Three Thousand Years and 115 Generations of 徐 (Hsu / Xu)

Over the years I have discussed economic historian Greg Clark's groundbreaking work on the persistence of social class. Clark found that intergenerational social mobility was much less than previously thought, and that intergenerational correlations on traits such as education and occupation were consistent with predictions from an additive genetic model with a high degree of assortative mating. 

See Genetic correlation of social outcomes between relatives (Fisher 1918) tested using lineage of 400k English individuals, and further links therein. Also recommended: this recent podcast interview Clark did with Razib Khan. 

The other day a reader familiar with Clark's work asked me about my family background. Obviously my own family history is not a scientific validation of Clark's work, being only a single (if potentially illustrative) example. Nevertheless it provides an interesting microcosm of the tumult of 20th century China and a window into the deep past...

I described my father's background in the post Hsu Scholarship at Caltech:

Cheng Ting Hsu was born December 1, 1923 in Wenling, Zhejiang province, China. His grandfather, Zan Yao Hsu was a poet and doctor of Chinese medicine. His father, Guang Qiu Hsu graduated from college in the 1920's and was an educator, lawyer and poet. 

Cheng Ting was admitted at age 16 to the elite National Southwest Unified University (Lianda), which was created during WWII by merging Tsinghua, Beijing, and Nankai Universities. This university produced numerous famous scientists and scholars such as the physicists C.N. Yang and T.D. Lee. 

Cheng Ting studied aerospace engineering (originally part of Tsinghua), graduating in 1944. He became a research assistant at China's Aerospace Research Institute and a lecturer at Sichuan University. He also taught aerodynamics for several years to advanced students at the air force engineering academy. 

In 1946 he was awarded one of only two Ministry of Education fellowships in his field to pursue graduate work in the United States. In 1946-1947 he published a three-volume book, co-authored with Professor Li Shoutong, on the structures of thin-walled airplanes. 

In January 1948, he left China by ocean liner, crossing the Pacific and arriving in San Francisco. ...

My mother's father was a KMT general, and her family related to Chiang Kai Shek by marriage. Both my grandfather and Chiang attended the military academy Shinbu Gakko in Tokyo. When the KMT lost to the communists, her family fled China and arrived in Taiwan in 1949. My mother's family had been converted to Christianity in the 19th century and became Methodists, like Sun Yat Sen. (I attended Methodist Sunday school while growing up in Ames IA.) My grandfather was a partner of T.V. Soong in the distribution of bibles in China in the early 20th century.

My father's family remained mostly in Zhejiang and suffered through the communist takeover, Great Leap Forward, and Cultural Revolution. My father never returned to China and never saw his parents again. 

When I met my uncle (a retired Tsinghua professor) and some of my cousins in Hangzhou in 2010, they gave me a four volume family history that had originally been printed in the 1930s. The Hsu (Xu) lineage began in the 10th century BC and continued to my father, in the 113th generation. His entry is the bottom photo below.

Wikipedia: The State of Xu (Chinese: 徐) (also called Xu Rong (徐戎) or Xu Yi (徐夷)[a] by its enemies)[4][5] was an independent Huaiyi state of the Chinese Bronze Age[6] that was ruled by the Ying family (嬴) and controlled much of the Huai River valley for at least two centuries.[3][7] It was centered in northern Jiangsu and Anhui. ...

Generations 114 and 115:

Four volume history of the Hsu (Xu) family, beginning in the 10th century BC. The first 67 generations are covered rather briefly, only indicating prominent individuals in each generation of the family tree. The books are mostly devoted to generations 68-113 living in Zhejiang. (Earlier I wrote that it was two volumes, but it's actually four. The printing that I have is two thick books.)

The Golden State

Apologies for the lack of posts. I've been enjoying some time with the family in CA :-) Kids have the MI middle school state swimming championships coming up and we got some good training done in a beautiful outdoor pool. I'm using USRPT methods, which seem to work well for my kids. I wish we had it when I was competing.

We had really good luck with the weather, sunny and 60s every day on the central coast.

Now I'm in the bay area for this meeting:

37th Annual J.P. Morgan HEALTHCARE CONFERENCE
January 7 - 10, 2019
Westin St. Francis Hotel | San Francisco, California

The Ballad of Bedbug Eddie and the Golden Rule

This is a bedtime story I made up for my kids when they were small. See also Isabel and the dwarf king.

Once upon a time, there was a tiny bedbug named Eddie, who was no bigger than a sesame seed. Like all bedbugs, Eddie lived by eating the blood of humans. Every night he crawled out of the bedding and bit his sleeping victim.

One night a strange idea entered Eddie's mind. Are there little bugs that bite me when I sleep? he wondered. That would be terrible! (Little did Eddie know that there was a much smaller bug named Mini who lived in his left antenna, and who drank his blood! But that is another story...)

Suddenly, Eddie had an inspiration. It was wrong to bite other people and drink their blood. If I don't like it, he thought, I shouldn't do it to other people!

From that moment on, Eddie resolved to never bite another creature. He would have to find a source of food other than blood!

Eddie lay in his bedding nest and wondered what he would do next. He had never eaten any other kind of food. He realized that to survive, he would have to search out a new kind of meal.

When the sun came up, Eddie decided he should leave his bed in search of food. He wandered through the giant house, with its fuzzy carpeting and enormous potted plants. Finally he came upon the cool, smooth floor of the kitchen. Smelling something edible, he continued toward the breakfast table.

Soon enough, he encountered the biggest chunk of food he had ever seen. It was a hundred times bigger than Eddie, and smelled of peanut butter -- it was a crumb of toast! Then Eddie realized the entire floor under the table was covered with crumbs -- bread, cracker, muffin, even fruit and vegetable crumbs!

Eddie jumped onto the peanut butter toast crumb and started to eat. He was very hungry after missing his usual midnight meal. He ate until he was very full. It took some getting used to peanut butter -- not his usual blood meal! But he would manage.

Suddenly, a huge crumb fell from the sky and almost crushed Eddie. He barely managed to jump out of the way of the huge block of cereal, wet with milk. Looking up, he saw a giant figure on a chair, who was spraying crumbs all around as he gobbled up his breakfast.

The Crumb King! exclaimed Eddie. The Crumb King provides us with sustenance!

Hello Crumb King, shouted Eddie. Look out below! You almost crushed me with that cereal! he yelled.

Between crunches of cereal, Max heard a tiny voice from below. Surprised, he looked down at the small black dot, no bigger than a sesame seed. Are you a bug? he asked.

I am bedbug Eddie! responded Eddie. Don't crush me with crumbs! he shouted.

From that day on, Eddie and Max were great friends.

Eddie became a vegetarian and devoted his life to teaching the Golden Rule: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” (Matthew 7:12)

Happy New Year 2018

Greetings from the Central Coast of California! I've been spending part of the holiday working with the kids on their swimming. Hope to get both of them qualified for the Michigan middle school state championship meet :-)







It's hard to beat sunshine, palm trees, and an outdoor pool in December!

On the beach, New Year's Day :-)

A brief exposition on the nature of tides:

Varieties of Time Travel

My kids have been reading lots of books over the break, including an adventure series that involves time travel. Knowing vaguely that dad is a theoretical physicist, they asked me how time travel works.

1. Can one change history by influencing past events?      

OR

2. Is there only one timeline that cannot be altered, even by time travel?

I told them that no one really knows the answer, or the true nature of time.

I gave them an example of 1 and of 2 from classic science fiction :-)

1. Ray Bradbury's short story A Sound of Thunder:

... Looking at the mud on his boots, Eckels finds a crushed butterfly, whose death has apparently set in motion a series of subtle changes that have affected the nature of the alternative present to which the safari has returned. ...

(Note this version implies the existence of alternative or parallel universes.)

2. Ted Chiang's one pager What's expected of us, which also notices that a single time line seems deterministic, and threatens Free Will. (More ;-)

... it's a small device, like a remote for opening your car door. Its only features are a button and a big green LED. The light flashes if you press the button. Specifically, the light flashes one second before you press the button.

Most people say that when they first try it, it feels like they're playing a strange game, one where the goal is to press the button after seeing the flash, and it's easy to play. But when you try to break the rules, you find that you can't. If you try to press the button without having seen a flash, the flash immediately appears, and no matter how fast you move, you never push the button until a second has elapsed. If you wait for the flash, intending to keep from pressing the button afterwards, the flash never appears. No matter what you do, the light always precedes the button press. There's no way to fool a Predictor.

The heart of each Predictor is a circuit with a negative time delay — it sends a signal back in time. The full implications of the technology will become apparent later, when negative delays of greater than a second are achieved, but that's not what this warning is about. The immediate problem is that Predictors demonstrate that there's no such thing as free will.

There have always been arguments showing that free will is an illusion, some based on hard physics, others based on pure logic. Most people agree these arguments are irrefutable, but no one ever really accepts the conclusion. The experience of having free will is too powerful for an argument to overrule. What it takes is a demonstration, and that's what a Predictor provides. ...

I attended a Methodist Sunday school as a kid. I asked my teacher: If God knows everything, does he know the outcomes of all the decisions I will ever make? Then will I ever make a free choice?

I also asked whether there are Neanderthals in heaven, but that's another story...

The ACME Fortune Cookie Factory

See also Isabel and the Dwarf King.

When we eat at a Chinese restaurant we usually get fortune cookies. Each cookie comes with its own mysterious message. Dad says that the messages are all written by people working at the ACME Fortune Cookie Factory. He says that he was once a fortune writer there. His masterpiece was a two-part message. The first message said WHEN YOU ARE HUNGRY EVERYTHING IS DELICIOUS. The second message said IF YOU ARE NOT HUNGRY, DON'T EAT. Millions of kids have pondered these messages. Dad says there is a life secret in these messages that most people miss -- including mom.

Dad just wrote the messages. Other workers had to make the cookies. The best worker was a little alien robot -- no one knew where he came from. Dad felt sorry for the robot, and thought he was destined for better things. Dad helped him send out the message HELP! I AM A PRISONER AT THE ACME FORTUNE COOKIE FACTORY. Dad says he doesn't know what happened to the robot.

Greeting the New Year

Drone invasion

I bought one of these today for the kids -- their 10th birthday is coming up. Very fun to fly -- reminds me a bit of flying kites when I was a kid. At one point it got away from us and ended up across the street in a neighbor's tree -- the dreaded kite eating tree :-)

See also Drone Art.

Coding for kids

I've been trying to get my kids interested in coding. I found this nice game called Lightbot, in which one writes simple programs that control the discrete movements of a bot. It's very intuitive and in just one morning my kids learned quite a bit about the idea of an algorithm and the notion of a subroutine or loop. Some of the problems (e.g., involving nested loops) are challenging.

Browser (Flash?) version.

There are Android and iOS versions as well.



Other coding for kids recommendations?

Strategic War (with cards)

War is a simple card game played by children. The most common version does not require decisions, so it's totally deterministic (outcome is determined) once the card order in each deck is fixed. Nevertheless it can be entertaining to watch/play: there are enough fluctuations to engage observers, mainly due to the treatment of ties. The question of how to determine the winner from the two deck orderings (without actually playing the entire game, which can take a long time) was one of the first aspects of computability / predictive modeling / chaotic behavior I thought about as a kid. This direction leads to things like classification of cellular automata and the halting problem.

My children came home with a version designed to teach multiplication -- each "hand" is two cards, rather than the usual single card, and the winner of the "battle" is the one with the higher product value of the two cards (face cards are removed). I thought this was still too boring: no strategy (my kids understood this right away, along with the meaning of deterministic; this puts them ahead of some philosophers), so I came up with a variant that has been quite fun to play.

Split the deck into red and black halves, removing face cards. Each hand (battle) is played with two cards, but they are chosen by each player. One card is placed face down simultaneously by each player, and the second cards played are chosen after the first cards have been revealed (flipped over). Winner of most hands is the victor.

This game ("strategic war") is simple to learn, but complex enough that it involves bluffing, calculation, and card counting (keeping track of which cards have been played). A speed version, with, say, 10 seconds allowed per card choice, goes very fast.

Has anyone seen heard of this game before? It's a bit like repeated two card poker (heads up), drawing from a fixed deck. Note the overall strength of hands for each player (combined multiplicative value of all cards) is fixed and equal. Playing strong hands early means weaker hands later in the game. The goal is to win each hand by as small a margin as possible.

Are there strategies which dominate random play (= select first card at random, second card from range not exceeding highest card required to guarantee a win)?


Don't forget to respond to the reader survey.

Isabel and the dwarf king

This is an old story I told the kids.

One day Max and Isabel were hiking in the mountains and came upon a cave.

Exploring in the gloom, they found a giant cavern, filled by a pile of gold and jewels. Atop the pile was a huge throne. On that throne sat the dwarf king.

Who dares enter my throne room? asked the dwarf king.

My name is Isabel and this is my brother Max.

You sure have a lot of gold, said Max.

Yes, said the dwarf king with a gleam in his eye. I am the richest in the world!

What use are riches in this dark cave? asked Max.

What?!? I am the richest in the world!!

Oh dwarf king, said Isabel, no hoard of gold is worth even a single flower, growing in the summer sun.

Years later, after the dragon came and burned all the king's kinsmen, Isabel wondered what had become of him ...

How we live now

Hyperparenting and the upper-middle (striver) class. This essay is about the book The XX Factor: How the Rise of Working Women Has Created a Far Less Equal World by Alison Wolf.

See also Kids these days and Having it all.

NYBooks: ... What most differentiates them is their total absorption in two things—their careers and their children. They devote extremely long hours to their professions, which often require them to be electronically available at almost all hours. According to Wolf’s data, upper-middle-class couples now work on average more hours per day than the rest of the population, and unlike the lower classes, they have no more leisure time now than they did in the 1960s. Contrary to what one might expect, upper-middle-class women usually return to work full-time after childbirth, whereas other women more often stop paid work at least temporarily or return only part-time. As Wolf points out, for upper-middle-class women to interrupt their careers means large sacrifices of opportunity. Moreover, their income is usually sufficient to cover the considerable expense of hiring nannies or other forms of child care. But even more important than the money is the fact that for these women, their sense of identity is tied to their professions. They are full participants in what James Surowiecki recently called “the cult of overwork.”

The commitment of power couples to their professions is outweighed only by their extraordinary involvement with their children. Wolf titles a section on children “Willing Slaves,” and begins with a one-sentence paragraph, “And then there are the children.” The next paragraph starts, “Young children dominate the lives of their parents not just emotionally but by completely upturning their lives.” Against all logic, as documented by Wolf, upper-middle-class couples somehow manage to spend more interactive time (not just being in the same room) with their children than any group in history—with or without careers, rich or poor.

True, they have fewer children; in fact, their fertility rate is so low that they don’t even replace themselves. But the few children they have are at the center of their lives, and fathers are often just as much involved as mothers. They spend enormous amounts of money on them, and employ a vast network of experts to help—beginning with childbirth classes and lactation consultants, and continuing through tutors to help them get into the best schools, athletic coaches to help the children make the team, teachers to help them develop their musical and dramatic talents, and so forth. Nannies alone cost on the order of tens of thousands of dollars per year. Children are also incorporated into their parents’ social lives ...

... The consequences of hyperparenting are unknown, since the phenomenon is only a few decades old. My views are shaped largely by observing my own family and friends, and that is not much to rely on, but I will speculate anyway. I see great advantages for the children, but also some warning signs. Young upper-middle-class children are, indeed, remarkably precocious. Since they have been exposed to adult conversations almost constantly from birth, they are much more articulate and broadly knowledgeable than children were a generation ago. They are also remarkably at ease with other people, both adults and children, because they are with them so much—with their parents’ friends, in early preschool, and in playgroups often organized among nannies. And having endured little frustration or isolation, they seem to me happier and more affectionate than children were in earlier generations. They love being with their parents (and why not?). They don’t go “up the street” to do “nothing,” as my friends and I did. They stick close to home, and their best friends are their parents.

[ Italics mine ]

Halloween

My son wanted a mutant cyclops jack o lantern :-)

Did I mention my kids love Calvin and Hobbes?

Too much homework?

I don't recall doing much homework until I was in high school. My grade school kids already have quite a bit to do, although I wouldn't say it has reached an excessive level. It is however clear that school is more serious than when I was a kid. In elementary school they didn't really know what to do with me so I spent a lot of time reading in the library. For some reason our library had all six volumes of Gibbon's History and Decline of the Roman Empire and Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. I could read pretty well but unfortunately no one tried to teach me any advanced math.

Atlantic Monthly: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

What happens when a father, alarmed by his 13-year-old daughter's nightly workload, tries to do her homework for a week

... whenever I bring up the homework issue with teachers or administrators, their response is that they are required by the state to cover a certain amount of material. There are standardized tests, and everyone—students, teachers, schools—is being evaluated on those tests. I’m not interested in the debates over teaching to the test or No Child Left Behind. What I am interested in is what my daughter is doing during those nightly hours between 8 o’clock and midnight, when she finally gets to bed. During the school week, she averages three to four hours of homework a night and six and a half hours of sleep.

... My daughter has the misfortune of living through a period of peak homework.

It turns out that there is no correlation between homework and achievement. According to a 2005 study by the Penn State professors Gerald K. LeTendre and David P. Baker, some of the countries that score higher than the U.S. on testing in the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study—Japan and Denmark, for example—give less homework, while some of those scoring lower, including Thailand and Greece, assign more. Why pile on the homework if it doesn’t make even a testable difference, and in fact may be harmful?

“It’s a response to this whole globalized, competitive process,” says Richard Walker, a co-author of the book Reforming Homework. “You get parents demanding their children get more homework because their children are competing against the whole world.”

The irony is that some countries where the school systems are held up as models for our schools have been going in the opposite direction of the U.S., giving less homework and implementing narrower curricula built to encourage deeper understanding rather than broader coverage. ...

Dept. of Nobody Knows Anything: redshirting children

See also Expert Predictions and Medical Science?

New Yorker: ... Redshirting is the practice of holding a child back for an extra year before the start of kindergarten, named for the red jersey worn in intra-team scrimmages by college athletes kept out of competition for a year. It is increasingly prevalent among parents of would-be kindergartners. In 1968, four per cent of kindergarten students were six years old; by 1995, the number of redshirted first- and second-graders had grown to nine per cent. In 2008, it had risen to seventeen per cent. The original logic of the yearlong delay is rooted in athletics: athletes who are bigger and stronger tend to perform better, so why not bench the younger, smaller ones for a year? The logic was popularized in “Freakonomics,” in which the authors, Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt, pointed out that élite soccer players were much more likely to have birthdays in the earliest months of the year—that is, they would have been the oldest in any group of students that used a January 1st cutoff for enrollment.

On the surface, redshirting seems to make sense in the academic realm, too. The capabilities of a child’s brain increase at a rapid pace; the difference between five-year-olds and six-year-olds is far greater than between twenty-five-year-olds and twenty-six-year-olds. An extra year can allow a child to excel relative to the younger students in the class. “Especially for boys, there is thought to be a relative-age effect that persists across sports and over time,” said Friedman. “Early investment of time and skill developments appears to have a more lasting impact.” Older students and athletes are often found in leadership positions—and who can doubt the popularity of the star quarterback relative to the gym-class weakling?

It’s this competitive logic, rather than genuine concern about a child’s developmental readiness, that drives redshirting. Many parents decide to redshirt their children not because they seem particularly immature or young but because they hope that the extra year will give them a boost relative to their peers. In light of modern competitive demands, why wouldn’t you want your child to have that edge? The psychologist Betsy Sparrow calls it “gaming the system”—and the data on who chooses to redshirt bears out that classification: the people most likely to redshirt their children are those who can most afford to do so—that is, the white and the wealthy. Families in the highest socioeconomic quintile are thirty-six per cent more likely to redshirt their children than those in the lowest, and while close to six per cent of white children are redshirted, the figure falls to two per cent for Hispanic children, and less than one per cent for their black peers.

The data, however, belies this assumption. While earlier studies have argued that redshirted children do better both socially and academically—citing data on school evaluations, leadership positions, and test scores—more recent analyses suggest that the opposite may well be the case: the youngest kids, who barely make the age cutoff but are enrolled anyway, ultimately end up on top—not their older classmates. When a group of economists followed Norwegian children born between 1962 and 1988, until the youngest turned eighteen, in 2006, they found that, at age eighteen, children who started school a year later had I.Q. scores that were significantly lower than their younger counterparts. Their earnings also suffered: through age thirty, men who started school later earned less. A separate study, of the entire Swedish population born between 1935 and 1984, came to a similar conclusion: in the course of the life of a typical Swede, starting school later translated to reduced over-all earnings. In a 2008 study at Harvard University, researchers found that, within the U.S., increased rates of redshirting were leading to equally worrisome patterns. The delayed age of entry, the authors argued, resulted in academic stagnation: it decreased completion rates for both high-school and college students, increased the gender gap in graduation rates (men fell behind women), and intensified socioeconomic differences.

As it turns out, the benefits of being older and more mature may not be as important as the benefits of being younger than your classmates. In 2007, the economists Elizabeth Cascio and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach decided to analyze the data of Tennessee’s Project STAR—an experiment originally designed to test the effects of classroom size on learning—with a different set of considerations: How would the relative class composition affect student performance? Their approach differed from most studies of redshirting in one crucial way: the students had been assigned totally randomly to their kindergarten classrooms, with no option for parents to lobby for, say, a different teacher, a different school, or a class in which the child would have some other perceived or actual relative advantage. This led to true experimental variation in relative age and maturity. That is, the same student could be relatively younger in one class, but relatively older in another, depending on his initial class assignment. The researchers discovered that relatively more mature students didn’t have an academic edge; instead, when they looked at their progress at the end of kindergarten, and, later, when they reached middle school, they were worse off in multiple respects. Not only did they score significantly lower on achievement tests—both in kindergarten and middle school—they were also more likely to have been kept back a year by the time they reached middle school, and were less likely to take college-entrance exams. The less mature students, on the other hand, experienced positive effects from being in a relatively more mature environment: in striving to catch up with their peers, they ended up surpassing them. ...

Few researchers would dispute that, in the immediate term, being relatively bigger, quicker, smarter, and stronger is a good thing. Repeatedly, the studies have found exactly that—older kindergarten students perform better on tests, receive better teacher evaluations, and do better socially. But then, something happens: after that early boost, their performance takes a nosedive. By the time they get to eighth grade, any disparity has largely evened out—and, by college, younger students repeatedly outperform older ones in any given year.

Having it All: opt outs want back in

No, you can't actually have it all -- neither as a man nor as a woman. If you want to spend time with your kids (I highly recommend it), that will take time away from your startup, hedge fund, climb up the ladder, investigations into quantum decoherence. You just have to strike a balance that you can deal with.

Men are on average more driven by career success and money than women, and similarly women are more, well, maternal than men. It's best to think about this (as with all questions dealing with groups of people) in terms of distributions rather than strict categories. There are outlier women who are better corporate warriors than 95% of men (but perhaps they comprise less than 5% of the female population!), and there are outlier men who are great stay at home dads. At least at the moment, and perhaps for deep evolutionary reasons, the male and female distributions are shifted relative to each other along these dimensions. To me, feminism means fighting for the rights of outliers to do what they want, while still respecting the larger number of women who might be happier in more traditional roles. In my opinion, noticing properties of distributions is not in any way anti-feminist.

NYTimes: ... The culture of motherhood, post-recession, had altered considerably, too. The women of the opt-out revolution left the work force at a time when the prevailing ideas about motherhood idealized full-time, round-the-clock, child-centered devotion. In 2000, for example, with the economy strong and books like “Surrendering to Motherhood,” a memoir about the “liberation” of giving up work to stay home, setting the tone for the aspirational mothering style of the day, almost 40 percent of respondents to the General Social Survey told researchers they believed a mother’s working was harmful to her children (an increase of eight percentage points since 1994). But by 2010, with recovery from the “mancession” slow and a record 40 percent of mothers functioning as family breadwinners, fully 75 percent of Americans agreed with the statement that “a working mother can establish just as warm and secure a relationship with her children as a mother who does not work.” And after decades of well-publicized academic inquiry into the effects of maternal separation and the dangers of day care, a new generation of social scientists was publishing research on the negative effects of excessive mothering: more depression and worse general health among mothers, according to the American Psychological Association.

I wondered if these changes affected the women who opted out years ago. Had they found the “escape hatch” from the rat race that one of Belkin’s interviewees said she was after? Were they able, as a vast majority said they had planned, to transition back into the work force? Or had they, as the author Leslie Bennetts predicted in her 2007 book, “The Feminine Mistake,” come to see that, by making themselves financially dependent upon their men — particularly at a time when no man could depend upon his job — they had made a colossal error?

The 22 women I interviewed, for the most part, told me that the perils of leaving the work force were counterbalanced by the pleasures of being able to experience motherhood on their own terms. A certain number of these women — the superelite, you might say, the most well-off, with the highest-value name-brand educational credentials and powerful and well-connected social networks — found jobs easily after extended periods at home. These jobs generally paid less than their previous careers and were less prestigious. But the women found the work more interesting, socially conscious and family-friendly than their old high-powered positions.

Pamela Stone, a professor of sociology at Hunter College and the author of the 2007 book “Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home,” heard many similarly glowing stories. In the early 2000s, she spent considerable time interviewing 54 well-off married mothers drawn primarily from the alumnae networks of several highly selective colleges and universities “who had navigated elite environments with competitive entry requirements,” as she described them in her book. Now she’s updating her research and has reached about 60 percent of her interviewees, two-thirds of whom have returned to work — their decisions sometimes prompted by their husbands’ somewhat reduced earnings, post-recession. “What I heard repeatedly was ‘The job found me’ or ‘The job fell into my lap,’ ” she told me.

Among the women I spoke with, those who didn’t have the highest academic credentials or highest-powered social networks or who hadn’t been sufficiently “strategic” in their volunteering (fund-raising for a Manhattan private school could be a nice segue back into banking; running bake sales for the suburban swim team tended not to be a career-enhancer) or who had divorced, often struggled greatly.

Note, moms with elite pedigrees have a much easier time getting back into the workforce after opting out to raise young kids.

Hmm ... this might affect average hourly wages by gender ... but too complex to make its way into the social science discourse ...

At a time when having a “good” job means working 50-plus hours a week, in addition to weekends and tech-tethered evenings, it’s not surprising that, if both spouses work, it can often feel as if neither is ever truly home. And that desire to be emotionally present at home, Pamela Stone, the sociologist, told me, became more pressing over time for the women she interviewed, reshaping their ambitions when they decided to go back to work.

While two-thirds of the women she reinterviewed originally worked in male-dominated professions like banking or corporate law, now only a quarter are employed in traditionally masculine and hard-driving fields. The rest chose more female-dominated, and far less lucrative, “caring, nurturing occupations” like teaching or nonprofit work, Stone said. Only one of the women she interviewed had returned to her former employer (in a “vastly different capacity, much diminished,” she said); and all have scaled down their ambitions.

“The longer they’re home, the more they continue the trajectory toward something different,” Stone told me. “They have greater appreciation of some of the values of home and connectivity, which were somewhat alien to them in their high-flying professions.”

Greetings from Hsinchu

The Silicon Valley of Taiwan.

Chillaxin'  =  chillin' and relaxin'   :-)

Dreams from my children

My kids made these posters in art class. I didn't know my son aspired to be a mathematician  :-)

In the backyard.

Obama's way

A glimpse into the inner Obama.

NYTimes: ... On rare occasions, Mr. Obama allows others a glimpse of the history, expectations and hope he carries with him. At the funeral of the civil rights leader Dorothy Height in 2010, he wept openly. Again and again, those close to him say, Mr. Obama is moved by the grace with which other blacks who broke the color barrier behaved under pressure.

When Ruby Bridges Hall went to see the famous Norman Rockwell portrait of her marching into school, which Mr. Obama had hung just outside the Oval Office, the president opened up a bit. The painting shows a 6-year-old Ms. Hall in an immaculate white dress walking calmly into school, a hurled tomato and a racial slur on the wall behind her.

The president asked Ms. Hall, now 58, how she summoned up such courage at that age and said he sometimes found his daughters staring at the portrait. “I really think they see themselves in this little girl,” he said, according to an interview with Ms. Hall.

“Doing the work we do, it gets really lonely,” Ms. Hall said. “I felt like we understood each other because we belong to the same club.”

The Rockwell painting:

Original photo:

I find these images deeply moving, all the more so because I have a 6 year old daughter. Can you imagine your child having to experience this?

Wikipedia: ... Former United States Deputy Marshal Charles Burks later recalled, "She showed a lot of courage. She never cried. She didn't whimper. She just marched along like a little soldier, and we're all very proud of her."

Child probabilist

I was playing a board game with the little guy and he was convinced he had developed a better method to roll the die. I asked him to check that his method actually works, so he obtained the distribution below. His number sense and intuition for probability are unusual for a six year old. He can do things I certainly could not when I was his age, but on the other hand he's had somewhat better instruction  :^)

At this point he doesn't know how to interpret the results of his statistical tests. He did tell me that if his dice rolling method didn't work then each row of marks would be the same. I wasn't there when he obtained this data.

See also Bounded Cognition.