tutors can make $30-60 per hour in Ann Arbor, and I have heard and believed stories that rates are substantially higher elsewhere (most notably in New York City). If one were to tutor full-time, this translates into an income of $60-120k per year.

Obviously, one would want to attempt this scheme in an area with a high density of students. During peak periods (around the time when the local colleges have midterms or finals), if one advertised and marketed aggressively, one might be able to round up 60 hours of tutoring a week or more. I am not sure how much work would be available the rest of the year, and summers would be particularly lean. The 60-120k numbers are almost certainly not attainable, but it might be possible to get enough hours to make 30-60k.

Be Grateful, Dummy

It seems that almost everyday, there is a story in the news suggesting the national mood has deteriorated even further. People of every ideology have their unique paranoid fantasy culminating in the inevitable decline of the US as an economic / military / political power. For people on the left, China and India are popular fixations of anxiety. In the other day, I read a piece in the New York Times actually entitled Western Men Are Doomed, which was long on provacation and short on actual substance. It even tried to fit supposed Chinese cultural / intellectual superiority in seamlessly with the fact China spent the 1800s under the heel of various European colonial oppressors. Fareed Zakaria, who has the conspicuous qualification of looking sort of like a middle-eastern vampire, seems to be marketing himself deliberately (in his Washington Post column) as a focal point for this sort of anxiety.

On the right, we now have the tea party movement, whose constituents seem to think they are facing a crisis as urgent as Soviet troops, aliens, gay zombies, etc. running loose in middle America. In addition to more reasonable complaints, some tea partyist believe that a conspiracy of rich douchebags is secretly running the world. Duh! I thought everyone knew this sort of thing had been going on since the beginning of time.

Some people are so pissed off that at least one of them felt the need to light his house his on fire and fly his plane into an IRS building. This is the house where his WIFE and DAUGHTER live, and its his PRIVATE PLANE he's flying into a building. What a jackass. You'd think this guy had something to live for, but apparently if you can't declare your house as a church on your taxes, life isn't worth living. I have all possible sympathy for his wife and daughter, I hope they are able to move forward with their lives, and its a tragedy he did this to them over something as eternal and as boring as taxation.

People need to be grateful for the what they have. Life in the US today, put in perspective, is about as good as life has ever been anywhere. I am a graduate student, and I make a lot less than the average American, but I can still eat as much as I want, drive around in my car, surf the internet on my computer. I can go basically wherever I want whenever I want, I can express any kind of opinion I want, I can associate with anyone I want. I enjoy more material abundance and political / intellectual freedom than almost all humans that have lived, ever.

The world isn't perfect, and there is a lot we can work on, but the life isn't that bad either. I disagree with much of the of anxious hand-wringing I discussed above, but even if you don't, you should put your troubles in perspective.

Daybreakers

Daybreakers had a lot of interesting cultural commentary, and I wanted to point out a few things that I thought hung together.

1. The subsiders are clearly meant to represent the dehumanizing effects of poverty: the result of becoming too poor to afford the primary vampire commodity is an unavoidable degeneration into an ugly, violent monster. A few interesting scenes, recurring images:

a. A number of scenes ended with the camera panning downwards to show subsider-on-subsider violence in the sewers beneath the city.

b. There were a couple scenes which humanized the subsiders. In the scene showing the execution of subsider Alison Bromley, she clearly recognizes Frankie and attempts to communicate with him, showing that she has maintained her identity and concepts of her relationships with others. Also, Dalton's neighbor turned subsider wears his wedding ring, with its sentimental / romantic inscription, to the bitter end. A nice addition here would have been for his subsider wife to burst hysterically onto the scene following the fight.

c. A number of vampire characters refer to the subsiders as animals without referring to the processes that produced their state, notably the cop responding to Dalton's subsider home invasion and the vampire mom shown in a newscast near the end of the movie. This is reminiscent of the attitudes of the upper classes in industrial revolution era England, which often held that the poorer classes were intrinsically small / ugly / dumb and ignored the possibility that this was a product of their material deprivation.

2. The characters all clearly view the vampire society as exploitative, and show a variety of different attitudes to this fact.

a. On one end of the spectrum is Bromley. Bromley clearly is happy to profit from the system: "It's not about a cure, its about repeat business." He also seems to viscerally enjoy it, which is clear in the scene where he describes his appreciation for the flavor of fear in blood. Dalton's lab coworker, who is prepared to kill his friend to suppress a cure for vampirism, is another example. The blood substitute, a focus of the plot, is a means to continue exploitation in the eyes of these characters.

b. Dalton is the other end; he is squeamish about being a vampire and is uncomfortable about the way humans are exploited. Dalton views his efforts to find a substitute as a way to end this exploitation, and is repeatedly frustrated by Bromley's refusals to guarantee that a substitute will be used towards this end.

c. Frankie Dalton is an interesting middle ground. Late in the movie, he tells his brother that he turned him to vampirism out of fear for his safety and dependence on their fraternal relationship.

2. Just a few more things:

a. Dalton works for a company called (or at least pronounced) Bromley-Marx!

b. As vampire society is going to hell, there is a shot of vampires on a deserted subway wearing lots of clothes in order to conceal the early signs of subsider mutation.

c. Dalton's hair looks way better after he is cured of vampirism.

Education Problems

I read an article in the New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/16/us/16college.html?_r=1&hp

and I decided it was time for a rant about the many things I think are wrong with the system of education in this country, as well as how they got so broken in the first place.  Eventually, I would like to get to a discussion of why college is so expensive, but first I would like to make a few fundamental arguments.  Most decisions about education are made not by students but by their parents, and thus parents are the focus of what follows.

My first claim is that most parents don't have specific knowledge about how their children should be educated.  I mean this in the following way: parents do not remember many of the things their children are supposed to be learning in school.  Obviously this is not true in elementary school, but starting in middle school or high school students learn material many of their parents forgot long ago.  Parents are thus not positioned to evaluate their children's education in an objective way; not knowing the material themselves, they can't evaluate how well their children know it or make judgments about whether it is being taught in an effective way.  

Parents are thus being forced to judge their children's education by other means.  In particular, parents judge a school by standardized tests, the general health of the school as an institution, and by their perceptions of both the school's alumni and current students.  One thing worth noting about the latter two criteria is that they are very relative; I would argue they are viewed in a much more relative way than education would be if education could be measured differently.  Standardized tests are almost relative by design, as on any standardized test a decline in scores across the board  would certainly result in a re-writing of the test.  Viewing schools as institutions becomes relative in that it is always desirable for a school to have more money, nicer buildings, better educated teachers, more better bigger faster cleaner everything.  Education itself is less relative; there is a limit on how well society demands high school students understand calculus, a specific and limited understanding of American history required for civic health, a finite set of novels that are regarded as significant, and so on.  Certainly we can always demand that schools do better, but it is much easier to assign education an objective passing grade than it is to assign one to test scores or school spending per student.

The problem with judging schools by their students is that the perception a school is good allows it to attract good students.  Parents who value education highly are more likely to have children who are good students.  Thus when these parents seek out schools with high performing students they are also ensuring that these schools will have high performing students in the future.  For example, private schools and other schools with selective admission will always have higher performing students than public schools because their incoming students are more talented.  This phenomenon has a number of consequences I will discuss later.

My second claim is that parents in the United States are primarily focused on their children eventually obtaining high paying jobs.  Parents are primarily interested in educating their children in the service of this goal and education itself (as a means of self-improvement) is a secondary or non-existent concern.  To justify this point, I have only my own observations about how education is presented to young people: high school is presented as the barest pre-requisite for employment and college is presented as the pre-requisite for any remotely decent job. In high school, getting good grades and participating in extra-curicular activitities is important for getting into college.  In college, grades are important where they influence the prospect of getting into graduate school, usually some kind of professional graduate school which leads to a lucrative career.  Education is always presented to young people as something which is done in the service of eventually making money.

The New York Times article referenced above bemoans the rising cost of higher education; I think that skyrocketing tuition is easy to explain granted the claims I make above.  My key points are as follows:

1. Education is now an economic commodity used to make money.  Schools are providing something financially valuable, so if they charge a lot for it people will pay it.  Tuition has skyrocketed because of increased demand and because universities have realized they are sitting on a gold mine.
2. School's dont compete by providing the best education because parents can't directly perceive what they are buying.  They compete by providing the perception of the best education, in ways I will discuss in a moment.

Universities can create the perception of excellence by attracting good students or by generally looking like a healthy, vibrant institution.  One way a university can attract good students is by having them already; other than this, every way in which a university can do one of the above things better requires $$$ MONEY $$$.  Elite universities these days have their own PR people which costs money.  They send massive amounts of mail out to every student in the country; many send mail to students they would not dream of admitting simply to create an image of exclusiveness by attracting more applicants.  All of this costs money.  Universities that want to move up in prestige build beautiful dorms, have awesome professional landscaping, and constantly build new buildings.  This costs money.  Parents use all of these things to try and evaluation the quality of education because they can't evaluate it directly, and all of these things cost tons of money.  [I have some more to say here]

Curse Words

One thing that interests me about curse words is that they tend to carry very little meaning, or at least very little descriptive meaning.  They also seem to be least offensive when they are used denotatively.  Hopefully I can make this point clear with a few examples.

I will focus on the classic four letter words, as English has many words which are profane to varying degrees but fuck, shit, and damn are the prototypes.  Their descriptive meanings, as I understand them, are:

Fuck - to have sexual intercourse with 

Shit - poop, or the act of pooping

Damn - to sentence to an eternity of torment in hell

These words seem to be least obscene when they are used with these descriptive meanings.  For example, consider the sentences:

Panda bears in captivity don't want to fuck.

Bears shit in the woods

God damns sinners

These sentences may not be totally fit for polite conversation, but as sentences containing four letter words go they are pretty mild.  Compare them to sentences like:

What the fuck!?

I can't believe this shit!

I don't give a damn!

Without too much loss of literal meaning, these sentences could be rewritten:

This is ridiculous!

I am upset and incredulous!

I don't care!

In the first group of sentences, the curse word does not provide any denotative meaning to the sentence.  In each, the denotative meaning is understood, and the curse word is used for emphasis.  Its meaning is entirely connotative, and indicates that the speaker is angry and that the listener should be disgusted with the mutually understood topic of conversation.  It seems that curse words become more profane as their use becomes more connotative and less denotative, and that they are most profane when they are totally devoid of denotative meaning.  

To make this more clear, consider the following pairs of examples: 

Shit!

I took a shit.

Fuck!

I like to fuck.

Damn!

God has the power to damn.

In each pair of sentences, the latter uses the word denotatively.  The former uses it almost totally connotatively; when someone exclaims "Shit!" they are not talking about poop but suggesting something about their mental state.  In my opinion, the former sentence is more profane in all 3 cases.

Just for fun, I am going to list a lot more pairs of examples.  You can let me know if you agree with my thesis.

My bitch just had puppies.

You bitch!

The painting was of an old French whore.

You whore!

Lorena cut off her husband's dick.

Yeah, he's a dick.

I took a crap.

Crap!

Tropic Thunder

I just saw Tropic Thunder, and I was a little underwhelmed by how offensive it was. After reading about all the controversy in the paper, I was expecting some really depraved shit and I didn't get it. I almost felt like the movie was in fact criticizing people who profit making movies about retarded people, and I thought what some of what they said was salient. Has this gone over everyone's heads? Is it just me? Were people paying attention to the movie, or did they get pissed and walk out when they heard a forbidden word?