28.6.05
TAPS. Market Power notes the passing of historian Shelby Foote. Perhaps I ought to post reviews of his campaign series books. I have the ones on Grant's eastern campaign on the night stand.
FORGOTTEN NOTHING, LEARNED NOTHING? NASA Chief Optimistic About Shuttle Launch.
Be very afraid.NASA administrator Michael Griffin offered an optimistic assessment of the agency's preparations for the launch of shuttle Discovery as early as July 13. It would be the first mission since Columbia broke apart during re-entry on Feb. 1, 2003, killing all seven astronauts aboard.
"We look like we're in pretty good shape," Griffin told the House Science Committee. "Based on what I know now, we're ready to go."
Congress, however, wants to keep something flying.Griffin sounded undeterred by the findings issued by a task force that said some of the most important long-term safety goals for shuttle flights have not been adopted.
After meeting Monday night, the task force concluded that the space agency still does not fully comply with three of the toughest recommendations from accident investigators in 2003.
The task force determined that NASA has put off long-term improvements to the shuttle's thermal shielding, thus failing to improve its ability to make emergency repairs in space. The group also acknowledged that delaying a summer launch a few months would not significantly reduce the risks of such space flight.
Be very, very afraid.Griffin, the agency's 11th administrator, was greeted warmly by lawmakers who warned him that NASA faces tough decisions ahead on how to balance its long-term plans of retiring the space shuttles, conducting further work on the international space station, creating a new manned space mission vehicle and beginning the work on a mission to Mars.
Committee Chairman Sherwood Boehlert, R-N.Y., said the agency was "pretty much flying blind right now."
"NASA can barely give a definitive answer to a single question about its programs. That is not, believe it or not, a criticism," said Boehlert.
THE MEDIA TEMPLATE? Here's the headline: Bush: Bloodshed in Iraq Is 'Worth It.' And here is the time stamp: Jun 28, 5:46 PM EDT.
So what will AP reporter Jennifer Loven be doing at 8 PM eastern, when the President delivers his speech? She has already filed the story.
SECOND SECTION. Or did Ms Loven go to Aruba instead? Michelle Malkin posted the story at 3.44 PM (Central, or 4.44 Eastern -- a reader gave her the heads-up.) Lots of trackbacks. Captain Ed had it by 4.08 PM. Spirited bull session there: a few commenters noted that there is such a thing as a pre-released text. John at Power Line had it by 4.11, just in time to board the Peninsula 400.
So what will AP reporter Jennifer Loven be doing at 8 PM eastern, when the President delivers his speech? She has already filed the story.
The interpretation is also filed.FORT BRAGG, N.C. (AP) -- President Bush on Tuesday appealed for the nation's patience for "difficult and dangerous" work ahead in Iraq, hoping a backdrop of U.S. troops and a reminder of Iraq's revived sovereignty would help him reclaim control of an issue that has eroded his popularity.
In an evening address at an Army base that has 9,300 troops in Iraq, Bush was acknowledging the toll of the 27-month-old war. At the same time, he aimed to persuade skeptical Americans that his strategy for victory needed only time - not any changes - to be successful.
It was a tricky balancing act, believed necessary by White House advisers who have seen persistent insurgent attacks eat into Americans' support for the war - and for the president - and increase discomfort among even Republicans on Capitol Hill.More specifics:
Bush's repeated acknowledgment of death and difficulty came less than a month after Vice President Dick Cheney proclaimed the Iraq insurgency "in the last throes." Still, the president's overriding message was one of optimism.And coverage of the opposition.
The liberal group MoveOn.org also unveiled television advertisements that call the Iraq war "a quagmire." "We got in the wrong way. Let's get out the right way," say the ads running in several contested congressional districts.I will have opportunity to watch some of this evening's speech. About now I'm wishing for a "Deviating from his pre-released text ..." story about 9 pm (Eastern) tonight.
SECOND SECTION. Or did Ms Loven go to Aruba instead? Michelle Malkin posted the story at 3.44 PM (Central, or 4.44 Eastern -- a reader gave her the heads-up.) Lots of trackbacks. Captain Ed had it by 4.08 PM. Spirited bull session there: a few commenters noted that there is such a thing as a pre-released text. John at Power Line had it by 4.11, just in time to board the Peninsula 400.
RESERVE CALLUP. Intel Dump's Phillip Carter has been assigned to the 101st Airborne and will ship out to Iraq. He intends to set up a group weblog from theater. Stay safe.
COLLEGE FOLLIES. First a brief update on the Zulauf space grab, then onto the more serious stuff. The powers that be were in such a hurry to get going on their space grab that one colleague was advised he had to have everything out of his office by the last Friday of exam week, May 13. Here it is the end of June and that office is in approximately the same condition that he left it in May. Herrn. Schneider u. Schwarz have concurred that associate dean W. William Minor be named the king of spades. They also have some observations about the state of the university, which currently has three colleges with acting deans. But that will have to wait for another day when there is less weighty news to address.
26.6.05
BREAKING THE SOCIAL CONTRACT? "Declining by Degrees" aired this afternoon on the Greater DeKalb PBS affiliate. (Check your local listings.) The producer's concluding message suggested that much was wrong. First, the producer interpreted a public policy shift that gives greater primacy to the private benefits of a university degree as the breaking of a social contract that emerged after World War II, with the G. I. Bill, Pell Grants, guaranteed loans, and research and development programs opening the university to all who wished to attend. Second, he suggested that there were difficulties with the teaching and learning that went on in college. Whether the two phenomena might have been related ... regular readers know my penchant for equating access with admitting the unprepared ... did not come out in the program.
Much of the content is a video version of this New York Times article, still available to readers, which I commented on in April, and now that I've seen the in-class transponders and what the learned astronomer did with them, I do want to get some. The Times writers spent more time at Arizona than at the other three colleges featured, Western Kentucky, Amherst (and the video folks correctly pronounced the silent "h," forsooth!) and Community College of Denver, and some of the vignettes from the other colleges (a documentary is at best a collection of anecdotes, there is nothing systematic here) prove instructive.
The president of Western Kentucky, who has the look of a televangelist about him, was very open about his responsibility. An interviewer asked him about retention, and he was honest enough to note that absent students enrolling and continuing, legislative support would not be continuing. But that puts the faculty in a difficult position; an assistant professor has a principles of macroeconomics class in which a few students are capable of 96 points on a 100 point quiz, but the class mean is about 55, which he treats as a C. Such grading policies might run counter to another Western Kentucky initiative that received some attention, the recruitment of merit scholars. Why take a full ride at a mid-major if your grades are inflated and the content might bedumbed down made more accessible? Other professors confront other difficulties: at Arizona the star-teacher astronomer is not on the tenure track; a tenured professor of political science complains that she's a political scientist, not a composition teacher (presumably she wrote some stuff in proper English to win tenure and promotion) and a freeway flyer in Denver is earning the same nominal salary teaching feminist theory at three or four Denver area colleges (whether his marginal value product has been accurately evaluated is left to the reader as an exercise; he was not happy about the prospects of never being able to draw a pension.)
Arizona's administration (motto: lots of lottery players but we let an Economics Nobel get away) is already doing damage control.
The program clearly reflects the mind-set of the producers that the spillover benefits of higher education are something worth buying, a perspective that clearly comes out in this comment producer John Merrow makes to interviewer Tavis Smiley. (Hat tip: University Diaries.)
Yes, higher education has a performance problem and an image problem. But there might be more than one way to address those problems.
Other commentary on the documentary available at Phantom Professor, King at SCSU Scholars, Ian at Truck and Barter, and Panopticon.
Much of the content is a video version of this New York Times article, still available to readers, which I commented on in April, and now that I've seen the in-class transponders and what the learned astronomer did with them, I do want to get some. The Times writers spent more time at Arizona than at the other three colleges featured, Western Kentucky, Amherst (and the video folks correctly pronounced the silent "h," forsooth!) and Community College of Denver, and some of the vignettes from the other colleges (a documentary is at best a collection of anecdotes, there is nothing systematic here) prove instructive.
The president of Western Kentucky, who has the look of a televangelist about him, was very open about his responsibility. An interviewer asked him about retention, and he was honest enough to note that absent students enrolling and continuing, legislative support would not be continuing. But that puts the faculty in a difficult position; an assistant professor has a principles of macroeconomics class in which a few students are capable of 96 points on a 100 point quiz, but the class mean is about 55, which he treats as a C. Such grading policies might run counter to another Western Kentucky initiative that received some attention, the recruitment of merit scholars. Why take a full ride at a mid-major if your grades are inflated and the content might be
Arizona's administration (motto: lots of lottery players but we let an Economics Nobel get away) is already doing damage control.
The program clearly reflects the mind-set of the producers that the spillover benefits of higher education are something worth buying, a perspective that clearly comes out in this comment producer John Merrow makes to interviewer Tavis Smiley. (Hat tip: University Diaries.)
The other thing that's happening is that, well, back at the time of the G.I. Bill, this country said education is a significant investment, a public investment, a worthwhile public investment. It's a good thing for Tavis to get educated, for John, and so on, because the whole country benefits. And we kept on doing that up until about the time Ronald Reagan became president, when people realized, hey, wait a minute. If this guy goes to college, he makes a lot more money, let him pay for it. And so for the last 25 years, we've been withdrawing the public investment so that now, as some wag put it, a rich white kid, dumb white kid, has as good a chance of getting into a top college as a poor smart nonwhite kid. So we're limiting access. So two things are happening. One is the standards aren't as high as they need to be, and the second is that your economic status is becoming your educational destiny. That's a bad thingPerhaps it is no accident that the documentary followed a macroeconomist. A microeconomist might make one of the following points. First, to the extent that that university graduates make more money, the "social contract" is a net transfer to the middle and upper income brackets ... I think that's called "regressive" in the slightly normative world of public finance. Second, to the extent that university graduates are more culturally competent, they might have learned that in kindergarten ... the marginal social benefits are nonexistent. Third, to the extent that graduation rates are lower for "Juanita and Carlos and Tavis," might that be a consequence of universities pursuing their vision of diversity by lowering admission standards for some people, setting them up to fail? Fourth, to the extent that the returns to education are specific to ability rather than to institution (a point the documentary makes when it notes that "prestige" is not the same thing as "performance") mightn't the merit aid Mr Merrow criticizes simply be a continuation of the social contract by new means, particularly if less prestigious but better performing universities attract sufficiently many strong students that some combination of student pressure and faculty toughness leads to improvements in the teaching and learning? The documentary notes both the non-aggression pact between party animals and researchers and the enthusiasm those same researchers have for working with the inspired students. Finally, who says that the return to a university degree will always and ever be there to exploit. Whether the high return is a speculative bubble or not, the existence of a premium for one type of worker provides an incentive to substitute. Long ago, the Luddites objected to textile machinery that could be serviced by less-skilled operatives, something that may have peaked with Fordism and time-and-motion studies, a development that lowered the premium to skill and which permits Thirteenth Generation sub-literates to earn tattoo money selling those fries you want with that sandwich simply by touching the picture on the screen. The premium to skill might be on a twenty-year rise but, again, to quote from the documentary, "past performance is no guarantee of future results."
for America.
Yes, higher education has a performance problem and an image problem. But there might be more than one way to address those problems.
Other commentary on the documentary available at Phantom Professor, King at SCSU Scholars, Ian at Truck and Barter, and Panopticon.
REMIND ME AGAIN, THIS IS A CUSHY JOB. The New York Times's Alan Finder investigates difficulties U.S. university students have understanding their foreign-born teaching assistants.
The article focuses on the steps being taken by universities, sometimes with the coaxing of trustees, or of legislators, to ensure that graduate assistants are sufficiently proficient in spoken English to be able to take questions and improvise, skills that native speakers often would do well to refine. Meep Meep .... has further thoughts along those lines.
There is, however, no investigation of the following situation, which I have encountered more than once. The student finds it easier to complain about difficulties understanding "take rrimit, goes to jhero" in quiz section than to make the effort to comprehend what "if abs(x-c) < ?(delta), then abs(f(x)-L) < ?(epsilon)" means in the first place, which might mean sitting down with pencil, paper, and book open for a while. (What would Kronecker make of my efforts to get a delta and an epsilon into the post here?)
Those are the same two decades over which the conventional wisdom has been university professors are underworked and overpaid. Why haven't U.S. students, who are quite good at discovering everything else easy, swarming into the graduate programs? (Whether social justice math and other deducationist fads are confounding effects will be left to the reader as an exercise.)With a steep rise in the number of foreign graduate students in the last two decades, undergraduates at large research universities often find themselves in classes and laboratories run by graduate teaching assistants whose mastery of English is less than complete.
The issue is particularly acute in subjects like engineering, where 50 percent of graduate students are foreign born, and math and the physical sciences, where 41 percent of graduate students are, according to a survey by the Council of Graduate Schools, an association of 450 schools.
The article focuses on the steps being taken by universities, sometimes with the coaxing of trustees, or of legislators, to ensure that graduate assistants are sufficiently proficient in spoken English to be able to take questions and improvise, skills that native speakers often would do well to refine. Meep Meep .... has further thoughts along those lines.
There is, however, no investigation of the following situation, which I have encountered more than once. The student finds it easier to complain about difficulties understanding "take rrimit, goes to jhero" in quiz section than to make the effort to comprehend what "if abs(x-c) < ?(delta), then abs(f(x)-L) < ?(epsilon)" means in the first place, which might mean sitting down with pencil, paper, and book open for a while. (What would Kronecker make of my efforts to get a delta and an epsilon into the post here?)
INNUMERACY IN THE NAME OF SOCIAL JUSTICE UPDATE. Joanne Jacobs reports that Diane Ravitch's essay on ethnomathematics (exp(i pi) + 1 = 0, thus the world is unjust?) is now available in full at Opinion Journal.
25.6.05
A SURVIVAL OF MORE INNOCENT DAYS? Owen at Boots and Sabers discovers that many senior administrators in the University of Wisconsin system have "backup jobs."
Traditionally, deans, provosts, and chancellors (using the Wisconsin terminology) are senior members of the faculty given additional responsibilities that they might hold by virtue of their long experience and wisdom (although that tradition might have died with Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, who faced some campus unrest in his time) who might hold such positions for a few years before returning to faculty. (There is at least one former president and one former dean of Arts and Sciences who returned to faculty at Northern Illinois rather than retire as a flag officer or jump to another university; they both may have been happier for it.)
Methinks Owen doth protest too much:
More precisely, road foremen return to engine service, or, more generally, supervisors return to bargaining unit jobs all the time. On the other hand, mid-level university administrators (holding positions other than department chairman, dean, provost, chancellor) sometimes are failed scholars, frequently from disciplines with large reserve armies of the underemployed, and sometimes hired for purposes that may or may not be central to the university's mission. Whether those mid-levels ought to be accorded the same protections as accomplished faculty (who sometimes deserve it; there is a reason one traditionally greets the newly seated chairman or dean with condolences) is another matter.
Traditionally, deans, provosts, and chancellors (using the Wisconsin terminology) are senior members of the faculty given additional responsibilities that they might hold by virtue of their long experience and wisdom (although that tradition might have died with Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, who faced some campus unrest in his time) who might hold such positions for a few years before returning to faculty. (There is at least one former president and one former dean of Arts and Sciences who returned to faculty at Northern Illinois rather than retire as a flag officer or jump to another university; they both may have been happier for it.)
Methinks Owen doth protest too much:
Only in the warped world of government work would anything like this be considered acceptable. Do you know what happens in the private sector when employees “don’t measure up or if they do things to embarrass their institution?” They get fired.Rene Lachmann.
More precisely, road foremen return to engine service, or, more generally, supervisors return to bargaining unit jobs all the time. On the other hand, mid-level university administrators (holding positions other than department chairman, dean, provost, chancellor) sometimes are failed scholars, frequently from disciplines with large reserve armies of the underemployed, and sometimes hired for purposes that may or may not be central to the university's mission. Whether those mid-levels ought to be accorded the same protections as accomplished faculty (who sometimes deserve it; there is a reason one traditionally greets the newly seated chairman or dean with condolences) is another matter.
KELO-BYTES. Paul at Electric Commentary, who gave me the idea for this post title as well as a link here (danke sehr!) has links to additional commentary on the case. Voluntary Xchange and Lynne at Knowledge Problem do some linking and thinking. Nathan Newman has a differing perspective in defense of the ruling.
THINKING ABOUT THE CLASS OF 2012. En route to Galesburg's Railroad Days (there will be more refrigerator cars on the yard lead tonight) I stopped for coffee in Princeton, which has a train station on the main line of the Burlington Route, and a tiger for a mascot (the local high school team. No creativity there. Galesburg's teams are the Silver Streaks, and I've always admired Kirkland Hiawatha nearby. That's class.) The local paper is rather pretentious about making its online content available; you may struggle with its registration script if you wish to check this report. Anyway, the headline story for the Saturday paper is the principal of the John F. Kennedy Elementary School in Spring Valley taking issue with a statement by a member of the Hall High School board who had the effrontery to say "We're stepping backward to educate the freshmen who should have been educated in eighth grade." The principal's riposte: "The effort and pride in which [c.q.] our teachers put into their job is undeserving of negative comments made in a public forum." Apparently some students are finishing high school with the equivalent of ninth grade language arts as their final English course.
I'm surprised this grade school superintendent, also quoted in the story, hasn't been selected forcorrective labor sensitivity training. "No matter how hard we try as educators, there are some people who just can't be reached. Some of these children fall in that 'bell curve' area, where they will always have to work twice as hard as their peers to stay at grade level."
Well, perhaps those teachers aren't making the proper motivational effort. The right-side sub-story reports on the trial of former Hall High biology teacher Gina Purvis, who "was indicted Dec. 15, 2004, by a Bureau County grand jury on one Class 2 felony of aggravated criminal sexual abuse with a 15-year-old male student. She was indicted Feb. 9 on four more Class 1 felonies of committing acts of sexual conduct with the same student.
Puts this Phantom Professor tale about the design of an entry examination for majors in perspective, these stories do.
I'm surprised this grade school superintendent, also quoted in the story, hasn't been selected for
Well, perhaps those teachers aren't making the proper motivational effort. The right-side sub-story reports on the trial of former Hall High biology teacher Gina Purvis, who "was indicted Dec. 15, 2004, by a Bureau County grand jury on one Class 2 felony of aggravated criminal sexual abuse with a 15-year-old male student. She was indicted Feb. 9 on four more Class 1 felonies of committing acts of sexual conduct with the same student.
Puts this Phantom Professor tale about the design of an entry examination for majors in perspective, these stories do.
INDUCEMENTS TO SPRAWL? DeKalb County ranks 73rd in Progressive Farmer's ranking of the best rural counties in the United States, many of which are attracting tract houses and all the other impedimentia of what the environmentalists call "sprawl" and the real estate hustlers call "development." The Chronicle writers must have been in a bit of a hurry; our westerly neighbor Ogle County ranks a little higher on this list, contrary to what they assert.
THE SUPERINTENDENT KNOWS HIS EMUS. Suppose you do a Google search on "virgin pendolino compared to thalys." Gets you here fast as a Hiawatha!
23.6.05
WHO WILL RID US OF THOSE ANNOYING ECONOMISTS? Via Newmark's Door, an essay by Ohio's Richard Vedder.
Colleges have devoted relatively little new funding over the past generation to the core mission of instruction (spending only 21 cents of each new inflation-adjusted dollar per student on it), preferring instead to assist research, hire more nonacademic staff, give generous pay increases, support athletics and build luxurious facilities. And while in the private sector companies have learned to get more work out of fewer employees, the opposite appears to have happened in higher education. In 1976 American education employed three nonfaculty professional workers (administrators, counselors, librarians, computer experts) for every 100 students; by 2001 that number had doubled.I haven't seen much evidence of choices 1 or 3 in my department. On the other hand, the class lists get longer year by year.
College is still a decent individual investment, certifying that the graduate meets minimum standards (often missing in high school) for competence, intelligence, maturity and literacy. But we should rethink the nature and magnitude of public support for universities. State governments, facing rising Medicaid bills and demands for primary and secondary education funding, are already slashing their support. I hope and expect this trend to continue. Big changes are coming to higher education. They are overdue.What's funny is that Professor Vedder is author of a book called Going Broke by Degree: Why College Costs Too Much. Does that refer to the out-of-pocket costs positional arms-racing parents face, or the opportunity costs of the 40% defect rate he refers to elsewhere in his article, something that might be ameliorated by changing the financial calculus facing marginal students?
CORPORATE WELFARE IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST? Lots of reaction to the Supreme Court's ruling in favor of New London, Connecticut using its eminent domain powers to redevelop its waterfront. Paul at The Electric Commentary, who does not like the ruling, provides numerous links to other objections. The Insta Pundit (who is a law professor) has a quick reaction here with links to the first set of reactions, additional links here, and an extended commentary at his MSNBC site. Key observation:
That appears to be Nathan Newman's point as well.It used to be that tax revenues were to be spent promoting the public good. Now, apparently, they're a public good in and of themselves.
To be fair, today's decision isn't a huge departure from previous law, which has been creeping in this direction for nearly a century.
The Supreme Court once again did its job by doing nothing, upholding a local eminent domain action in New London, CT. As the five Justices in the majority noted, "It is not for the courts to oversee the choice of the boundary line nor to sit in review on the size of a particular project area."An elaboration from an earlier post brings in one dimension of the welfare economics of eminent domain.
But we don't want a legal standard that poor people can lose their homes to eminent domain (as happened without legal protest during the age of "urban renewal"), but middle class people have a key to the courthouse to overturn local planning decisions. You can bet that if the Supreme Court jumps into this game, planning decisions to create jobs for poor people will be struck down in the future.On the other hand, Professor Bainbridge identifies another dimension: although takings under eminent domain must be compensated at market value, those takings, by definition, are displacing extramarginal sellers.
First, it fails to take into account the subjective valuations placed on the property by people whose families have lived on the land, in at least one case, for a 100 years. In other words, if the Supreme Court rules for the city, the government will be able to seize land at a price considerably below the reservation price of the owners. Second, unlike the prototypical eminent domain case, in which the land is seized to build, say, a school or road, in this case the city is using eminent domain to seize property that will then be turned over to a private developer. If this new development increases the value of the property, all of that value will be captured by the new owner, rather than the forced sellers. As a result, the city will have made itself richer (through higher taxes), and the developer richer, while leaving the forced sellers poorer in both subjective and objective senses.There is one additional dimension to the use of eminent domain, something economists refer to as the hold-up. Put simply, if somebody holds assets that are instrumental in making a project successful, that holder can extract all the rents of the project by holding out for a price in excess of the equilibrium price. That is a behavior one would also expect of the extramarginal seller. How, then, to distinguish a genuine extramarginal seller from a hold-up artist? Does eminent domain exist to eliminate that information cost? But ... should it be used to augment the tax increments a city government seeks, or to move people around in accordance with the aesthetic preferences of that government, as was the case with much of the urban renewal Mr Newman alludes to?
WE HAVE MORE IMPORTANT ISSUES TO DEBATE. A Constitutional amendment to criminalize flag desecration? Right Wing Nut House isn't impressed.
The people who desecrate the flag by burning it are not worth defending. But what the flag stands for is. That’s why I sincerely hope that cooler heads prevail in the Senate and this amendment is consigned to the trash bin where it belongs.Mitch at Shot in the Dark suggests a corollary to answering speech with more speech.
Better idea: Calling "Extinguishing Burning Flags" a form of "Performance Art", and making sure dozens of "artists" attend all moonbat rallies, bearing fire extinguishers.With illustrations.
WELCOME WISCONSIN VISITORS. Greetings, visitors from Public Brewery and The Electric Commentary.
GET UP, GET UP, GET OUT OF HERE ... multiple times, and the Brewers send the flatlanders home one run short. What's it going to be tonight, the Black Bavarian or the Triple Bock?
QUOTE OF THE DAY comes from University Diaries.
There are a number of other observations about so-called "productivity" enhancements, but Professor Allitt's closing suggestion is a tad optimistic.
Powerpoint, UD has always felt, is ideally designed for autistics.There's more.
Powerpoint caters not only to the autistic but - much like television - to the retarded. It is slow, redundant, and has pictures.An article by Patrick Allitt (the author of I'm the Teacher, You're the Student) on the free side of the Chronicle of Higher Education includes the Superintendent's pet peeve about any presentation that uses "slides" (which are supposed to be projected from 80-count trays to railfans, but I digress) whether of the Power Point variety or the overhead version.
At a medical-history conference last year, I was the only history professor in a group of doctors. Many of them were good amateur historians, but all of them were cursed with a dependency on PowerPoint, which seems to exercise an even stronger appeal among physicians and scientists than among professors of the humanities and social sciences. Every word the doctors spoke was duplicated on a screen above their heads. It was numbingly repetitive.Not to mention rendering the presenters redundant -- they could have hired a reader and stayed home to do more research. There's also an anecdote about the usual joys of booting up a so-called smart classroom, and the learning opportunities lost.
Don't we know that?How much better the class would have been with no more than a blackboard and a few sheets of paper! Note taking would have been silent; students would have talked to the teacher and each other, would have concentrated on the substance rather than the technology, and would have had more time -- not less -- to devote to their work. Best of all, a warm atmosphere of collective endeavor would have displaced the anonymity and chill that the machines created.
I talked with the professor afterward, and he acknowledged that technology could be a distraction as well as an aid. He added that, although his was a writing-intensive class, the students didn't like to write, and that they wrote badly. Every college teacher knows it. The current generation of students has devoted thousands of hours to mastering computers but hasn't learned how to maintain verb-tense consistency in a sentence, hasn't learned not to follow a singular subject with a plural verb, knows almost none of the more-advanced rules of grammar, and uses apostrophes with chaotic caprice.
There are a number of other observations about so-called "productivity" enhancements, but Professor Allitt's closing suggestion is a tad optimistic.
Experiment with a no-Web, no-e-mail semester. You'll love it, and your dean will love you, as she realizes that some of the money previously allocated to buying unnecessary new devices can now be devoted to scholarships and salary increases instead.That is, if your department has sufficient budget for paper handouts. And it is naive to expect that anybody who actually does the work will benefit by the savings. Watch those go for directors of diversity who can go on leave for seven months, or for additional purveyors of crying towels to those students whose fragile egos have been shattered by those mean professors.
22.6.05
AN OVALTINE SHAKE TONIGHT. Brewers 9, Cubs 4. The Sprecher is in the cooler for week's end; there's work to be done.
THE WATER WAR SPREADS. Thickly settled parts of Illinois and Wisconsin are close enough to Lake Michigan to benefit by the cooling easterly breezes, but when it comes to using the lake water, many of those places might as well be in the Mojave Desert. The Xoff (Christoff, for newbies, not cutoff) Files have discovered a particularly nasty spat bubbling in the yuppified southwest suburbs of Milwaukee. By international treaty, water may be piped from the Great Lakes only to locations in the Great Lakes watershed. The subcontinental divide, west of which water goes to the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico, runs very close to Lake Michigan (the Des Plaines River connects to the Mississippi, and in the Milwaukee area the subcontinental divide is a pronounced ridge just west of Sunny Slope Road offering good views of downtown. Some Milwaukee suburbs (this is probably true of some of the Chicago suburbs) straddle the divide, and here is where the treaty revision fun begins.
The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, which serves readers on both sides of the subcontinental divide, considers the possibility that prices provide information.
The water war, however, is causing remoter precincts to take sides. Here's the Green Bay Press-Gazette take.
Under the proposed agreement, all of the City of New Berlin, because the Great Lakes basin boundary literally runs across that city, will be considered in the basin as a so-called 'straddling' community. This is new language added by the agreement's drafters.If adopted by all the governing bodies, New Berlin would be able to obtain Lake Michigan water without a formal diversion procedure, and would only require the approval of the state of Wisconsin for such a withdrawal.The City of Milwaukee currently sells Lake Michigan water to the City of New Berlin for use in its eastern, in-basin portion.If you're prepared to grant the idea of a straddling community, why not a straddling county?
The drafters have created another new category -- straddling COUNTIES -- whose municipalities are eligible to apply for exceptions from the no-diversion-outside-the-basin rule because some of their county is in the basin, and some of the county is outside. Eastern Waukesha County makes the entire county a straddling county under this definition, so municipalities in Waukesha County can apply for diversions even if, like the City of Waukesha, the applicant municipality lies outside the basin.The post goes on to note a number of stipulations about conservation and return of water to the basin from which it was drawn in proportion to use, although, curiously, the role of prices as incentives to conserve never comes up. Not surprisingly, the policy positions of local newspapers, which may or may not be representative of local preferences, is literally divided. The Waukesha Freeman, located west of the divide in what has at times been the fastest-growing suburban county in the U.S., wants to dip its straw.
When cooler heads are allowed to analyze this concept, it will certainly come to the surface that allowing the hookup to Lake Michigan is preferable to continuing to drain down the underlying water supplies in the shallow and deep aquifers through continued well digging.Well, yes, and many people will tell you that a plastic pig is preferable to a Miata, but again oughtn't we talk about the prices at which people act on their preferences?
The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, which serves readers on both sides of the subcontinental divide, considers the possibility that prices provide information.
Adversely affect? Getting up early adversely affects me. But I'm well paid for doing so. (And don't get me started on federal disaster relief, this post is long enough already.)This is not a question of preventing people from living where they want to live. Want to live on a mountaintop or on the side of cliff? Go ahead. Just don't expect the rest of us to pay for trucking your building materials to the top of the mountain or to rebuild the place when it slides off the cliff.
Communities in Waukesha County have seen an explosion of growth because the county is a great place to live. Good schools, low crime, lovely lakes and streams, lots of open space.
But as that space fills up, there is more pressure on the landscape, including the water table, which apparently is being drained faster than the rains can replenish it. Which means that residents are going to have to start paying the real costs of all that development.
This is not to say that water diversions should be barred out of hand. Keeping the communities of Waukesha County thriving is essential to the economic success of the entire region. A deal involving diversion is certainly possible - Waukesha County Executive Dan Finley has already raised some intriguing possibilities - as long as the result doesn't adversely affect the Great Lakes or the people on its shores.
The water war, however, is causing remoter precincts to take sides. Here's the Green Bay Press-Gazette take.
Here we have the assertion that growth exceeds supply, without any discussion of pricing. These writers, at least, are honest enough to admit that their situation is different; in fact, the Great Lakes basin extends to at least the Wolf River, well west of Green Bay. Again, one has to ask about the pricing: there is plenty of hardscrabble farmland west of Green Bay and east of the Wolf that might have potential for subdivisions.Forget it.
It all sounds too much like a slippery slope to faraway states with water shortages potentially exploiting the lakes.
Until now, only communities in the basin — the area where water naturally drains to the lakes — were allowed to tap them for their water supply. Green Bay gets its water from Lake Michigan, and the suburban Central Brown County Water Authority plans to do the same next year when its pipeline is completed to Manitowoc.
The draft agreement among governors of the Great Lakes states and Canadian provinces would bend the existing rules to let communities straddling the basin tap in as well.
Fast growing Waukesha County west of Milwaukee is one of them. Parts of it are inside the basin, but the city of Waukesha is not. Its water flows to the Mississippi River.
Apparently oblivious to the fact that the available groundwater supply had its limits, the city allowed growth to exceed the water supply and now finds itself in a bind. So, it's making its case for lake water — and fretting about the cost of infrastructure if it has to return it to the lake.
Waukesha is in the same spot that some Central Brown County Water Authority communities found themselves — with limited or poor-quality groundwater and the need to find a new supply. But, here, they have the good fortune of being solidly in the basin.
IT'S AIRSHOW SEASON and Country Pundit finds a source of aircraft cheesecake (the airplanes themselves, not the nose art!) that recommends the aesthetics of the Messerschmidt ME-262 Schwalbe. Preservationists are building an entirely new series of these jets.
Apparently the weakness of these things was in lining 'em up for landing and getting 'em flying.
Apparently the weakness of these things was in lining 'em up for landing and getting 'em flying.
GIVE ME CHOPIN, FRANKIE YANKOVIC, AND DA CRUSHER. French trades unionists apparently raised the spectre of outsourcing plumbing to migrant Poles (merde!) as one reason to reject the European Union constitution. Tom Palmer (via Electric Commentary) has discovered a marvelous counter-campaign by the Polish National Tourism Office.
21.6.05
A MATHEMATICIAN IS AN ORGANISM FOR CONVERTING COFFEE INTO THEOREMS. Look out, this train of thought is an attempt to clean out the yard, at the sacrifice of some order, although there is a rough logic to what follows.
Start with a rather silly story in the Washington Post about the effect of a daily Starbucks on the debt burden of law students. Jeff at Quid nomen illius? points to a thorough rebuttal by David at OxBlog. (The Superintendent would only object that the sight of a stressed-out law student nursing a Starbucks might elicit something other than his choice of hope or the Post writer's choice of pity.) University Diaries offers a convex combination of Whitman and Reader's Digest by way of comment.
Professor Althouse draws a contrast between a one-time splurge and a daily investment in something useful.
The trackbacks at Professor Plum are worth a look; via Instructivist I find a Sapient Educator post that sums it up, so to speak.
RUNNING EXTRA: Sorry, that link I thought I had to the full article isn't available.
Start with a rather silly story in the Washington Post about the effect of a daily Starbucks on the debt burden of law students. Jeff at Quid nomen illius? points to a thorough rebuttal by David at OxBlog. (The Superintendent would only object that the sight of a stressed-out law student nursing a Starbucks might elicit something other than his choice of hope or the Post writer's choice of pity.) University Diaries offers a convex combination of Whitman and Reader's Digest by way of comment.
Professor Althouse draws a contrast between a one-time splurge and a daily investment in something useful.
By contrast, it seems extremely sensible to buy years of a daily pleasure, which gives you some nutrition and focuses your mind and which gets you out of your little room or the library and puts you in a bustling, social environment, where you have your own little table and can get some good studying done.That is, if you're capable of good studying. Here we switch from poring over Smyth v. Ames or Jarndyce v. Jarndyce to converting that coffee into theorems. I should think that the production of theorems would require knowledge of the following things: factors, factoring, fallacies, finite decimal, finite set, formulas, fractions, and functions. But where the younglings ought be first encountering these things, in some curricula what they are instead encountering are families (in poverty data), fast food nutrition data, fat in fast food, feasibility study, feeding tours, ferris wheel, fish, fishing, flags, flight, floor plan, flower beds, food, football, Ford Mustang, franchises, and fund-raising carnival. That's from a Diane Ravitch article in the Wall Street Journal (King at SCSU Scholars has a link to an excerpt; I may (or not!) have a working link to the whole thing on my office computer.) Professor Plum went into the fever swamps of education "theory" (move along, no theorems here) to find a course outline for a graduate course in "Teaching Mathematics for Social Justice" offered at Northeastern University, in which the readings are representative of recent educationist fads and require no prior understanding of Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments or Rawls's Theory of Justice, let alone Durkheim or Weber or Adorno, and apparently Euclid or Euler or Goldbach don't figure in the pedagogy.
Have you had your Pepto today?This introductory course explores principles of social justice in education as a lens in rethinking school mathematics. The course will provide participants with
a) an opportunity to expand their knowledge and awareness of issues of social justice in the context of mathematics education;
b) an opportunity to develop a pedagogical model for teaching for social change;
c) a process to critically examine the content of school mathematics curriculum and instructional practices from the perspective of social justice;
d) an opportunity to contemplate on the role of the teacher as an agent of change and “transformative intellectual”.
Throughout the course we will emphasize the relationship between theory and practice in an attempt to understand some of the complexities and challenges in addressing issues of social justice in mathematics teaching and learning.
The trackbacks at Professor Plum are worth a look; via Instructivist I find a Sapient Educator post that sums it up, so to speak.
If progressive educators and multiculturalist continue to get their way, the unintended effect will result in many poor and impoverished American students not receiving the type of education needed to break the cycle of poverty. In addition, the United States will continue to rank near the bottom when compared with other industrialized nations in academic achievement.One wonders if that hypothesis qualifies as an issue of social justice.
RUNNING EXTRA: Sorry, that link I thought I had to the full article isn't available.
REVEALED (EXPENSE) PREFERENCES. Charlie Sykes links to two stories that lead him to question pleas of poverty by the University of Wisconsin system.
One deals with the Fine Arts Quartet, who are artists-in-residence at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee with an arrangement comparable to that enjoyed by the Vermeer Quartet at Northern Illinois. That arrangement has been the subject of some acrimony in the music department as well as some scorn from Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel art critics Cary Spivak and Dan Bice.
The consultants' specific recommendation:
Their existence can be a source of rancor, as Messrs. Spivak & Bice report.
Then there's the Diversity Boondoggle, which diverts more resources for less return than a string quartet. Hell, more for less than a wind trio. Case in point: Wisconsin-Madison's former vice-chancellor for student affairs, now a special assistant to the chancellor, who recently took a seven-month leave occasioned by a student affair that went bad, as often happens when one goes fishing off the company pier. University officials noted that, as this student affair was consensual, involving a student who was a university employee in a different division, not reporting to the vice-chancellor, and thus not actionable, despite the following language in the university's harassment policy: "Power differentials between the parties in a consensual romantic and/or sexual relationship may cause serious consequences." Don't you just love the possibility that fishing off the company pier can be sexual without being romantic: the rabbit culture forsooth! And the student in this tryst has a power card of her own to play. "I'm boinking the Director of Diversity. Give me the grade I deserve at your peril."
So the Director of Diversity took a seven month leave and nobody noticed? Calculation of the return on that investment is left to the reader as an exercise.
But evidently that's more important than, oh, making sure that sufficient sections of Intermediate Accounting or Economics or Music Appreciation are on offer.
RUNNING EXTRA: A commenter recommends the latest from Messrs. Spivak and Bice.
Remind me again why raising tuitions, tightening admission standards, and abolishing the face-saving tenth-week drop are bad ideas.
One deals with the Fine Arts Quartet, who are artists-in-residence at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee with an arrangement comparable to that enjoyed by the Vermeer Quartet at Northern Illinois. That arrangement has been the subject of some acrimony in the music department as well as some scorn from Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel art critics Cary Spivak and Dan Bice.
The musicians carry the title of professor, but it's been years since any of them stood at the front of a UWM lecture hall. They're too important to deal with the riff-raff, a.k.a. undergrads. On rare occasions, before a concert, some members do actually mingle with a handful of the star students in the Department of Music in a sit-down called a master class.No surprise that Mr Sykes would pick up such a column; a frequent theme in his Profscam (details or compare prices) is the professor missing from the classroom, or present only as a lecturer who hives off all the student contact to underpaid graduate assistants and subcontracts the scoring of the scan-trons to the assessment office. The theme returns as counterpoint to an observation in a consulting report Messrs. Spivak & Bice discover.
So, when UWM recently hired a couple of consultants to analyze the music department, it wasn't surprising that the pair cast the spotlight on the Fine Arts Quartet. Their report noted that the quartet is humming along while the rest of the department is suffering from funding shortfalls and a faculty shortage.(A situation not unique to the music program, by the way; word has reached the Superintendent's office of a dearth of intermediate accounting offerings at Milwaukee.)
The consultants' specific recommendation:
"Terminate as soon as possible the commitment to the Fine Arts Quartet. In the current environment of diminishing funding from the state, to have faculty lines consumed by non-teaching roles seems wasteful and detracts from more important uses of resources."Possibly. Mr Sykes, who found it amusing that winners of teaching awards frequently receive a reassignment to work on teaching methods rather than teaching courses, and who was not pleased with reduced teaching responsibilities for accomplished researchers, would no doubt concur. But the existence of artists-in-residence and endowed chairs for researchers (translation: teaching duties limited to graduate seminars and supervision of dissertations) says something about an underappreciated function of higher education, namely, the cultivation of the most talented future performers, experimenters, analysts, and practitioners, as well as about the real preferences of many in the academy. So much for all that talk about "access." The inducement to become truly outstanding in one's field evidently includes an assurance that none but the best students will have access to you, whether you hold a distinguished chair at Harvard, Milwaukee, Marquette, or Barely Normal. There is nothing wrong with distinguished chairs per se, although the consultants correctly note that such positions have opportunity costs.
Their existence can be a source of rancor, as Messrs. Spivak & Bice report.
Well, if you can't make time with the Hiawatha, best bid on a yard engine somewhere. At least management provided some additional yard crews. The dean's compromise sheds some light on how difficult it is to come up with a notion of social justice that the entire university can accept. On the one hand, a faculty with all the status hierarchies of a feudal court offends the sense of justice of the serfs and mendicant monks; on the other hand, to not develop great talent to its fullest potential is an injustice. Although senior administrators at Fine Arts or in Bolton Hall would no doubt quail at being compared to cultivators of the American Beauty rose, their behavior (which is representative of university administrators everywhere) suggests that indeed some pruning of the early buds to make possible the great talents has some value.Back in the day, quartet members actually taught classes, but that changed about five years ago. Other music teachers whined about the sweetheart deal that the quartet members enjoyed by being paid more while being able to cherry-pick which classes they taught.
Robert Greenstreet, then the acting dean for fine arts, came up with the compromise of officially relieving the performers of their teaching duties but throwing the department a bone by letting it hire two professors. Greenstreet, who was out of town Friday, opted to not call us back to provide his review of how the deal has worked out.
Then there's the Diversity Boondoggle, which diverts more resources for less return than a string quartet. Hell, more for less than a wind trio. Case in point: Wisconsin-Madison's former vice-chancellor for student affairs, now a special assistant to the chancellor, who recently took a seven-month leave occasioned by a student affair that went bad, as often happens when one goes fishing off the company pier. University officials noted that, as this student affair was consensual, involving a student who was a university employee in a different division, not reporting to the vice-chancellor, and thus not actionable, despite the following language in the university's harassment policy: "Power differentials between the parties in a consensual romantic and/or sexual relationship may cause serious consequences." Don't you just love the possibility that fishing off the company pier can be sexual without being romantic: the rabbit culture forsooth! And the student in this tryst has a power card of her own to play. "I'm boinking the Director of Diversity. Give me the grade I deserve at your peril."
So the Director of Diversity took a seven month leave and nobody noticed? Calculation of the return on that investment is left to the reader as an exercise.
But evidently that's more important than, oh, making sure that sufficient sections of Intermediate Accounting or Economics or Music Appreciation are on offer.
RUNNING EXTRA: A commenter recommends the latest from Messrs. Spivak and Bice.
Opportunity costs are everywhere. In the music department, other faculty members (the column does not disaggregate by tenure-trackers and freeway flyers) face what the internal review characterizes as "teaching loads that are very high" and uses the term "swamped," presumably to mean that the Fire Marshal determines how many students shall be permitted in a class."The outside reviewers comment on the wisdom of continuing support for the Fine Arts Quartet," said the UWM review of the school's music department. "The problem is that, as far as we can determine, no mechanism exists for a reassessment of whether this support still represents as valuable a resource as it did years ago when established.
"The program needs to consider whether the resources consumed in any effort represent the best use of the resources given the overall programmatic needs."
Remind me again why raising tuitions, tightening admission standards, and abolishing the face-saving tenth-week drop are bad ideas.
IN THE EVENING CAN THE DAY BE PRAISED. The summer solstice coincides with a full moon ... lots of potential for moonbattery, but it was another gorgeous day in Paradise. I've been working away at the research projects I committed to, but if there's a choice between spending more time at a computer or more time at the pool, guess what wins? Thanks for looking in.
16.6.05
A REFRESHER COURSE IN THE PRINCIPLE OF DERIVED DEMAND. In matters of textbook selection, is the professor principal or agent? In the Chronicle of Higher Education, John B. Thompson (via Public Brewery) looks at the economics of the vanity university press. Start with the research monograph.
The main explanation almost certainly lies elsewhere. Research libraries constitute a principal market for scholarly monographs, and in the course of the 1980s and 1990s they were subjected to intense pressures of their own: the steep rise in the prices of scientific journals and the increasing costs of information technology. Library budgets were limited, and something had to give. In the period from 1986 to 1998-99, the number of monographs purchased annually by research libraries in the United States declined by more than 25 percent. Since academic publishers were also producing more monographs each year, that meant that an ever-increasing range of available titles was competing for a dwindling pool of resources.Anybody ever look at the tariffs the academic press use? There was an institutional price for libraries, and an individual price. The institutional price anticipated university libraries being able to draw on indirect cost returns from sponsored returns; the individual price treated the sharable inputs as a free good. The most grasping vice-president of traffic at The Octopus would blush at the value-of-service pricing that resulted. Was it the avarice of the publishing houses or the end of lavish indirect cost returns that changed the calculus?
At the same time, many American university presses were coming under pressure from another source: their host institutions. In the 1970s and 1980s, some began to find themselves faced with growing pressure to reduce their dependence on direct or indirect subsidies and become more autonomous financially -- "self-supporting" was the term often used. Universities faced their own fiscal constraints, and university presses, with their somewhat ambiguous status (were they academic units or business units?), were obvious targets for financial scrutiny.Reading between the lines, I see those indirect cost returns going away. And it took a while for the Principle of Derived Demand to bite on the textbook producers.
But bite, ultimately, it did. (The Superintendent's suspicion remains that grants, whether from the government, or from Mummy and Daddy, make many students less sensitive to textbook prices than they might be. Compare and contrast the price of a widely used paperback version of just about any introductory course textbook with that of any full-color hardback rail enthusiast book with a similar page count to see what I mean.)The professors are the gatekeepers in the marketing chain. But the person who recommends the textbook is not the person who buys it. Hence the considerations that weigh uppermost in the minds of the gatekeepers are not necessarily the considerations that matter most to the students ultimately required to buy the book. The adoption system thus creates a form of non-price competition -- that is, competition among publishers on grounds other than price -- that has shaped the evolution of the textbook-publishing business.
In the attempt to persuade professors to adopt their textbook rather than the textbook of a rival company, publishers have invested more and more resources in producing evermore elaborate and comprehensive textbooks and in developing a range of ancillaries, from instructors' manuals and test banks to packages of software and multimedia products -- the so-called "package wars." But while the struggle for adoptions ratchets up the scale of investment, the only way of generating a return on that investment is through the sale of printed textbooks to students. Most of the electronic and multimedia supplements are given away to professors with the aim of influencing their adoption decisions. Thus the only way to recoup escalating costs has been to concentrate on lower levels of the curriculum, where student numbers are large, and to increase the prices of textbooks. The big textbook publishers have done both. They have concentrated on the first and second years of the college curriculum, and they have commonly increased textbook prices by at least 6 to 8 percent per year. But the increase in prices has tended to fuel a second development, which has played a crucial role in the field of textbook publishing: the growth of the used-book market.
Publishers listened carefully to the gatekeepers because they needed their adoptions to survive, but they didn't pay much attention to students because they assumed that students would buy what they were told to buy. Now the silent partner is demanding to be heard in the only voice that really matters in this game: They are refusing to buy. They regard prices as too high and are inventing all sorts of ways to avoid doing the one thing they are supposed to do, which is to buy the books. They are borrowing books, sharing books, going online to shop around for the cheapest books they can find, and so on. Enterprising jobbers are importing cheaper foreign editions and undercutting the sales of American editions. Textbook publishers are experiencing increasing returns of unsold books and declining levels of "sell-through," the percentage of students who purchase assigned texts.Don't you love bypass and arbitrage? All that's missing is the representative of Harcourt Brace or South-Western or one of the other exploiters of students whinging about cream-skimming and unfair competition. At the same time, the behavior of the commercial publishers has provided an opportunity for the academic presses to profitably offer some works.
The growth in monograph output over the last couple of decades has been driven not by an overall growth in demand but by a combination of other factors (including the demand from academics for credentials that can be used in the tenure-and-review process and the short-term need of presses to meet their sales forecasts). Publishing fewer monographs and concentrating only on works of outstanding quality might result in some friction with local faculty members, and some temporary shortfalls in frontlist revenue, but if it is accompanied by an effective shift of editorial strategy to other kinds of commissioning, it would strengthen the position of the presses in the long run.Yes, steps that would make published research more likely to be read research are steps in the right direction. And here's another opportunity.
The presses could strengthen their positions considerably by focusing their attention on publishing for the higher-education market -- especially for those levels of the curriculum, like upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses, that have been neglected by the big textbook publishers, who have been forced by the logic of their own field to concentrate on the lower levels of the curriculum. The commissioning of textbooks and supplemental texts would not compromise the commitment of the university presses to publish original works of scholarship, but would be complementary to it and entirely consistent with their overall educational mission.Although a university administration that sees some common costs of the university press and the academic units is an administration in a position to engage in all sorts of creative cost allocations ... On the other hand, peer-reviewed textbooks, or research monographs written and edited with a view toward their utility as upper-division textbooks, cannot be all bad. We certainly hear a lot from our spokesmen about the value of the teacher-scholar.
SOME THOUGHTS ON IMMIGRATION. Victor Davis Hanson does not like official neglect of illegal immigration.
And what does one make of this?
Robert Samuelson also has some gripes.
All by way of announcing that one of the immigration papers is headed back to a journal.
The politics are by now surreal. Those of the corporate right want cheap labor. So they join the self-interested multicultural left in politics, journalism and academia who don't mind seeing a growing presence of unassimilated and dependent constituents.But how does one square that with a preceding paragraph in the essay?
Both sides agree that when newcomers arrive legally from Mexico in the thousands, rather than unchecked in the millions, these immigrants become among our best American citizens.That hardly sounds like "unassimilated and dependent." Indeed, the point of the burdensome underground economy along with the difficulties in sneaking in is to discourage precisely those individuals who are least likely to assimilate and most likely to become dependent.
And what does one make of this?
Let's break this down. Remittances include money sent to the old country to buy passage for the rest of the family, something that is in my own family tree. And what is the optimal investment in health care and housing for a prime-aged worker? That second paragraph echoes Jacob Riis a century ago, whose photos of the slums of New York inspired both zoning codes and immigration quotas. Is it really necessary for a prime-age male living away from his family to invest in health insurance that is unavailable to his wife and kids in the Third World, or to live in a split-level suburban house? Is the illegal immigration spawning flight by previous residents to more expensive quarters?For starters, take remittances. Billions of dollars are sent annually back to Mexico from its citizens who come to the United States--one of the largest sources of foreign exchange for the Mexican economy.
But that cash does not come out of thin air. If such transfers aid depressed parts of Mexico, they also drain capital from struggling immigrant communities in the United States. Workers without high school diplomas who send back much of their wages often cannot pay for their own proper health care, education or housing here.
In the American Southwest, entire towns are deprived of critical revenue that could be invested in infrastructure, alleviating the need for state and federal intervention to ensure some sort of parity with American citizens.
Second, when employers hire millions of young laborers from Mexico--often off the books and in cash--poorer American workers cannot organize and thus are left to watch their own static wages eaten up by rising costs.Really?
Which is it? Poorer American workers being raced to the bottom, or entry-level workers deprived of their rites of passage?Finally, there is something elitist in this new idea that American youth should no longer work summers and after-school hours in agriculture, hotels, restaurants and landscaping.
These hard jobs were once seen as ways to gain experience and understand the nobility of hard physical work. An entire generation of Americans is growing up that has never mowed a lawn, pruned a bush or washed a dish.
More frequently it is an uncaring elite--made up of both Democrats and Republicans--that advocates not enforcing immigration laws. And it is past time for them to explain why it is moral or liberal, rather than merely convenient, to import millions outside the law to do the jobs we supposedly cannot.Why? Perhaps there is a rough efficiency -- not mere convenience -- in the use of the underground economy as an apprenticeship to obtain the most productive illegal immigrants as future citizens. The illegality serves as a fig-leaf for the apprenticeship; indentured servant contracts being illegal apart from at graduate school.
Robert Samuelson also has some gripes.
We could do a better job of stopping illegal immigration on our southern border and of policing employers who hire illegal immigrants. At the same time, we could provide legal status to illegal immigrants already here. We could also make more sensible decisions about legal immigrants—favoring the skilled over the unskilled. But the necessary steps are much tougher than most politicians have so far embraced, and their timidity reflects a lack of candor about the seriousness of the problem. The stakes are simple: will immigration continue to foster national pride and strength or will it cause more and more weakness and anger?Yes, but resources have opportunity costs. More expensive fences? More careful vetting of applicants for work permits? More raids of workplaces? Mr Samuelson recognizes this, I think.
Over time, they move into the economic, political and social mainstream; over time, they become American rather than whatever they were—even though immigrants themselves constantly refashion the American identity. But no society has a boundless capacity to accept newcomers, especially when many are poor and unskilled. There are now an estimated 34 million immigrants in the United States, about a third of them illegal. About 35 percent lack health insurance and 26 percent receive some sort of federal benefit, reports Steven Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies. To make immigration succeed, we need (paradoxically) to control immigration.And perhaps that control includes the existence of a notionally illegal but officially winked at underground economy. And here we go again with that "lacking health insurance" stuff. Must healthy people be compelled to buy health insurance? "Receive federal benefits?" Sure. People who are here legally are eligible for government loans, to enlist in the armed services, to drive on the roads ... if there is an illegal-immigrant gravy train, please document it.
All by way of announcing that one of the immigration papers is headed back to a journal.
SHARABLE INPUT FOLLIES. Book Review No. 17 is Stan Abbot and Alan Whitehouse's The Line that Refused to Die, which appears to be out of print. Its primary focus is the political economy of defining the public interest in such a way that the Settle to Carlisle portion of the Midland Railway could be retained as part of the British Rail network rather than as an expensive (and probably doomed) preservation railway. I rode the Settle and Carlisle last fall, although it was not a subject of an extensive report as the overnight trains and the Electroliner descendants provided much more material. That the Settle and Carlisle is a British anticipation of the Lackawanna Cutoff, itself the subject of a more costly campaign to restore the tracks and the passenger trains, which I was unaware of at the time, prompted me to pay more attention to the sesquicentennial-celebrating Semmering Pass.
The economics of the British Rail effort to close the Settle-Carlisle make for amusing reading. Some preliminaries: a railroad presents all sorts of problems of allocating common and joint costs. The starting point for such a problem is the existence of a sharable input. The track that supports a fixed-capacity Electroliner at 4.50 can support a 'Liner Follower of as many standard coaches as required at 5.00, a one car Kenosha Local at 5.10, and the ferry truck service at 5.30. The track can be used to provide different types of outputs at different times of the day, which makes it a sharable input, and we would say that there are economies of scope (this explanation has it part right; I resolved to finish some research papers this summer, thus no amendments headed to Wikipedia from me) in providing railway transportation if the cost C of providing the passenger and freight services together is lower than the cost of providing the same level of each output (non-economists just have to learn to think in ceteris paribus terms) with two kinds of railroads. Formally,
That brings us to two British Rail fiddles in their attempt to close the Settle-Carlisle. In 1982, the authors suggest (p. 62) that British Rail charged to the Settle and Carlisle the entire cost of two additional locomotives and 10 coaches account a re-routing of a Nottingham-Glasgow service over the Settle and Carlisle (absent the Settle-Carlisle, the train would run a different way; absent a train on the Settle and Carlisle, that stock would still have to be paid for.) At the end of 1987 (p. 155) British Rail did not credit the Settle and Carlisle with any division of the revenue from detouring trains or from passengers boarding or detraining beyond the line (the aforementioned Nottingham-Glasgow riders as well as Nottingham-Carlisle or Leeds-Glasgow riders.) Alas, there is no generally accepted economic principle for obtaining the opportunity cost of a sharable input; the best one can do is ask two questions. First, could an equally capable entrant operate a service offering only one of the multiple products more cheaply? That's a test for cross-subsidy; in light of the legal constraints on building railroads, not to mention the irreversibilities involved therein, it's not one easy to conduct, although if you ever hear management of a multiple-product business objecting to an entrant's cream-skimming, you're probably hearing a confession that there is some cross-subsidization going on. Second, would the entire enterprise be more profitable, or lose less money, absent one of the products, with the incremental cost of each product properly identified. That's a full employment provision for industrial economists, notwithstanding the easy formula involved.
There's also an interesting comment at p. 186 on the use of buses as substitutes for trains.
The economics of the British Rail effort to close the Settle-Carlisle make for amusing reading. Some preliminaries: a railroad presents all sorts of problems of allocating common and joint costs. The starting point for such a problem is the existence of a sharable input. The track that supports a fixed-capacity Electroliner at 4.50 can support a 'Liner Follower of as many standard coaches as required at 5.00, a one car Kenosha Local at 5.10, and the ferry truck service at 5.30. The track can be used to provide different types of outputs at different times of the day, which makes it a sharable input, and we would say that there are economies of scope (this explanation has it part right; I resolved to finish some research papers this summer, thus no amendments headed to Wikipedia from me) in providing railway transportation if the cost C of providing the passenger and freight services together is lower than the cost of providing the same level of each output (non-economists just have to learn to think in ceteris paribus terms) with two kinds of railroads. Formally,
C(passenger, freight)(The hostility of Union Pacific to Amtrak suggests the folks in UP's headquarters believe the inequality points the other way.) Because the volume of passenger service and the volume of freight service are under the control of the railroad, one can speak of the opportunity cost of displacing a freight train by running a passenger train (that's the way Union Pacific thinks) or the converse (one of our 115 car unit coal trains takes paths away from five or six express passenger trains is how the Europeans would see it) which makes the cost of the track a common cost. There is a complexity, however. If the passengers all want to travel to work between 6 am and 9 am and return between 4 pm and 7 pm, there are some large windows of time during which there is no point in running any passenger trains; you might looking at something like the trackage into Grand Central Terminal or the Gloucester Branch of the old Boston and Maine, where there's scant reason to run a freight train. The track transports passengers for six hours of the day and sailboat fuel the other eighteen. In this instance, the input takes on properties of a joint cost in which the outputs are produced in fixed proportions (think of a joint of meat: a steer produces two sides of beef and a hide that can be used as leather. One cannot produce more beef without producing more leather. The economics of bulls or cows, which must be combined although not necessarily in fixed proportions to produce steers, is more complicated. In transportation, once a coach has been built with five third-class and three first-class compartments, or a jet with a division of seats between commuter coach and sardine can, something similar arises.) Off-peak pricing of commuter trains, highways (same caveat on this explanation), standby air fares, and roller coasters works because successful entrepreneurs recognize that bygones are forever bygones and any revenue that exceeds the avoidable cost of moving the seat makes the enterprise more profitable. Accountants struggle with all sorts of methods of allocating common and joint costs (any machine that is idle for part of the day, say, because hiring people to work the night shift is too expensive, qualifies) and those methods lead to a number of follies, including the old joke about losing a nickel on each widget but making it up on volume (treat your standard volume as 75% of the estimated daily capability of the machinery, then sell 110% of that estimate) or the depressingly familiar criticism of rapid transit ("Amtrak loses $6 on each passenger. If more people ride, the taxpayers lose more.")< C(passenger, 0) + C(0, freight).
That brings us to two British Rail fiddles in their attempt to close the Settle-Carlisle. In 1982, the authors suggest (p. 62) that British Rail charged to the Settle and Carlisle the entire cost of two additional locomotives and 10 coaches account a re-routing of a Nottingham-Glasgow service over the Settle and Carlisle (absent the Settle-Carlisle, the train would run a different way; absent a train on the Settle and Carlisle, that stock would still have to be paid for.) At the end of 1987 (p. 155) British Rail did not credit the Settle and Carlisle with any division of the revenue from detouring trains or from passengers boarding or detraining beyond the line (the aforementioned Nottingham-Glasgow riders as well as Nottingham-Carlisle or Leeds-Glasgow riders.) Alas, there is no generally accepted economic principle for obtaining the opportunity cost of a sharable input; the best one can do is ask two questions. First, could an equally capable entrant operate a service offering only one of the multiple products more cheaply? That's a test for cross-subsidy; in light of the legal constraints on building railroads, not to mention the irreversibilities involved therein, it's not one easy to conduct, although if you ever hear management of a multiple-product business objecting to an entrant's cream-skimming, you're probably hearing a confession that there is some cross-subsidization going on. Second, would the entire enterprise be more profitable, or lose less money, absent one of the products, with the incremental cost of each product properly identified. That's a full employment provision for industrial economists, notwithstanding the easy formula involved.
Note that the costs of those diesels and coaches providing Nottingham-Glasgow must remain in both terms.Incremental Cost =
C(existing network) - C(network without Settle and Carlisle line).
Incremental Revenue = Current Revenue - Revenue of smaller network.Here one must work out whether the Nottingham-Carlisles, not to mention Nottingham-Glasgows, would ride the longer way 'round in the same volumes.
There's also an interesting comment at p. 186 on the use of buses as substitutes for trains.
The trains would be replaced by National Express coaches, but painted in BR colours. The coach services would call only at the places served by the train and would run to generally similar times. It would be like having a train, but one which used roads as a cheaper alternative to tracks. Again, there seems to have been little thought given to exploiting the flexibility of buses and coaches.In British parlance, a bus offers urban transportation service, and a coach interurban service. In either instance, it is a rubber-tired vehicle with the ability to go, subject to weight and clearance restrictions, anywhere on the road network, something that a train cannot do. The train's advantage is in moving large volumes of people between locations that originate or receive large volumes of people, such as Naperville to downtown Chicago. To the extent that people migrate off the rail network, motor coaches (how's that for a compromise?) provide the transit authority with an ability to adapt to new traffic patterns until the emergent pattern of location offers sufficient volume for a fixed-guideway (generally rail) service.
15.6.05
SIXTY YEARS AGO. Sgt. Karlson's unit will soon finish its occupation duties in Saalfeld and return to Paris. The Pacific War is still in progress, with Iwo Jima serving as an air base, Okinawa still being contested, and the 87th among the European Theater divisions intended to stage to Okinawa in preparation for the invation of Japan.
By now, the men have managed to bring cameras into theater and here are a few pictures.
The Germans did fight hard.
Here two GIs take a break from recovering plane pieces. I don't know what we're looking at, but credit the pilot for keeping most of the crew accommodation intact in the crash landing.
In the background is the house Sgt. Karlson's unit, the Headquarters Battery of the 912th Field Artillery appropriated (in Belgium they asked permission first, in Germany they simply evicted the occupants.)
Here's the observer and radio group for Headquarters Battery.
Sgt. Karlson took the pictures. Some of the other information comes from a notebook his mother maintained for the duration of his hitch. The notebook makes interesting reading in that it lists the contents of assorted care packages (to use a term not yet invented), the dates they were mailed from Milwaukee, and the dates and locations they were delivered. Many did arrive at the front lines before the Germans packed it in.
Stars and Stripes published this abstract of the 87th's work in Europe.
By now, the men have managed to bring cameras into theater and here are a few pictures.
The Germans did fight hard.
Here two GIs take a break from recovering plane pieces. I don't know what we're looking at, but credit the pilot for keeping most of the crew accommodation intact in the crash landing.
Bernie and Willy
In the background is the house Sgt. Karlson's unit, the Headquarters Battery of the 912th Field Artillery appropriated (in Belgium they asked permission first, in Germany they simply evicted the occupants.)
Here's the observer and radio group for Headquarters Battery.
Saalfeld, June 1945
Back row: PFC Frank G. Roberts, radio operator, Swannoa, N.C.; T/5 Clarence C. Van Fleet, fire director, Middletown, N.Y.; PFC Robert Crook, bugler, Meridian, Miss.; T/4 Louis N. Fasula, radio operator, Rotterdam Junction, N.Y.; T/5 Henry E. Gemino, radio operator, Elmont, Long Island, N.Y.; T/5 John F. Reckus, radio operator, Wilkes-Barre, Penn.; T/4 Charles Yesline, radio operator, Pittsburgh, Penn.
Back row: PFC Frank G. Roberts, radio operator, Swannoa, N.C.; T/5 Clarence C. Van Fleet, fire director, Middletown, N.Y.; PFC Robert Crook, bugler, Meridian, Miss.; T/4 Louis N. Fasula, radio operator, Rotterdam Junction, N.Y.; T/5 Henry E. Gemino, radio operator, Elmont, Long Island, N.Y.; T/5 John F. Reckus, radio operator, Wilkes-Barre, Penn.; T/4 Charles Yesline, radio operator, Pittsburgh, Penn.
Center: T/5 Lawrence J. Eckenberger, radio operator, Long Island, N.Y.
Front: T/5 Anthony J. Trapino, radio operator, Madison, Wis.; T/5 Tony Turner, driver, Virginia; Cpl. Douglas R. Cuthbert, radio operator, Coal City, W.V.; Cpl. Frank G. Lunsford, liaison, Ohio; T/5 Elvin A. Dittberner, radio operator, Lodi, Wis.; T/4 Bernard E. Wielechowski, radio operator, Ambridge, Penn.
Sgt. Karlson took the pictures. Some of the other information comes from a notebook his mother maintained for the duration of his hitch. The notebook makes interesting reading in that it lists the contents of assorted care packages (to use a term not yet invented), the dates they were mailed from Milwaukee, and the dates and locations they were delivered. Many did arrive at the front lines before the Germans packed it in.
Stars and Stripes published this abstract of the 87th's work in Europe.
JUST COWBOY UP. Book Review No. 16 is One Nation Under Therapy, by Christina Hoff Sommers and Sally Satel. I did finish it despite this cautionary tale. The book suggests that aggressive therapeutic interventions -- the "grief mythologizers" chasing the ambulances -- immediately after something bad happens might not be optimal for all people. From pp. 189-190:
With so little faith in an individual's natural ability to tolerate emotional pain, the trauma industry is bound to undermine his confidence in his capacity to cope.The conclusion is a bit more polemical. At p. 217:
What is missing from that call to arms is any mention of the role of careful peer-reviewed research to provide the evidence that knowledge-based classrooms are more effective (my sense is that they are, but that's not my area of expertise); that the population is not overwhelmingly Hamlets and Ophelias (contrary to the canard I recall from health class years ago that we're all neurotic in some way?); and that the efficacy of post-traumatic therapies that focus on sucking it up surpasses that of trauma counseling. The book holds forth little hope for such things; one is hard pressed to think of a notionally scientific document more subject to revision by argumetam ad popularum than the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.Sigmund Freud himself once said, referring to the fate of all false ideas, "The voice of the intellect is a soft one but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing." Therapism falters under rational scrutiny; if Freud is right, its hold on the American mind cannot last. But a change in perspective will not come easily. Too many Americans have been convinced, for example, that self-expression is more important than self-control, that nonjudgementalism is the essence of kindness, that psychic pain is a pathology in need of a cure.
Therapism will begin to recede when parents demand knowledge-based instead of feelings-centered classrooms. Its entrenched hold on the country will loosen when conscientious psychologists correct, rather than promulgate, the myth that we are a nation of afflicted Hamlets and Ophelias. It will be weakened when journalists report on post-traumatic growth at least as often as they highlight post-traumatic stress.
YOUR CLASS BIASES ARE SHOWING. Newsweek interviews Danica Patrick.
Bad analogy. That fish already has a bicycle. The interview continues in a similar vein; Ms. Patrick confirms everybody's perception of flatlander drivers, as well as exhibiting some unusual flatlander predilection for reacting to happy news.Are you the Gloria Steinem of racing?
The what? I don't even know who that is. Is that bad?
No, no. She's a famous feminist.
I'm sure that to some people I'm something like that. I'm sure everybody has their opinion about what I am.
AMBITIOUS? Blogs for Industry is putting together a list of tenure-track academicians who maintain weblogs, classified by department and by college. Economics is in Liberal Arts.
SAD INDEED. Matt at Hit and Run picks up some comments from retired Texas A&M economics professor Morgan Reynolds, who argues at Lew Rockwell that the Trade Center had been wired for an implosion. Mitch at Shot in the Dark links to a disclaimer by A&M president Robert M. Gates noting that Professor Reynolds is retired, and not speaking for the University. (Strictly speaking, that is true of any faculty member's work, including refereed publications and Nobel Prize Lectures.)
Professor Newmark provides a link to a useful rebuttal of this claim, which is not new, in Popular Mechanics. (Suggestion: go to the printable format and scroll.) There's a bit more in Henry Petroski's Pushing the Limits, soon to be a book review on these pages, with this simple explanation at p. 174.
What makes this story particularly sad is that Professor Reynolds taught me price theory, using Alchian and Allen's Exchange and Production and Stigler's Theory of Price, works not usually associated with Wisconsin economics; it is in his class that I learned the "shipping the good apples out" and other classics rather than yet another variation on the Viner-Wong diagram. A commenter at Little Green Footballs (via J. C. A. Bambenek, who has a number of other useful links) notes,
Professor Newmark provides a link to a useful rebuttal of this claim, which is not new, in Popular Mechanics. (Suggestion: go to the printable format and scroll.) There's a bit more in Henry Petroski's Pushing the Limits, soon to be a book review on these pages, with this simple explanation at p. 174.
The collapse of the lower floors of the towers under the falling weight of the upper floors occurred for the same reason that a stack of books supported on a coffee table can break that same table if dropped on it from a sufficient height.Do not attempt this experiment with Grandma's keepsake table. Professor Petroski continues,
Within days of the collapse of the towers, failure analyses appeared on the Internet and in engineering classrooms. Perhaps the most widely circulated were the mechanics-based analysis of Zdenek Bazant of Northwestern University and the energy approach of Thomas Mackin at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Each of these estimated that the falling upper structure of a World Trade Center tower exerted on the lower structure a force some thirty times what it had once supported. [You'd thus need a pretty tall ladder to simulate that effect on a table with a stack of books.] Charles Clifton, a New Zealand structural engineer, argued that the fire was not the principal cause of the collapse. He believed that it was the damaged core rather than the exterior tube columns that succumbed first to the enormous load from above. Once the core support was lost on the impacted floors, there was no stopping the progressive collapse, which was largely channeled by the structural tube to occur in a vertical direction.Much as a controlled implosion would do.
What makes this story particularly sad is that Professor Reynolds taught me price theory, using Alchian and Allen's Exchange and Production and Stigler's Theory of Price, works not usually associated with Wisconsin economics; it is in his class that I learned the "shipping the good apples out" and other classics rather than yet another variation on the Viner-Wong diagram. A commenter at Little Green Footballs (via J. C. A. Bambenek, who has a number of other useful links) notes,
I was hoping this would slide under the radar until Morgan came to his senses. The reason: the good professor is a relative. Age, stress, and a possible grudge against the government have combined to cloud his judgment and cause him to make a public spectacle of himself.I hope his mind will clear. It would be a shame for the man who summed up the case against socialism during the debates over Hillary-care as "it's boring" to be best known for this.
BLOW, YOU OLD BLUE NORTHER. The heat and humidity (not quite up to Taiwan standards, but neither is the air-conditioning) have given way to cooler drier air on northwesterly breezes; might be time to do some practicing with the Laser.
14.6.05
THE NATURE OF PEER REVIEW. Bill at Atlantic Blog has read Freakonomics (which was Book Review No. 13 should you wish to compare notes) and offers some observations.
That I have grumbles is no surprise. Every academic is contractually obligated (really, you can look it up) to piss on another academic's new book, unless the writer is his good buddy, co-author, thesis supervisor, senior colleague (especially if the academic is untenured), upcoming paper discussant, or journal editor, in which case he sucks up.The grumbles are instructive.
TO REITERATE: THE SUPERINTENDENT KNOWS HIS EMUS. A commenter to the first post in this series notes that the German and Italian railways were playing around with luxury streamlined electric and diesel trains during the era of the Flying Yankee and the Comet. True enough, although a flying sandwich and an allusion to a stick in one eye just fail to stir the blood. (Here is the Italian family described in English, scroll down for Mussolini's anticipation of the Electroliner.) But it wasn't until AFTER the Second World War that the Italians came up with a forward view to match this, and the Germans are Johann kommt spätlich at it.
And the story of the Electroliners is more compelling. No fascist megalomania here ... a bankrupt electric railroad orphaned by the Public Utility Holding Company Act inspired by the failure of the Insull power and electric railway holding company that provided the Depression-era Enron-style corporate scandal borrows money from its employees (which was never repaid) to buy two state-of-the-art electric trains just in time for World War II. The North Shore transported many boots to and from liberty at the on-line Great Lakes Naval Training Station, and the railroad managed to stay in operation until just after Wisconsin suffered its most recent loss in the Rose Bowl.
Racine, Wisconsin, 28 September 1957.
And the story of the Electroliners is more compelling. No fascist megalomania here ... a bankrupt electric railroad orphaned by the Public Utility Holding Company Act inspired by the failure of the Insull power and electric railway holding company that provided the Depression-era Enron-style corporate scandal borrows money from its employees (which was never repaid) to buy two state-of-the-art electric trains just in time for World War II. The North Shore transported many boots to and from liberty at the on-line Great Lakes Naval Training Station, and the railroad managed to stay in operation until just after Wisconsin suffered its most recent loss in the Rose Bowl.
NOTICE OF EMBARGO FILED by Mungowitz End.
I will post here only those things that I am willing to stand behind, and believe, in my actual life as Mike Munger, Duke Professor. Since I don't think I have anything interesting to say, in a blog at least, in that voice I don't expect any further blogging on this URL.
PORTLAND HAS MASS TRANSIT, DOESN'T IT? Going Underground identifies a cultural competency that Oregon's administration ought to consider.
Managing Director of the London Underground has just told commuters to take a shower before they get on the tube as an attempt to be more considerate during these "sweltering" summer months.The response from the undergroundlings?
Or why not provide some decent air conditioning instead?Apparently Underground passengers have gripes that are common to transit riders everywhere: seat hogs, aisle blockers, cell-phone yakkers, loud and drunken sports fans.
SLOVENLY HABITS, SLOPPY THINKING? Illini or Huskie? offers a differing point of view on cultural competence.
A San Jose social worker offers yet another hypothesis.
Hint: it can come bundled with a case of chlamydia. And it's not as if I haven't heard this rationalization before, from weak students. Joanne Jacobs links to the kind of "success" these rationalizers enjoy.Suppose it's Saturday night, and you take a stroll down Annie Glidden to Starbusters ... a local college bar. After 5 minutes of casing the joint ... could you really assert that college students DON'T dress for success?
Okay okay okay...so maybe we're not talking about academic success. This is more the type of success that results in a notch in your belt, or a new number in the cell, or a couple free drinks (for some students, the definition of 'success' at a bar is slightly more lurid than I'd like to get into right now...so we'll just leave it riiiiiiight there).
But what is really sad is the rationalizing of the rationalizers coming from the academy.For many, any interest in college and pursuing a career beyond retail or service industry is deferred, even abandoned, in order to maintain champagne tastes on a beer budget. Lacking an identity, they attempt to create their own through expensive clothing and accessories, said Ian Pierpoint, a senior vice president at the Chicago research firm Synovate."
This is the best-dressed, least-able, least-equipped generation ever,'' Pierpoint said. "If you're 24 or 25 and you're still at home, you're not doing a lot of things, like paying your own utilities. They are in some ways very experienced, but they are more coddled than other generations.''
Let's distinguish that hypothesis from a competing hypothesis. Will United Airlines' pensioners really lose their pensions, or will the Pension Benefits Guarantee Trust (managed by the same folks who brought you the Social Security Trust Fund) kick that can down the road so these kids can pay for it later?Jason Leong's [one anecdote in the article] love of everything lavish is emblematic of the country's snowballing obsession with celebrity culture, said Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, author of the upcoming book "Class-Passing: Social Mobility in Film and Popular Culture.'' Many young people, she said, are inspired to live like stars even as the economy becomes more uncertain.
"I don't know if these kids are responding to seeing their parents not getting the pay-offs to the American dream,'' said Foster, a professor of English and film studies at the University of Nebraska. "But if they see that what their parents did is not working, or if they see someone who has worked for 30 years at United Airlines lose their pension, can you blame them?''
A San Jose social worker offers yet another hypothesis.
"It's not that going to school is too hard,'' he said, "it's that it's not easy enough.''Lovely. Yet another call for easing demands and calling it access?
13.6.05
LIVING AT THE EXPENSE OF OTHERS. Destination: Freedom notes that the national government might not be providing any funding for the Hiawatha service, and Illinois is not in a position to come up with any additional money, but Wisconsin might be able to come up with some money. (Is that Frederic Bastiat chuckling in the corner?) That's despite a creditable on-time record and passengers discovering the Mitchell Field station.
It's not as if the airlines can somehow pick up the slack in case the Hiawatha service is cut. I got together with the siblings and brother-in-law to bid farewell to the National Liquor Bar, and my brother the aviator informed me that a flight from MKE to ORD does not follow a rhumb-line course (as they did at one time.) Rather, a plane that departs Milwaukee (assuming it has a landing slot at O'Hare, that's sometimes a heroic assumption) has to get into the instrument landing funnel somewhere in the neighborhood of Madison or of South Bend, depending on the wind conditions. Minimum wheels-up to touchdown time 45 minutes, which is the drive time from the airport to the State Line, and the Hiawatha is passing Six Flags by then ...
And we were just a bit late for a proper farewell to the bar. The Miller was on tap, but the grill had already been closed and scrubbed for sale.
It's not as if the airlines can somehow pick up the slack in case the Hiawatha service is cut. I got together with the siblings and brother-in-law to bid farewell to the National Liquor Bar, and my brother the aviator informed me that a flight from MKE to ORD does not follow a rhumb-line course (as they did at one time.) Rather, a plane that departs Milwaukee (assuming it has a landing slot at O'Hare, that's sometimes a heroic assumption) has to get into the instrument landing funnel somewhere in the neighborhood of Madison or of South Bend, depending on the wind conditions. Minimum wheels-up to touchdown time 45 minutes, which is the drive time from the airport to the State Line, and the Hiawatha is passing Six Flags by then ...
And we were just a bit late for a proper farewell to the bar. The Miller was on tap, but the grill had already been closed and scrubbed for sale.
THE CULTURAL COMPETENCE FOLLIES. University Diaries found a point-counterpoint in the Salem (Oregon) Statesman-Journal in which a state legislator makes a pertinent observation about the University of Oregon's cultural competency initiative.
So what's up at Oregon? The six-year graduation rates at Oregon flirt with 60%, which is not that impressive, although it is above the national average, and the disparities among populations are not as pronounced as they are elsewhere, for example at Northern Illinois. Some of the arguments being offered for the initiative don't appear to make much sense given the comparable defect rates among sub-populations. Wouldn't it make more sense for the Oregon administrators to deal honestly with their 40% defect rate, or push for a higher four-year completion rate? Consider this. That just might work. The reservations Betsy's Page picks up from Joanne Jacobs suggest that what Oregon is considering will not work. The points do call for a bit of fisking.
Exhibits capacity to promote equity of student access and outcomes.
This is a classic canard. Will a faculty member be called on the carpet for suggesting that admitting unprepared students and calling it "access" does not make much academic sense? Will the Office of Harrison Bergeron be evaluating grades to make sure that there are no under- or over-represented populations on the "A" list or on probation?
Advocates for social justice.
That's not as easy as it looks. Consider Wikipedia's observations.
Ability to identify, discuss, and challenge institutional racism and bias.
Oceania grapples with Eastasia, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. One would think that after 30 or 40 years of making "commitment to affirmative action principles" and all that came after preconditions for administrative positions and implicit in "fit" there would be no institutional racism remaining. Biases, on the other hand ... can you say "self-referential?" Are these Silent Generation relics so unsure of their own commitment to their version of "social justice" that everybody else must be alert to their remaining failings?
Ability to receive and integrate critiques of cultural competence.
"Plays well with others" dressed up as a salary review? And so it goes on.
Betsy's Page gets to the plain meaning of the plan.
Before we require teachers to be culturally competent, we need to know what it is, how you measure it, if it is just another educational trend that will be discredited in the future, and how much it will cost.In private correspondence, an Oregon faculty member asked me for suggestions in bringing the reservations some faculty members raised to the attention of the legislature. It appears as if the author of this essay, Rep. Linda Flores of Oregon City, who chairs the state House Education Committee, is someone who is sympathetic to the objections. A professor of education suggests that cultural competence is simply part of effective teaching (but differences in learning style exist among sub-populations as well as within them, nicht wahr?) and worthy of further consideration.
In the meantime, we need to use proven methods to close the achievement gap. High expectations of all students, high standards for students and teachers, and rewards for the many, many excellent teachers we now have -- and respect for each and every person.
Let the battle be over how we define cultural competency, not the need for it.OK. Cultural competence means being able to show up on time, finish your tasks on time, and look like you know what you're doing. Let's continue from there.
So what's up at Oregon? The six-year graduation rates at Oregon flirt with 60%, which is not that impressive, although it is above the national average, and the disparities among populations are not as pronounced as they are elsewhere, for example at Northern Illinois. Some of the arguments being offered for the initiative don't appear to make much sense given the comparable defect rates among sub-populations. Wouldn't it make more sense for the Oregon administrators to deal honestly with their 40% defect rate, or push for a higher four-year completion rate? Consider this. That just might work. The reservations Betsy's Page picks up from Joanne Jacobs suggest that what Oregon is considering will not work. The points do call for a bit of fisking.
This is a classic canard. Will a faculty member be called on the carpet for suggesting that admitting unprepared students and calling it "access" does not make much academic sense? Will the Office of Harrison Bergeron be evaluating grades to make sure that there are no under- or over-represented populations on the "A" list or on probation?
That's not as easy as it looks. Consider Wikipedia's observations.
The concept of Social justice has been politicised and it is sometimes stated proactively as being the promotion of equality through comprehensive government action. In practice, such interventions have not often produced equitable results, resulting in favouritism towards classes of people, restrictions of personal liberty and excessive regulatory burdens. Many critics regard the guarantee of equal outcomes, which is implicit in many social justice movements, as antithetical to the notion of equal opportunity because it frequently requires special, favoured treatment to arbitrary classes of people. Actual justice, they argue, does not penalize success nor reward failure, but holds all persons to the same standards regardless of their race, ethnic origin, financial condition, religion or beliefs.Where is the justice in requiring the faculty to be sensitive to differences in learning styles that correlate with ascriptive characteristics, or in requiring students to learn queer theory, if 1 + rt/1! + (rt)2/2! + (rt)3/3! + (rt)4/4! + ... has no meaning to finance majors?
Oceania grapples with Eastasia, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. One would think that after 30 or 40 years of making "commitment to affirmative action principles" and all that came after preconditions for administrative positions and implicit in "fit" there would be no institutional racism remaining. Biases, on the other hand ... can you say "self-referential?" Are these Silent Generation relics so unsure of their own commitment to their version of "social justice" that everybody else must be alert to their remaining failings?
"Plays well with others" dressed up as a salary review? And so it goes on.
Betsy's Page gets to the plain meaning of the plan.
This is scary. These are all non-objective standards that can be twisted to mean that anyone could be described as "incompetent" in their devotion to cultural diversity. No wonder the professors were very upset about this plan. This newspeak in the plan sounds like a way to punish professors who don't pass all their students with grades distributed equally among racial groups. And if any little darling complains that their professor didn't measure up on one of these criteria, kiss good-bye to tenure.The little darlings, on the other hand, might be left professionally incompetent in the service of an untested theory.
10.6.05
DEVELOPING CULTURAL COMPETENCE. Train-trip days are also days with the early news reports, including a sound bite of Chicago's Mayor Daley the younger playing the "competitiveness" card to encourage the Chicago schools to strengthen the math skills of their charges, lest all the technical jobs go to India and to China. (Sorry, I was not able to turn up a quote on a cursory inspection of the usual sources; the research department will get to working on it anon.) I do want to make some more observations about that cultural competence and related topics as well, but the following occurred to me on-train.
Isn't one purpose of education to develop some cultural competence among students? Mightn't part of that competence be working well with others? OK, let's see where that goes.
1. The working day begins at 8 am. Not 8.03. Not 8.15. Not "whatever." So what excuse does the faculty have for not reprimanding those individuals who cannot bestir themselves to arrive at a 10 am class in time for a 10 am start? (Yes, perhaps a standard of "whenever" might emerge at some time in the future. But it's not the current standard.)
2. Clients expect to receive their reports or their locomotives on a date certain. (See, I can use that therapeutic language, too.) So why be forgiving of "I forgot to bring it" or "my hard drive crashed" or "I left it in the car." Clients don't necessarily pitch a hissy fit when it's late, but they sometimes don't come back. I think that translates as "you're fired."
3. Dressing for success matters. So why go into class (whether as student or professor) looking like you just rolled out of bed and grabbed whatever was near to hand?
These diversity and cultural competence plans often deploy the phrase "social justice." That's a rather challenging concept, as I intend to argue shortly. But first, a question: what justice is there in failing to develop the basic skills to conduct one's affairs competently.
Isn't one purpose of education to develop some cultural competence among students? Mightn't part of that competence be working well with others? OK, let's see where that goes.
1. The working day begins at 8 am. Not 8.03. Not 8.15. Not "whatever." So what excuse does the faculty have for not reprimanding those individuals who cannot bestir themselves to arrive at a 10 am class in time for a 10 am start? (Yes, perhaps a standard of "whenever" might emerge at some time in the future. But it's not the current standard.)
2. Clients expect to receive their reports or their locomotives on a date certain. (See, I can use that therapeutic language, too.) So why be forgiving of "I forgot to bring it" or "my hard drive crashed" or "I left it in the car." Clients don't necessarily pitch a hissy fit when it's late, but they sometimes don't come back. I think that translates as "you're fired."
3. Dressing for success matters. So why go into class (whether as student or professor) looking like you just rolled out of bed and grabbed whatever was near to hand?
These diversity and cultural competence plans often deploy the phrase "social justice." That's a rather challenging concept, as I intend to argue shortly. But first, a question: what justice is there in failing to develop the basic skills to conduct one's affairs competently.
ENTRANCE OF THE GEEPS INTO VALHALLA. A treat in the mailbox when I got home: a special edition of Eisenbahn Journal on the history of the NOHAB diesels ("Rundnasen and Kartoffelkäfer") which turn up in several of the Scandinavian countries, all over the Low Countries, and in Hungary. The issue includes some drawings and specifications (imagine F unit noses and BL2 windows) and some pictures of similar power in Australia, including a unit for Australia's West Coast Railway (scroll down, there's also something reminiscent of the latter-day Boston and Maine) that is just BEGGING for the shield and wing treatment on each nose. (Well, why not? The Victoria's painting is a shameless borrowing from the Erie.) The real clincher, however, is a picture that I will have to scan and post, featuring a preserved G12 demonstrator in multiple with a Norwegian Di 3 (there is video of these motors, order it here; it's GM-lok i Norge.) And when Hell freezes over, those 567s will just keep a'comin!
THE SUPERINTENDENT KNOWS HIS EMUS. Last fall, I characterized the high-speed trains of Europe (Eurostar, ICE, TGV, Thalys, Pendolino) as third-generation Electroliners. Today I was catching up on some railroad reading (what better place to do some railroad reading than on a train?) including a Railway feature on the Pendolinos. (Memo to IPC Group: there might be money in selling content on-line.) I will quote the relevant bits: if you have the October 2004 issue onDeadTree (TM), verify that at p. vi of the centerspread is this.
A Pendolino is in fact a pair of trains coupled back-to-back -- each four cars long and with identical electrical equipment. Much of the equipment is distributed through the four vehicles and the sets are not capable of running with any vehicles missing. The slight exception to this is the extra, ninth, vehicle which has been added to the centre of each set.The Electroliner in the Superintendent's back yard appears to be four cars articulated over five trucks, but it is numbered 801-802. Why two numbers? Because for control purposes, it is set up as two four-motored 75 person cars, one motor per axle, running in multiple and controlled from an XMA-1 sixteen-point controller at either end. (The center truck is not powered. The train provides the capacity of three conventional cars with the power demands of two.) One way to keep a 'Liner moving is to cut out the motors on one unit.
PUSHING PRODUCTIVITY TOO FAR. Northern Illinois University is another institution of higher education that has gone to a four-day week during the summer session (the rationale is to spend a lot less on electricity and air conditioning; one of these days the private sector will discover the backward-bending supply curve and end the work week at noon on Friday. Those of you with long memories will recall when the work week ended at noon on Saturday for most people; the Fair Labor Standards Act simply institutionalized an economic phenomenon in progress. But I digress) which meant I had no guilt slipping away to explore the newest exercise in intermodalism: the Amtrak Hiawatha to Milwaukee's Mitchell Field. There is a special timetable in force making allowances for Form B work (engineering possessions, for my continental readers, which can be done under traffic in North America) keeping the corridor in shape for 79 mph running as well as providing some additional crossovers (one pair has been installed near the old A-68 interlocking at Caledonia, and another might be installed on the Milwaukee side of the airport station, which is one platform on the east track occupying space formerly devoted to the eastbound siding at Lake.) Those possessions, however, can lay out trains. I did a bit of exploring this time; riding from Chicago to the airport station, getting lunch at the airport (where the trains are listed on the arrival and departure boards, and where passengers have to walk farther from curbside to United's puddle-jumpers than they have to walk to the trackside, despite the station being laid out like an airport, with the long side perpendicular to the tracks) and then unloading at Sturtevant to watch a few freight trains. But here is the productivity problem: train 335 off Chicago at 1.05 is a half hour late at Sturtevant (2.34, which puts it into Milwaukee at about 3.00, the time that equipment is supposed to leave Milwaukee as 338.) The crew did a good job turning the train and kept their good humor, leaving Sturtevant at 3.45 and arriving Chicago at 4.59, again, about 30 minutes late with eight minutes to turn the train to leave as 339 at 5.08. The commuter train services were a minute or two off as well, but that morning drill with two or three trains arriving at the south end within five minutes, and another two arriving at the north end in the same time interval.
9.6.05
MAY THE FARCE BE WITH YOU. I took the opportunity to watch the much-ballyhooed Star Wars prequel and must register my disappointment. Why, in the vacuum of space, would one have to open gun-ports and run out a broadside (what's the analog to firing on the up-roll?) from a man-of-war that sounds a bit like a DC-7? And what is the strategic value of capturing the galaxy's largest slag dump? But the movie will clarify "He's more machine than man" from one of the real movies.
REVIEWING THE INTERCHANGE REPORT. Doxagora finds my roller coaster story, also catches the brass at the New York Times crying with their mouths full. Samantha at The Torch has a spot-on observation on Oregon's cultural competency initiative.
[Oregon's] President Frohnmayer said that “to me [cultural competency] means that we are able to effectively reach all of the students who have demonstrated their competence to be in the university but for whom, because of cultural background, traditional techniques of teaching may not be as effective as others” (emphasis added). If you cut through the politically correct newspeak in that quote and think about what Frohnmayer seems actually to be saying, his comment is ridiculous and patronizing. It is bad enough that this patronizing attitude prevails at American colleges and universities; the fact that the University of Oregon now wants to coerce its professors into sharing this attitude is unconscionable.There's more on my mind about developments at Oregon and elsewhere around the academy, but that's for the weekend.
RESISTANCE IS FUTILE. Tim at Where Worlds Collide does not disapprove of the latest offering from Dapol, the overseas version of an SD70 known as the Class 66, or, pejoratively, "Shed." Which they spend less time on than the representative Euro diesel.
The odds are, if you see a freight train, it will have one of these locomotives on the front. They are now the second most numerous main line British diesel of all time, after the class 47. They're going to be the backbone of freight haulage for the forseeable future.And if they hold up as well as the GP-9, which Atlas will be reissuing in O Scale, they will be good on a model railway of any era from the late 1990s to the early 2030s.
RECOGNIZE SABOTEURS, WRECKERS, AND ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE! Via Public Brewery, a transportation safety poster in best socialist realism style from the Maryland commuter rail system (where the tracks are too hot to highball, at least on the old Baltimore and Ohio tracks today.)
8.6.05
DO I KEEP READING? Next up is One Nation Under Therapy, which Theodore Dalrymple reviewed for New Criterion (additional observations at Arma Virumque.) I suppose I'll keep slogging, but anecdotes like this, from p. 18, are troubling.
An eighth grader named Steve is supposed to give the prime factors of the number 34; instead he lists all the factors. It is not easy for the teacher to be affirmative about Steve's answer. But she finds a way, "Okay. Now Steve you're exactly right that those are all factors. Prime factorization means that you only list the numbers that are prime. So can you modify your answer to make it all only prime numbers?"If he gave anything other than 2, 17 there's something wrong with the teacher's understanding, and if he also gave 1, 34 the teacher has failed to impress on the students that the identity factors are a waste of time.
HARMONIC DIVERGENCE. Stalking the Riemann Hypothesis, recently reviewed, offers an interesting starting point for the creation of the zeta function, namely, the reciprocals of the primes. Start with the harmonic series, 1 + 1/2 + 1/3 + 1/4 + 1/5 + 1/6 + 1/7 + 1/8 + 1/9 + ... This series diverges. Intuitively, one can see this: 1/3 + 1/4 > 1/2; 1/5 + 1/6 + 1/7 + 1/8 > 1/2; the sum of the next 8 exceeds 1/2, ad infinitum; see this (.pdf) for details. On the other hand, 1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + ... converges to 2; but what about my red terms, 1 + 1/2 + 1/3 + 1/7 + ... That series diverges, but the linked file and this site will reveal that it is not easy to demonstrate it.
The book reveals a commonality between the Riemann hypothesis and some work in physics. I read on p. 177, "the numbers that describe the primal waves of the prime counting function are much like numbers that describe the energy levels of the fundamental wave functions of an 'average' heavy nucleus." Theoretical physicists and number theorists are working on related problems, forsooth.
There's also this instructive passage at p. 216. "Research in mathematics is frustrating. If it's not frustrating, you're probably tackling problems that are too easy ... your steady state is that you are stuck." But you persevere and you'll often make progress.
On to Book Review No. 15, which returns to my blue terms, the reciprocals of the squares? That yields 1 + 1/4 + 1/9 + ... which converges to the circular constant pi squared over 6, or pi2/6. Now we're into e: The Story of a Number, which is a history of a number of related problems, including squaring the conic sections (the rectangular hyperbola posed a number of problems, but Gregoire Saint-Vincent, using methods proposed by Pierre de Fermat, noted that the rectangles he used to approximate the area were all of equal size -- unit elasticity! There's also an excerpt from George Cheyene's 1734 Philosophical Principles of Religion that must have offered the typefetter some challenges. It's illustrated, and this description is priceless.
And thus the connections among various subseries of the harmonic series. To obtain the natural base e, add 1 to 1 + 1/2 + 1/6 + 1/24 + ... and get 2.718281828... (there is a limiting value but it is not the solution of any polynomial); there is a connection between 1/x (integrating out the rectangular hyperbola) and the natural logarithms, and e raised to the power ix, where i is the square root of negative 1 and x is any number, equals cos(x) + i sin(x), two trigonometric functions.
What occurred to me upon reading this book was how badly my high school math teachers exposed me to the idea of radians and polar coordinates. We begin measuring angles in degrees, and these correspond to what we can do on a map. No skipper in my experience has ever ordered, "Helmsman, steer a course of pi over 6 relative to magnetic." Is there a more intuitive way to expose beginning students to the circular functions and the exponential by playing with the sub-series of the reciprocal series rather than all of a sudden dropping radians on students?
The book reveals a commonality between the Riemann hypothesis and some work in physics. I read on p. 177, "the numbers that describe the primal waves of the prime counting function are much like numbers that describe the energy levels of the fundamental wave functions of an 'average' heavy nucleus." Theoretical physicists and number theorists are working on related problems, forsooth.
There's also this instructive passage at p. 216. "Research in mathematics is frustrating. If it's not frustrating, you're probably tackling problems that are too easy ... your steady state is that you are stuck." But you persevere and you'll often make progress.
On to Book Review No. 15, which returns to my blue terms, the reciprocals of the squares? That yields 1 + 1/4 + 1/9 + ... which converges to the circular constant pi squared over 6, or pi2/6. Now we're into e: The Story of a Number, which is a history of a number of related problems, including squaring the conic sections (the rectangular hyperbola posed a number of problems, but Gregoire Saint-Vincent, using methods proposed by Pierre de Fermat, noted that the rectangles he used to approximate the area were all of equal size -- unit elasticity! There's also an excerpt from George Cheyene's 1734 Philosophical Principles of Religion that must have offered the typefetter some challenges. It's illustrated, and this description is priceless.
Let (as before) AC, AH be the Afymptotes of any Hyperbola DLF defined by this Equation yxn=1, in which the Abfciffa AK=x and Ordinate KL=y, and n is fuppofed either equal to or greater than Unity.There's also an imagined conversation between Johann Bernoulli the elder and J. S. Bach on the use of the logarithmic spiral and the tempering of the musical scale. (The major scale has two half steps and five full steps in an octave ... 1 - 1 - 1/2 - 1 - 1 -1 - 1/2; the chromatic scale thus has twelve half steps in an octave, and the frequencies of each recurrence of a note an octave higher are twice as great. But if one attempts to provide all smaller intervals as integer multiples one runs into problems.)
And thus the connections among various subseries of the harmonic series. To obtain the natural base e, add 1 to 1 + 1/2 + 1/6 + 1/24 + ... and get 2.718281828... (there is a limiting value but it is not the solution of any polynomial); there is a connection between 1/x (integrating out the rectangular hyperbola) and the natural logarithms, and e raised to the power ix, where i is the square root of negative 1 and x is any number, equals cos(x) + i sin(x), two trigonometric functions.
What occurred to me upon reading this book was how badly my high school math teachers exposed me to the idea of radians and polar coordinates. We begin measuring angles in degrees, and these correspond to what we can do on a map. No skipper in my experience has ever ordered, "Helmsman, steer a course of pi over 6 relative to magnetic." Is there a more intuitive way to expose beginning students to the circular functions and the exponential by playing with the sub-series of the reciprocal series rather than all of a sudden dropping radians on students?
5.6.05
PORCINE COSMETOLOGY. University Diaries finds either a climbdown or an obfuscation by Oregon president David Frohnmayer, providing more material for Herrn. Schneider u. Schwarz.
On the opposite coast, Harvard's president, Larry Summers, continues his climbdown, with results noted by Heather Mac Donald (via Power Line; see also Discriminations.)
Who says it has to be about cultural background? Are we talking about differences in learning styles? Is this the latest iteration of the role model argument? And if the objective is effective teaching, why the focus on queer theory and the entire universe of alternative lifestyles in the draft plan? Why not put some Turing and some Keynes on the reading lists? Strikes me as a lot of trouble to just find one more way of determining that a tenure-tracker's teaching is below average.Cultural competency, Frohnmayer said, is a straightforward concept.
"To me it means that we are able to effectively reach all of the students who have demonstrated their competence to be in the university but for whom, because of cultural background, traditional techniques of teaching may not be as effective as others," he said. "A good teacher is always open, I hope, to ways to increase teaching effectiveness."
On the opposite coast, Harvard's president, Larry Summers, continues his climbdown, with results noted by Heather Mac Donald (via Power Line; see also Discriminations.)
Though the administration announced the outcome in advance—it wanted, at a minimum, a call for a new high-placed diversity bureaucrat and for more affirmative-action hiring efforts—the creation of task forces, complete with paid staff, is by now an ironclad ritual whereby colleges and universities demonstrate their deep concern for pressing issues.The existing programs haven't worked. Let's have more of them. See why I call it the Diversity Boondoggle.
Precisely. One has to develop the feedstocks at one end of the Ph.D. pipeline in order to take delivery of Ph.D.s at the other end. Harvard and similar institutions, by the way, did snap up many such colleagues at the beginning of the affirmative action era. Wayne State, a Detroit area public research university, was at one time a source of such faculty; the Wayne administration did everything it could except raise salaries and admission standards to obtain a comparably diverse faculty after those raids occurred.First, its purpose is to recommend the identical set of actions that the institution, whether academic or corporate, has already been doing. Every college in the country has been frantically pursing “diversity” in hiring and admissions for decades. The task force itself commends the diversity policies of 17 rival colleges—the mere tip of the iceberg—without drawing the obvious conclusion.
The second obstacle follows from the first: there is nothing more that can be done. If untapped pools of highly qualified female and minority candidates existed out there, schools would have snapped them up long ago—if not your college, then its dozens of competitors, just as desperate to placate the quota gods. (The one course of action that might, in the case of black and Hispanic faculty recruitment, bear long-term results is the one that elite college personnel are least likely to choose: intensive mentoring of young students and the jettisoning of all “progressive” pedagogy in the schools.)
The only new hires that diversity initiatives generate are in college administrations, already overloaded with sinecures. The Harvard task force demands the creation of a most remarkable new position, a Senior Vice Provost for Diversity and Faculty Development.That sounds like the same sort of thing Oregon might currently be considering. I have some lurid samples of what the local office of Faculty Development does: although the people who run it are good people, their efforts do everything except the most logical way to develop a faculty, which is to provide the proper inducements for people to do their jobs well.
And just in case the lesser functionaries in the provost’s office still don’t appreciate the exalted status of the new Senior VP for D, the task force provides that “she” (the report’s choice of words) “be given priority in terms of office space.” So much for non-hierarchical, anti-patriarchal collaborative sharing of collective resources. Naturally, the Senior VP for D will “also be supported by a group of dedicated staff.”But there won't be any paper for the diversified faculty members to produce class handouts, or any additional classes on the works of inter alia Turing and Keynes. There's a lot more in the article; I'm just hitting the low spots. Here's more porcine cosmetology, in this case renaming the diversity incentive fund. It doesn't matter what you call it, any institution of higher education has one.
In an unusual collision with the truth, the task force acknowledges that “there was a sense that candidates hired with support of the [existing] funds are somehow less qualified.” Someone slipped up big-time here, because admitting the poisonous stigma that affirmative action efforts impose on their “beneficiaries” is something that diversocrats must never ever do. But the task force’s encounter with reality is brief. It appears fully satisfied with the idea that renaming the Outreach Fund will eliminate the stigma of race and gender preferences.Heh.
Harvard’s millions will guarantee that it can rout all competitors for female nuclear physicists, but its competitors will undoubtedly up their own antes to stay in the game. There must be better ways to spend the millions of dollars that schools will dedicate to poaching “diversity” trophies from rival institutions—buying books for libraries, for example, or grooming scholars in neglected fields such as the American founding, or producing operas on campus, or capping tuition hikes.All totally pointless, as the return on investment in a degree from a name college is lower than the return on investment in a degree for a comparable state-located or less well-known college.
Harvard has just dumped $50 million down a bureaucratic sinkhole tells you all you need to know about why attending Harvard for eight months costs more than most families earn in a year. Eventually, students and parents may start asking why anyone would want to.It's called a market test, baby.
AT THE NINTH DECIMAL PLACE? Danica Patrick has an advantage racing Indy cars because she's lighter than the average guy driver? Illustrated bull session in progress at Catallarchy.
SORTING ALGORITHMS. Book Review No. 14 is mathematician Dan Rockmore's Stalking the Riemann Hypothesis. There's some cool number theory in there that I wish to address another day; for now some brief observations on the logic of the book, which presents approaches to finding the nontrivial zeros of the Riemann zeta function by mathematicians and by physicists who are chasing a related, or possibly the same, fundamental knowledge. The mathematics is pretty elementary, if one does not know what a "zeta function" is this book won't help. It does draw some intellectual parallels in the style of Gödel, Escher, Bach for the reader that likes to make connections among seemingly unrelated things.
One of the connections involves Stanislaw Ulam's work on sorting algorithms, which occurred to him as he was putting bridge hands together. He produced a result defining the fewest moves used to sort a hand of cards as "the size of the hand less the length of the longest rising sequence," where a rising sequence is "any (ordered) subset of the cards that are in the correct relative order." This example, from pp. 252-253, illustrates such a sorting of thirteen cards (numbered here for simplicity) and dealt in the following order:
2 5 1 13 7 6 11 4 10 9 3 8 12
Professor Rockmore uses the term "cycle" to refer to each repositioning of a card; I will use the term "move" for reasons of my own that I will expand upon later. Each move is the repositioning of ONE card, hence, with 13 cards and a longest rising sequence of length 5 (2, 5, 6, 8, 12) the cards can be blocked in station order (oops, giving the game away) placed in consecutive order in eight moves, hence:
1 2 5 13 7 6 11 4 10 9 3 8 12
1 2 3 5 13 7 6 11 4 10 9 8 12
1 2 3 4 5 13 7 6 11 10 9 8 12
1 2 3 4 5 7 6 11 10 9 8 12 13
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 11 10 9 8 12 13 (*)
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 10 9 8 11 12 13
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 9 8 10 11 12 13
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 (*)
Where red denotes a move to the left (port) and green a move to the right (starboard) and the asterisked moves have an equivalent move in the opposite direction, e.g. 6 7.
As I was reading this example, it got me to thinking about sorting a cut of freight cars, where one cannot simply pluck a car out of the middle of the cut and place it on the end, but one has to sort it, moving cars from one track to another, something like this: Again, suppose the cars come in in the following order. (For the moment I will treat each number as a destination; there are some complications involving cars or blocks of cars headed to the same destination at different locations in the train that I don't want to get into at the moment.)
2 5 1 13 7 6 11 4 10 9 3 8 12
Here's our crusty conductor, who recognizes you can't use any Giant Hand Assistance.
"Cut behind two. One in, ten out."
1
2 5 13 7 6 11 4 10 9 3 8 12
"One in, eleven out."
1 2
5 13 7 6 11 4 10 9 3 8 12
"Cut three ahead of the engine, one in, two out."
1 2 3
5 13 7 6 11 4 10 9 8 12
"Cut behind five, one in, four out."
1 2 3 4
5 13 7 6 11 10 9 8 12
(If these cars had been blocked elsewhere on the same railroad, there'd be one unhappy crew as there are two strict falling sequences in proper reverse station order. There is no wye track -- triangle, if you will -- nearby.)
"Two in, seven out."
(I use this next trick on the Fox Valley all the time. It blows the minds of people who haven't seen it before.)
1 2 3 4 5 13
7 6 11 10 9 8 12
"Cut off. One out, tie on, cut behind one, one in, six out."
1 2 3 4 5 6
7 11 10 9 8 12 13
"One in, six out."
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
11 10 9 8 12 13
"Cut behind three, one in, two out."
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
11 10 9 12 13
"Cut behind two, one in, two out.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
11 10 12 13
"Cut behind one, one in, two out.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
11 12 13
"Three on and stretch 'em."
I've probably reinvented some well-known algorithm in combinatorial theory or operations research, if anyone has investigated the properties of what I call strict falling sequences, but if not, there might be some way of evaluating the optimality of correctly blocking cuts of cars as they proceed through the railroad network, such that trains do not have to be completely re-marshalled several times.
One of the connections involves Stanislaw Ulam's work on sorting algorithms, which occurred to him as he was putting bridge hands together. He produced a result defining the fewest moves used to sort a hand of cards as "the size of the hand less the length of the longest rising sequence," where a rising sequence is "any (ordered) subset of the cards that are in the correct relative order." This example, from pp. 252-253, illustrates such a sorting of thirteen cards (numbered here for simplicity) and dealt in the following order:
2 5 1 13 7 6 11 4 10 9 3 8 12
Professor Rockmore uses the term "cycle" to refer to each repositioning of a card; I will use the term "move" for reasons of my own that I will expand upon later. Each move is the repositioning of ONE card, hence, with 13 cards and a longest rising sequence of length 5 (2, 5, 6, 8, 12) the cards can be blocked in station order (oops, giving the game away) placed in consecutive order in eight moves, hence:
1 2 5 13 7 6 11 4 10 9 3 8 12
1 2 3 5 13 7 6 11 4 10 9 8 12
1 2 3 4 5 13 7 6 11 10 9 8 12
1 2 3 4 5 7 6 11 10 9 8 12 13
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 11 10 9 8 12 13 (*)
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 10 9 8 11 12 13
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 9 8 10 11 12 13
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 (*)
Where red denotes a move to the left (port) and green a move to the right (starboard) and the asterisked moves have an equivalent move in the opposite direction, e.g. 6 7.
As I was reading this example, it got me to thinking about sorting a cut of freight cars, where one cannot simply pluck a car out of the middle of the cut and place it on the end, but one has to sort it, moving cars from one track to another, something like this: Again, suppose the cars come in in the following order. (For the moment I will treat each number as a destination; there are some complications involving cars or blocks of cars headed to the same destination at different locations in the train that I don't want to get into at the moment.)
2 5 1 13 7 6 11 4 10 9 3 8 12
Here's our crusty conductor, who recognizes you can't use any Giant Hand Assistance.
"Cut behind two. One in, ten out."
1
2 5 13 7 6 11 4 10 9 3 8 12
"One in, eleven out."
1 2
5 13 7 6 11 4 10 9 3 8 12
"Cut three ahead of the engine, one in, two out."
1 2 3
5 13 7 6 11 4 10 9 8 12
"Cut behind five, one in, four out."
1 2 3 4
5 13 7 6 11 10 9 8 12
(If these cars had been blocked elsewhere on the same railroad, there'd be one unhappy crew as there are two strict falling sequences in proper reverse station order. There is no wye track -- triangle, if you will -- nearby.)
"Two in, seven out."
(I use this next trick on the Fox Valley all the time. It blows the minds of people who haven't seen it before.)
1 2 3 4 5 13
7 6 11 10 9 8 12
"Cut off. One out, tie on, cut behind one, one in, six out."
1 2 3 4 5 6
7 11 10 9 8 12 13
"One in, six out."
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
11 10 9 8 12 13
"Cut behind three, one in, two out."
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
11 10 9 12 13
"Cut behind two, one in, two out.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
11 10 12 13
"Cut behind one, one in, two out.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
11 12 13
"Three on and stretch 'em."
I've probably reinvented some well-known algorithm in combinatorial theory or operations research, if anyone has investigated the properties of what I call strict falling sequences, but if not, there might be some way of evaluating the optimality of correctly blocking cuts of cars as they proceed through the railroad network, such that trains do not have to be completely re-marshalled several times.
FITTING. Here's to Illinois, the land of lucrative personal injury lawsuits and famous rent-seeking ward heelers, and also the port of entry for the world's largest catfish.
THE PRODUCTIVITY PSYCHOSIS. Bill Hendrick of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (it's a newspaper, if you know how to reach the Superintendent and about Swindon's last King, you can get in, if the story doesn't get archived) has been interviewing the pshrinks.
It's also a world in which our political masters have used tax money intended to provide more capacity on the roads to conceal the extent of their funding of rent-seekers, in which our universities fret over "cultural competence" whilst researching invented spelling and invented math in the common schools, which raises the incompetence tax we pay, in which businesses tell us that the latest voice-mail limbo or service retrenchment is an improvement.Do you seethe in traffic, just waiting for some nut case to cut you off? Or grind your teeth in office meetings when the same old fawning ladder-climbers gush out their aim-to-please drivel? Or feel your face flushing when the guy blabbing away on his cellphone keeps holding the brakes after the light turns green, refusing to budge until you honk?
If so, you may well have a problem with anger, which seems to be rising faster among the teeming masses than the jet you just missed while waiting in the cattle line at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport.
Researchers say many Americans aren't just stressed, but are boiling with anger and could blow like a volcano at the least provocation.
We live in a fast-paced, high-tech world where we're forced to rush, rush, rush on the job and off, which is why many people turn into ticking time bombs as soon they get behind the wheel or in line at the grocery store or movie theater only to see others cut in.
SIGNAL-JAMMING. Brainster is unimpressed with a New Yorker article seeing something positive in abolishing the office of valedictorian. He focuses on that part of the article in which aspiring valedictorians take advantage of the rules, something which the article suggests is contrary to the spirit of the award, but for which he correctly notes,You wanted to be valedictorian pretty much forever, but you never thought to find out what the rules were?The article offers readers some other useful information, however. Two academicians did some ethnography on valedictorians.
Dedicated to the well-rounded ideal—to be a valedictorian, after all, you must excel in classes that don’t interest you or are poorly taught—the valedictorians had “used their strong work ethic to pursue multiple academic and extracurricular interests. None was obsessed with a single talent area to which he or she subordinated school and social involvement.” This marks a difference, [coauthor Karen] Arnold said, from what we know about many eminent achievers, who tend to evince an early passion for a particular field. For these people, Arnold writes, a “powerful early interest evolves into lifelong, intensive, even obsessive involvement in the talent area.” She goes on, “Exceptional adult achievers often recall formal schooling as a disliked distraction.” Valedictorians, by contrast, conformed to the expectations of school and carefully chose careers that were likely to be socially and financially secure: “As a rule, valedictorians relegated their early interests to hobbies, second majors, or regretted dead ends. The serious athletes among the valedictorians never pursued sports occupations. Most of the high school musicians hung up their instruments during college.”Not many model railroaders, or dabblers in number theory? And here's an interesting nugget for observers looking for those missing men in college.
In the nineteenth century, young women largely outperformed young men in American high schools. They generally won more prizes, graduated at higher rates, and displayed lovelier penmanship. At graduation, girls would read while sitting or standing on a low step, since it wasn’t considered proper for them to speak from a platform.Plus ca change. Despite the somewhat downbeat findings of her research, Professor Arnold defends the office of valedictorian.
“Over the past ten years, a lot of school districts have been abolishing the valedictorian, and I’m against that,” Karen Arnold told me. “On the day we allow anybody who’s always wanted to be a quarterback to play on the high-school football team, then we can get rid of valedictorians. If we rank anything, we ought to rank what we say is most central to school, which is to say, academic learning.”Quite. Current thinking in the common schools, however, is to do less ranking off the field. Kimberly at Number 2 Pencil links to Chicago Tribune coverage of that phenomenon. She focuses on the greater difficulty universities that admit large classes on the basis of scant information will face in the absence of class rankings. A close reading of the article suggests the absence of class rank will encourage more aggressive positional arms races.
[The story continues with some anecdotes about valedictorian-gaming. Don't mess with economists.] Break this down ... the policies generally specify that a student graduating in the upper 50% (or some other cutoff) of any high school class gets in, but absent any information about class rank (which may be rendered meaningless by grade inflation in any event) admissions directors will reveal a preference for graduates from reputable high schools. Watch for house prices in such districts to rise further."Everyone is familiar with a New Trier," [Ohio State admissions tsarina Mabel] Freeman said.
"You can't just make assumptions about all high schools."
Other admissions directors, however, said they often agree with a high school's decision to abandon rank.
Simply put, "there are some very competitive high schools where class rank hurts the students," said Molly Arnold, director of admissions at Illinois State University, one of the schools that participated in [Lincolnshire] Stevenson [High]'s pilot study [to provide percentile rather than class rank information.]
Arnold said 10 percent more Stevenson applicants were accepted this year when class rank wasn't included.
Removing class rank also can benefit students applying to Indiana University, said admissions director Mary Ellen Anderson, who said that generally only students in the top half of their classes are admitted.\
That can be difficult at competitive Highland Park and Deerfield High Schools, so officials voted in 2004 to eliminate rank beginning with next school year's senior class, said District 113 Supt. Ann Riebock.
That means Megan Dayno will be one of Deerfield High School's last two valedictorians when she graduates Thursday with a 3.99 unweighted GPA after getting an A-minus in AP economics. The school also has a valedictorian with the highest weighted GPA.
NOBODY PAYS LIST PRICE. Via Cranky Professor, Scott Inside Higher Ed finds a university president who doesn't like "leaving money on the table."
Value of service pricing, don't you love it? President Cooper does.William E. Cooper, the president at Richmond, says he realizes that his university’s cost increase “superficially seems outrageous.” But he said that he became convinced that Richmond “was about $7,000 underpriced” and that the additional revenue would allow for more financial aid and improvements in facilities and academic programs. “We could dink around with this and ramp it up a little each year, but we decided it was better to bite the bullet, to realign this and stay in place, rather than looking confused.”
But what of student choices, and the widespread public and political fear that high prices discourage students? With certain student segments, that’s flat out false, Cooper says. Richmond found, he said, that it was losing students to more expensive institutions and enrolling students whose parents were willing to spend more than Richmond was charging.
“We were leaving money on the table,” Cooper says. “We had all these people with a kid at Dartmouth or a kid at Syracuse, and a kid here, and we were the cheap school.”
“One of the strong philosophical bents of this change was the price insensitivity of people who really care about higher education,” Cooper says. “Just like people buy the best cappuccino maker if they really care, so with higher education. If you really care, a couple thousand bucks isn’t in the decision maker and that’s the student and family we want.”That last sentence appears to be garbled, but it's classic positional arms race. But is that a sustainable strategy for private universities that aspire to be exclusive, given the absence of any premium to a degree from a more famous university (many of which appear to be engaging in the same kinds of false economies and misguided diversity initiatives of their state-located competitors?)
4.6.05
HANDS IN THE AIR, FEET OFF THE FLOOR. A local newspaper released its June entertainment guide and guess who made the centerfold?
Stephen Karlson sits down for a topic that permeates both his professional and personal interests, and has since a visit to what then was called Mariott’s Great America in 1977. It’s enough to energize an NIU associate economics professor after grading piles of final exams.But that's not just for fun.
In addition to published works with titles like A Positive Theory of Immigration Amnesties, Karlson looks at the ways parks attempt to find a balance between attractions and prices.To be specific,
Yup. Must. Remember. That. Resolution.Wherever 200-foot-high investments meet throngs of ticket-buying consumers, there’s bound to be economic implications. Karlson first let his enjoyment seep into the office when what he heard from economists at the time wasn’t reflecting what he experienced at the park.
Lately, that interest has created a unique parallel in Karlson’s mind. Parks such as Great America offer “cut” tickets, designed for patrons to pay extra for the privilege of jumping to the front of the line at certain times of day. Meanwhile, in places like southern California and the Washington, D.C. beltway, state officials are reconfiguring high-occupancy (or carpool) lanes into high-occupancy toll roads, where drivers can pay an additional cost with something like Illinois’ I-PASS to use a less-congested lane of traffic. Officials with the Virginia Department of Transportation in April agreed to upgrade Interstate 495 in such a way, and other states have commissioned studies proposing similar parallel toll-roads.“I’d like to shed a little light on the economics of these things,” he said, hoping to complete his research by the time school starts up again in the fall.
A REAGAN WORKOUT. The Midwest is not known for earthquakes or hurricanes but those summer thunderstorms can disrupt a day. About 1 pm Saturday afternoon one decided to do a bit of tree-pruning in the neighborhood, leaving part of my neighbor's tree in my driveway and part of my tree in a different neighbor's patio. Rang the police to let them know about some 'phone lines arcing where a tree had found them, rang the tree service, rang the insurance company, waited for the rain to stop, then broke out the crosscut saw and pruning shears and got cutting. A neighbor came by with a chain saw later, and took care of the bigger pieces. Lots of stuff for the chipper which the city will be running through the neighborhood, but everything's pretty well tidied up. More storms in the forecast, however.
SECOND SECTION. No tornado, but lots of damage in the nearby blocks. More coverage at the DeKalb Chronicle.
SECOND SECTION. No tornado, but lots of damage in the nearby blocks. More coverage at the DeKalb Chronicle.
2.6.05
BUNDLING. At Fly Bottle, a bull session on whether the argument that Social Security is really a form of insurance (regular readers will be familiar with the Superintendent's contention that bundling a bad insurance policy with a bad investment plan is not a virtue) that ought not to be treated as equivalent to an investment plan. In the Corner Solution, a request to stop quibbling over the definition of the program and get down to the specifics of fixing it in some way. Via Newmark's Door, some observations from Germany by Ralph Peters on what's in store if the fix (and also to Medicare and Medicaid) are deferred too long. Angry Europeans looking for somebody to blame ... haven't we heard that before?
TO REMEMBER. Marquette Warrior points to a fine collection of Memorial Day editorial cartoons compiled by the Marquette Office of Homeland Security.
PRESERVING THOSE SUBSIDIES FOR THE RICH. Kevin of the Badger Blog Alliance discovers some student government types (.pdf) who are receiving a reality check.
Yes, there is plenty of expense-preference behavior in the academy. But low tuitions and state support both transfer resources upward, and attenuate incentives to do well in college, if this model (commentary here) has any validity.
Rather than defend students and their families by creating more top-level administrative efficiencies, eliminating outrageous perks such as $700 monthly car allowances, and fighting for additional state support; UW leadership chose the easy road by selling students up the river under the guise that tuition increases protect educational quality. We must end the rhetoric that affordability and quality are competing issues. Both are critical components in preserving a public university system. State support is the only concrete way to protect both access and quality.The quote exemplifies why interviewing the beneficiary of a program is unlikely to provide evidence for the allocative efficiency of said program.
Yes, there is plenty of expense-preference behavior in the academy. But low tuitions and state support both transfer resources upward, and attenuate incentives to do well in college, if this model (commentary here) has any validity.
MARGINALIZATION IN THE SERVICE OF THE RIGHT CAUSE IS MANDATORY. Marquette Warrior notes.
But it's all a sham.
Feminists are allowed to demean men, militant blacks to demean whites, gays to demean conservative Christians, and liberals to demean Republicans, people who own guns, people who drive SUVs and indeed pretty much anybody who doesn’t agree with their politics.David at The Torch explains.
[George Mason's Peter] Berkowitz makes an important point: in recent years, a collection of legal, political, and social theorists has argued that free speech is itself repressive. Consequently, speech must be shaped and regulated so that it advances only the correct viewpoints and suppresses those viewpoints (subjectively) considered to be dangerous, intolerant, and hateful.(Looks like yet another book to read ...)
But it's all a sham.
At Harvard Law School, I saw many of these “progressive censors” up close. It is my belief that “progressive censorship” was less a principle than an expedient rationalization—a justification for grabbing and holding power in the small feudal state that is the modern university. In the larger culture, many of these same individuals declare their undying love for the First Amendment. Why? Because it is the only thing that allows them to maintain their public voice—and keep their job.Never mind that the job they're doing is counterproductive.
CHEAPER THAN LIONEL. Slightly used, well-maintained 161 passenger gallery coaches, $1 each. What's the deal? Chicago's Metra has taken delivery of some 300 ADA-compliant coaches over the past few years, and it is disposing of older coaches. Virginia Railway Express and the new commuter train operation in Nashville (Nashville? Shall we call it the Grand Ol' Reliable?) have taken delivery of these coaches for a buck each, and the new commuter train operation in Salt Lake City (Must. Research. These.) got some for free. Why?
[Federal Transportation Administration] spokesman Paul Griffo said even though that’s true, Metra could have disposed of the cars as it saw fit – but when a transit agency agrees to transfer cars to another agency, and those cars were either bought or refurbished with federal funds, then the transfer price must be free, Griffo added.And Metra came out ahead about $25K per car.
So why not hang onto the cars and make the rush-hour trains longer, or run more trains? Two reasons. First, many of the trains already use the whole platform when they stop. Platforms aren't cheap, particularly if the stations are already hemmed in by roads and other buildings. Second, there aren't a lot of paths left at rush hour for the trains; there's a queuing problem if one attempts to run trains on closer headways, and in some circumstances the peak-hour capacity of the line will actually be less with more trains, as the additional trains impede the progress of following trains.Metra officials said the sale let them avoid an estimated $25,000-per-car scrapping cost.
Because the cars were built from older carbon steel alloys that no longer have much market value, “we would have had to pay a scrapper to take them,” [Metra spokesman Dan] Schnolis said.
IT'S CALLED RENT SEEKING. The Illinois state budget is signed. It passed with a simple majority ahead of the deadline before a super-majority rule takes effect.
If you say so.[Democratic Governor Rod] Blagojevich, however, said that he thinks the budget negotiations with Democrats benefited all the state's residents.
"I think the winners in this budget and in this session are parents and children, senior citizens, working people and taxpayers, business, doctors and their patients," said the Chicago Democrat, who is expected to sign the budget.
The pork projects are just part of the deal, he said.
"There's a process here that's an imperfect process," Blagojevich said. "It's called democracy."
NOT RELATED. I found pictures of State Line resident and motor racing sensation Danica Patrick on Karlson and McKenzie, the home page for the hosts of a radio show on 101.5 FM WPDH in Poughkeepsie, New York, not far from the Cold Spring that has antique shops which Google sometimes confuses with Cold Spring Shops. Keith Karlson is not related in any way that I know of. Caution: these links may not be work safe.
COMPLICITY IN YOUR OWN DESTRUCTION. Thus does Professor Plum comment on the Oregon diversity initiative. Herewith some of his comments [in bold] on the Chronicle story.
Professor Botvinnik, (any relation to the Grandmaster?) the damage has been done long ago. I want to expand on this observation from yesterday, "Administrators are capable of engaging in expense-preference behaviors that are compatible with the worldviews of sufficiently many campus politicians that those campus politicians acquiesce in administrative power grabs..." A poem by Pastor Martin Niemöller, the one that begins "First they came for the communists" comes to mind, for the structure, not for the comparisons. (Let's keep things in perspective. Pastor Niemöller was prisoner of a totalitarian state that required the combined weight of the Soviet Union, the British Empire, the United States, Tito's partisans, and the Free Poles and Free French to crush it. Academic administrators tremble at the thought of losing a student to the University of Phoenix and grovel cravenly when the most junior of legislators calls.) But why the structure? Herewith an indictment of all too many campus politicians, too many of whom have been for a long time complicit in the destruction of their curriculum, their departments, and their integrity.
First they came for the smokers. And you went along with it. Smoking, after all, is a dirty habit encouraged by misleading advertising. What is a little marginalization of people who have dirty habits, never mind if the smoking policy is an administrative ukase? It's all for the Greater Good.
Then they came for the Greek-letter organizations. And you went along with it. The Greek-letter organizations are islands of exclusion, colonies of village idiots who remind you of your high-school tormentors, and controllers of a sexual cartel that never granted you a certificate of convenience and necessity (are you following this, Thomas Frank?) and the opportunity to pay them out was too tempting, never mind the damage that this does to the concept of freedom of association.
Then they came for your positions. And you went along with it. The policies of identifying diversity hires, or terminating a search because the pool of applicants was insufficiently diverse, or of setting up area studies departments to appeal to scholars who had the kind of diversity you valued, and who gave you an opportunity to make a statement for your form of social justice (that will have to wait) was with your connivance. And you were receptive to the idea that for hundreds of years, the universities had been practicing affirmative action for white guys, so arguments based on merit or the lack thereof were so much special pleading. Besides, those hires and those departments were for the students you weren't terribly interested in dealing with anyway.
Then they came for your curriculum. And you went along with it. Standards were just another path-dependent social construction, and there was no reason for a teacher of mathematics to take any courses in the math department, or for a future marketing executive to understand psychology or a pre-law to understand the classical allusions.
And now they have come for you. And you are surprised. Grandmaster Botvinnik would tell you that ten or twenty years ago you asked them to. Former faculty senator Karlson warned you, and you thanked me for stating opposing views so eloquently. But you did nothing to improve your position.
The president of the University of Oregon has backed away from some of the more controversial parts of a proposed five-year diversity plan after some professors balked at it. Because of their objections, the plan will be sent to a committee of faculty members for further consideration. [Yeah, they will merely use more palatable language.]Oregon's president, one David Frohnmayer, is making a strong case for membership in the deck of cards, but the updates from the last year will be dealt with first. Here is some material for his dossier, which will be forwarded to Herrn. Schneider u. Schwarz in due course.
Mr. Frohnmayer said in an interview on Thursday that administrators had “taken a step back from the draft plan, given the extent of the response.” [The proper response in a free society would be to throw them out the window.]Ah, that Silent Generation obsession with process.
“We’re wedded to the objectives of the plan, but not to particular steps in any lockstep way,” he said. “We’re a community that lives to move with a greater sense of consensus.” [What a load of infected treacle. Only an idiot would fall for this mealy-mouthed cant]Community, consensus, blah blah blah. (The Professor is being too kind. This is precisely the kind of talk that fills the minutes of faculty senates everywhere.) The unstated premise is that it must be the right community and the proper consensus, which is to say, complicity in your own destruction. I'm coming to that. But first an understanding of what will happen next, when the plan (which conveniently for the administration is being unleashed at the end of the academic year, when serious faculty are thinking about the research they haven't been able to do because of the usurpations of the administration) goes to the faculty senate.
Mr. Frohnmayer has sent the plan to a committee, which is made up mostly of professors, and asked them to develop a new document that more people at the university can agree upon. “It was prominently labeled as a draft,” he said. “It was never meant as a fait accompli. This was a first attempt to develop a dialogue.” [Yeah, sure. When they realized that some professors might make a scene, and embarrass them, they backed off. But then we always knew that bullies were cowards.]Is this a special ad-hoc committee full of the administration's toadies? That's a popular dodge for going around usual channels? Or is it a standing committee on curriculum, which is likely to reach a consensus agreeable to the administration? Dialogue, piffle. Process, nuance, self-destruction. Don at Left2Right sees what is at work.
I won't bother spelling out what's repulsive about these proposals. I suspect only the authors of the Plan, locked in endless committee meetings, could have failed to notice. But I wouldn't be insistently dour.He has an interesting take on why the plan is a bad idea.
Regardless, those of us who favor affirmative action and diversity need to be loud and clear in denouncing travesties like the Oregon plan. So please, consider it well and truly denounced by this academic leftist.So, from a different perspective, does Number 2 Pencil. Do read it all, and savor this. (In this excerpt the bold is from the Oregon plan. The bulleted list is just additional confirmation of its lameness. The Fisking is in plain text.)
• Cultural sensitivity and knowledge are necessary but not sufficient for individuals to behave in a culturally competent way. What gets rewarded gets done. Funny, when we try to use that as a defense for NCLB, or for teacher merit pay, or any other system that recognizes good work over bad work, we hear that it's not fair to use the carrot-on-a-stick method to improve education.And why economics departments tend not to test pc-positive. Ms Swygert links to an open letter to Mr Frohnmayer signed by 24 professors (fields not provided) raising objections to the plan. Key paragraphs from this, which will also be reviewed by Schneider u. Schwarz:
1). The Orwellian insertion of the undefined political notion "cultural competency" into every aspect of administration, teaching, and performance evaluation throughout the University.Ayup.
2). The dramatic interference into the faculty search and recruitment which, apart from violating academic freedom, will have a devastating effect on the quality of research and teaching at the university.But the devastation began long ago, with the open complicity of the faculty. (I will get to that.)
3). The spending of vast additional sums of money on diversity-related bureaucracy, requirement that at a minimum the university has a vice provost for equity and diversity as well as four assistant vice-provosts, creation of a "Diversity Institute", seven new funded centers and directors, more special math and English classes reserved for minority students, the creation of new departments of Ethnic Studies and Women's Studies, a minor in Queer Studies, ... . The list goes on and on.Meanwhile, there are no resources for the things that really matter.
But it is already clear from the above that many faculty will see the document as an attempt to create an atmosphere of fear, hostility, and political intimidation throughout every aspect of the University. Already, many of the best faculty are talking about leaving. Many others will boycott these draconian measures or will go for help to the legislature and the press. At a time when salaries of state employees have been frozen because of budget problems and morale on campus is already low, it is outrageous that the university is spending millions on projects like this.Right. What was that William Buckley quote about organized labor having to fear a principled Republican, which is to say not much to fear at all? (It's from the 1950s and in Quotations from Chairman Bill.) There's something similar here. Academic administrators wet their beds over fear that the University of Phoenix (talk shop for three hours a week and call it college) will draw off their students. What they most have to fear is an administration in a famous university that will take a principled stand against coreless curricula and diversity boondoggling, but the recent mau-mauing of Harvard's President Summers suggests that they also have not much to fear at all. Never mind some of the outrage captured at Inside Higher Ed.
"Who do you think you are?" Boris Botvinnik, a math professor, asked. "You would like to tell us what to do in terms of research in mathematics? We'd like to have a nice atmosphere of diversity on campus. We hire the best people available, and this is the only way to keep the level of the department high."(Thanks to Blogs for Industry and Joanne Jacobs for following this story.)
Professor Botvinnik, (any relation to the Grandmaster?) the damage has been done long ago. I want to expand on this observation from yesterday, "Administrators are capable of engaging in expense-preference behaviors that are compatible with the worldviews of sufficiently many campus politicians that those campus politicians acquiesce in administrative power grabs..." A poem by Pastor Martin Niemöller, the one that begins "First they came for the communists" comes to mind, for the structure, not for the comparisons. (Let's keep things in perspective. Pastor Niemöller was prisoner of a totalitarian state that required the combined weight of the Soviet Union, the British Empire, the United States, Tito's partisans, and the Free Poles and Free French to crush it. Academic administrators tremble at the thought of losing a student to the University of Phoenix and grovel cravenly when the most junior of legislators calls.) But why the structure? Herewith an indictment of all too many campus politicians, too many of whom have been for a long time complicit in the destruction of their curriculum, their departments, and their integrity.
First they came for the smokers. And you went along with it. Smoking, after all, is a dirty habit encouraged by misleading advertising. What is a little marginalization of people who have dirty habits, never mind if the smoking policy is an administrative ukase? It's all for the Greater Good.
Then they came for the Greek-letter organizations. And you went along with it. The Greek-letter organizations are islands of exclusion, colonies of village idiots who remind you of your high-school tormentors, and controllers of a sexual cartel that never granted you a certificate of convenience and necessity (are you following this, Thomas Frank?) and the opportunity to pay them out was too tempting, never mind the damage that this does to the concept of freedom of association.
Then they came for your positions. And you went along with it. The policies of identifying diversity hires, or terminating a search because the pool of applicants was insufficiently diverse, or of setting up area studies departments to appeal to scholars who had the kind of diversity you valued, and who gave you an opportunity to make a statement for your form of social justice (that will have to wait) was with your connivance. And you were receptive to the idea that for hundreds of years, the universities had been practicing affirmative action for white guys, so arguments based on merit or the lack thereof were so much special pleading. Besides, those hires and those departments were for the students you weren't terribly interested in dealing with anyway.
Then they came for your curriculum. And you went along with it. Standards were just another path-dependent social construction, and there was no reason for a teacher of mathematics to take any courses in the math department, or for a future marketing executive to understand psychology or a pre-law to understand the classical allusions.
And now they have come for you. And you are surprised. Grandmaster Botvinnik would tell you that ten or twenty years ago you asked them to. Former faculty senator Karlson warned you, and you thanked me for stating opposing views so eloquently. But you did nothing to improve your position.
I'M RICH ENOUGH THAT I DON'T HAVE TO USE ONE. Miss Manners offers advice to people who are hassled for lack of providing hassling opportunities, now via cell phone.
Precisely.Miss Manners knew it would come to this. It happens with every new toy.
Overnight, people switch from declaring its very existence to be rude to declaring it rude not to have one. Same thing happened with the answering machine: At first, everyone was screaming about how rude it was to have a machine answer the telephone, and the next thing Miss Manners knew, they were screaming about the lack of consideration in not letting callers leave a message.
So do not confuse the question of owning a cellular telephone with that of misusing one. The issue is whether you should have one, not whether anyone should. And in this issue, you are the only one who has a say. Others should be told, "I don't find it's worthwhile at this time."
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