News – Page 118 – Quixotic Pedagogue

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.

March 24, 2014/by dpogreba

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

Daily Wisdom

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.

March 21, 2014/by dpogreba

Daily Wisdom: Do Flies Do Calculus?

Daily Wisdom

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.

March 20, 2014/by dpogreba

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