Birth timing and Valentines Day

Andrew Gelman points me to this new paper that examines birth rates on Valentines Day and Halloween. Given the day, here is what happens on Valentines Day.

[Interesting date indicator in original.] From this it looks like people just plan to have their births on Valentines Day. Unlike other days where Andrew Leigh and I found birth timing effects (April 1 and Feb 29, for instance), it is harder to come up with a theory for this but I’m happy for people to try in the comments. That said, I can’t help but wonder if doctors were scheduling timing that day to make sure they weren’t interrupted in the evening or could take a quieter Feb 15. 

 In other Valentines links, a trembling lips equilibrium and every economics model recalibrated for relationships.

Parenting with a gun

As regular readers know, I'm all about the incentives. And I'm also all about imaginative punishments. But the viral video (21 million hits at last count with ads activated too boot) of one father taking a gun to his teenage daughter's laptop really misses the mark. Usually, I relish these things as an opportunity for teaching stuff to kids but this one has the parent getting so much wrong it isn't funny.

That is what I told Caroline Howard today at Forbes. She writes about it in this post. The whole dispute was over this man's 15 year old writing a "letter to her parents" on Facebook basically complaining about her household chores and asking for payment. The letter itself is pretty mild stuff for a teenager. My children will regularly complain to us directly. But the thing here is that this one just complained to her friends on Facebook. She didn't show it to her parents or in public. Her father ended up finding it by trawling her computer. And that is when he let loose.

What he does, appealing to some previous Facebook issue, is destroy her laptop and then, posted the whole shebang on YouTube. Anybody can surely see that the last thing you should do to a laptop or thing is destroy it to show how valuable it is. Apparently this was with the intention of embarrassing her but I gotta say that I cannot imagine that amongst her peers she is getting anything other than sympathy. And the irony is, that given her destroyed laptop, she can't even see his whole rant.

This is not about household chores (find me a parent and child who has never had an issue over this) and it is not about unappreciative children. What this is about is communication. This father-daughter pair are telling us exactly how it shouldn't be done. And in this, you have to point your finger at the adult in this. Facebook is the means by which teenagers talk to each other. If they can't complain about their parents there, where are they supposed to do it? The fact that this was all apparently news to the father is a problem with their communication. In the Forbes piece, I wonder if the gun had anything to do with it. 

To be sure, there is a larger parental issue of how to instill values in your children. For us, we usually like some thoughtful discussion over an episode of Wife Swap. But here was one child putting down her perspective and then getting return fire. That isn't going to do the trick.

By the way, the ad showing on the YouTube video I saw was of teenagers sharing stuff with their mobile phones. Great placement Google Nexus!

Cartoon Guide to Economics: Volume II, Macroeconomics

My 11 year old son has written a review. You can read it here. It didn't quite capture his reaction upon finishing it.

"How was it?"

"It was very interesting. But when are they going to do Volume 3."

"Volume 3? Why do you think there'll be another volume?"

"Well, this one was about all of the problems. Unemployment, high prices, poor countries. They can't just leave it like that! They now have to tell us how to solve them."

Sigh. I guess we all know that macroeconomics is where it ends and no cartoons are going to quite help. I had to break the truth to him. I guess it uncovers something quite deep about our profession. Microeconomics offers problems and, at least, convincing solutions. When we talk about macroeconomics, that isn't the message.

Rooster parenting?

Last year we had the Tiger mother and the Lemur father. For this year's instalment, we turn to France and an article published in the Wall Street Journal entitled "Why French parents are superior?" (clearly cashing on the similar title for Chinese parents last year). The difference is that this time the article is not written by a superior parent but by a sceptical, yet ultimately admiring one. 

So let's play the national characteristics translated into stereotyped parenting style game: what is it that French parents do? For starters, let's look at the results. 

Soon it became clear to me that quietly and en masse, French parents were achieving outcomes that created a whole different atmosphere for family life. When American families visited our home, the parents usually spent much of the visit refereeing their kids' spats, helping their toddlers do laps around the kitchen island, or getting down on the floor to build Lego villages. When French friends visited, by contrast, the grownups had coffee and the children played happily by themselves.

Basically, French parents do not have to worry about their children's public behaviour. They play to themselves, don't interrupt adults talking and have learned to wait. Suffice it to say, you read this and you think: this is just great. Indeed, I'm pretty sure that is exactly what the parents in our household are trying to achieve.

But how do they do it? The word we would use here is "discipline" but according to the article the more appropriate French word is "education." When a French parent is saying "no" this is a route to educating the child as to what they should be doing and not an admonishment or punishment. There don't appear to be elaborate economic incentives -- carrots or sticks -- just a resolution that this is the way of the world and children should expect it. 

The article's author, American Pamela Druckerman, tries to find the dark side of all this but ultimately fails. She can only half heartedly attempt to do so by turning her nose up at the adults.

Rest assured, I certainly don't suffer from a pro-France bias. Au contraire, I'm not even sure that I like living here. I certainly don't want my kids growing up to become sniffy Parisians.

In reality, whether we ascribe it to French people or just a parenting style, the article does point to lessons: a large part about what we get in children's behaviour is about what we as parents expect. Want to have a more independent parenting style, then act like that is your right. Your children will get the picture and it is far from clear they will be worse to wear for it. Read the article. At least for a day, I suspect your children will get a little less attention.

My thoughts on tech & education

Apple recently got lots of press for its move into textbook publishing, but the attention was secondary to another, more significant, announcement made a few weeks earlier. On January 3, Khan Academy announced that Vi Hart would be moving to Mountain View and joining its team.

The Khan Academy, founded by Salman Khan (a former hedge fund manager), is a not-for-profit, online venture that is currently revolutionizing K-12 education. If you want to know how, here is the obligatory TED video. With over 4 million unique users each month, the Kha Academy is attracting high-profile attention, including funding from the Gates Foundation.

Vi Hart is lesser known but her engaging videos explaining mathematics have been viewed millions of times. Want to get a taste? Check out this story. Hart does not quite do what the Khan Academy does but she operates in the same space. Her interest is not in the standard K-12 curriculum but broader concepts of mathematics; the stuff students rarely see before college.

The fact that these two are getting together demonstrates something important regarding online education. Experiments are happening and the successful ones are complementary to one another. In particular, both Khan and Hart have evolved a particular style of video instruction. It is a style that removes the lecturer from the picture. Previous videos for educative purposes did not do that. Many universities, for example, spent a lot of time recording their lecturers and professors. Sometimes the results are incredible. But more often than not, the format was stale. Part of the reason is that giving a lecture is different from making a video. A lecturer has to have a sense of the room while moving back and forth from PowerPoint slides or a blackboard. It is hard to capture that on a video. Moreover, the same lecture spoken over the top of a slide deck won't quite work on video. To see this, see this example of my own. It is fine, but somehow not very engaging.

The Khan Academy broke through this format issue by not making videos as if the student were sitting in a classroom but as if he or she were sitting next to them at a table. Indeed, that is how Khan started out — tutoring his nieces and nephews over Skype. So it is more personal but, more importantly, it is the sort of thing that is easy to pause, rewind, and review.

Vi Hart's style is different. She is speaking to an audience, but a YouTube audience is not a classroom. What she does cannot be done in a classroom because she has to speed up the images relative to her speech. That takes work and imagination to get right. And Hart is not the only one who has developed this skill. Just take a look at this series of videos by C.G.P. Grey. The underlying technology is PowerPoint but it is accelerated beyond what one could do in a lecture hall. The result is incredibly engaging and compelling. It also manages to explain complex arguments without oversimplifying them.. Finally, 321 FastDraw has made a business out of accelerated doodling.

These developments stand in sharp contrast to what Apple has focused on. Making textbooks more interesting is a noble cause. Making them cheaper is something more important still. But in the examples Apple gave us, the materials were multimedia. The focus was the text, and out of the text lifted pictures, more interaction and videos that were documentary in style. The problem is that the textbook itself embeds a certain style of learning. For one, it is linear. A curriculum is supposed to start at the beginning of the textbook, build on chapter by chapter until the end is reached. The Kahn Academy requires building but does not set out a path that all students must follow. Apple has built note-taking into its software, but when you think about it, when students have to take notes, you've failed to teach them.

But more importantly, the way a textbook is used in the classroom compels standardization in learning rates. All students are supposed to be "on the same page" so that an instructor can give complementary class material. The problem, as Clay Christensen has recently emphasized, is that students rarely learn at the same rate, let alone in the same way. Thus, in designing the interaction between teacher activities and either textual or online learning, the goal is to break free of the strict complementarity that compels step-by-step advancement of the group. Instead, online learning has to provide the means by which students can learn and master at their own pace. The idea is to unbundle the teacher's time from the class. Instead of a teacher's attention being broadcast, it needs to be divided up into smaller packages and doled out as needed by individual students or smaller groups. That is the promise of online or digital learning: allowing teachers' time to become divisible rather than a block.

There are people out there, for the most part far removed from traditional education, who are experimenting and working out how to make modular, compelling content that can free teacher time. They are finding each other and that is great news for the future.

This post was originally published on HBR Blogs (23rd January 2012).

Back on the radio

It has been a while but I did a radio interview on Parentonomics the other week. It is now posted online and you can listen to it here. I'm on about 3/4 of the way through. 

My best line was my last one and it was a little obscured. "I'm wistful for the days you could just change a nappy and the smell would be gone. With a teenager smell removal is much harder."

Seeing through incentives

As regular readers know, there is nothing more attractive to this blog than a child seeing through incentives. This contribution from FailBlog requires no further explanation.