November 2009 Archives
A Wall Street Journal feature on "The Million-Dollar Penny" illustrates an unexpected result of the new marketplace the Web helped create: high-end objects go even higher, while the formerly solid center sinks in value.
Lots of moderately priced coins are beautiful and have great stories behind them. And many "average" students go on to do exceptional things, sometimes those that are international recognized, but often known mainly to their families and communities. While Europeans may have learned to stop worrying and love elitism again there are signs that America is rediscovering that excellence can be inclusive, despite the current dogma that never the twain shall meet. Witness Henry Ford's desiderata for the Model T as "Universal Car," as quoted in a brilliant essay by my late colleague Michael S. Mahoney:
Some design and marketing practices now neglect the middle ground for appeals based on luxury on one side or price on the other. But whatever happens to collectibles, education and manufacturing alike could benefit from another look at Henry Ford's philosophy.
"It's easier to sell a $100,000 coin today than a $1,000 coin," says John Albanese, founder of Certified Acceptance Corp., based in Bedminster, N.J., which verifies graded coins.I've been studying the rare book market, which is far more transparent than it was in the days when networks of antiquarian booksellers used more roundabout magazines, catalogs, and personal connections to search. It's easy to find the lowest price for used books on line -- a bit too easy, according to writers suspecting online booksellers of promoting them over royalty-paying new copies -- and Google Book Search and other sources provide searchable and downloadable images of a growing number of public-domain titles. But the rarest books, especially those in pristine condition, haven't been affected. Of course there are limits to this thinking. Luxury real estate is still suffering in the market crisis. especially since its aura as a gilt-edged investment is gone, and because mortgages are harder to get. Still, it's better to be a builder of oligarch-grade yachts than of vessels for the merely rich.In higher education, the best-endowed private universities (even after catastrophic endowment losses) and the community colleges are in greatest demand. And even in the latter there are long-standing concerns about average students, the "neglected majority."
Lots of moderately priced coins are beautiful and have great stories behind them. And many "average" students go on to do exceptional things, sometimes those that are international recognized, but often known mainly to their families and communities. While Europeans may have learned to stop worrying and love elitism again there are signs that America is rediscovering that excellence can be inclusive, despite the current dogma that never the twain shall meet. Witness Henry Ford's desiderata for the Model T as "Universal Car," as quoted in a brilliant essay by my late colleague Michael S. Mahoney:
(1) Quality in material to give service in use, (2) Simplicity in operation --because the masses are not mechanics, (3) Power in sufficient quantity, (4) Absolute reliability --because of the varied uses to which the cars would be put and the variety of roads over which they would travel, (5) Lightness, (6) Control, (7) Inexpensive operation [largely because of lightness]The Model T never really approached this ideal, but it was admired worldwide,especially in the Soviet Union, where it inspired those signature tractors, and Ford's philosophy inspired later quality mass cars from the Volkswagen to the present. No wonder overseas automotive barons once admired American products. Even the Fiat billionaire Gianni Agnelli, surrounded by some of the world's most exclusive fabrics and tailors, was a fan of Brooks button-down oxford shirts.
Some design and marketing practices now neglect the middle ground for appeals based on luxury on one side or price on the other. But whatever happens to collectibles, education and manufacturing alike could benefit from another look at Henry Ford's philosophy.
"Don't Be Evil"? Silicon Valley seems to be thinking a lot more about the unthinkable, or at least the distasteful.The New York Times Digital Domain feature notes with tongue only partly in cheek that Apple has just applied for a patent on a system that would let consumers use electronic devices free in return for exposure to a stream of advertisements that would compel responses before the machines would resume functioning.
Would anyone have guessed that Apple, so widely revered, would seek patent protection of a gimmick not unlike one used to sell vacation timeshares? (Agree to attend the sales seminar and get a free weekend getaway!) Or could anyone have predicted that the Apple of 2009, a company with premium products, would file a patent application that could make it a latter-day descendant of Free PC and ZapMe, companies that in 1999 gave away PCs engineered to always display on-screen ads?And there's a parallel move, disclosed in 2008 by The Times (London):
The Times has seen a patent application filed by [Microsoft] for a computer system that links workers to their computers via wireless sensors that measure their metabolism. The system would allow managers to monitor employees' performance by measuring their heart rate, body temperature, movement, facial expression and blood pressure. Unions said they fear that employees could be dismissed on the basis of a computer's assessment of their physiological state.
The obstacle to both applications is clearly not the "understaffed and underfunded" Patent Office.
Both ideas may be non-starters, at least as presented by the respective newspapers. The kinds of businesses that would be interested in buying the Microsoft system are already causing considerable physiological and mental distress to their employees. As long as the profits are rolling in, they don't need to pay Microsoft to tell them so. And Apple's mooted satanic pop-ups have their own structural flaw. Consumers seeking free equipment for agreeing to watch advertising have all shown that they hate paying money for anything. Not the best prospects for marketers except con artists, and why should they pay when broadcasting spam is virtually free?
Of course, the applications could be staking out less offensive innovations in deliberately grandiose general language for maximum legal protection. Or they could be intended to thwart expected moves by competitors.
In fact, maybe both documents are really disinformation, designed to lure journalists (and bloggers) into speculation that obscures the companies' real intentions, like those World War II "invasion plans" designed to be discovered by the Wehrmacht.
But who knows whether Microsoft against Apple might some day turn into Big Brother versus Big Bother.
(Photo: Lars Plougmann/Flickr)
Names can be prophetic. Consider this account of a German privacy case by my friend John Schwartz, about a lawyer suing Wikipedia to enforce globally a German law limiting the naming even of convicted criminals after their release:
But it's still worth remembering a point made by the Wall Street Journal's "Numbers Guy," Carl Bialik, quoting one statistician on the alleged predictive power of names:
An injunction-seeking attorney named Mr. Stopp? Of the firm of Stopp & Stopp? Psychological researchers have found a statistically significant influence of names in choices of career. The phenomenon is called "implicit narcissism" or "implicit egotism." (Not that the firm concerned, or any other individuals with fitting names, are personally narcissistic or egotistic.) It worked for the poker champion Chris Moneymaker -- his real name, incidentally. A distinguished astrologer in India has made name change a formidable science, and the British have web sites to expedite the process.Mr. Stopp has already successfully pressured German publications to remove the killers' names from their online coverage. German editors of Wikipedia have scrubbed the names from the German-language version of the article about the victim, Walter Sedlmayr.
Now Mr. Stopp, in suits in German courts, is demanding that the Wikimedia Foundation, the American organization that runs Wikipedia, do the same with the English-language version of the article.
But it's still worth remembering a point made by the Wall Street Journal's "Numbers Guy," Carl Bialik, quoting one statistician on the alleged predictive power of names:
"In very large samples like the ones here, even small differences will be judged statistically significant," Prof. [Hal] Stern [of the University of California, Irvine] says. "This means that we're confident the difference is not zero. It does not mean the difference we see is important."
President Obama wants to make it easier to dismiss teachers whose students aren't performing well on tests. But what about the parents? By the president's own account, his daughter's performance jumped when he and his wife made clear their expectations, evidently without a change of instructor:The president . . . went off script for a few moments, telling of a C grade that his 11-year-old daughter, Malia, brought home from school recently. It didn't meet the standards at the Obama home, he said, and Malia knew it.
More recently, he said, she came home with a score of 95.
"What was happening was, she had started wanting it more than us," he said.
And I wonder about negative incentives when positive ones have such questionable results; merit pay for test scores has been a disappointment, at least in Texas:
Maybe attrition plus the dread jobless recovery will come to the schools' rescue. From the Depression into the 1960s, the teaching corps, not only in major cities, were an elite, many of whom had aced competitive examinations (the best known, Lyndon Johnson, was an outstanding classroom teacher). Not all new recruits of the postwar boom could be expected to measure up, just as the nation was spoiled by the efficiency of the mid-century Post Office, but there was more to it than the drought of investment banking jobs. Discrimination in other professions made instruction one of the few alternatives for talented women. There was also more religious and racial bias in what remained of the private sector. Fortunately, Depression-era unemployment levels, racism, and sexism are unlikely to return. So how do we recruit and train teachers?For the $300 million spent on merit pay for teachers over the last three years, Texas was hoping for a big boost in student achievement.
But it didn't happen with the now-defunct program, according to experts hired by the state.
The Texas Educator Excellence Grant, or TEEG, plan did not produce the academic improvements that proponents - including Gov. Rick Perry - hoped for when the program was launched with much fanfare in 2006, a new report from the National Center on Performance Incentives said.
"There is no systematic evidence that TEEG had an impact on student achievement gains," said researchers for Texas A&M University, Vanderbilt University and the University of Missouri.
Since teacher education and certification programs don't seem to relate to progress in actual instruction (not unusual; bar exam results aren't correlated with future legal competence) Malcolm Gladwell has proposed the sink-or-swim system used in football and financial advising. You can't evaluate aptitude in advance, so let lots of people try and keep those who work out because of a mysterious interpersonal aptitude one researcher has named "withitness." (Who, I wonder, will re-teach the kids who experience withoutitness?)
But teaching isn't like pro sports, finance or the arts. The average struggling musician can take hope, like the aspiring athlete, from a few colleagues' superstar incomes. Not teachers. Even Frank McCourt never planned to be a best-selling author -- it was his method of teaching by storytelling that helped him become one.
And we need many more teachers than quarterbacks, investment advisors, or special forces commandos. According to the Census Bureau, in 2004 there were 3.1 million primary and middle school teachers and 772,000 secondary school teachers. In 2005 we had only 800,000 physicians, and 20 years before that only 500,000, according to one unofficial report. Education's problem isn't that people don't realize it's important. Most do. The problem is that it is so important, just as health care became a greater issue with the expansion of medicine.
So if the educational establishment is still not delivering, conventional incentives are disappointing, major salary increases unrealistic because of scale and state and local fiscal crises, and sifting battalions of aspirants for Gladwellian "withitness" is a non-starter, what's left?
Musical ability was once considered the domain of "withitness" too. Shinichi Suzuki showed it was possible to train teachers to bring out latent talent in large numbers of students. We should focus not on threatening teachers but on creating better ways to help them.
The greatest of the twentieth-century gurus, Peter Drucker, was also the one who best recognized the educational side of all enterprises. Zachary First, managing director of the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University replied to my query about one of his most brilliant insights, which I haven't yet found in print:
"Peter Drucker long consulted for ServiceMaster. He was both an advisor and friend to the company's Chairman and CEO, C. William Pollard. Drucker once suggested to Pollard that ServiceMaster's real business was not janitorial services or lawn care or pest control, but rather 'developing people.'"Maybe academia can in turn learn something from the crabgrass removal business. How to develop the people who are developing people -- that's the question.
(Photo: Gamma-Ray Productions/Flickr)
Why do some technological and cultural products spread like kudzu while others wither on the vine? Journalists and academics have written volumes about "stickiness," but even the sharpest manufacturers, publishers, and producers have been rejecting future hits for decades -- often ideas and styles the break normally reasonable rules. Parker Brothers actually declined Monopoly twice: as the Landlord's Game (a simulation promoting Henry George's socialist tax reform principles, with a cult following in academic economics) in the 1920s, and its ultimate pro-capitalist version, authorized for a pittance by the unworldly original patent holder, in the 1930s. (The developer of that successful revision, or rather inversion, had to market a home-made prototype to convince them.) But if the game had flopped, there would have been many plausible reasons -- too complicated, consumers were sick of monopolies, etc.
Recent tributes to the late composer Vic Mizzy show the power and unpredictability of hits. The LA Times explains how it worked:
For whatever obscure neurological or aesthetic reason, the theme song has joined the ranks of the earworms. It's infectious even across species. Parrots learn not only speech but melodies and rhythm from their human companions, and the Addams Family theme song is an avian hit on Youtube, with dozens of versions by cockatiels alone. Here's the best finger snap I found:
Creative success is usually a lot of work -- except when it isn't. And in the end, like the Mizzy's Adamses, it can also be a bit "mysterious and spooky."
Recent tributes to the late composer Vic Mizzy show the power and unpredictability of hits. The LA Times explains how it worked:
. . . [B]ecause the production company, Filmways, refused to pay for singers, Mizzy sang it himself and overdubbed it three times. The song, memorably punctuated by finger-snapping, begins with: "They're creepy and they're kooky, mysterious and spooky, they're altogether ooky: the Addams family."It's encouraging to note that budget limits helped make the song such a success.Mizzy was challenged to become a one-man band and chorus, rose to the task, and managed to include copyright ownership in his contract. Mizzy not only had the right idea, he was willing to put hours of work into the right execution.
In the 1996 book "TV's Biggest Hits: The Story of Television Themes From 'Dragnet' to 'Friends,' " author Jon Burlingame writes that Mizzy's "musical conception was so specific that he became deeply involved with the filming of the main-title sequence, which involved all seven actors snapping their fingers in carefully timed rhythm to Mizzy's music."
For Mizzy, who owned the publishing rights to "The Addams Family" theme, it was an easy payday.
"I sat down; I went 'buh-buh-buh-bump [snap-snap], buh-buh-buh-bump," he recalled in a 2008 interview on CBS' "Sunday Morning" show. "That's why I'm living in Bel-Air: Two finger snaps and you live in Bel-Air."
For whatever obscure neurological or aesthetic reason, the theme song has joined the ranks of the earworms. It's infectious even across species. Parrots learn not only speech but melodies and rhythm from their human companions, and the Addams Family theme song is an avian hit on Youtube, with dozens of versions by cockatiels alone. Here's the best finger snap I found:
Creative success is usually a lot of work -- except when it isn't. And in the end, like the Mizzy's Adamses, it can also be a bit "mysterious and spooky."
