BIRTH OF EDP | 1884 (September 23)

September 23, 2018–This day in 1884, the basic element of modern information technology was born, electronic data processing (EDP). 

Herman Hollerith patented his mechanical tabulating machine, the first EDP system. 

He created the machine to handle data-processing needs at the U.S. Census Bureau, where he began his career.

Hollerith printed the cards and sold them at a high markup. He also built the processing machines, which he leased to customers. A fine business model. 

The equipment was described as an "Electrical Counting Machine".

It took nearly 80 years for data processing to move beyond punched cards, and a century to make them obsolete. 

The Hollerith cards became the 128-column IBM punched cards, which were the early basis for data storage, retrieval, and transfer. Hollerith invented the first automatic card-feed mechanism and the first keypunch machine.

The 1890 Tabulator was hard-wired for processing Census data. His 1906 Tabulator simplified rewiring for different jobs. His 1920s improvements supported prewiring and fast job changing.

I can testify that Hollerith's punched cards were used as computer input and output for almost a century. When I started my career as an economist at the Federal Reserve Board in 1964, we used cumbersome mechanical calculators that took up one-quarter of the desk space. When I left the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation in 1969, we were using the cumbersome IBM 360 machines, still using punched cards as one form of input.

A short video on the Hollerith card system is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch.

In 1911 four corporations, including Hollerith's firm, were merged into a fifth company, the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR). Under the presidency of Thomas J. Watson, in 1924, CTR was renamed International Business Machines Corporation (IBM).  By 1933, Hollerith had died and the subsidiary companies were incorporated into IBM.

Here's a biography of Hollerith, who earned a Ph.D. from Columbia University School of Mines in 1990, when he was 30, and by then had already created a business based on his punched-card system: http://wvegter.hivemind.net/abacus/CyberHeroes/Hollerith.htm.

BIRTH | May 11–Richard Feynman

Richard Feynman

This day in 1918 was born physicist Richard Phillips Feynman in Queens, N.Y. He went to New York City public schools. He was rejected by Columbia because his admission would have exceeded the Jewish quota of the time. 

Instead of Columbia, he went to MIT and then completed his doctorate at Princeton. He won the Nobel Prize in 1965 and is rated one of the greatest ten theoretical physicists of all time. 

He worked on the Manhattan Project to develop the nuclear bomb, and he was the youngest group leader in the project's theoretical division. When the first test bomb was detonated in 1945, he was excited and happy, but as soon as Germany ceased to be a threat to the world, he questioned his own work on the bomb. 

He made enormous contributions to the field of quantum mechanics. Feynman diagrams are now fundamental for string theory and M-theory, The world-lines of the diagrams have developed to become tubes to allow better modeling of more complicated objects such as strings and membranes. But shortly before his death, Feynman criticized string theory in an interview that is frequently quoted by critics of the theory: 

I don't like that they're not calculating anything. I don't like that they don't check their ideas. I don't like that for anything that disagrees with an experiment, they cook up an explanation—a fix-up to say, "Well, it still might be true."

He enjoyed his work and tried to convey the joys of physics to lay people. He said:

• The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool. 
• Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts. 
• Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it. 

He was married three times, the third time for 28 years until his death on February 15, 1988, in Los Angeles. He is survived by a son Karl and a daughter Michelle Louise.

Video (TED talk): https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_feynman

June 17 - The Ironic Origins of the SAT (with Comment)

The national office of the College Board, founded in
1900. The office is at 45 Columbus Avenue, NYC.

The following was posted this morning by Garrison Keillor on Writer's Almanac:

It was on this day in 1901 that the first standardized tests were administered by the College Board. Before standardized tests, many universities had their own college entrance exams, and prospective students were required to come to campus for a week or more to take exams. 

Since each college's exam demanded a different set of knowledge, high schools offered separate instruction for students based on which colleges they hoped to attend. Some colleges accepted applicants based on how well previous graduates of the same high school were doing at the college. Other colleges sent faculty to visit high schools, and if the high school met their criteria, then they would admit any graduate of that school. 

It was a confusing system, and as more Americans began to attend college, it was no longer practical. Between 1890 and 1924, the number of college students grew five times faster than the growth of the general population. In 1885, the principal of a prestigious boarding school wrote to the National Education Association asking them to reform the system. It took 15 years of discussion, committees, and arguments, but the College Board was finally formed in 1900. Its founders hoped to simplify curricula at the high schools, and make a college education accessible to a wider pool of applicants.  

Beginning today and throughout this week in 1901, the first standardized college entrance exams were given to 973 students at 67 locations (plus two more in Europe). More than a third of the students were from New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Students were tested in English, French, German, Latin, Greek, history, mathematics, chemistry, and physics. The tests were essays, not multiple choice, read by a team of experts in each subject. The experts met at tables in the library of Columbia University, and the essays were graded as Excellent, Good, Doubtful, Poor, or Very Poor. 

Columbia was one of the main forces behind the conversion to standardized testing — of the 973 applicants, 758 were applying to either Columbia or its affiliate Barnard. For the next couple of decades, the tests were in use but were not widely accepted. Only a small fraction of incoming freshmen took standardized tests, and there were only 10 colleges that admitted all of their students based on the test — some colleges looked at the test, but also provided their own entrance exams, and happily admitted students of any qualifications if their parents were donors. 

The early tests were considered "achievement" tests because they tested for students' proficiency in certain subjects. A couple of decades later, the College Board switched to "aptitude" tests, intended to measure intelligence. There were mixed motives for this change. On the surface, it made college admittance more fair and accessible to students whose high schools didn't teach ancient Greek or prepare students specifically for college. 

But the biggest proponents of intelligence testing were college officials who were concerned about the rapid influx of immigrants — especially Eastern European Jews — to their student body. A Columbia University dean worried that the high numbers of recent immigrants and their children would make the school "socially uninviting to students who come from homes of refinement," and its president described the 1917 freshman class as "depressing in the extreme," lamenting the absence of "boys of old American stock." 

These college officials believed that immigrants had less innate intelligence than old-blooded Americans, and hoped that they would score lower on aptitude tests, which would give the schools an excuse to admit fewer of them. In 1925, the College Board began to use a new, multiple-choice test, designed by a Princeton psychology professor named Carl Brigham, who had modeled it on his work with Army intelligence tests. This new test was known as the Scholastic Aptitude Test. The first SAT was taken in 1926. These days, more than 1.6 million students take the SAT each year.

Comment

When I applied in 1955 for transfer to an American high school from one in England, I was required to take the high-school equivalent of the SAT. No surprisingly, I was the only person at my school taking it. My examiner, Fr. Timothy Horner (who subsequently came to the United States and headed up St. Louis Priory), relished the instructions, which were intended for huge halls of examinees. "All students will now pick up their pencils in their right hand. At the signal, all students will break the seal on the exam booklet and will begin answering the questions."

Garrison Keillor doesn't say it, but the irony is that the SAT tests showed that the undesired immigrants were highly intelligent. The alumni-children legacy preference continued, but I am told that official records show that it was not available for alumni children applying for scholarships. The idea seems to have been that if Harvard's continuance is partly dependent on wealthy donors, those that cannot afford to send their children without financial aid are not part of the relevant population.

Today, the highly intelligent applicants for whom an alleged quota exists at top universities are reportedly (see my letter of 2012) those whose parents immigrated from Korea, or those applying directly from Korea. In Korea, educational achievement is highly valued, and Harvard is a top brand.

COLLEGE GRADES | Inflation Since 1960!

December 22, 2013 – An A is not what an A used to be, it seems.

College grades have apparently inflated since my college days.

An A is now the most common college grade, according to an article published last year by Professors Stuart Rojstaczer and Christopher Healy:

In 1960, 15 percent of all college grades were A's.  The most common grade was a C.

In 2012, an A was the most common grade given nationally (43 percent). A's and B's together now account for 73 percent of all college grades at public universities and 86 percent of all private school grades. 

Arthur Levine, president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and former president of Columbia's Teachers College, similarly found:

• In 1969, seven percent of students reported an A- grade-point-average or higher.  

• By 2009, that number had risen to 41 percent. 

Even at Harvard? The Harvard Crimson earlier this month says yes. In "Substantiating Fears of Grade Inflation, Dean Says Median Grade at Harvard College Is A-," it reports that at Harvard, the "most common grade is A." The story has 504 comments as of today.

Rojstaczer and Healy say that student engagement has fallen and the average amount of study has declined from 24 hours a week in the '60s to 15 hours a week today.

Some universities including Columbia and Dartmouth, have begun issuing "honest transcripts", disclosing not only the letter grade the student received for each class, but also the average grade that the professor gave the entire class, thereby putting each grade in context. Thomas Lindsay reports this month (mindingthecampus.com) that a bill in Texas would require honest transcripts for students at Texas universities. .

Comments:

The "honest transcript" program has been championed by Republicans, presumably because they don't like liberal elites, even though the careers of both Bushes were assisted by these elites. Also, teachers are highly unionized and focusing on grade inflation can be seen as a way for those who criticize labor unions to demonstrate a collective laziness among students and faculty.

However, I don't know why this should be a partisan issue. As it stands, recent graduates from colleges with inflated grades can virtually all present themselves as above average among their college peers. However, honest transcripts are not a panacea:

1. Some classes are selective. The professor interviews you and decides who can take the course. In this situation, the presumption is that all the students deserve higher grades than in a less selective introductory class.

2. Some universities are more selective than others. A Harvard student is presumed to be better prepared than a second- or third-tier college. Should Harvard students be graded the same way as an unselective college?

3. Some departments are more likely to grade on a curve than others. Science and engineering, where knowledge is more easily measured, tend to grade more strictly.

4. In professional schools – business, law, medicine – grade inflation is less of a problem because professors know that the grades are directly related to a person's career and the task of sorting out the best students is taken very seriously. Being too generous to students could mean certifying people as capable of something that they are not. leading  to poor clinical performance.

What other considerations should be on the table?