Quantitative baseball analysis took a big step forward with the introduction of VORP ("value over replacement player"), which measures each player's worth compared with a below-average replacement, measuring contribution at the margin. For basketball, Bill Simmons recently proposed VOTT, or value over Tim Thomas, saying, "Is there an NBA forward alive who couldn't play 31 minutes a game, score 12 points, notch five rebounds and three assists, miss 70 percent of his 3-pointers and allow his guy to score at will?" These tools allow you to figure out how much to pay a player, and to compare players across positions.

Well, there's no reason academia should miss out on the fun. I hereby propose a new statistic for teacher evaluation: Value Over Wikipedia. I define this as the amount of value a teacher creates above browsing Wikipedia in the subject area for two hours a week.

People used to go to college because the professors were exclusive fonts of information. All information would flow in one direction, from prof to student, and at the end of the semester, the student would be asked to regurgitate some names, dates, and equations on a sheet of paper, to indicate "learning." A college education had value because you paid money to be near these repositories of information, and learn things from people that you could only learn otherwise with a lot of work. Now more than ever, anyone with an Internet connection can learn college level material. There's still value in a college education but now college professors need to emphasize different things.

Wikipedia is more competitive than you'd think. Ask any current college student to name the first place they'd look to find out about an unfamiliar person, place, event, or thing. In addition to an encyclopedia, there's Wikibooks (here's their textbook on calculus). Furthermore, one of my professors had negative value last term. I stopped going to class at the end of October and used Wikipedia to look up equations and answer the homework problems.

But Wikipedia is a limited tool; it should only be able to compete with weak teachers. There's an apocryphal story about Albert Einstein, that he stopped writing during a conference and had to ask a graduate student in the audience for a simple physics equation. The audience was surprised; surely the greatest physicist of the 20th century would know an equation that every introductory student memorized! Einstein replied that he never memorizes anything that can be looked up in a book. Some interpret this the wrong way; the ability to instantly access information, equations, and APIs is, and always will be, a good thing - it allows us to focus on doing other things. It does mean that we should throw most memorization-based classes out the window.

Wikipedia excels at providing facts but sucks at providing understanding. It can't answer questions, or construct a coherent narrative. It can't make its readers ask or answer critical questions about the reading.

So your teachers should have high V.O.W. But I know there are many who don't. Here's hoping we can improve those at the margin.

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Lots of work to do this week; write an essay explaining how Rome's emperors had power despite not actually holding the title of "emperor," and get a Power Wheels truck to wander around a room without hitting the walls. I'll try to write this weekend. I've been pondering the incongruity between these two points: 1) Nearly everyone thinks of themselves as a good person (including the person who cut you off in traffic) 2) Some (or most) people are assholes; the people that I think are assholes surely don't think of themselves in the same light. Update: As usual, David Foster Wallace provides some help.

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Your parents are on Facebook. They are still uncool. Presentation tips from Edward Tufte. I recommend his books The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within, Second Edition and The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. The best new game I've seen in a while: Wiki Paths. You are placed on a random Wikipedia page and have to navigate to a target page within 5 minutes, using only the links in front of you. Fun.

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He starts talking about education at the 8:06 mark.

A few good points:

• If everyone in the USA had teachers in the top 25% of the teaching distribution, we could catch up to Asia in terms of student performance in about two years. In four years we could blow the world away (Note diminishing returns and other factors here are important, probably understated by Gates).
• Teachers are paid based on how long they've been teaching, and whether or not they have a masters' degree in education. These two factors are nearly irrelevant to teacher performance. As a result, we're not retaining our best teachers.
• Most states have rules limiting the amount of times the principal is allowed to visit a classroom. In one state the principal can make one visit per year and must inform the teacher ahead of time. Other states have laws that you are not allowed to use data on teacher performance in making tenure decisions.
• We have more data on teacher performance than ever before, and we also have cheaper access than ever before - it's easier for the best teachers to be available because of cheap video technology.

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• "It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question." - John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism

• Crazy statue in Magnitogorsk.

• Evidence that our perceptions of people are almost entirely subconscious and don't rely at all on what the person actually says. This article was printed and placed on the dorm room wall, below the David Foster Wallace speech and right next to the Bash Brothers poster. Hat tip to Overcoming Bias. My immediate reaction was one expressed by a commenter:

• "To what extent could the causation be going in the other direction? Perhaps the researchers have merely identified markers that are statistically likely to accompany competence. The competence would lead to success. For instance, good instructors will tend to utilize every channel of communication, including non-lingual ones, even if those channels don't contribute the main impact of their lecture. Hence instructors using non-lingual channels would tend to be rated higher. The same reverse causation could easily be seen with good salesmen (they want to eek out every possible advantage, hence use every mode of communication even though the non-lingual ones may be substantially less helpful)."

• Really, Kellogg? This segment was great, and unexpectedly bold from SNL. "If you want someone to stop smoking weed, don't give them three months off."

• Finally, Gretchen Rubin with indispensable advice, in a sidenote! This deserves its own post. It works best when confronted with a personal appeal.

(As a sidenote, I use this trick frequently: If I’m not sure about my reaction to some event, I imagine someone describing the situation to me as if it happened to a stranger. That often clarifies my view. Along the same lines, I remember reading somewhere that writer Anne Lamott thinks about herself in the third person, to take better care of herself: “I’m sorry, Anne Lamott can’t accept that invitation to speak; she’s finishing a book so needs to keep her schedule clear.”)

• My two favorite songs recently:

Shadow Journal, by Max Richter. Tilda Swinton is the narrator Guru Josh, Infinity 2008 (video slightly NSFW, song slightly ridiculous)

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Yo-Yo Tricks Flip Throw Ins Clean & Jerk

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Sorry for the downtime - I finally bought web hosting, which means I don't have the cheap godaddy bar at the top of the page anymore. It took me a while to figure out how to move and configure the blog. So welcome to the new improved website, now ad-free!

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Or, maxims that young people take for granted: 1) 99.9% of questions have already been answered - the trick is in finding the solution. 2) There is a quicker, better way to do everything you currently do on a computer. 3) As storage and replication costs approach zero every resource should be available for free somewhere. As usual the trick is to find out where or from whom.

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If we divide the workforce into two broad categories, those who get out of bed in the morning because they love what they do, and those who are more attracted by the paycheck, I would place academics firmly in the first camp. Yet when asked to teach a class in the field of their expertise, some fail to get students excited about the subject matter. This is curious because obviously the professor likes the material well enough to dedicate his professional career to its study and advancement. So it should be pretty easy to excite students and get them curious about history or economics or whatever. A few possibilities, off the top of my head: 1) The professor hasn't given much thought to what's interesting about the field. If art history is all that you know, you may lose sight of the bigger picture. In a sense this implies that undergraduates are better rounded than their professors. 2) The professor doesn't think it's his job to make the subject matter interesting. Unfortunate but respectable. When the students are engaged in the material grades, satisfaction, enthusiasm and participation are higher. Ultimately if students are going to excel they need a better motivator than paper deadlines and exams. 3) The course they teach is a survey course, rehashing the basics of the field, not the cutting edge of research. As a general rule classes don't incorporate new material. Addendum: Your time is precious; you should consider at least once a week why you choose to spend time learning what you're learning.

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Stop hating on business jets.

Stop hating on Michael Phelps.

Arnold Kling on the stimulus package.

MIT computer robot competition; essentially, programming dumb robots to beat other robots on a "field." I'm entered into the competititon

Cash4gold TV ad, my favorite from yesterday. Unfortunately, the site is a complete scam.

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