Value of college education

Traditionally, a lot of education's value has been described as a signaling mechanism. As such, it's been analyzed based on ROIC or other such economic terms.

But Tyler Cowen makes a convincing argument that perhaps the value of education is in self-acculturation.

Men are born beasts.  But education gives you a peer group, a self-image, and some skills as well.  Getting an education is like becoming a Marine.  Men need to be made into Marines.  By choosing many years of education, you are telling yourself that you stand on one side of the social divide.  The education itself drums that truth into you.

Similarly, if you become a Mormon or a Protestant in Central America, your life prospects go up.  It is not that Mormons have learned so much more, but rather they have a different sense of self.  They have a positive self-image about their destiny in life and choose a different set of peers.  They also choose not to drink. 

The beasts model differs from classic signaling theory.  If education is pure signaling, just give everyone a standardized test in seventh grade and then close up the schools.  But the process of self-image formation, at least for most people, is far from complete at that point. 

That being said, education will look like what the signaling model predicts.  It will be about subtle brainwashing, image, and learning markers of status.  What the signaling model misses is how important those features are for your subsequent productivity.

Nerds will hate education and tend to embrace the signaling model.  Their sense of self is often formed quite early, and they do not why so much time should be wasted in school.  This is one reason why the signaling model is so popular in economics.

I remember dropping one of my cousin off at a school in Seattle. It was some school for training people to program videogames (the name eludes me), not a traditional university. He was headed there for his first year of schooling.

I didn't know him that well as we'd lived on opposite sides of the country most our lives, but on the ride over to the school, I chatted with him a bit about his interests in videogames. Like many boys, we'd both enjoyed playing videogames, but he'd taken it to a much greater degree, choosing to make that his life's work.

In one way, I envied him. To know what you want to do in life that young and to just go for it seemed liberating. On the other hand, I'd already graduated from college, and I couldn't help but feel concerned, even nervous, as we neared the campus.

I entered college with no clear idea what I wanted to do with my life, and I exited the same way. It felt like a feature, not a bug. I've always seemed to value entropy more than the next guy, and perhaps that's led me to chase novelty more than I should have. It remains what it is even today. That day, as I pulled into the campus and drove towards his dorm (it was more of a multi-room apartment), it was the certainty of what I expected to find there that scared me. 

I walked him into his dorm room to meet his roommates. They were as I expected. Not the way they looked or dressed, though as soon as I saw them they were as I'd always imagined they might be.

Nerd isn't the right word, though it's not far off. Nowadays, we might give it a more positive spin: otaku. At Comic Con this year, Wil Wheaton was asked, by someone in the audience, to explain to her newborn Violet why it's awesome to be a nerd. He gave a great off the cuff answer, with this punch line:

Being a nerd is not about what you love. It's about how you love it. 

My cousin loved video games. Maybe what I was really worried about the acculturation effects of what I imagined to be the homogeneity of attending what amounted to a trade school at such a young age. 

Maybe I envied him for his certainty. I wonder what he's up to now.

Texting while driving

Is texting while driving dangerous? I have always thought the answer self-evident, though perhaps that's just another cognitive bias of intuition. Tyler Cowen points to an economic paper (PDF) that seeks but can't find evidence of a surge in accidents from increased cell phone usage.

Cell phone ownership (i.e., cellular subscribers/population) has grown sharply since 1988, average use per subscriber has risen from 140 to 740 minutes a month since 1993, and surveys indicate that as many as 81 percent of cellular owners use their phones while driving—yet aggregate crash rates have fallen substantially over this period.

In particular, the study looks at a spike in calls from moving vehicles at 9pm, when many cell phone plans transition from peak to off-peak rates. Such a spike exists, but a corresponding rise in crash rates was not detected.

To me the study seems flawed in that a phone call, especially with the rise of Bluetooth and hands-free devices, seems less dangerous than trying to tap out a text message, which requires a long period of focusing your eyes on your handset and tapping with some precision on a tiny keyboard. 

The rise of services like Uber help, but it may just be that making humans better or even just less emotional drivers has its natural limits. Self-driving cars can't come fast enough in some ways. 

I still want to scream every time I see a driver peeking at their phone while driving, and that was even before I saw the Werner Herzog short documentary "From One Second to the Next"  which was commissioned by AT&T.

I was reminded of Darren Aronofsky's short PSA's against the use of meth. The first one I saw from that series The Meth Project really jolted me at the time, it was one of the earliest of the PSA's that employed the shock and awe strategy that I can remember seeing on TV. 

The dying art of movie choreography

By employing directors with backgrounds in drama, the studios hope action-heavy films will be infused with greater depth. The catch, however, is that drama directors are usually inexperienced at, and thus incapable of, properly handling their material that is the film's main selling point, or one of them. 

The outcome isn't pretty: action that gets the point across but lacks coherence, as well as the unique personality that the director was supposedly hired to provide.

That's Nick Schager in a great piece over at RogerEbert.com titled Why Most Modern Action Films Are Terrible. He points to many recent examples including Wolverine, Skyfall, Thor, Red, and The Avengers, all examples of what Matthias Stork has termed Chaos Cinema.

 [It's very useful to read and watch Stork's text and video essay on Chaos Cinema]

It's difficult to imagine this trend of shooting and editing diminishing over time. First of all, it's very difficult to learn to choreograph actors, action, and camera in a sophisticated manner to establish spatial coherence and clean continuity. It's much easier on set just to set up a ton of cameras and then just edit it together in a montage with rapid cuts and have the whole thing land as chaos.

Second, with the cost of filming coming down with the advent of digital cameras (the cost of shooting and storing a frame of film digitally is moving ever downwards, but with film the cost is now increasing as fewer and fewer places both manufacture and process physical film), the temptation to shoot a lot and sort it out in post processing will only become more and more enticing. 

It's not just action films that have suffered, though. One of the things that independent film doesn't get dinged for enough is shoddy or simplistic cinematography. It's great that more voices can afford to shoot a movie on the cheap these days, but it also means that many people without any training in cinematography or visual grammar are pumping out indie films with some of the most uninspired framing and blocking you can imagine.

I grew up watching a lot of Hong Kong action films, and one of the underappreciated elements of early work by John Woo or the movies of Johnny To is their rich action choreography. No matter what you think of his movies, Steven Spielberg is a master of this skill; consider the assault on Normandy at the start of Saving Private Ryan as just one example of keeping the viewer spatially oriented at all times while still conveying the utter chaos the soldiers were experiencing.

Some directors today still do wonders with actors, space, and the camera. Paul Thomas Anderson and his cinematographers have pulled off some amazing shots. Not all of them have to be as showy as the single shot that opens Boogie Nights, too. Take David Bordwell's dissection of one static single shot in There Will Be Blood. So much is conveyed simply through blocking of the actors and careful positioning of the camera.

In The Master, even with the burden of shooting in 65mm, with the massive cameras that large format calls for, Anderson and cinematographer Mihai Malaimare Jr. pulled off some wonderful shots, including one gorgeous shot in which an actress strolls languorously through a department store, a vision of retail desire.

In the past here, I've analyzed one particular sequence in Birth that plays out like a waltz, complete with a waltz in the accompanying score from Alexandre Desplat. In To The Wonder, the camera seems to be engaged in a dance with Olga Kurylenko, the two of them circling each other as Kurylenko literally dances through fields.

It takes a director and cinematographer working together, bound by trust, to pull off such shots.  When it happens, it elevates a movie to a subconscious power and clarity that burrows into your memory.

One reason I suspect this is an area that gets little attention from viewers is that the vast majority of movie critics never bother to comment on this aspect of the movies. The technical aspects of filmmaking are considered secondary to the story or the acting. It's also difficult to pull stills from movies into a review to illustrate one's points. Even if you know how to do it technically, the legality of using such images is questionable, especially for a professional critic.

It's a shame. Only with more dialogue can people come to appreciate just how skilled some of the cinematographers working in the movies today really are. If you think lighting a single still subject for an Instagram photo is complicated, try lighting an actor moving through space while being shot with a camera that's also in motion. 

Kite Patch

Currently the number one campaign on Indiegogo, the Kite Patch is a patch that allows you "to go virtually undetected by mosquitos for up to 48 hours."

I have no idea what "virtually undetected" means or how effective this patch will be. The patch claims to work by using compounds that disrupt a mosquito's ability to detect human CO2 signatures.

Mosquitos love me, I still have giant welts all over my legs from my recent trip to Kauai, so if this works I will consider it a massive breakthrough.  The campaign uses contributions to send Kite Patches to Africa to help to halt the spread of malaria, so I'm in with fingers crossed.