Fascinating Facts and Trivia.

Daily Wisdom: Are NCAA Athletes Underpaid?

David Berri, using the example of the Kansas men’s basketball team, says they are:

To illustrate, prior to the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, Embiid had produced 4.67 wins for the Kansas Jayhawks (calculated essentially according this approach used for the NBA). Using college revenue data from the U.S. Department of Education, economist Robert Brown (for research Brown, I, and a few others are working on) estimated that one win for the Kansas men’s basketball team was worth $159,601 in 2010-11 ($166,585 in 2014 dollars). Given these two numbers, Embiid was worth approximately $777,286 (again, prior to the tournament). If we take the USA Today number seriously, this means the Jayhawks have underpaid Embiid by a bit more than $650,000.

Repeating the same calculation for every player on the Jayhawks, we see, as the following table illustrates, that Andrew Wiggins (who some people think is worth the number one pick in the NBA draft) was only the fourth most productive Jayhawk this year. Even though Wiggins has underperformed relative to expectations, he has still been underpaid by more than $450,000. And combined, this entire team has been underpaid by about $2 million.

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Daily Wisdom: After 88 Years, Tolkien’s Translation of Beowulf to Be Published

Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien was largely responsible for the resurgence of interest in the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, so it’s only fitting that his translation from 1926 is finally being published. Tolkien’s son Christopher, who edited the work said:

“It is as if he entered into the imagined past: standing beside Beowulf and his men shaking out their mail-shirts as they beached their ship on the coast of Denmark, listening to the rising anger of Beowulf at the taunting of Unferth, or looking up in amazement at Grendel’s terrible hand set under the roof of Heorot.”

Tolkien’s Beowulf will be available on May 22.

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Daily Wisdom: Do Flies Do Calculus?

Given my inability to do complex math, it’s especially troubling to learn that scientists at Cornell have discovered that flies are doing calculus:

At Cornell University, for instance, researchers have been investigating how the flies recover when their flight is momentarily disturbed. Among their conclusions: a small group of fly neurons is solving calculus problems, or what for humans are calculus problems.

To do the research, the members of Cornell team — Itai Cohen and his colleagues, including Z. Jane Wang, John Guckenheimer, Tsevi Beatus and Leif Ristroph, who is now at New York University — glue tiny magnets to the flies and use a magnetic pulse to pull them this way or that. In the language of aeronautics, the scientists disturb either the flies’ pitch (up or down), yaw (left or right) or roll, which is just what it sounds like.

 

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Daily Wisdom: Are Some Students Not College Material?

Michael Petrilli argues that we should tell a lot more students that college is not for them. He writes:

But what if such a cautionary sermon is exactly what some teenagers need? What if encouraging students to take a shot at the college track—despite very long odds of crossing its finish line—does them more harm than good? What if our own hyper-credentialed life experiences and ideologies are blinding us to alternative pathways to the middle class? Including some that might be a lot more viable for a great many young people? What if we should be following the lead of countries like Germany, where “tracking” isn’t a dirty word but a common-sense way to prepare teenagers for respected, well-paid work?Here’s a stark fact: According to research by Georgetown’s Anthony Carnevale and Jeff Strohl, less than 10 percent of poor children now graduate with a four-year college degree.

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Daily Wisdom: STEM Education Might Not Mean Jobs

Almost everyone writing about education in the United States today focuses on the need for more STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) workers.

While there is certainly value in studying those fields, The Atlantic’s Michael Teitelbaum argues STEM isn’t about finding jobs:

Among college-educated information technology workers under age 30, temporary workers from abroad constitute a large majority. Even in electrical and electronic engineering—an occupation that is right at the heart of high-tech innovation but that also has been heavily outsourced abroad—U.S. employment in 2013 declined to about 300,000, down 35,000 and over 10 percent, from 2012, and down from about 385,000 in 2002. Unemployment rates for electrical engineers rose to a surprisingly high 4.8 percent in 2013.

Claims of workforce shortages in science and engineering are hardly new. Indeed there have been no fewer than five “rounds” of “alarm/boom/bust” cycles since World War II. Each lasted about 10 to 15 years, and was initiated by alarms of “shortages,” followed by policies to increase the supply of scientists and engineers. Unfortunately most were followed by painful busts—mass layoffs, hiring freezes, and funding cuts that inflicted severe damage to careers of both mature professionals and the booming numbers of emerging graduates, while also discouraging new entrants to these fields.

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