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Q&A with author of ‘Odd Couples’

May 9, 2013 by

Daphne Fairbairn, author of Odd Couples: Extraordinary Differences Between the Sexes in the Animal Kingdom, completed a Q&A for National Geographic in which she covers some of the broader themes of the book. Check it out below!

Your spouse may baffle you at times, but does he latch on to your rear as a miniscule parasite 500,000 times smaller than you?

That’s what a male seadevil does. Is your honey 50 times your size and liable to eat you after a snuggle? Let’s hope not, else she’d be a garden spider.

e animal kingdom is full of amatory pairs whose extreme physical differences would give a matchmaker pause. But many of these dimorphic differences make good evolutionary sense, Daphne J. Fairbairn explains in her book Odd Couples: Extraordinary Differences between the Sexes in the Animal Kingdom.

National Geographic Senior Writer Rachel Hartigan Shea spoke with Fairbairn, a biologist at the University of California, Riverside, about why in nature, love isn’t always one size fits all.

…

Why are the differences between the sexes in some animals so extreme?

If you are coming into the world as a male, the way you get your genes into the next generation is getting your sperm to meet up with the eggs of females. So whatever it takes to do that is how the males are going to turn out. (Related Q&A: “Unlikely Animal Friendships.”)

Read the full article at National Geographic

Filed Under: Author Q&A, Biological Sciences, Twitter, Women and Gender Studies

Q&A with Benn Steil, author of ‘The Battle of Bretton Woods’

March 28, 2013 by

The Globe and Mail interviewed Benn Steil, author of The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order, to find out what the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement to recognize the U.S dollar as the central means of exchange and to back the U.S dollar with gold can teach to policy makers today amidst the global financial turmoil.

Is the “currency war” metaphor useful in today’s context? You wrote of a time when countries were making a point of devaluing their currencies. That’s not technically happening now.

The situation in the 1930s was far more serious than what we are witnessing today. Remember, in the early 1930s the world was still on the fraying remnants of the gold-exchange standard. Fixed exchange rates were still considered to be the norm. So as one country after another dropped out of that system, it was never clear to anyone where the bottom was.

Since everyone was unmooring from gold and the dollar at the same time, nobody was ultimately able to use competitive devaluation as a tool for increasing net exports. So what did they do? They turned to the next step, which was systematic protectionism. And that’s what led to the collapse of global trade.

We’re not seeing anything of the sort, yet, going on around the world. We are just seeing concern, rightful concern, expressed about where these unusual forms of monetary accommodation will lead down the road. There are reasons to be concerned. If countries are determined to devalue their currencies and can’t because others are pursuing the same policies, then they may turn to trade measures as the next logical step. But we are quite a ways away from that.

How would describe what we’re witnessing in currency markets?

I would say we are in an age of improvisation. Before the crisis, we were in a period that Ben Bernanke coined as the `Great Moderation.’ It seemed that for all intents and purposes central bankers had discovered the Holy Grail. You just target a low and stable rate of inflation and if you stick with that course you will have accomplished all that a good central bank can do, at least in normal circumstances. Unfortunately, now that we are not in normal circumstances, the rule books have been ditched and nobody knows what the rule book is.

Can a broad commitment to flexible exchange rates work as an international monetary system?

In the 1930s, nobody really considered that to be a system. Flexible exchange rates were considered to be a failure of alternative systems, like the gold standard, like the gold-exchange standard, or like the dollar-based gold exchange standard that was agreed at Bretton Woods. In the early 1970s, when we moved to that system (of flexible exchange rates), although it did have some prominent supporters like Milton Freidman, this was not a policy decision as it were, that the world took to move from a system of fixed, but adjustable, exchange rates to a new system of flexible exchange rates. It was something that was forced on the world by the failure of the Bretton Woods monetary system…I really don’t believe the (Group of 20) as an institution has in any sense coalesced around what might be an appropriate mix of policies for the world’s major countries from the perspective of global stability and global growth. There really is no consensus.

Do you see a day when there might be a return to a stricter global monetary system?

I don’t.

In the 1940s, there was a deal to be struck between the U.S. and the world. The U.S. really was the world’s only credible international creditor. The only way you could trade internationally other than barter was with gold and dollars. Both were in very short supply in the 1940s, so the U.S. offered the world a deal: We will provide you with short-term balance of payments assistance through our new International Monetary Fund, in return for which you pledge not to devalue your currency without the acquiescence of this new fund, which of course would be American dominated. The world wasn’t wild about the deal, but it was the best on offer…

Compare that to the situation between China and the United States today. The U.S. now is the world’s largest international debtor; China is the world’s largest international creditor. Chinese holdings of dollar-denominated securities amounts to $1,000 (U.S.) per Chinese resident. If China were to provoke a dollar crisis by trying to nudge the world to an alternative monetary system in which the dollar was not central, China would risk a collapse of the purchasing power of its vast hoard of dollar-denominated assets. The U.S. for its part sees little motivation to change this system. It still raises debt in a currency that it mints…There isn’t the political basis for a deal to be struck between China and the United States right now. I don’t any new Bretton Woods emerging out this situation. I can see circumstances under which this system collapses.

Read the full interview here.

Filed Under: American History, Author Q&A, Economics, Twitter

In Honor of University Press Week (#UPWeek) Princeton University Press Authors Share the Importance of University Presses

November 13, 2012 by

 

“University presses have been essential not only for advancing the critical study of American literature but, perhaps more important, for making (and keeping) available reliable texts of American writers whose works don’t have the immediate commercial potential that would attract the interest of most trade publishers. The Library of America, on whose board I sit, depends on the scrupulous editorial work of university presses (other examples would be the Ohio State edition of the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne) for bringing the best texts to a broader public. My own experience with university presses–Harvard, University of Missouri (for which I co-edited one volume of Emerson’s sermons), and, most recently, Princeton–is that editorial support is first-rate, and attention to the manuscript meticulous,  And, of course, it is a gift to any author to know that his or her work is likely to remain in print long after the first phase of public attention has passed. In short, university presses are invaluable–among many other reasons– for their role in preserving our national literary culture.”

~ Andrew Delbanco, Author of  College: What it Was, Is, and Should Be

 

“For me, the value of university presses is immense. Among their many important contributions is their support of the so-called ‘long tail’ of the publishing industry — books that do not necessarily attract a wide audience, but nevertheless have importance for our culture or society. But university presses are also able to meld popularity with intellectual rigor. One example is Princeton’s recent  reprinting of Andrew Hodges’ extraordinary biography of Alan Turing.  It’s great that this book, described in a New Yorker review as ‘one of the finest scientific biographies ever written‘ is available to the public in a special new edition for Turing’s centenary year.”

~ John MacCormick, Author of 9 Algorithms That Changed the Future

 

 

“University presses allow us to disseminate ideas in long form and in a way that enables more people both within my field and in the social sciences more generally to learn about new research through an interdisciplinary channel.  Articles are often published in journals that are very narrow and specific, and thus can be overlooked by scholars in other fields or areas of concentration. University press books are much more accessible to a wider academic audience while maintaining academic rigor and excellence. In my world, if one is to publish books at all, a university press is essential to tenure.  Additionally, university presses are very focused on upholding the integrity of the research and reference to the scholarly context in which my work emerged from. Many editors at university presses are very up to date on the research in the field and are actively engaged in the ideas and research all along the way from inception of the idea to the page proofs.  My experience with Princeton University Press was wonderful and fun from beginning to end. I could not recommend a publishing house more.”

~ Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, Author of The Warhol Economy: How Fashion, Art, andMusic DriveNew York City(New Edition)

 

“University presses have special importance in the field of economics, and I suspect others, for two primary reasons. First, unlike journals, which are typically more stringently constrained by space, academic presses give scholars  the ‘leg room’ they require to elaborate their ideas, allowing them the opportunity to develop and share the bigger picture surrounding their scholarship. Second, unlike journals, which typically reserve space for narrower contributions the details of which have been fully worked out, university presses permit scholars to explore potentially important and ‘expansive,’ albeit at the time of writing, still largely speculative ideas–the kind of ideas that provide fertile soil for future contributions to knowledge.”

~ Pete T. Leeson, Author of The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates

 

“The university press serves as a signal to everyone in my field that the work has been peer reviewed to a rigorous standard and deemed valuable by experts in the field. It’s the highest endorsement for a book in Political Science. The university presses are willing to go the extra mile to publish the necessary graphics and tables that enrich my arguments and provide the real value in my books. The high quality of everything they do, from the feel of the paper down to the simplicity of the graphic design signals readers that what is inside is important.

The university presses are serving the scientific and artistic communities in a way that a commercial press could not do–it’s sort of the difference between the big-budget studio film and the quirky independent film, we love them both but for different reasons.  And books, like films, would be less complete without the smaller niche market offerings.”

~ Lynn Vavreck, author of The Message Matters: The Economy and Presidential Campaigns

 

 

Filed Under: Author Q&A, Princeton University Press, Publishing, Twitter, University Press, University Press Week

Brink Lindsey discusses his new eBook HUMAN CAPITALISM with Glenn Loury on Bloggingheads

August 28, 2012 by

Filed Under: Author Q&A, Blogging Authors, Business, Economics, Education, Election 101 - Inequality, Election 2012, In the News, Political Science, Twitter

Q&A with Sönke Johnsen

February 3, 2012 by

Quinn Fusting, PUP’s editorial assistant in the life sciences, has conducted a Q&A with Sönke Johnsen, the author of The Optics of Life: A Biologist’s Guide to Light in Nature.

Q: When, how, and why did you become interested in light?

A: I grew up in a house where we made just about everything, including science toys. My dad was a physicist, and we would spend weekends building pinhole shoebox cameras, arc lamps from dismantled batteries, and once even a solar hot dog cooker made out of a sledding saucer covered in aluminum foil. He would also bring home surplus items from his lab, like head-sized Fresnel lenses and chunks of sapphire lasers. He also set up a black-and-white darkroom in the attic where I spent much of my childhood and adolescence. My mother was creative as well and introduced me to painting, drawing, tie-dying and such. There were no computers yet, and our TV only got two channels (three if my little brother stood in just the right spot), so I had plenty of time to fiddle around.

As for why…well, light is beautiful. What’s more wonderful than the light filtered through new leaves on a windy, Spring day? Or the green bioluminescence trailing your limbs as you swim on a moonless night?  The stars alone are worth having eyes for. I can’t imagine not studying light. 

Q: What drove you to write an optics guide for biologists?

A: I’m not entirely sure. I do enjoy writing, but this was a lot of work, so there must have been a reason. When I pitched the project to my editor, I told her that it would fill a niche, but I’ve never been one to lose sleep over unfilled holes. I also told her that optics was important to biology. It is, but so what? Steve Vogel told me once that writing books is wonderful because it transforms you from a competitor into an enabler. I do hope this book helps people use optics in their research, but honestly I still feel competitive. Maybe I just want people to stop me in the hall and say, “Nice book!” I’d be lying if I said this didn’t matter. I’m shallow, and flattery goes a long way with me.

There’s more though. While not religious, I am often overcome by this world — it’s like being given a prize over and over. The most remarkable part to me is that we are able to appreciate and at least partially understand it. Being a biologist, I can mumble about scientific curiosity being an epiphenomenon of natural selection for cooperative hunting, foraging, individual recognition, and so on, but that doesn’t make it any less incredible. As the physicist Isidor Rabi said when the muon was discovered, “Who ordered that?” However we acquired this ability to appreciate and understand the world, it would be rude to waste it. So I wrote this book to share this feeling, this amazement at what is all around us.

Q: What would you say is the most important thing for biologists to know about optics?


A: That it’s easier to learn than you think. The long history of the field and its connection with human vision has left us with a horrible mess of units and concepts. Only in optics do people still publish papers using units like stilbs, nits, candelas, trolands, and my personal favorite, foot-lamberts. However, the reality of optics itself is simple and elegant. With the right introduction, you can sidestep the mess and get right to the fun parts.

However, light is also harder to work with than many people appreciate. The main reason for this is that we don’t measure light in our daily lives. Since childhood, we develop an intuitive sense of weights, lengths, area, temperature, and so on. For example, we can guess someone’s height to within 5% and weight to within 10%-20%. However, even after a decade of measuring light, I can’t tell you how bright my office is on this overcast morning to within even an order of magnitude. This is like saying that I can’t decide whether I am six or sixty feet tall. So you need to be careful. It’s worth it though. The biological world is a funhouse of optical tricks and traits just waiting to be discovered. Just today, I read that jumping spiders use image defocus to judge distance and that bowerbirds play with visual perspective to impress their mates. How cool is that? 

Q: What is light anyway?

A: I have no idea. I have thought about light since I was five years old and am no closer to understanding its fundamental nature. I am in good company though. Even Richard Feynman, one of the creators of the theory of how light and matter interact and widely acknowledged as one of the best explainers of physics, said that light cannot be understood. We have equations that let us predict what light will do to a precision of more than twenty significant figures, but no one has come up with a description of light that makes sense. It is unlikely that anyone ever will. Read enough about the subject, and your head will start to itch.

However, while the non-intuitive nature of light can be unsatisfying, it doesn’t affect our ability to use it. In other words, as long as you do your measurements and math correctly, you can think of light as little purple buffaloes and it won’t matter. After all, we don’t really understand the fundamental nature of anything, but manage just fine.

Filed Under: Author Q&A, Biological Sciences, Course Use, Physics, Textbooks, Twitter

Q&A with Duke political science prof Ruth Grant on the murky ethics of incentives

January 9, 2012 by

We are pleased to have just published Duke political science professor Ruth W. Grant’s fascinating new book about the uses–and abuses–of incentives called STRINGS ATTACHED: Untangling the Ethcis of Incentives. Her new book is a must-read for every politician, businessperson, and manager.

STRINGS ATTACHED is co-published with the Russell Sage Foundation and they have recently conducted a terrific Q&A with Ruth on the book and her work. 

Q: When you consider the controversies that currently dominate the political debate, the use of incentives isn’t high on the list. People seem more vexed about policies like the health care mandate or income taxes than, say, the use of a tax deduction to encourage charitable donations. Why did you become interested in the use of incentives as a form of power, and why do you think we should talk about them more?

A: I think that I have always been uncomfortable with certain kinds of incentives in my own experience; for example, incentives in the workplace that undermined team spirit or incentives in my child’s classroom that really made her feel manipulated. Other incentives don’t bother me at all. I began to notice that incentives have become the preferred tool of policy in all kinds of settings – governments, businesses, schools, prisons, hospitals – and it seemed important to think through which uses of incentives are innocuous and which are not. The fact that we have invented a new verb – “to incentivize” – is an indication of how much this approach has seeped into the culture. “To incentivize” is a much narrower concept than “to motivate,” which includes incentives, inspiration, arousing curiosity, etc. Something is lost if we automatically consider only incentives when we want to influence people. It seems important to discuss these issues precisely because incentives are pervasive, but also taken for granted.

continued….

Filed Under: Author Q&A, Law, Philosophy, Political Philosophy, Political Science, Twitter

Sheldon Garon taking on myths about the history of savings, one Q&A at a time

December 6, 2011 by

Princeton Professor Sheldon Garon has done a few major interviews so far this week to discuss the big ideas in his new book, Beyond Our Means: Why America Spends While the World Saves.

His recent Q&A with NPR’s senior business editor Marilyn Geewax is the most popular post on the NPR site today: http://www.npr.org/2011/12/05/143149947/why-americans-spend-too-much

And Kimberly Blanton of the Squared Away Blog of the Financial Security Project at Boston College recently spoke with Prof. Garon about savings rates, “over-indebtedness,” and America’s “unusual” Christmas shopping season: http://fsp.bc.edu/united-states-of-credit/

You can also check out Prof. Garon’s interview yesterday with Marilyn Geewax and host Michel Martin on “Tell Me More” from NPR News: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=143141870

Filed Under: American History, Asian and Asian American studies, Author Q&A, Economics, European History, History, In the News, World History

Edwidge Danticat honored with the 2011 Langston Hughes Medal

November 30, 2011 by

Congratulations to Edwidge Danticat, author of Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work, who has been honored with the 2011 Langston Hughes Medal from City College of New York. The award recognizes the body of Danticat’s work.

“The Langston Hughes Medal is awarded to highly distinguished writers from throughout the African American diaspora for their distinguished contributions to the arts and letters. Among past recipients of this award are James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Cade Bambara, Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, Ralph W. Ellison, Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, August Wilson, Chinua Achebe, Derek Walcott, and Octavia Butler, to name a few.”

Here is a video of a Q&A with the author at the 2011 Langston Hughes Festival:

Filed Under: American History, Author Q&A, Awards, Books To Add To Your Reading List, Events, International Studies, Prizes, Twitter

Robert Frank at LSE

November 30, 2011 by

Check out this video of Robert Frank’s 11/10 LSE Lecture on his new book: The Darwin Economy: liberty, competition, and the common good. The book’s Facebook page is updated regularly with news, clippings, and author videos!

Filed Under: Author Q&A, Business, Economics, Events, Pod/Vodcast, Twitter

Don’t let humor become anemic!

October 31, 2011 by

Emrys Westacott is doing his darnedest to make sure this doesn’t happen, extolling The Virtues of Our Vices in his Q&A with the  Holy Post Blog of Canada’s National Post.

Anyone know a good tasteless zombie joke I can throw in here for Halloween?

Filed Under: Author Q&A, Twitter Tagged With: ,

Dialogue with Howard Wainer, author of Uneducated Guesses

July 28, 2011 by

Howard Wainer’s most recent book, Uneducated Guesses, is both a challenge to education policymakers and a warning to the country about the misguided policies that shape our nation’s educational system. Wainer uses statistical evidence to uncover the problems that threaten education in the United States in a book that is both accessible and eye opening for any reader. We recently posed some questions to Professor Wainer and are thrilled to post this dialogue about various issues he addresses in his book.



PUP: You discuss a lot of issues surrounding college and university admittance in Uneducated Guesses, one of which is the current trend of not requiring the SAT for admittance. Do you think that more schools will follow suit?


Professor Howard Wainer: I hope not. Right now there are powerful forces pushing some schools to abandon admission tests. One of the most insidious is how making such tests optional artificially boosts the school’s US News & World Report rankings. I hope that by exposing such strategies it will help to stifle such policies.




PUP: I always thought the rankings were done without room to really “cheat”. How do optional SAT admissions allow schools to game the rankings?

HW: If they make an admission test optional, applicants will behave sensibly. If their scores are lower than is typical for the school to which they are applying,they are likely to not submit them. Therefore the average SAT score, calculated from those who submit them, will be higher than the true, but unknown, all-student average. Thus schools that make the SAT mandatory are placed at a competitive disadvantage. Suppose one school’s average SAT score (an important component of the US News & World Report rankings) included all attending students, whereas another school’s only included the top half? It doesn’t make for fair comparisons.




PUP: So then, how well designed are college rankings and how much do they mean?

HW: I think that the rankings generated by US News & World Report are a sensible way to begin. They choose a set of variables that are positively related to the vague concept ‘quality’, rank schools on each of these variables, and then add them up. The key elements that are of concern are: (i) are the variables all pointed in the right direction, (ii) are there any important variables missing, (iii) are there any included variables that have no relationship to ‘quality’. If these bases are covered there is a theorem (stated and proved by Princeton statistician Sam Wilks 75 years ago) that tells us that this procedure will work. Consumers of such an index must be worried about two things – first, the extent to which the variables used can be gamed, and second, that they are interpreting the rankings too finely.




PUP: Jumping to another topic you discuss extensively in the book: testing. You note that tests in which examinees are allowed to choose which questions they answer are problematic–why is this?

HW: Because they are not fair. It is insuperably difficult to write test questions that are of equal difficulty. If examinees choose unwisely they will get lower scores than others who choose to answer easier questions. When we build tests with choice we exacerbate group differences. In one test I looked at, women, for whatever reason, seemed to systematically choose harder questions, and thus obtained lower scores, than comparable men who chose the easier options.




PUP: Your book makes it clear that you believe that essays on large-scale standardized tests also pose special problems: they are time consuming for examinees, expensive to score, and yield less reliable scores than multiple-choice exams. Why do you think the College Board opted to add a writing section to the SAT?

HW: I don’t know. That test was added to the SAT after I left Educational Testing Service (ETS), so I was not privy to the discussions involved in its genesis. But I can guess. It is well known that if a topic is tested its likelihood of being taught increases. I suspect that the College Board wanted to emphasize the importance of developing skills in writing clear prose and that they probably figured that if there was a separate test of writing, schools would be more likely to emphasize its instruction.




PUP: Another take away for me was the sheer number and variety of tests that students take. You have a fascinating chapter on AP courses and tests, so let me start by asking why do you think so many high schools have such a high failure rate among their students who take AP exams?

HW: AP courses have a well-deserved reputation for rigor and quality among both parents and educators. Hence there is pressure on schools to offer as many AP courses as possible and to enroll as many of their students in them as they can. Unfortunately, not all students are prepared for such courses. Nevertheless, too often such students are allowed to take the courses; perhaps because school officials yield to parental pressure, or perhaps because schools are judged by the size of enrollment in AP courses, or both.

When this happens, AP teachers are placed in a difficult position. They must choose between teaching the course in a way that covers the material necessary to pass the exam or using up as much class time as necessary for remedial material. If they choose the latter they cheat those students who are prepared to take the course, if they choose the former they must leave some students hopelessly befuddled. Faced with this Scylla and Charybdis, the only sure outcome is unhappiness all around. Schools that screen students carefully before allowing them to take AP courses are the only ones that make full use of the considerable resources required to teach advanced courses.




PUP: And now to one of the hot-button issues in contemporary education policy — Value-Added Models of teacher evaluation. In the book you provide real evidence that this system simply doesn’t work as it stands now. Can you explain this a bit further?

HW: Evaluating a professional’s competence is a task that has a long and rocky history. Many people have worked on this in the past, and many more are working on it right now. Why don’t we learn from what is done with other professionals? How are lawyers or doctors evaluated? I suspect that if patient outcome was the principal datum in physician evaluation we would see many more dermatologists and far fewer oncologists. While it is obvious in medicine that the success of a physician is crucially dependent on the overall health of the patient, proponents of Value-Added Models seem to believe that a teacher can be evaluated without regard to the students’ initial ability. There is this mistaken belief that somehow the magic of statistics can make equal things that are not. It can’t.




PUP: You speak highly of computer adaptive testing in Uneducated Guesses, what is that exactly?

HW:To be efficient a test should be aimed at the ability of the examinee. It makes no sense to ask calculus questions of 3rd graders. Mass-administered tests have to have questions that span the range of ability of the examinees. This means that there will be questions that are inappropriately difficult for some people and inappropriately easy for others. A computer adaptive test, a CAT, fixes this. It asks the examinee a question of middling difficulty. If the examinee gets it right it asks a more difficult one. If the examinee gets it wrong it asks an easier one. In this way it can quickly zero in on the appropriate level. In practice we have found that a CAT only needs about half as many questions as a paper & pencil test to arrive at a score of comparable accuracy. For some purposes this is a significant saving.




PUP: Computer adaptive tests seem like the way to go, so why do you think institutions are not adopting the method?

HW: They are expensive to implement because they require a large pool of items to be included that have all been pre-calibrated. Such a system can be done by a large commercial testing organization (e.g. ETS, the US military, the College Board, ACT) but it is nigh onto impossible for a classroom teacher.




PUP: What do you believe is the largest misconception about the school system in the United States?

HW: That it can work miracles without the full cooperation of parents and without a lot of money.

To discuss this we must use the right words. We must distinguish between education and schooling. The former takes place 24 hours a day and for most of that time is determined by the home, the community, the church, and the school. The latter takes place for six hours a day, 5 days a week, 30 weeks a year. To have an effective education system, all of the components must work together toward common goals. To leave it to teachers whose schools are too often so short of resources that they, the teachers, end up having to buy classroom supplies from their own funds, is a recipe for failure.

Filed Under: Author Q&A, Education

Have a question for the authors of Blind Spots?

June 15, 2011 by

Harvard Business School professor Max Bazerman and Notre Dame business ethics professor Ann Tenbrunsel are taking questions about business, ethics, and everything in between over at Freakonomics, so make sure to post your queries and comments here.

While you’re there, make sure to read the authors’ recent guest post adapted from their recent Princeton book, Blind Spots: Why We Fail to Do What’s Right and What to Do about It.

Filed Under: Author Q&A, Blogging Authors, Business, Twitter
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