Tuesday, March 29, 2016

Teenage Drivers? Be Very Afraid

Fashion & Style

Teenage Drivers? Be Very Afraid

By BRUCE FEILER MARCH 19, 2016

Spend enough time having parenting conversations, as I’ve done personally and professionally for the last dozen years, and certain patterns emerge. In nine out of 10 cases, if you’re talking about highly motivated parents, the message to Mom and Dad is: back off, chill out, park the helicopter.

Whether you want your children to be independent, resilient, creative; whether you’re talking to teachers, psychologists, grandparents; whether you’re discussing homework, food, sports; the recommendation, time and again, is relax.

Recently, I stumbled onto a topic in which the advice was the exact opposite.

Among the people who know what they are talking about, the unanimous message to parents is: You’re not worried nearly enough. Get much more involved. Your child’s life may be in danger.

What’s the topic? Teenage driving.

“If you’re going to have an early, untimely death,” said Nichole Morris, a principal researcher at the HumanFIRST Laboratory at the University of Minnesota, “the most dangerous two years of your life are between 16 and 17, and the reason for that is driving.”

Among this age group, death in motor vehicle accidents outstrips suicide, cancer and other types of accidents, Dr. Morris said. “Cars have gotten safer, roads have gotten safer, but teen drivers have not,” she said.

In 2013, just under a million teenage drivers were involved in police-reported crashes, according to AAA. These accidents resulted in 373,645 injuries and 2,927 deaths, AAA said. An average of six teenagers a day die from motor vehicle injuries, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Charlie Klauer, a research scientist at the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, said her research suggested the numbers were even higher because many teenage accidents go unreported. “We believe one in four teens is going to be in a crash in their first six months of driving,” Dr. Klauer said.

How to address this problem is not as simple as it seems, especially as technology has taken over teenagers’ lives.

One father I know bought his son a manual-transmission car because it required him to use two hands, to eliminate the option of using a cellphone. I recently overheard a conversation between my sister and her 16-year-old son in which she reminded him not to text while driving, and he replied, “But I’m using Google Maps, and the text pops up automatically on the screen.”

So what’s a parent to do, especially one who knows teenagers are always one step ahead of any rules they try to impose?

FRIENDS DON’T LET FRIENDS DRIVE WITH THEM When I asked Dr. Morris what parents should be most worried about, she answered definitively, “Other passengers.” Adding one nonfamily passenger to a teenager’s car increases the rate of crashes by 44 percent, she said. That risk doubles with a second passenger and quadruples with three or more.

Most states have what are called “graduated driver’s licenses,” meaning some combination of learner’s permit, followed by a six-month or so intermediate phase, followed by a full permit. Restricting the number of passengers who are not family members is among the most common regulations in the early phases, but Dr. Morris said most parents disregard the rule once that time expires.

That’s a huge mistake, she said. “Even if your state drops the non-familiar-passenger restriction after six months, parents should make it their own rule,” Dr. Morris said.

Distraction is highest when boys ride with other boys, she said, whereas boys actually drive safer when girls are in the car. Altogether, passengers are a greater threat than cellphones, she believes. “Your cellphone isn’t encouraging your teen to go 80 in a 50, or 100 in a 70,” she said.

TURN OFF NOTIFICATIONS Phones are still a huge problem, though.

Dr. Klauer has done three studies, in which she places video cameras in cars and monitors drivers for a year. Even when teenagers know they’re being monitored, they still use their telephones for texting, talking or checking Facebook at least once every trip, including ones only a few blocks.

“Teens’ prevalence for engaging their devices is higher than other age groups,” she said, “and their risk for being involved in a crash when they do is higher.”

Even if the phone is tucked away in a pocket or backpack, enticing beeps or ringtones make it hard to resist. Dr. Klauer recommends blocking all notifications before even getting in the car. “You’re more likely to do it if you’re sitting calmly at home,” she said. “In the moment, it’s really hard not to look at the screen.”

THE TWO-SECOND RULE If your child insists on using the phone for navigation or listening to music, the research suggests there’s only one safe place for it to be: in a dock, at eye level, on the dashboard. The worst places? The cup holder, the driver’s lap, the passenger’s seat.

“The real enemy is taking your eyes off the forward roadway,” Dr. Klauer said. “Anything more than two seconds is extremely dangerous. The longer you look away, the worse it gets.”

Though she’s skeptical young drivers actually need navigation for most trips, Dr. Klauer said audible turn-by-turn directions are preferable to paper maps, because there’s less rustling in your lap. Similarly, streaming music has advantages over flipping radio channels, as long as the driver is not selecting each individual song.

EVERY TIME IS A DANGEROUS TIME Just because technology has introduced threats doesn’t mean the old threats like drinking or driving at night have gone away. In 2013, almost a third of teenage drivers killed in crashes had been drinking, the Transportation Department found. Also, safety experts say, driving late at night is much more dangerous than during the day.

Jennifer Ryan, the director of state relations at AAA, told me the organization recommends that teenagers not be allowed to drive between 9 p.m. and 5 a.m. for the first six months of having their license. “We encourage parents should go beyond that if they don’t feel their teen is ready,” she said.

To help navigate these issues, AAA has a sample contract parents and young drivers can sign, with consequences agreed in advance.

BELLS AND WHISTLES ARE A PARENT’S BEST FRIEND Over all, teenage driving deaths have been declining in recent years, though specialists agree it’s because of improved safety features on roads, such as more impact-resistant median barriers and smarter technology in cars. These include automated brakes, airbags, forward collision warning systems and lane departure warning systems.

Dr. Morris encouraged parents to adopt as many of the safety features as possible. “I did not grow up in a wealthy family,” she said. “I drove a $3,000 car when I was in high school. But if the idea is that these bells and whistles aren’t necessary for teens, I would argue against that. I know it’s expensive for parents, but any advanced safety feature is well worth the money and peace of mind.”

BE A BACK-SEAT PARENT The most surprising thing I learned is how passionately researchers believe that parents are not doing nearly enough to supervise their children. “Our studies show that the more the parent is involved when a teen is learning, the lower their chances are for a crash,” Dr. Morris said. “That means asking questions, supervising them, giving them opportunities on different types of roads under different conditions.” The mistake parents often make, she said, is thinking, “Finally I don’t have to car-pool you everywhere!”

Dr. Klauer said that in her studies she would send video snippets to parents when their children violated the law. When parents looked at the results and discussed them with their teenagers, results improved. The only problem: Half the parents never even looked at the warnings. “I know you trust your child,” Dr. Klauer said. “But if you’re not paying attention, chances are they’re not driving as safely as you think they are.”

The bottom line: Teenage driving may be that rare outlier when it comes to parenting. As soon as you give your children the keys to the car, it may be time to pull the helicopter out of the hangar for a spell and follow them down the road.

Art & Design David Hammons Is Still Messing With What Art Means

Art & Design

David Hammons Is Still Messing With What Art Means

By HOLLAND COTTERMARCH 24, 2016

“Orange Is the New Black,” left, and an untitled work, part of a career survey of David Hammons at the Mnuchin Gallery. Credit Jake Naughton for The New York Times

“I can’t stand art actually. I’ve never, ever liked art.” So the artist David Hammons told the art historian Kellie Jones in a 1986 interview. Then why do you make it? Ms. Jones asked. Because, Mr. Hammons offered, art is about symbols and “outrageously magical things happen when you mess around with a symbol.” Precisely such things are happening in the exhibition “David Hammons: Five Decades” at Mnuchin Gallery.

At the time of the interview Mr. Hammons was already a star, known for his formal and conceptual brilliance and his unpredictable ways. At various points in the 1980s, he sold snowballs on a sidewalk near the Bowery, erected three-story-high basketball hoops in Brooklyn, and made sculptures from hair swept from Harlem barber shop floors. He was creating — in public places with found materials for non-art-world audiences — odd, witty, barely graspable objects that were also emblems of wealth, class and race. And after making them, he’d change course, and location, or disappear, following a career GPS of his own.

“Untitled (Snowball),” by David Hammons. Credit Jake Naughton for The New York Times

In line with his untrackable ways, his first official career survey in 25 years is not in a museum on the Bowery or in Harlem, but in a commercial gallery of the blue-chip persuasion on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. And if Mr. Hammons hasn’t technically organized the show of 34 objects, about half on loan from public and private collections, he has seriously messed with it. He arrived when the original installation was finished, yanked out several major items, inserted some new ones, and added a soundtrack. The result is effectively a giant new multipart Hammons work, and pure enchantment, from object to object and room to room in Mnuchin’s two-story space.

From left, “Untitled (Williams College),” “Spade (Power for the Spade)” and “Untitled (A Mobile Garden)” by David Hammons. Credit Jake Naughton for The New York Times

The arrangement is only vaguely chronological, though there are early pieces near the start. They’re from the 1960s, when Mr. Hammons, who was born in Springfield, Ill., in 1943, was in Los Angeles, closely aligned with a community of black artists. Watts still smoldered; Black Power was in forward drive. It was a red-alert moment. Mr. Hammons responded to it with a series of ingenious life-size body-prints – literally, oil-smeared bodies, including his own, leaving imprints on paper — on political themes.

In some, like “Spade (Power for the Spade)” from 1969, he turned racist clichés on their head. In others, he invented a cast of imaginary characters, a kind of African-American “Our Town.” The woman in profile in the 1970 “Sexy Sue” could be a churchgoer dressed in her Sunday best and every detail of her floral-patterned lace dress is preserved. There’s a lingering myth that beauty and politics can’t coexist. Mr. Hammons finesses that myth.

A detail of an untitled sculpture made from bottle caps, by David Hammons. Credit Jake Naughton for The New York Times

The show then leaps to the 1980s, after he had settled in New York, picked up assemblage as his primary medium, and based it on materials grounded in black urban life. That life, as he envisioned it, was cosmopolitan in scope. An untitled 1987 wall sculpture made of hundreds of beer and soft-drink bottle caps worked into decorative patterns suggests a kind of “African” fantasia. (More recently, the Ghanaian artist El Anatsui has tapped a related format to bring new African art to the West.) Mostly, though, his turf is inner-city America, mapped out in abject fragments: the torn-off hood of a sweatshirt hung like a hunting trophy high on a wall; a coiling Minimalist-style sculpture made from bottles of skid-row wine.

“In the Hood,” by David Hammons. Credit Jake Naughton for The New York Times

Music, long one of the few routes to big-time success open to African-Americans, is part of the picture, referred to in an installation of three microphone stands titled “Which Mike do you want to be like…?” The implied choices are Jackson, Jordan and Tyson, but the mouthpieces that represent them are too high up for most people to reach.

Sports are another way up and out, but again uncertain. Mr. Hammons gave the sky-kissing hoops he erected in Brooklyn the wry title “Higher Goals.” And he brings a reduced version of one of them to Mnuchin in the 1997 “Basketball Chandelier.” In this case, the basket is at normal height, but unusable, made from ropes of cut-glass beads and flanked by ornamental sconces.

“Basketball Chandelier,” by David Hammons. Credit Jake Naughton for The New York Times

The 1990s brought a subtle shift in thematic emphasis in Mr. Hammons’s art, from race to class. He has always treated race as a kind of Duchampian ready-made, to be defined and deployed at will. And he has never tried to separate it from class. Still, you see the balance tilting in new combinations of street finds and luxe, or faux-luxe, materials in a spellbinding installation on Mnuchin’s second floor.

“Basketball Chandelier,” tall and tawdry, is in the center. To the left, with a title both punning and descriptive, is a piece called “Smoke Screen” (1990-95). A vertical swath of gold-colored fabric, carefully draped on a cast-iron stand, it looks regal until you notice burn holes in its surface, and cigarette butts poking through and scattered on the floor. Across the room is a painting or drawing on paper, also impressive in size and dated 2002, of what appear to be billowing clouds. Only up close do you see the trace of imprinted words and lines. The cloud patterns were made by a basketball dribbled repeatedly over the paper’s surface after being coated with what the checklist describes as “Harlem earth.”

“Fur Coat,” by David Hammons. Credit Jake Naughton for The New York Times

Five years later, when Mr. Hammons had his first exhibition of new work at Mnuchin (then called L&M, with Dominique Lévy as a partner), overt references to racial blackness were pretty much gone, though politics was not. The 2007 show, a collaboration with his wife, Chie Hasegawa, consisted entirely of expensive fur coats, of the kind easy to spot on the streets of the Upper East Side, that had been defaced: burned, slashed, swiped with paint. (One is included here.) The effect was shocking. This was art about in-your-face violence, toward animals, toward property, toward privilege, toward the gallery it was in.

A second show soon followed, this one of big, studiously bland abstract paintings that Mr. Hammons had shrouded in industrial tarps, frayed blankets and plastic sheeting. He seemed to be on the attack here too, against a tradition of auction-friendly, history-book-hogging Modernism, or against the exclusions, segregations and refusals its values were built on. At the time, the new work, with its visual variety, humor and fulsome collage effects, generated cryptomodernist pleasures of its own and was hugely, and predictably, popular.

An untitled sculpture made in part of human hair, by David Hammons. Credit Jake Naughton for The New York Times

However you read Mr. Hammons’s recent art, and many ways are possible, one central fact holds true: He is messing with — expanding, exploding — ideas of what art means, and especially what “black art” means, making it broad enough to be borderless, useless as a descriptive label by a controlling and abidingly racist market culture. The soundtrack for his survey speaks to this. Years ago it might have been jazz; this time he has filled Mnuchin’s imperious quarters with classical Japanese court music, further shaking up fixed notions of Otherness.

Not that this makes art easy to love, particularly in a time of bloated prices and small ideas. The American writer Marianne Moore began a poem about poetry with these clipped words. “I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle. Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it, after all, a place for the genuine.” That’s what Mr. Hammons has evidently found in art — the genuinely political, the genuinely beautiful and the outrageously magical — and has been passing on to us these 50 years.

Your Money | Special Section Why We Think We’re Better Investors Than We Are

Your Money | Special Section

Why We Think We’re Better Investors Than We Are

By GARY BELSKYMARCH 25, 2016

From their earliest days, the loosely confederated research efforts that came to be known as behavioral economics spawned a large quantity of studies centered on securities investment. This was not because the field’s pioneers were especially interested in stocks and bonds, nor was the early research commonly underwritten by financial services firms.

Rather, the hive of activity that evolved into its own field — behavioral finance — reflected that investment markets provide unusually robust data sets for analyzing “judgment under uncertainty” (the title of a seminal textbook co-edited by the winner of a Nobel in economic science, the behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman) and “decision under risk” (a phrase in the subtitle of his Nobel-winning “Prospect Theory”). Every day, global securities markets provide researchers with billions of data points for understanding how people make choices when resources are at stake and the outcome is unknown.

Which, if you think about it, is a fair description of most decisions. Indeed, the majority of cognitive biases and shortcuts that influence everyday judgment and choice have analogues in investment behavior. Consider the “sunk cost fallacy,” a primary reason an unhappy lawyer might struggle to leave the law and an unsuccessful investor might balk at selling money-losing shares.

Both people are highly likely to obsess over their sunk cost — law school tuition and time served for the lawyer, the original investment amount for the stock picker — in a nonconscious desire to justify their earlier decisions. Both are also very likely to fall prey to “loss aversion,” a key tenet of Prospect Theory, which tells us that humans typically respond to the loss of resources — be it time, effort, emotion, material goods or their proxy, i.e., money — more strongly than they react to a similar gain.

What differentiates the typical lawyer and average investor, however, is their justification for engaging in their activity. Lawyers are trained to do what they do, while the majority of investors are not. Ask a random player in a law firm’s basketball league whether he or she could compete with LeBron James, and the most common response will be laughter. Yet many of those lawyers would willingly compete with the billionaire investor Warren E. Buffett.

Despite the spectacular growth of index funds — passive investment vehicles that track market averages and minimize transaction costs — millions of amateur investors continue to actively buy and sell securities regularly. This despite overwhelming evidence that even professional investors are no more likely to beat the market than monkeys throwing darts at securities listings.

Money managers, at least, are paid to make investment bets. But why do amateurs believe they can outperform the professionals — or even identify those pros who will outperform? (Performance of individual mutual funds cannot be predicted with any greater degree of accuracy than individual stocks or bonds.) Many biases and cognitive errors contribute to this costly behavior, but a few deserve mention.

Overconfidence

Consider this pair of challenges:

Give high and low estimates for the average weight of an empty Boeing 747, picking numbers far enough apart to be 90 percent certain that the true answer falls somewhere in between. Now, give high and low estimates for the diameter of the moon in miles. Again, choose numbers far enough apart to be 90 percent certain that the true answer falls somewhere in between.

Come up with a range for each so you could confidently bet $9 against the prospect of winning $1.

As it happens, an empty 747 weighs nearly 400,000 pounds, and the diameter of the moon is roughly 2,200 miles. But research involving these and similar problems suggests that these answers do not fall within your high and low estimates. That’s because most people do not realize how little they know about the subjects or how difficult it is to bracket estimates as requested.

Instead, people come up with what they believe to be logical estimates of the plane’s weight and moon’s diameter, then they adjust from those figures to arrive at their brackets. But unless you work for Boeing or NASA, your initial estimates are probably going to be wildly off the mark, so the brackets should be wider they probably are — say, from one pound to one billion pounds for the plane’s weight and from one mile to a billion miles for the lunar diameter. That most people do not default to such broad ranges reflects a trait that behavioral economists call overconfidence. This is not run-of-the-mill arrogance, but rather the tendency we all have to overrate our abilities, knowledge and skill, at whatever level we might place them.

Studies have revealed significant overconfidence in the judgments of scientists, lawyers, engineers, doctors and those in other professions. The University of Pennsylvania psychologists Philip Tetlock and Barbara Mellers collected more than 25,000 forecasts from people whose job it was to anticipate how the future would unfold. All demonstrated remarkable overconfidence. When they were 80 percent sure of their predictions, they were correct less than 60 percent of the time.

Another example is shown in a 2012 study from the State Street Center for Applied Research, in which investors were asked about their financial acumen.

“Nearly two-thirds rated their financial sophistication as advanced,” said Mirtha Kastrapeli, a senior research analyst at State Street. “This seemed a little optimistic, so in our 2014 study, The Folklore of Finance, we ran a financial literacy exam. The average score was just 61 percent, barely a passing grade. This disconnect between actual and perceived financial sophistication, she explains, is evidence of how widespread the overconfidence bias is.”

Optimism Bias

Overconfidence is hard-wired into our brains because it is useful. Many of our mental biases evolved because they make us cautious or they otherwise protect us from harm, but overconfidence is part of a suite of cognitive traits that serve to propel us forward. Just as no one would think to write a children’s book about a train engine that repeats, “I think I can’t,” few explorers would venture into the wild — and few entrepreneurs would start new businesses — unless they believed that they would succeed in the face of long odds.

A bias toward optimism helps to explain why many, if not most, smokers are confident that they will not develop cancer; why many drivers are certain that their texting will not lead to an accident; and why many investors believe they can outperform the market. “We are evolutionarily programmed to believe that things will work out,” said David Hirshleifer, a finance professor at the University of California, Irvine.

Hindsight Bias

More confounding than the existence of investor overconfidence is its persistence: As markets teach us costly lessons, we should grow humble. But the fact that many do not reflects what Professor Hirshleifer describes as self-enhancing psychological processes. One of the biggest esteem builders is hindsight bias, or the tendency to rewrite our own history to make ourselves look good. In landmark experiments by the psychologist Baruch Fischhoff, then at Hebrew University, study participants were directed to make predictions about real-life events, then were asked periodically to recall the events and their predictions after the fact. His findings? Participants consistently misremembered their forecasts, in ways that made them look smarter. Too often we look back not in anger but in awe, at least of our own capacities.

Attribution Bias

Of course, many people easily recall failures, which suggests that hindsight bias is not all that powerful. But even when our failures remain vivid memories, we remember them in a way that neutralizes their ability to inhibit our present-day decisions. When events unfold that confirm our thoughts or deeds, we attribute that happy outcome to our skills, knowledge or intuition. But when life proves our actions or beliefs to have been wrong, we blame outside causes over which we had no control — and thus maintain our faith in ourselves. The Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer describes the phenomenon as, “Heads I win, tails it’s chance.”

Confirmation Bias

Finally, even if investors are not rewriting history or blaming outside forces, they are still highly likely to miss signs of their own incompetence. The culprit is confirmation bias, which leads us to give too much weight to information that supports existing beliefs and discount that which does not. And those existing beliefs need not be long held, explains Thomas Gilovich, a Cornell University psychology professor. “Once one entertains the idea that ‘this seems like a good investment,’ the processing of relevant information narrows considerably — and in a direction that leads to overconfidence.”

Professor Gilovich, an author of “The Wisest One in the Room: How You Can Benefit from Social Psychology’s Most Powerful Insights,” warns that overcoming overconfidence is difficult. Common prescriptions include a meaningful period of diligently logging one’s investment ideas, to keep track of hits and misses. Note the emphasis on ideas and not just actions. More often than not, the aforementioned biases lead us to recall investments that soared that we thought to make but did not — and to forget those that plummeted.

Professor Hirshleifer advises a strategy of self-distancing, or considering the opposite side of any transaction before making it.

Such a strategy was also recommended by Professor Gilovich, with a caveat. “Something more specific and guided is likely to be more effective, like conducting a ‘pre-mortem,’ ” he said. “The idea is to suppose that your idea bombed. What would you be saying to yourself right now about how or why you should have foreseen it?”

VANTAG galeria

Tuesday, March 29, 2016