Interesting, very interesting

From Marginal Revolution, the Politically Incorrect Paper of the Month, v.2

Less than three percent of the highest-paid U.S. executives are women. Why? In Performance in Competitive Environments: Gender Differences, a new paper in the Aug. 2003 QJE, the authors suggest an intriguing answer.

The authors compare male and female performance at solving mazes across different incentive systems. In a simple piece-rate system men perform slightly but not markedly better than women, on average the men solved 11.23 mazes in 15 minutes compared to 9.73 for the women, a difference of 1.5. But in a tournament, in which only the highest-paid performer wins, the men significantly improve their performance and the women hardly improve at all. As a result, the gender-gap in performance rises (men complete 15 mazes, the women only 10.8 for a difference of 4.2, stat. significant at p=0.034).

Now here is where it gets really interesting. One might think that this shows that women are less competitive than men. To test this the authors run single-sex tournaments. Surprisingly, in the single-sex tournaments the women’s performance improves considerably relative to both their performance in the piece rate system and to their performance in the mixed tournament. Women do like to compete just not against men! Men’s performance stays about the same as in the mixed tournament.

The discussion continues, including [gasp] a graph.

She came out through the classroom window

From USA Today, Teacher accused of ordering student thrown from window

A teacher at a Newton County [Georgia] school has resigned after officials say she admitted she told two students to throw a 14-year-old girl from a classroom window.

The teacher, a 63-year-old Conyers resident, was not immediately arrested after the Monday incident, which took place at Sharp Learning Center. But the Newton County Sheriff’s Office is investigating.

The student, whose name was not released, was taken to Newton General Hospital on Tuesday night for neck pains and cuts to her body, said Newton County Sheriff’s Office investigator Marty Roberts.

According to an incident report by resource officer Brian Chiappetta, the incident took place in the morning during second period. The students were in class when the teacher took a photograph of some of the students, the report said. When the girl asked why the teacher had taken her picture, the teacher allegedly responded with a disparaging remark about the girl’s appearance.

The girl became upset and began to use profanity and hit the office assist button on the classroom wall, the incident report said. The teacher then allegedly told two 14-year-old boys to pick up the girl and throw her out the window.

The two boys later told principal Kenneth Daniels that they threw the girl out the window because they did not want to be written up for disobeying a teacher.

All the books you’ve read

From Three Bed Two Bath

From Peter Carlin’s interview with Tom Brokaw’s replacement, Brian Williams.

He’s moved among the world’s most powerful people for years, but Williams still works overtime to learn more about the nation and world he covers. A voracious reader of U.S. history (he’s currently reading John Dean’s biography of President Warren Harding and the diaries of Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson), Williams goes berserk when asked about C-Span.

“Oh my God. Oh yes, oh yes,” he said. “Ask my kids about me and Book-TV. Ask them what happens when I have a spare moment. I’ll watch anything on C-Span.”

All this, he knows, serves somehow to prepare for days such as Sept. 11, 2001, when network anchors must confront the camera for hours on end to narrate history’s most jarring moments.

“There’s no script, no teleprompter, nothing set up to help you,” Williams said. “This is where your learning comes in, all the books you’ve read, all the knowledge you can muster about your country.”

All the books you’ve read. This is why, when the Wife and I go to a stranger’s house, especially if they have kids, the first thing we look for are the bookshelves. No bookshelves, we get nervous.

To show the world the touching way we honor our fallen

From a Transcript of Remarks by John Kerry, A Contract with America’s Middle Class

I know that every four years people who are running for president tell you that this is the most important election. Well this one is different: It’s the most important election in our lifetime. Today, we confront challenges as great as any in our history.

If you don’t believe that this is the most important election in our lifetime, then all you have to do is look at your front pages. We see the haunting images of our soldiers loading flagged draped coffins. We see rows of them in the belly of a cargo plane for their long flight home. We see images of them being saluted on their final march to their final resting place. And those images are paired with a story about a husband and wife who took photos to show the world the touching way we honor our fallen. And they were fired for their openness and honesty. My friends truth is on the line in the election.

Who is that man on the $10 bill?

David Brooks has reviewed Ron Chernow’s new biography, Alexander Hamilton, Rich Uncle of His Country. The review begins:

When Alexander Hamilton was 10, his father abandoned him. When he was around 12, his mother died of a fever in the bed next to his. He was adopted by a cousin, who promptly committed suicide. During those same years, his aunt, uncle and grandmother also died. A court in St. Croix seized all of his possessions, sold off his personal effects and gave the rest to his mother’s first husband. By the time he was a young teenager, he and his brother were orphaned, alone and destitute.

HamiltonCover.jpgWithin three years he was a successful businessman. Within a decade he was effectively George Washington’s chief of staff, organizing the American revolutionary army and serving bravely in combat. Within two decades he was one of New York’s most successful lawyers and had written major portions of The Federalist Papers. Within three decades he had served as Treasury secretary and forged the modern financial and economic systems that are the basis for American might today. Within five decades he was dead at the hands of Aaron Burr.

Alexander Hamilton was the most progressive, and is the most neglected, of the founding fathers. He was the most progressive because he saw that America could be a capitalist superpower, and he figured out which institutions it would need to realize that destiny.

He is the most neglected, first because he was a relentless climber (and nobody has unalloyed views about ambition), second because he was a great champion of commerce (and nobody has uncomplicated views about that either) and third because his most bitter rivals, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, outlived him by decades and did everything they could to bury his reputation. So there is no Hamilton monument in Washington, but at least we now have Ron Chernow’s moving and masterly ”Alexander Hamilton,” which is by far the best biography ever written about the man.

Continue reading the review or the first chapter of the book.

Another time

NMBillboard.jpg

According to the Albuquerque Journal, this billboard will be “unveiled Sunday in Austin, Colorado Springs, Dallas and Tucson as part of a state Tourism campaign to attract visitors from neighboring states.”

It’s a great sign, but strictly speaking aren’t Austin and Dallas in another time zone. Tucson for that matter is in a different time zone, Mountain Standard Time, while New Mexico is on Mountain Daylight Time. Oh, well.

Update: NewMexiKen suggests this slogan instead — New Mexico. Set your clocks back 500 years.

The Library of Congress…

was established on this date in 1800.

President John Adams approved legislation that appropriated $5,000 to purchase “such books as may be necessary for the use of Congress.” The first books, ordered from London, arrived in 1801 and were stored in the U.S. Capitol, the Library’s first home. The collection consisted of 740 volumes and three maps.

Barbra Streisand…

was born in Brooklyn on this date 62 years ago. Miss Streisand has been nominated for the best actress Oscar twice, winning for Funny Girl in 1969. She also shared the Oscar with Paul Williams for best original song in 1977 for A Star is Born.

Who wants a DVD player that automatically deletes all the juicy bits of movies?

It’s great having Mark Morford back and mad as hell — Where’s My (Bleeping) Sex?

Because what the world really needs now is more uptight little companies from Utah that will help us all block out the random messy naked blood n’ guts of the world.

Companies that will, without anyone asking them to, protect us from media evildoers and exposed flesh and scary exploding things and that part in “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” wherein the universe is blessed, for the briefest of moments, with the joy of Kate Winslet’s radiant nipples.

This is what is happening. This is the happy godlike agenda of Utah’s ClearPlay, a twee and shrill little corporation that has taken it upon itself to sit around the cube farm all day and watch countless Hollywood flicks and zap out any and all icky violent suggestive material in, say, “Lost In Translation.” For your protection. How kind.

Continue reading Who wants a DVD player that automatically deletes all the juicy bits of movies?

The latest from The Apprentice

Gary Susman catches us up on the latest gossip about The Apprentice from Entertainment Weekly’s EW.com.

”The Apprentice” may have ended its season a week ago, but the contestants’ 15 minutes of fame aren’t over yet. Most notably, Omarosa Manigault-Stallworth continues to stir controversy. This week, she continued to do what she seems to do best: get fired. After it was announced that she’d filmed a cameo in a Clairol Herbal Essences ”streaking party” ad, the hair color manufacturer was deluged with angry e-mails and boycott threats, MSNBC reports. On Wednesday, the company announced it was washing its hair of her and dropping her from the ad, issuing a statement that saPOSTID: ”After reviewing the film of all the possible endings a decision has been made not to use the Omarosa take.” Still, her streak isn’t over; she’ll still appear in an episode of NBC’s soap ”Passions” in May, and she says she’s in talks for a role in a sitcom pilot.

”Apprentice” winner Bill Rancic is on his way to a $250,000-a-year position managing Donald Trump’s skyscraper construction project in Chicago (a project that may be tracked in a spinoff series), but the résumé that helped land Rancic the job may have been inflated. Rancic may have claimed that he grew his company, Cigars Around the World, into a ”multimillion dollar” business, but a Securites and Exchange Commission filing issued after Rancic sold the company last year and posted at The Smoking Gun shows the firm’s sale price was just $425,000, with an additional ”consideration” of up to $450,000 coming Rancic’s way through 2006. Close, but no cigar.

Trump held a mini-reunion with some of the contestants on CNN’s ”Larry King Live” on Wednesday, where The Donald announced a mini-scholarship program. The first beneficiary: Troy McClain, the only contestant who didn’t have a degree. ”I read somewhere where Troy wanted to go back to college. And the problem is, he’s got a family. You know, it’s hard to afford college. College is expensive,” said Trump, who made McClain an offer contingent upon the approval of the other contenders. ”The offer is that I will pay for his college education if he wants to go back.” The other contestants voted unanimously that McClain should accept the offer. Said Trump: ”Congratulations. You better pick a nice, good, expensive college.”

Thanks to Jill for the help on this one.

William Shakespeare…

may have been born on this date in 1564. That’s good enough for NewMexiKen, and good enough for The Writer’s Almanac, where you can listen to a variation of this very text in the mellifluous tones of Garrison Keillor.

Today is believed to be the birthday of William Shakespeare, born in Stratford-upon-Avon, England (1564). He was a playwright and poet, and is considered to be the most influential and perhaps the greatest writer in the English language. He gave us many beloved plays, including Romeo and Juliet (1594), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595), Hamlet (1600), Othello (1604), King Lear (1605), and Macbeth (1605).

We don’t know much about his life, but we do know that he started out as an actor and later acted in his own plays. Scholars believe that he usually played the part of the first character that came on stage, and that in Hamlet he played the ghost.

He used one of the largest vocabularies of any English writer, almost 30,000 words, and he gave us many of our most common turns of phrase, including “foul play,” “as luck would have it,” “your own flesh and blood,” “too much of a good thing,” “good riddance,” “in one fell swoop,” “cruel to be kind,” “play fast and loose,” “vanish into thin air,” “the game is up,” “truth will out,” and “in the twinkling of an eye.”

Shakespeare has always been popular in America … [though] the first recorded performance of a Shakespeare play in the United States didn’t take place until 1730 in New York City. It was an amateur production of Romeo and Juliet. He fell out of favor after the Revolutionary War, but then pioneers revived his work out West. An illiterate mountain main named Jim Bridger became famous for having memorized most of Shakespeare’s plays, and he would recite them for audiences of miners and cowboys. Many of the mines and canyons across the West are named after Shakespeare or one of his characters. There is a city of Shakespeare in New Mexico, a Shakespeare Mountain in Nevada, a Shakespeare Reservoir in Texas, and a Shakespeare Glacier in Alaska. Colorado has mines called Ophelia, Cordelia, and Desdemona.

Pat Tillman

Former NFL player Pat Tillman was killed Thursday while serving as an Army Rangers soldier on a mission in southeastern Afghanistan.

Two Sports Illustrated stories help us honor someone truly remarkable: “Not Standing Pat: A star NFL player leaves the game to serve his country” and “A cut above: Pat Tillman, Arizona State’s height-loving, tree-swinging, book-cracking linebacker, is the best player you’ve never heard of.”

See also Sports Illustrated writer Tim Layden on Remembering Pat Tillman, published online today.

They say the good die young. Pat Tillman was 27.

Beasts of burden

A couple of items noticed at the bottom of Harper’s Index for March 2004

Maximum prison sentence in months for causing the death of a U.S. worker by willfully violating federal safety regulations : 6 [AFL-CIO (Washington) ]

Maximum prison sentence in months for harassing a wild burro on federal lands : 12 [Bureau of Land Management, National Wild Horse and Burro Program (Washington) ]

Smile, you’re on camera

From The Week Newsletter

Officials in Manalapan, Fla., population 321, want to photograph every person who enters the town. To prevent crime, town commissioners are preparing to vote on a plan to install surveillance cameras on every road leading into town and photograph drivers’ faces and license plates. Computers would automatically check the plate numbers against police databases. The plan is probably legal, said the local ACLU, but some residents are concerned. “I’d have to make sure I’m dressed up to go out to the mailbox,” said Marion Pulis.