CONTINUAL AND FEARLESS SPRAYING AND CUFFING. Madison's Hallowee'n weekend, which is a nearly 30 year tradition of street partying and outrageous costumes (anybody else remember 1978, the year of two papal conclaves?) is apparently a bit too successful for the current city government. Dane 101 appears to be the Isthmus News Service of the crackdown coverage and commentary. (Former Madison mayor Paul Soglin has a weblog??!?) Notes from the Underground provides several links. Danny at Electric Commentary came back from State Street intact.

A FACTION FIGHT AMONG THE ELECT? That's stolen from a characterization I read somewhere about the selection of rulers of the Soviet Union after the Stalin-Trotsky split ended any hope of popular sovereignty in the building of Communism. (Sorry, many more books, many more beers, fewer and less nimble brain cells, can't point you to the book and page the way I once did.)

There's something in last week's Peggy Noonan column that prompts the title. In some ways, she's sounding a Fourth Turning Alert, seeing the cracking of established institutions everywhere. But it's this paragraph that irritates:

Our elites, our educated and successful professionals, are the ones who are supposed to dig us out and lead us. I refer specifically to the elites of journalism and politics, the elites of the Hill and at Foggy Bottom and the agencies, the elites of our state capitals, the rich and accomplished and successful of Washington, and elsewhere. I have a nagging sense, and think I have accurately observed, that many of these people have made a separate peace. That they're living their lives and taking their pleasures and pursuing their agendas; that they're going forward each day with the knowledge, which they hold more securely and with greater reason than nonelites, that the wheels are off the trolley and the trolley's off the tracks, and with a conviction, a certainty, that there is nothing they can do about it.

Oh, come off it. The entire partisan tussle, all the blue-and-red, all the shouting and talking points merely ticket-punching by people who attended the same few private colleges, interned with Heritage or Brookings, wrote for Washington Monthly or New Republic or National Review merely a faction fight among the elect for the right to tell The Rest of Us what to do? And now they're frustrated because more than a few of The Rest of Us are pursuing our own goals?

Justus for All makes the same point in fewer words.

What we are experiencing I think is a dramatic empowerment of the individual, and a corresponding decline in the ability of the 'elites' to control events.

Emergent meritocracy, forsooth! Must think about this further. Must, however, recommend The Sovereign Individual for a more pessimistic assessment of the consequences of that empowerment and decline. (That book antedates September 11, and it marvels at the United States flipping several submarines' worth of cruise missiles at one wealthy Saudi expat called Osama bin Laden. There is much more of a similarly gloomy tone to be found between the covers.)

The Anchoress suggests the current generation of elites longs for The Reckoning as a way of achieving long-held goals. Classic Fourth Turning thinking that.

Photon Courier links to a sandhouse session on the Noonan column he started at Chicago Boyz, but at posting time the Watsonville yardmaster appears to have lost the train of thought.

RISING FRUSTRATIONS. Russian Violets offers her version of The Talk.

Mike Rose said in Lives on the Boundary that "Students will float to the mark that you set." I'm going, today, to remind them that I will not lower the mark because they are too lazy and unmotivated to achieve. Instead, they will bear the burden of their actions.

Go. Read. Understand. Empathize.

TO THE SHORES OF TRIPOLI. It's Hallowe'en, and its the 202nd anniversary of the capture of Philadelphia by Tripolitans bent on lifting the blockade of the Barbary Coast. A subsequent raid by Constitution, Enterprise, and the war-prize Intrepid (a precursor of the Q-ship?) burned Philadelphia. No less than Admiral Nelson himself hailed the operation as "the most bold and daring act of the age."

CARNIVAL CALL. This week's Carnival of the Capitalists sets up a particularly long bannerline at Triple Pundit. Thanks! If you've followed the ringmaster's directions this far ("triple" in the title calls for such a comment) the electricity deregulation post, with links to all the radio coverage, is here.

INCENTIVE COMPATIBILITY? University administrators seek the assistance of student governments in ratifying fee-increases to pay for amenities. Are the referenda illegitimate because few voters vote?

Colleges say they are giving students what they want, pointing out that the fees have been approved by student governments or referendums. But a vast majority of students aren't involved in the process. College administrations control most of the revenue - with little oversight from the UW System staff and Board of Regents who govern the state's 13 four-year public universities.

Or are the referenda flawed because they enable a current cohort of students to pass along the costs to future students?

And where does the money go?

UW-La Crosse is using $10 million in student fees to pay for a recreation center that was built in the mid-1990s.

UWM is using $5 million in student fees to help pay for the renovation of the Klotsche Pavilion.

UW-Parkside is using $24.1 million in student fees to expand its student union.

UW-Oshkosh will use $21 million in fees to build a new fitness center.

UW-Madison, meanwhile, will use $17 million in fees to help pay for a development called University Square that will include housing, retail, health services and a student activities
center.

"There are more student-funded projects now than 15 years ago, primarily because the buildings are older and student expectations are higher," Harris said.

University administrators frame these projects as student-initiated and student-approved. Fee increases must pass a student referendum, a vote by a student government body or both.

But in most cases, few students are involved in the review and approval process.

That becomes a tender subject sometimes.

Janelle Wise, a UW-Madison senior who served as chair of the student finance committee, disapproves of some of the choices made by the administration, specifically the decision to use almost half a million dollars a year in student fees to fund the school's diversity education staff.

Wise says UW-Madison should be using other sources of money to fund a unit that reports to the administration.

Particularly a unit that has revealed expense-preference behavior in the extreme. Such projects are guaranteed to get the legislative micro-managers involved, as they have.

THE ST. LAWRENCE SEWER? The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel launches a three-part report on the state of the St. Lawrence Seaway.

Now, nearly 50 years after the manmade shipping link between the Great Lakes and Atlantic Ocean opened for business, it turns out Seaway boosters were right: Foreign cargo did flood the lakes, but it wasn't what we had hoped for. And the Seaway did change our lives, but not necessarily for the better.

Alas, no spices from the Indies or exotic Teutonic brews in the holds.

Fouled beaches, beleaguered fish populations and ominous wildlife die-offs - all linked to the Seaway and to biologically contaminated ballast spills from overseas freighters - are often written off as a grim but necessary cost of the Great Lakes doing global business.

But with each passing year, that global business is looking more and more like a bust.

Most bulk and container freighters can't even fit into the Seaway, which was undersized from the day it opened. The result is that Great Lakes overseas traffic is limited to a small fleet of pre-World War II-sized ships that typically bring in slabs of foreign steel to feed the region's dwindling manufacturers, and depart with shrinking loads of Midwest grain.

And with the railroads able to price grain shipments by the trainload, and thin-slab casters able to recycle scrap into decent sheet, neither the importers' nor the exporters' price advantage is what it used to be.

One estimate of the total annual economic benefit associated with floating that material in and out of the Great Lakes basin on overseas ships instead of bringing it into the region by some other means, such as trucks or trains or Mississippi River barges, is less than $55 million.

Not much benefit given the possible recreational losses.

Yet the total cost of the two-decade-old zebra mussel invasion just to utilities and municipal drinking systems - which must keep water intake pipes clear of the clustering mollusks - has been estimated at $1.5 billion. That figure likely tops $2 billion when similar expenses to other industries are factored in. Then there are the costs that don't appear in a ledger - the immeasurable price tag of a shredded Lake Michigan food chain, or a family's ability to enjoy a day at the beach.

And the traffic benefits of the Great Lakes are overwhelmingly movements of bulk-cargo through the Upper Lakes in boats so large that they're landlocked. (Leave aside for the moment the possible valuation of recreational opportunities. We can do such things with the proper tools.)

U.S. Seaway boss Albert Jacquez says Great Lakes and Seaway shipping generates $3.4 billion in business revenue annually on just this side of the border. Ships plying these waters move 222 million tons of cargo per year, according to a 2002 Army Corps of Engineers study.

But here is a critical point that gets lost in the Seaway's annual reports and press releases: The overseas portion of that traffic is a skimpy 15.4 million tons - 6.9% of the total cargo moved. And that overseas trade - mostly inbound steel and outbound grain - registers barely a blip on the U.S. import-export charts.

Last year, for example, Seaway grain exports accounted for about 3.6% of the nation's overseas grain shipments, according to the U.S. Grains Council. In a typical year, Seaway steel imports account for around 6% of the U.S. annual total.

Regular readers are aware of these points. Is it time to pull the plug on the St. Lawrence Seaway?

A QUOTE FOR THE DAY.

Toleration gives us the dictum attributed to Voltaire, that I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. Relativism, by contrast, chips away at our right to disapprove of what anybody says. Relativism names a loose cluster of attitudes, but the central message is that there are no asymmetries of reason and knowledge, objectivity and truth.

That's Simon at Butterflies and Wheels. Read and understand.

PSEUDO-INDIAN SPEAKS. Critical Mass sees the hidden meaning.

Ward Churchill spoke at DePaul University. His visit caused enormous controversy, in part because Churchill causes controversy wherever he goes, but also because the visit highlighted what looks to be an institutional double standard about who does and does not get to speak at the school.

The American Thinker has coverage from a DePaul mathematician and a Chicagoland attorney who demonstrated great creativity in getting into the speech.

POSSIBLE SOURCE OF COMPANY MAIL? The Speaker of the House, who represents the Fourteenth District of Illinois, has a weblog.

BY THE BRIGHT SHINING LIGHT OF THE MOON. Carnival of the Badger No. 11 pops up at The American Mind. Jump around!

THE WORD GETS OUT. Some time ago these pages called attention to the Free Speech Zone at Northern Illinois University. The continued existence of this free speech policy, along with several other abuses, has earned Northern Illinois University a Speech Code Rating of Red from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

Several of the award-winning phrases are excerpts of university harassment policies. My sense is that these policies exist for purely bureaucratic reasons, otherwise known as "butt-covering." The harassment training session I attended included hypotheticals based on some rather un-mannerly fishing off the company pier as well as some lame attempts at team-building that gave offense. The relevance, particularly, of the latter, to a university escapes me. I'd welcome any explanation, in the comments, or by private e-mail, of the value of team-building activities among the for-profits.

ROUND AND ROUND ON REVERSE AUCTIONS. The University's National Public Radio news affiliate has made available all three interviews addressing the Commonwealth Edison rate increase and the reverse auction for the procurement of supply. The first interview features Dave Kolata, executive director of Illinois's Citizens Utilities Board. Next out is Commonwealth Edison's Vice President of Energy Acquisition, Arlene Juracek. This morning was my turn. The news director was kind enough to run the local feature in its time slot, rather than cut away to the announcement that Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers had withdrawn her nomination.

A seven minute interview is not a lot of time to communicate information. The producer's judgement was that the comparisons I drew between Priceline.com as a reverse auction and the joys of procuring pizzas would be the most accessible to a general audience. Herewith a quick synopsis of the other topic we chatted about.

1. Deregulation and fragmentation of formerly vertically integrated natural monopolies makes some sense. Although it seems a bit jarring to be undoing a power system in which one company generates, transmits, and distributes the electricity, there is ample economic research confirming that economies of scale do not persist at the largest generating stations in service. A system in which distribution companies purchase power from competing generating companies with the interstate transmission supervised by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the local distribution supervised by the state public service commission introduces competition where competition is practicable while preserving regulation of the natural monopoly components by the proper federal and state commissions. I mentioned natural gas as a useful analogy, with a bit of history best summarized as The Regulation-Induced Shortage of Natural Gas. The breakup of the Bell System also provides useful lessons in introducing competition where previously there was none. Put simply, had regulatory commissions worked the way Bob LaFollette and Richard T. Ely envisioned, there might be no interest in deregulation and restructuring. But experience uncovered a number of problems LaFollette and Ely did not anticipate.

2. The reverse auction is a useful tool for getting the low-opportunity cost producers to reveal themselves. (One snippet that didn't make it onto radio included an "if any students are listening, this is disclosing your comparative advantages.") But the nature of the contract is important. I came up with the pizza metaphor after reading a statement by the New Jersey Ratepayer Advocate (think of a guardian ad litem for the householder too busy or too put off to read all the filings before the commission.)

The power is to be procured in 180 "slices" of 100 megawatts each. If the auction works as intended, the price for the 100-megawatt slices will drop until there are no longer enough bidders to supply all of the electricity needed.

Doesn't that sound like 30 pizzas? (Better cut it into six slices. I'm not hungry enough to eat eight.) But not all megawatt-years(?) are identical. Some of these slices will be for base-load capacity. The power grid analogue of your basic cheese and sausage pizza is a coal-fired or nuclear steam-turbine station that can spin lots of power onto the grid, relatively cheaply, day in and day out. It's not the kind of thing you can turn on or off quickly, and if you're going to take it off-line for maintenance, you'd best have something ready to replace its power when you do that. These units, however, are not so helpful on those hot days when all the air conditioners are running constantly, or on those cold days when all the baseboard heating units turn on at the same time. Something a bit more expensive to run but easier to turn on or off to meet that peak-load is in order here. Put a slice of pineapple and an anchovy on half of one slice on a six-slice cheese and sausage pizza.

The idea of procuring most of the power supply in advance is to avoid the situation California's system operator ran into a few years ago, when forecast load was for a lot of baseboard units to kick in, and a few owners of generating capacity easily turned on recognized that they could extract a lot of rent from a system operator desperate that the system not fail from an overload. The New Jersey system, on the other hand, appears to commingle the base-load and the peak-load procurement in one price per slice. One of my observations that didn't make the final cut was that such pricing might benefit Exelon with payments as-if the company is being paid to make some slices of pineapple-anchovy-sausage-and cheese when it is making only cheese and sausage. Exelon's private information about northern Illinois load patterns did make the cut.

3. Despite those potential difficulties, the reverse-auction approach has some promise. It spares Edison's load managers the exposure to hold-up that Californians faced, an exposure that would have been present even without the abuse of the system committed by some power traders at Enron. It introduces competitive bidding for long-term contracts, something a bit more flexible than the Demsetz auction of the right to operate the vertically integrated monopoly. The compromise the commission, the power companies, and the intervenors have yet to work out is one of specifying the auctions in such a way that providers of base-load power face different incentives from providers of reserve power, such that base-load providers do not receive a blended price in excess of their opportunity costs, and reserve providers are not discouraged from participating because that blended price is below their opportunity costs.

NA NA, HEY HEY, GOOD BYE! Juan Uribe with an amazing grab and throw of a seeing-eye chopper over the mound. Runner out, game over, 1-0 Sox.

NO BARTMAN IN HOUSTON. Amazing catch by Sox shortstop Juan Uribe, getting to a foul fly before the fans could interfere, and hanging onto it as he tumbles into the third-base seats. 1-0 Sox, two outs, last of the ninth.

IT'S CALLED A MARKET TEST. Also in Atlantic's "College 2005" set is Richard Hersh's "What Does College Teach?" Mr Hersh is editor of Declining by Degrees, a project reviewed here. The article also hides behind the Pay to Read gatekeeper. It argues the case for improved assessment of universities, including a sensible proposal that universities quantify their value added ("a school is adding considerable value if it graduates more of its students than would be expected given their high school records and socioeconomic background, and adding little if it admits a bumper crop of high-achieving kids and then graduates them at a below-average clip.) Let me direct your attention, however, to two observations. Early in the article Mr Hersh notes a research finding that occasionally merits mention on these pages.

But although the researchers found wide variations in learning within each college or university, they were unable to uncover significant differences between colleges once the quality of the entering students was taken into account.

That information, alone, ought suffice to put paid to the positional arms races among colleges to simultaneously trash the U.S. News rankings and boost their standing thereon. (There is another paid article on the shenanigans enrollment managers engage in to tweak their entering classes in such a way as to make their rankings look better. Much of what is in there will make readers angry. But does it surprise that if an airline's seat-pricing algorithm is more valuable than its airplanes, that something similar would NOT be true of a university?) The money quote, however, is key to Mr Hersh's case for better assessment.

Finally, there is direct assessment of student learning that takes place constantly on college campuses, usually symbolized by grades and grade point averages. For our purposes these are nearly useless as indicators of overall educational quality -- and not only because grade inflation has rendered GPAs so suspect that some corporate recruiters ask interviewees for their SAT scores instead.

Focus on that last sentence. Remember this?

I continue to anticipate the Fortune 500 company, disgusted with spending large amounts of cash training junior executives in things the universities failed to provide, to announce that hereafter it will be recruiting in selected high schools.

High school juniors and seniors write the SATs. Somewhere, some personnel manager has to be wondering, what is the point of relying on a datum four or more years old with a noisy signal of progress since then ...

HASTA LA VISTA, EL CRUSHER. Here is a Spanish version of "The Crusher." The WFMU Blog that located it correctly asks, " what's Spanish for "do the crusher you turkeynecks" anyway?"

The words are straightforward enough. I recall, though, that the first hold is the eye gouge, followed by the hammer lock.

PUT IT ON THE BOARD ... YES! This isn't supposed to be live-blogging the World Series, but Jermaine Dye just batted in a run. 1-0 Sox.

WHAT IS SEEN AND WHAT IS UNSEEN. The "College 2005" insert in the November 2005 Atlantic Monthly includes a number of articles contemplating the tension between merit and access. I am pleased to report that the articles do more than the usual navel-gazing about the thirty or so expensive finishing schools that claim to be the five best colleges. I am less pleased to report that each of the linked articles is behind a subscription wall. You may thank me in advance for developing some proficiency in touch typing (and the backspace is a heck of a lot more convenient than that correction fluid.) First up, Ross Douthat, a recent and disillusioned Harvard graduate asks, "Does Meritocracy Work?" His conclusion: too well, for reasons not entirely the fault of higher education.

In this inherited meritocracy the high-achieving kid will not only attend school with other high achievers but will also marry a high achiever and settle in a high-achieving area -- the better to ensure that his children will have all the cultural advantages he enjoyed growing up.

Ah, the old assortative mating bugaboo? In a milieu which an apprentice characterizes as "drive-through divorce" with assortative mating, is the college Diversity Office now supposed to expand the mating pool? Let's stick with the facts on the ground. The key to the tension between merit and access is this.

Through boom and recession, war and peace, the proportion of the poorest quarter of Americans obtaining college degrees by age twenty-four has remained around six percent.

Why? Here, the first thing that is not seen.

Certainly, policies that strengthen families or improve elementary education undercut social stratification more effectively than anything colleges do. For now, however, numerous reasonably prepared students -- 300,000 a year, by one estimate -- who aren't going to college could be.

I'll return to Mr Douthat's thinking about access shortly. But notice what slips into that first sentence. Poverty as a consequence of poor life management skills? How many observers have shied away from that inference for fear of being mau-maued for blaming the victim or ordered to the corrective labor camp to be made more culturally competent? More specifics.

The higher one goes up the income ladder, the greater the emphasis on education and the pressure from parents and peers to excel at extracurricular achievement -- and the greater the likelihood of success.

Is there, anywhere, a program of sensitivity to the special needs of the disadvantaged that can overcome external reinforcement of internal ambitions? Or is that simply cooling out the mark?

Mr Douthat follows that observation with a curious parenthetical.

Even the admissions advantage that many schools give to recruited athletes -- often presumed to help low-income students -- actually tends to disproportionately benefit the children of upper-income families, perhaps because they are sent to high schools that encourage students to participate in a variety of sports.

What is seen and what is not seen, again. Compare and contrast collegiate hockey in the East (home-grown preppies) with that in the midwest (recruits off the iron range and the Canadian tundra.) But the elephant in the room is the exploitation of predominantly African-American youth in basketball and football, the so-called income sports, whose unpaid labors incompletely subsidize the entire intercollegiate athletics enterprise. Title IX of the 1971 Civil Rights Act mandates subsidies to female runners, gymnasts, equestriennes, tennis players, golfers, in proportion to the womens' share of the applicant pool. And you're surprised that well-off parents wouldn't pick up on that? Why not end the exploitation of the football and basketball players and drop ALL the athletic scholarships? It's easy to allocate zero dollars in proportion to any definition of the share of females in the pool of potential applicants.

Mr Douthat considers a number of reforms. Some have merit. Sometimes he gets a bit silly.

Public universities that spend more to improve access and graduation rates could make up for it by cutting, say, faculty salaries. Public schools already have a hard time keeping sought-after teachers from jumping to private colleges; if more money were spent enrolling and graduating poorer students, the problem would worsen?

What, you mean I get better working conditions and get paid more money? It's not the teachers that are sought-after. It's the researchers. Increase my class size? You've cut my pay. Request that I spend research time filling in progress reports for students admitted under various special criteria? You've cut my pay. Downsize the faculty and reduce the pool of colleagues working on similar projects? You've cut my pay.

The article is worth a look, warts and all. Hit your library. It's possible that the "College 2005" material will move to a free archive once the rents have been extracted from the Must. Read. It. Now. set. If the memory serves, I will advise readers of its availability.

HEIL (HAIL) THE WEHRMACHT ... I MEAN, THE BUNDESWEHR. German pacifists object to the Bundeswehr closing its golden jubilee ceremonies in Berlin with Der grosse Zapfenstreich ("bar time," in Wisconsin English.)

The "Zapfenstreich," originally just a signal indicating lights out dating back to the end of the 16th century, took on a musical form and has been an institution in the German armed forces since 1838.

Politics professor Wolf-Dieter Narr of Berlin's Free University argued that the ceremony belongs to the eras of German imperialism and the Nazis.

"I don't claim it was the product of the Nazis, but it was certainly a ceremony they used," Narr said.

I have a recording of one such ceremony from before Reunification. Was it in Ordnung to hold it in Bonn, but not in Berlin? Where was the professor on the subject of goose-stepping by the Volksarmee of the so-called Democratic Republic, 1949-1989? That, too, is a holdover from the Kaiser that the Nazis used. Zapfenstreich has a back-beat you can goose to, but the current German military doesn't do that. For that matter, where does the professor stand on the subject of placement examinations for Gymnasium? That was certainly a ceremony in use in the Nazi period. Come off it, already.

More interesting is this observation by another protestor.

Frank Brendle of the anti-ceremony alliance said the transformation of Germany's military from a purely defensive force to more professional units capable of operating abroad was another focus of the protest.

"It is an expression of militarized politics. We have moved from an army of defense to one of attack," Brendle said.

But outgoing Defense Minister Peter Struck defended the celebrations, saying it had nothing to do with the Nazis or the Wehrmacht.

"The military tattoo is an old Prussian tradition," he told Reuters television.

Ah, those old Prussian traditions. (They include surrendering to Americans, a tradition the Prussians borrowed from the Hessians.) All the same, when you see German troops doing close-order drill with bicycles, worry, particularly if you're French.

KEEPING THE POOR POOR? Two views of the role of the university, its relationship to corporations, and the value of testing. Robert Miranda, writing at WisPolitics, is uneasy about workplace preparation and testing.

For decades our educational system has been structured through "testing"-the tests are designed to persuade the working class, and people of color that they and their children are intellectually incapable of performing as professionals, filling the better and higher paid jobs, or leading the nation. The book, "The Bell Curve" (Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray) provides us with an overt attempt to prove and justify this twisted logic. In fact, the book states that Latino immigration is contributing to the downfall of American national intelligence (p. 341). Statements such as this contribute to this wicked prevailing notion of intellectual inferiority within communities of color.

Indeed, tests help to screen the children of the working class, Latinos, Blacks and other communities of color away from universities and point them towards vocational and so-called "career" programs, effectively excluding them from the best jobs our nation has to offer. Many European and Asian models of higher education follow this doctrine of elitism effectively cutting off upward mobility of generations of workers.

University leaders understand this and over the years they have been eager participants and co-planners of the transformation of the university becoming a production-line plant for corporate research and development. [They] are ideologically indistinguishable as a group from the leaders of major multinational corporations, and share the same goals. The truth of the matter is that these ideological homogenous men (and women) have created a racially and class-biased system of education, and are doing so deliberately and with malice aforethought.

Kimberly at Number 2 Pencil notes that testing has some value. (Her focus is on a different argument than Mr Miranda's social stratification argument.)

What testing critics are hoping you don't notice with this type of criticism is the fact that, if you can't read and write and do basic calculations - skills for which test scores tend to be extremely good proxies - your chances of economic success in our society are extremely low, regardless of your academic or artistic abilities. Sure, there are kids with rock-bottom SATs who make big bucks on stage or on a playing field, but the percentage of Americans who make a living with those skills alone is pretty darn small.

What this type of testing critic wants you to conclude is that kids who do well on standardized tests have learned many literacy- and numeracy-related facts without really understanding them, that these skills are utterly separate from other mental and physical abilities, and that the development of skills that are measurable with tests always happens at the expense of other critical skills. I think that's nonsense. You want to teach your kids good habits of mind, good social skills, and some touch football or ballet as well? Then explain to them that, unless they're prodigies, they'll be supporting themselves with their minds, not their bodies, later on in life, and skills such as discipline and teamwork will serve them just as well later on life as they will on their upcoming exams.

Does research show that high test scores predict everything a kid will do later in life? Of course not. But I think there's sufficient research to show that low test scores are a sign of a real problem, and a strong indication that intervention is needed. Maybe if schools of education impressed this upon the would-be teachers and principals, educational research would have a bit more impact on education today.

Study both of these posts. I have been reading a series of gloomy if at times not-well-thought-through essays on meritocracy and college competition in the back-to-college section of The Atlantic. These will be material for some upcoming posts.

CARNIVAL CALL. Carnival of Education 46₍₈₎ returns to The Education Wonks.

A PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT. The university's National Public Radio news affiliate is doing a three-parter on an upcoming electricity rate case that includes the unbundling of generation from transmission and distribution. The first interview features Dave Kolata, executive director of Illinois's Citizens Utilities Board. Next up, an interview with a representative from Commonwealth Edison. Airing Thursday morning: some compare-and-contrast from me. Links to the second and third interview to be provided.

RAILWAY PRESERVATION LOSSES. There has been a fire in a roundhouse in suburban Nuremberg that damaged or destroyed 24 historic locomotives and cars. We are not referring to the main Deutsche Bahn collection in downtown Nuremberg, although Pravda is insufficiently clear on whether this roundhouse holds a subsidiary collection or some other museum's collection. (Old habits die hard where railway secrets are concerned, nichevo?) Where Worlds Collide links to German news coverage of the fire and the aftermath. Looks like a V200 diesel (the make that enticed Southern Pacific to go Fairbanks-Morse one better) and a German Santa Fe (they had freight locomotives with trailing axles??) are among the casualties.

THE CARNIVAL OF LAW AND ECONOMICS. Blawg Review hosts both the 107th presentation of Carnival of the Capitalists and the 29th Blawg Review, with a focus on business law. Don't overdose on the cotton candy!

A RAILWAY PRESERVATION REPORT. It's been rather busy with the day job, which turns into a night job as well. Here, however, are some pictures from a local preservation railway that does its biggest business on fall weekends. (One end of the line is behind a farmers' market that does a great business with hayrides, pumpkins, apple pies and other Dairy State harvest goodies. Lots of kids see the train and talk the folks into going for a ride.)

First up, a real camera shot of the recently restored Sheboygan Light, Railway, and Power Car 26. This car served for many years as a lakefront cottage before its owners donated it to the museum to put it back on rails.


Inside, the seating is tidy if not particularly luxurious. These cars existed to bring workers to the Kohler factory and farmers to the department stores. On weekends they hauled picnickers to Elkhart Lake (long before the Forumula 1 set discovered the place.)


Philadelphians might cringe at this picture. Sorry. If one has to modify a car to load from street level and run off a trolley wire, one might as well be honest about it. This is former Philadelphia and Western and Philadelphia Suburban car 164. Philadelphia Suburban purchased the Electroliners to offer coffee shop and tavern-lounge service on the Norristown High Speed Line.


Here is a picture from October, 2004. The locomotive is one of the newer pieces in the collection. It was built in 1935 and served to shift coal hoppers for Wisconsin Electric Power at Port Washington, Wisconsin until about 1970. It does on occasion move revenue freight for the preservation railway, which does serve some on-line industries.


Inside the museum ticket office and gift shop is this O Scale layout built by the late Tom Matola, an accomplished modeler of streetcars and interurbans. The model is of a Milwaukee 500-series deck-roof streetcar, one of the heavier cars to break up the streets of Milwaukee. If only some trader would make castings for Milwaukee's unique harp-case streetlights. (Visitors to the contemporary city take note: the ones that have proliferated in shopping and tourist districts of late are replicas. The originals mostly disappeared in a fit of misguided modernization during the 1960s and 1970s.)

A FEW BYTES OF FAME. Welcome, visitors from The Main Quad, which made Cold Spring Shops the Featured Blog last Sunday. Thanks! And greetings to visitors from Samantha Burns, who has a Random Blogroll (is that anything like the Penn Central traffic department?) that occasionally routes traffic this way. This is a working site. Expect trains of thought on any track, in any direction, at any time.

WHY ARE WE PAYING TWICE FOR THE SAME JUNK? Two posts address different dimensions of the university's remediation dilemma. Perhaps the Retention Pond will be drained when sufficient policymakers think about the cost-benefit ratio. Start with something I found at Joanne Jacobs's place.

College students, educators rue unpreparedness.

Gov. Jennifer Granholm called on the state Board of Education to adopt mandated graduation requirements. State Superintendent Mike Flanagan will make a recommendation to the board Nov. 15 on boosting graduation guidelines.

"Everybody feels they have to do something because the economy is so drastically changing and kids have to be prepared to work in a much more technologically advanced world," said Kathleen Straus, president of the state Board of Education.

The problem is clear in the enrollment for remedial math at Wayne State, which has soared 85% in the last four years. There are 1,200 students in 12 sections of the class, a computer-based course.

"These students are coming in at the level of ninth-grade math," said Patty Bonesteel, developmental math coordinator at Wayne State. "Without a doubt, the idea of being bad at math is perfectly fine in our culture, and that's unfortunate."

They're beginning to catch on.

One of the main problems is that high schools simply haven't kept up with the changing economic times, and that has left the United States lagging behind, said Beverley Geltner, superintendent for Southfield Public Schools. And it's not just a school issue.

"It's a national survival issue," Geltner said. "The American standards of education are simply not world class anymore."

Funny how incentives work, isn't it?

There's a related post over at Anonymous Community's place.

Instead, judging by the amount of remediation we have to do at the cc level, what we have for the 13-to-17 population could be described as holding tanks.

Remediation is a live wire, as a political topic. Yet, educationally, it’s an obvious need.

Some have argued that colleges should get out of the remediation business. Leave high school material to the high schools, and don’t bill the taxpayers twice for teaching subject-verb agreement or the pythagorean theorem. Save tax money, and maintain the brand integrity of higher education.

He goes on to note that, for a number of reasons, some remediation is a necessary evil. Point granted. There is, however, an efficient level of remediation, and accumulating evidence that the current level is inefficiently high. It doesn't come for free, and it's draining on people who expected to be working in the higher learning yet encounter ever-rising administrative expectations that those same people do special education. (Think about it this way: do you really want a high-strung test pilot teaching weekend flyers how to read a check list? Shouldn't the test pilot be pushing the envelope on the latest hard-to-unload passenger bus?)

EVERYTHING HAS AN OPPORTUNITY COST. University Diaries has located a number of useful posts on mission creep in the higher learning, this time focusing on the misnamed cultural competency. First up: Wendy McElroy.

'Cultural competence' "entails actively challenging the status quo…one table noted the need to incorporate institutionalized notions of power, privilege, and oppression into the definition….Thus, for many, cultural competence is transformative and political."

There is something of the Cretan Paradox in this definition. Suppose the status quo at a university is a 'cultural competence' mission. Is it thus culturally competent to actively challenge the mission? Suppose further that the university has a Director of Cultural Competence. Does that person embody an institutionalized notion of power, privilege, and oppression? But let us suppose that the Director is destooled and the mission statement rewritten? Is not there a new status quo to challenge, ad infinitum, ad nauseam?

Next up: Butterflies and Wheels.

So at the University of Oregon. There was this committee, see, and it came up with ever such a good idea to transform the university - the entire university, every bit of it, not just the studies departments, but all of it, math, physics, biology, all of it - from a pesky old educational and research institution into a wonderful caring hand-holding Make Everything Better device. Into a branch of mental health and/or social work. Super idea, no? Only...one wonders why not leave that to mental health and social work and similar organizations, in order to leave time and space for the university to go on doing what the university is (generally) supposed to do? On account of how it's all tooled up to do that, and knows how, and has the equipment in place, and has the rules written down, and the staff hired, and the beds fitted up with sheets. That's not to say it couldn't do it better, that there's no possible room for improvement, but it is to say that it seems a little wasteful to make it do a completely different job after it's already gone to all that trouble. Unless of course we think teaching and research are just completely valueless, in which case it does make sense to recycle all those books and microscopes and libraries and lecture rooms into something else as best as people can. But do we think that? Have we decided that? Have we quite, entirely made up our minds that teaching and research are just boring effete pointless elitist preoccupations that should now make way for therapy and massage and bedwetting? Have we? I on't think we have, quite. We may be stumbling and creeping in that direction, but I don't think we're quite there yet.

Go read the whole thing. Reflect on whether there might be comparative advantages in researchers being researchers, therapists being therapists, and higher education higher.

Finally, a lengthy and rather gloomy essay by Professor Norman Levitt. Too much stuff to highlight here. Let me offer this.

Therefore, if I tell you that a university is, above all, an institution for the preservation and extension of learning and for its dissemination to the emerging generation, for the winnowing of truth from falsehood and imposture, for the conservation of the highest values our civilisation can conceive, for the emulation, insofar as we are capable, of the finest and deepest minds our civilisation has produced, for the hoarding and protection of what must survive of our civilisation even after all the dross has fallen away; if I tell you all this without satiric intent, and with the purpose of describing an ideal that is at least approximable if not perfectly realisable, then I will have committed an enormous gaffe, by the standards that our culture inflicts on us all. I will have tried to sell you a bill of goods, swamp real-estate, pump-and-dump stock, the Brooklyn Bridge.

Read the rest, and ask, where is the Fortune 500 employer who will tell the job-fair sales representative "Enough?" Read it, and ask, where is the stressed parent who will tell the campus recruiter, "Enough?"

GRAD SCHOOL PREPARATION? Constrained Vision notes that Duke's economics department seeks to phase out the B.A. Her take:

The econ department says it's trying to improve the degree and "give economics majors a more complete understanding of the field", but if I were feeling cynical, I might wonder if this already overcrowded department were trying to cut down on the number of majors.

The Duke Chronicle article reporting on the story suggests the deans would like to milk more effort out of an already overstretched faculty.

The elimination of the degree is one of the first steps in the Undergraduate Economics Major Initiative, which also includes the restructuring of course distribution requirements for majors.

The changes were prompted by top academic deans’ suggestions that the department provide students with more hands-on research experience.

“We said, ‘Rather than just trying to tweak our program, why not take this opportunity to look at the program as whole—if we had the possibility to create an ideal program, what would it look like?’” said Assistant Professor of the Practice Michelle Connolly, who led the committee that mapped out the major’s changes.

One notable difference between the B.A. and B.S. majors was that the B.A. degree did not require undergraduates to take econometrics, which will now be required for all majors.

“It’s certainly not that we’re unhappy with having a B.A. degree, it’s just that it’s important enough for every student to have econometrics,” said Connel Fullenkamp, associate director of undergraduate studies for economics.

Would an econometrics requirement in the B.A. crowd out a language requirement or some other college-wide component? The econometrics requirement is something that would serve aspirants to a Ph.D. in economics well. It might also induce substitutions.

“We don’t know to what extent students are only doing the B.A. because they just don’t want to do the additional constraints of the B.S.,” [director of undergraduate studies Emma] Rasiel said. “If, on the other hand, the economics B.A. is kind of pushing the limits of their mathematical abilities, they might think, ‘OK, maybe I should try another major.’”

Is Duke a university with only graduate degrees in business (as is the case at Harvard and Northwestern?) Or, if there is an undergraduate business program, does the economics major serve as a safety major in case the business program has to limit enrollments?

TWO SPORTS GIANTS, GONE. Milwaukee Brewer general manager Harry Dalton, who put together Bambi's Bombers and Harvey's Wallbangers, dead at 77. Mr Dalton did the Cardinals out of Ted Simmons, Pete Vuckovich, and Rollie Fingers. St. Louis might have repaid the favor by winning the Series...

Also crossing the final summit, Reggie "The One, The Only, The Crusher" Lisowski, who may have wrestled in the world's first cage match. Late in his career Jesse Ventura and Hulk Hogan were making their debuts. And yes, this is the wrestler The Novas sang "You do da eye-gouge, you turkey-neck" about.

In 1985, a reporter asked The Crusher why he was so popular in Milwaukee. "I think the working people identify with me, because years ago I worked when I wrestled, too. I worked in a packing house. I worked at Ladish, Drop Forge, Cudahy Packing House. I was a bricklayer. But finally, I got away from punching the clock," he said.

And read and understand this, turkey-necks!

"People make a joke out of it," he said of wrestling. "But it wasn't a joke to me. It was a living."

The world is a little less colorful tonight.

CLIMB EVERY MOUNTAIN. DoDo's Monday Train Blogging features the lost railroads of Colorado.

IT TAKES A LOT TO STOP A TRAIN. Photon Courier discovers that Norfolk Southern opted to retrieve track washed into Lake Ponchartrain by Hurricane Katrina rather than await delivery of new ties and rail. The gambit paid off, with the bridge repaired and in service 16 days after the storm surge. Resourceful? Yes. Also predictable. This is the company that for many years viewed toilets and in-cab air conditioning in diesels as unproductive additional-cost extras. Why buy new track if track already prepared to be exposed to the salt air has just been washed off the bridge?

UNIVERSITY ADMINISTRATORS ACTING SILLY. I once went to the Saturday Night Fights at DePaul and a womens' basketball tournament broke out. Apparently the DePaul administration redeemed itself somewhat in allowing some dissenters to listen to a speech by Colorado's fourth-rate Barrington Moore, jr.



Instapundit recommended The Mental Ward, where there is extensive coverage of the protest of Mr Churchill's visit. Marathon Pundit also attended the protest. Both sites provide additional links to others who followed the controversy leading up to the visit and the protest that accompanied it.

HOW DO YOU SCOUT BLOCKING AND TACKLING? I've been rather busy with grading and judging a student paper competition and in paying attention to the Badgers' win over Purdue missed the Northern Illinois score. Not to worry: Huskies 45, Kent State with a spite-check field goal late in the game. There was some worry in DeKalb with regular runners Garrett Wolfe and A. J. Harris out with injuries. Reserve Adrian Davis carried for 242 yards. Sean Ostruszka reveals the secret.

I think you’re praising the wrong guys. Let me introduce you to the true workhorses behind the Huskies.

To quote from the Epistle of Vincent to Green Bay, "The team that blocks better and tackles better will win the game."

INCENTIVES MATTER. Joanne Jacobs locates an Idaho proposal that matriculants in high school earn a C average in middle school first.

The State Board wants middle school students to earn a cumulative C average in math, science, social studies and language and pass pre-algebra as their ticket into high school beginning with next year's sixth-graders.

Those who don't meet the standards would be held back.

This is promising. What follows is more promising.

Better middle school preparation will help kids handle more rigorous high school classes that would require two more years of math and an additional year of science as part of a college preparatory curriculum all students would be expected to complete, the State Board says.

But let's think this through.

Earning a middle school C average is one of several parts to the State Board's plan to toughen high school with an eye toward encouraging more kids to go to college after graduation.

Relatively few Idaho youngsters start college, but with proper middle- and high-school preparation, will some of them require the remediation that too often passes for college? I can see the denizens of the retention ponds fretting over this prospect. Education Gadfly correctly notes that such a proposal will encourage grade-grubbing at lower levels.

If the Gem State's middle schools are like those in the rest of the country, they suffer from low academic expectations and an emphasis on social development rather than learning. Giving middle school teachers an incentive to inflate their students' scores could make that illness even more acute.

Whatever the problem, there is a tremendous social waste in the elementary schools punting their failures to the middle schools punting their failures to the high schools punting their failures to the colleges in such a way that more than a few potential high achievers finally live up to their potential ... upon completing a Master's degree. That path requires people to defer entering their peak earning years as well as to come up with more resources working their way through ... stuff their common schools might have equipped them with?

I KNOW I WROTE SOME QUOTES DOWN. Patience.

THIRTY SECONDS, BLUE FLAG AND GUN.^(*)Today is the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar. I was hoping to complete a relevant book review in time, but it's the fall semester and the deadlines keep on getting in the way.

England Expects that Every Man Will Do His D-U-T-Y

Apparently British flag codes worked on a variant of what later evolved as the Enigma cipher with the combination of numbers changed every few weeks in order that the opponent could not steal the signals. (Unlike a third base coach, an admiral cannot by planting a chaw in his cheek or scratching himself designate that a particular hoist is the real hoist. There is also a little problem with running strings of flags up and down the yardarms of not terribly maneuverable ships that are sometimes pitching in the storm and sometimes being shot at.)

The evolution of the flags is interesting. Although Nelson's code uses flags that represent numbers, "D" is the contemporary "Uniform" flag; "U" is "Peter over X-Ray" (if I ever hoisted that during one of my stints on Race Committee, everybody would have more reason than usual to doubt my sanity), "T" is "X-Ray over Kilo," and "Y" is "Peter over Uniform." If you're racing on the inland lakes, you might see "Peter over Lima," although most race committees use a plain blue flag rather than Blue Peter as the "racing rules now apply" signal.

There is a lesson for schoolteachers on Nelson's hoist and on the contemporary nautical flags. It provides interpretations for some but not all of the common hoists. I like "Bravo," which in racing means "Protest!" and on the high seas means "I am preparing to discharge explosives," and "India," which in racing means "I acknowledge that I maneuvered into your right of way" and on the high seas means "I am maneuvering with difficulty."

INDIVIDUAL RECALL. Amy Ridenour's National Center has Trafalgar bicentennial links. (Piped aboard by Sean at The American Mind.)

^(*)I did serve the Lake Geneva Yacht Club as a Principal Race Officer, 1988-1998. We will revert to the usual railroad nomenclature with the issuance of the next timetable.

WE ARE BADGER BUCCANEERS. This week's Carnival of the Badgers has a salty theme.

DRAIN THOSE RETENTION PONDS. Money might be tight at Northern Illinois University, but our Office of Faculty Development has resources to send a newsletter around to everybody as well as to post it for those who would rather print it themselves. This month's topic: students behaving badly.

Classroom Civility

Today there is a seemingly growing problem of lack of civility in university classrooms across the nation. Disruptive classroom behaviors include students arriving late and leaving early, reading newspapers, coming unprepared, being argumentative, refusing to participate, students not respecting the views and rights of classmates and faculty, private conversations, cell phone and beeper use.

I wait for the statement from headquarters that says "You do not have to put up with such things. Here are the sanctions we will support."

Instead, we read,

Media provide visual images of the current state of unrest and terrorism that today’s culture has come to expect; these images can readily translate to the classroom (Lepper, 2000). Easily filed lawsuits may keep faculty and administrators from acting on incidents of classroom incivility. In many cases, faculty may not retaliate for fear of retribution.

I repeat. Where is the statement from headquarters that says, unambiguously, "You do not have to put up with such things?"

I go to Professor Lepper's suggestions, and what do I see?

In many ways, the overall trends in educational institutions are mirror images of the trends that we experience in society. Therefore, if there is evidence of unrest in the social landscape, then we can expect to experience student unrest in the college classroom. The media attention given to the recent outbreaks of student violence in our nation's elementary and secondary educational institutions (Columbine being the most recent), have represented the extreme of classroom incivility. These outbreaks have also reemphasized the vulnerability of the classroom professor in regards to physical and mental abuse or even death. According to [Alison] Schneider [Chronicle of Higher Education OnDeadTree], college professors across the country are complaining that their courses have been hijacked by 'classroom terrorists'.

Here would be an opportunity for Professor Lepper to observe, "Columbine happened because the school authorities adopted a nonjudgemental stance toward the behavior of state-class athletes and burnouts alike, treating the emergent social order as applied constructivist theory, no matter how cruel it became. Choices have consequences."

Instead, he places classroom disruption in a historical context.

Every college professor has experienced instances where students were rude or confrontational in the classroom. The student activism in the 1960's and 1970's is an example of students confronting professors about the nature of the knowledge being presented, and on a more personal note, the nature of the research in which the professors were engaged. This same type of questioning was commonplace in the colonial colleges. During that era, students were embracing the ideas of the enlightenment in contrast to the religious dogma that laid the foundation for the curriculum, and represented the base of knowledge that their professors were drawing from. This blatant student disrespect of the knowledge of their professors eventually fueled the intellectual and emancipatory revolutions that founded this nation.

We were talking about people reading the newspapers, text-messaging, and conducting private conversations with neighbors or cell-buddies? Somebody with a smattering of knowledge of Marx or Leibniz or Philip Johnson (the evolution skeptic, not the architect) or William Brewster or worked up about a thread on NoIndoctrination or Democratic Underground is a Good Problem. This claim, although historically accurate, is a non-sequitur to the problem at hand.

Professor Lepper buried the lead.

Many faculty feel that it is not necessarily the fault of students or faculty members that has allowed for the rise of incivility in the classroom. Instead, they feel that it is the result of an overall lack of support by university administration that has left the individual professor powerless against rude and hostile students. Today's universities are more concerned with increasing revenues than they are about increasing students' intellect. This new emphasis on revenue has shifted the university's perspective on the student/teacher relationship, and this has caused a shift in power that has left university professors powerless to defend themselves against blatant attacks by students. Students are now seen as clients who are being provided an educational service by professors, and just like at McDonalds or Wal-Mart, the customer/student is always right. The reliance of university administrators on this business model of education has deligitimated the institution of higher education while simultaneously undercutting the authority of the professor in the classroom.

The good news for beleaguered faculty is that the business model is wrong. The demand for a university education is a derived demand, derived from the willingness of employers and graduate schools to accept a university's graduates. And the motivated students grasp this. What Professor Lepper appears to be calling for is a university administration worthy of its motivated students. Alas, it is likely to take a more stringent market test to effect such a change. I continue to anticipate the Fortune 500 company, disgusted with spending large amounts of cash training junior executives in things the universities failed to provide, to announce that hereafter it will be recruiting in selected high schools.

WHY AM I HERE? It's the third Friday, and time for the monthly report from the Teacher Certification committee I've been conscripted onto.

As some readers might have suspected, the teacher preparation program at Northern Illinois is confronting its review from the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, which the cognoscenti refer to as EN-Kate. I can see that a regular serving of Professor Plum will help me get through this hitch. What distinguishes Northern Illinois from Professor Plum's university is that Northern Illinois involves several colleges in teacher certification. Therefore, although the College of Education will have to jump through the hoops Professor Plum mentions, others are also subject to being called into the center ring.

At least I now know what the point is. We received it, on a nice blue sheet of paper.

The Unit Assessment uses common measures across programs to determine candidate progress in three areas outlined in the NIU Conceptual Framework^(*) Within each broad area, several categories of performance are assessed.⁽⁺⁾ The measures for Knowledge seek to assess candidate performance related to: content standards, Illinois Professional Teaching Standards, technology and core language arts standards, and scholarship. The measures for Practice seek to assess candidate performance related to: P-12 student learning, collaboration, and preparedness for diverse settings. The measures for Reflection seek to assess candidate dispositions related to: caring, lifelong learning/scholarship, creative and critical thinking, collaboration, and diversity. In addition to these common measures of performance, the unit assessment system assures that all candidates have been tested for tuberculosis (TB test) and have passed a criminal background check.

That last sentence jars, but note it is the most substantive performance measure in the statement of philosophy.

We also have a statement of principles.

Statement of Principle – Contemporary Experiences

The professional education faculty preparing candidates for initial teacher certification support, as a matter of principle, that all members of the unit such faculty should undertake sustained contemporary professional experiences in school settings minimally once every three years.

For purposes of this statement of principle, a contemporary professional experience is defined as an activity at a PK-12 school site that relates directly to the area of pedagogical training (certification) delivered by the respective member of the teacher preparation unit. Such contemporary experiences are expected to promote the faculty member’s knowledge of and direct experiences with current practices involving curriculum and instruction, diverse student populations, changing school and community cultures, and other policies and issues affecting local education agencies. Such contemporary experience requires the respective faculty member to engage in interaction with school site personnel and students in manners such as direct teaching of students across time, teacher action research, and cooperative endeavors. Such contemporary experience does not include activities such as observation of student teachers, delivery of in-service presentations, or teaching graduate or undergraduate classes.

That took about a half hour of discussion, two amendments to strike each of the "Such contemporary experience" sentences, and the subset of all faculty treated as "professional education faculty" as well as suitable "experience" and sufficiently above minimal work remain to be spelled out.

^(*)The conceptual framework is the document I referred to here as having a logo that resembles a hazardous-material warning.

⁽⁺⁾Catch that Divine Passive? The assessment isn't going to do itself. Somebody -- a lot of somebodies -- are going to be busy filling in forms and otherwise providing information, all because "Data is the force behind needed change." I thought the struggles between the Light Side and the Dark Side of the Force were behind change, and Data was an android. Silly me.

TONIGHT'S RAILROAD READING. Fruits and Votes admires things that run on rails and recommends others, including this service, for the commentary. Thanks! But do check out this European site run by DoDo at the European Tribune. DoDo, do I have the engine for you!

Union Pacific "Centennial" 6930 at the Illinois Railway Museum.

There are several posts of interest at DoDo's site. Let's start with a topic that has long been of interest here, the quest for the world's fastest steam locomotive. One post considers the case for the Hiawatha.


The caption describes this as the Afternoon Hiawatha at Deerfield, although the postwar red Mars light and mixed consist suggest that we are looking at No. 46, the 4 pm 80 Minute Train from Milwaukee to Chicago. The chimney in the background and the small rise suggest the C&NW roundhouse at Chase and the overbridge near Oklahoma Avenue in Milwaukee. Corrections and clarifications welcome.

The post links to an intriguing discussion of Mallard's speed tape suggesting measurement error or tape-doctoring. What if the instant of 126 is a hiccup recorded as Mallard ruptured herself? (The Gresley A4s had rather tender inside-cylinder heads.) To be fair, the post also mentions the Germans interpreting the speed tape on their record-holder contender conservatively.

Another post looks at the tricks railroads use to fit more cargo within the existing loading gauge. The comments point to the first installment of the experiences of a New Yorker writer riding a Union Pacific hopper train.

TWO ROADS DIVERGED IN THE WOODS. One of the difficulties we faced at Wayne State was the lack of preparation our charges had, irrespective of their ancestry or national origin. Best of the Web links to more recent news from Michigan.

The 2005 National Assessment of Educational Progress results show significant improvement in math. But the test results show little improvement in reading scores overall since 1992.

The gap between Michigan African-American students' progress and progress nationally has grown during the last decade.

At least policy makers are thinking about the right things. When I started at Wayne, I discovered that Michigan students could earn a high school diploma without algebra, let alone finite math or pre-calculus. (Milwaukee required something similar to finite math. Perhaps that's why the tools that Michiganians used to build the cars came from Milwaukee.)

"I think it has to do with is the importance of high expectations and standards," said Joan Ferrini-Mundy, associate dean for science and mathematics education at [Michigan State]. "Particularly for students who are being underserved, particularly black students and urban students." The good news is that the gap between black and white students' scores in math and reading within Michigan has decreased.

Best of the Web observes,

We'll agree it's bad news that black Michiganites are doing badly, but why is it good news that nonblack ones are losing ground even more rapidly?

NO JOY ON THE GOLD COAST? Tough times in Wrigleyville, with the World Series opening at Comiskey Park with one of the three teams that finished ahead of the Cubs visiting. The Sprecher is on ice.

RECLAIMING THE CULTURE. The National Basketball Association recommends business casual.

Players are required to wear business attire whenever they are engaged in team or league business.

Proscribed:

Headgear of any kind while a player is sitting on the bench or in the stands at a game, during media interviews, or during a team or league event or appearance(unless appropriate for the event or appearance, team-identified, and approved by the team).

Does that mean the end of the rather goofy ritual in which the draft pick puts on the one-size-fits-all gimme cap after his name is called?

Also proscribed:

Sunglasses while indoors.

Does that also apply to Jack Nicholson?

For an opinion that concurs in part and dissents in part, go here.

JUST IN TIME FOR THE COMMISSION. Inside Higher Education covers the opening of the Secretary of Education's Commission on the Future of Higher Education. University Diaries links to an Andrew Hacker review in the New York Review of Books of six books that paint a rather bleak picture of the state of the enterprise.

THERE'S THE GREAT WESTERN WAY, AND THEN THERE'S THE WRONG WAY. Tyler at Marginal Revolution finds an excerpt from The Undercover Economist (hey, I have a gift certificate to use...) with disquieting implications for someone who bought bubble.com at 300 times earnings back in 1999.

Not long after the Great Western Railway shares were put on sale for 100 pounds a share in 1835, there was a tremendous burst of speculation in rail shares. Great Western shares peaked at 224 pounds in 1845, ten years after the company was formed. Then they crashed and never reached that level again in the century-long life of the company. The long-term investor would have received dividend payments and would have made a respectable but unremarkable 5 percent annual return...

Small consolation for being part owner of the 12"=1' version of these beauties.


King Stephen was renamed King Edward VI in the 1930s.

WAKE UP AND SMELL THE COFFEE. Russian Violets notes reality riding in on the Gales of November.

And much of the foolishness that all too often accompanies first papers has disappeared -- as have many of the fools who have figured out that college is not an extension of high school and may just not be something they are equipped to handle at this point in their lives. It's like there's a big, giant pot of coffee that gets brewed as the weather grows colder; I used to call it a "come to Jesus" moment, but now, I really think it's a form of self-awareness that hits students around this time -- particularly the first-year students.

The taxonomy of her charges is enlightening. Do read it.

MAYBE.

You Have A Type A- Personality

A- You are one of the most balanced people around Motivated and focused, you are good at getting what you want You rule at success, but success doesn't rule you. When it's playtime, you really know how to kick back Whether it's hanging out with friends or doing something you love! You live life to the fullest - encorporating the best of both worlds

Do You Have a Type A Personality?

(Via Kelly in Kansas.)

IT'S CALLED MAKING CONNECTIONS. Joanne Jacobs finds a particularly inane piece of writing by an Iowa student with delusions of writing for Glamour. The inane piece is amusing.

When I got to college, the education system did a better job of focusing on students' career goals. But even then, I found myself stressing over statistical equations and astronomy facts during my first two years. Why? I was never going to use that information. For open majors, the general-education requirements are great. For me, they were a waste of time and tuition.

Not only did the gen-ed classes waste my time and money, but they also hurt my GPA. Being forced to take classes makes them less interesting. If they aren't interesting, you won't do well in them. Statistics and astronomy bored me, so I opted not to attend class and neglected to study for them. These gen-ed classes caused my GPA to plummet. I worried that these classes - ones that I would never use - were going to hurt my chances of getting into the journalism school, which has a 3.0 GPA requirement. As it turned out, my GPA was below 3.0 after my first year. I had to take summer classes to raise it, and luckily, I was eventually admitted to the J-school. I can not imagine what I would have done if I were not admitted. I would have had to change my major.

How is this fair? I shouldn't have to give up my dream of working at Glamour magazine because my GPA was low - all because of some stupid gen-ed classes that I was forced to take. Let's just get rid of them.

The smackdowns in the comments section of Joanne's post are brutal.

CARNIVAL CALL. Teaching Carnival II, with a focus on the struggles and triumphs of the higher learning, calls at Scribbling Woman.

STORED, UNSERVICEABLE? It appears as though Cassandra at Villainous Company has suspended service.

FOURTH TURNING ALERT. Critical Mass posts extended excerpts from an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Her interpretation:

The point of the piece is that higher education may well be reaching its tipping point--the moment at which parents, college-age students, and the general public decide that college is just no longer worth it.

It's a Fourth Turning Alert for the generational message. From the Chronicle,

Gen Xers also were told by one academic report after another how poorly educated they were as a generation, what a "rising tide of mediocrity" they and their schools represented.

Married Gen Xers with children are among America's most conservative voting blocs. They are fiercely protective of their children, in school and elsewhere. On their own and through PTA's, they are doing all they can to make sure that schools don't fail their own sons and daughters the way (they were told) their schools had failed them. Hence, at the grass roots, Gen Xers have propelled school choice, vouchers, charter schools, home schooling, and the standards-and-accountability movement.

And now they are coming, with their children, to college.

When we have raised the issue, we have found that, far more than boomers, Gen Xers are likely to recall college in hindsight as a waste of time and money. Their recollection of their own college years has morphed into a profound skepticism bordering on cynicism, a demand for standards and accountability, and a keen interest in the bottom line. Considering what they have done as school parents, it's not hard to predict how they will behave as college parents. This get-real generation will focus on standards, transparency, measurable results, accountability, and (especially) cost. They will ask, perhaps very pointedly, whether courses and the professors who teach them are worth the money. After carefully checking out the college dorms, food, gyms, and career-counseling services, they will ask about "ROI" (return on investment). Some will wonder whether class discussions focusing on issues of the 60s and 70s, still so intriguing to many boomer professors, teach anything their kids need in the workplace.

Many will ask why, in recent decades, whatever the economic climate, higher education has relentlessly risen in cost relative to inflation.

The answer to that last question is simple. The return on investment for those who finish has risen even faster. But that vocationalism at the expense of making connections is going to trouble Northern Illinois president John Peters, who in his State of the University speech noted,

Our students tend to be practical and outcomes-oriented. And like their peers across the country, many have come of age in the "No Child Left Behind" era of standardized testing. In fact, the most visible" generation gap" on today’s college campus involves faculty who stress critical thinking skills and students who just want to know if it’s going to be on the test.

That focus on being prepared for the test long predates "No Child Left Behind." The roots of the problem lie in "To get a good job, get a good education." The focus of this site is frequently on the ability of Higher Education to deliver a good education. Critical Mass links to a statement from the American Council of Trustees and Alumni that makes the same point, but in such a way as to more clearly spell out the task at hand.

The AACU report suggests that one reason American students are less rounded and less prepared for life after college is, ironically, that all they really do in college is try to prime themselves for life in the global economy. The intellectual impoverishment of that approach to undergraduate education, which increasingly sees college as a time for resume building, networking, and personal advancement, is taking its toll on a generation of young people who emerge from their undergraduate years well versed in gamesmanship but not particularly knowledgeable about anything else.

Curiously, the resolution of this tension between academic vocation and vocationalism might be in ... ensuring that division of labor between common and higher education is properly carried out. But that now comes with a new label, P-20.

The P-20 program, or preschool to graduate school program, asks observers to imagine a world where third-graders read at or above their level, every student learns algebra by the time they enter high school and every student who attends college finishes and enters the workforce as an educated member of society.

Better watch out. If that initiative works, legions of hand-holders and faculty tasked with teaching high school classes in the guise of "remediation and retention" might have to look for new jobs. University presidents serious about this program will have to treat their research faculty with more respect as their sycophants in the retention ponds turn on them. (Yes, I am deliberately being churlish here. I earned a research degree and was hired for my research skills. Skimpy pay raises and increased special-education responsibilities do not much for the morale do.)

But it's worth doing, and doing properly. Common schools that do not teach third graders to read set them up for future failure. Oh, snap! spells that out.

YOU'RE JUST THE HIRED HELP. Must be Minnesota Teachers' Convention. King's university has an open house and allows visiting families to park everywhere.

We've had "Year of the Student" and I guess now it's "Year of the Parents Who Can Afford A Day Off to Drive to Campus and Give Us Tuition Money." I can't wait until the university declares "Year of the Employee".

No. Your responsibility is to keep the hockey team eligible and Report For Diversity Training.

CARNIVAL CALL. Carnival of the Capitalists kicks off its third year from winter quarters at Accidental Verbosity.

GETTING HOSED DOWN BY THE ZOOKEEPERS. Great metaphor for a thesis defense? Congratulations, Jeff!

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE. University Diaries envisions Duke's administration re-educating the university's neighbors.

“We all know we need to demonstrate the ability to deal with disadvantaged people, and people of different ethnicities, and so forth. But the offspring of America’s affluent represent every bit as legitimate a culture as, say, the Hmong, or the Amish. It’s time for the shopkeepers and homeowners of Durham to demonstrate that they understand the cultural backgrounds and sensitivities of our student population, and to behave accordingly.”

Hie thee hence, and read it.

THE TRAIN USED TO STOP AT PAWTUCKET. Destination: Freedom reports that commuter trains may again call at the Pawtucket-Central Falls station.


I've ridden through that station several times and have always been impressed by it.

FAILURE TO SOCIALIZE. What do upscale universities have in common with poverty-pocket school districts?

Start in the common schools. Joanne Jacobs finds a Detroit News article reporting that Michigan teachers "give up on disadvantaged students."

The startling finding -- turned up in a statewide survey -- shows the problem is more a matter of class and income than race and ethnicity.

Nothing startling here. We used to have shop class and reform school for such problems. Times have changed, as have the skill sets of machinists and the attitudes toward warehousing delinquents. So too, has the notion that schools exist to instill some of the habits of the middle classes in the youngsters.

For example, college students studying to be teachers would welcome more training on dealing with diversity, which is often synonymous with race. But the survey says the bigger problems in the classroom are more directly related to economic class (family income), the education background of parents, as well as language barriers.

Interestingly, the poll suggests all the problems won't be solved with higher school budgets. If teachers are right, many problems lie outside the classroom.

Teachers need better training before they are assigned to a classroom, and more support once they get there in dealing with poor children. Schools must also be prepared to provide additional services to help students from homes where education is not a priority.

And they must work with poor parents to engage them in the learning process.

Unfortunately, the examples being set by more favored members of society are not good. Betsy's Page finds a story about well-to-do Dukies behaving badly. Her observation:

Some kids are disgusting and giving a fine university a bad name. It just goes to show how all that looking for character in the application process can't do much to screen out some truly obnoxious people. The school is full of fine kids who are volunteering in the Durham community and really trying to build healthy town-gown relationships and then these jerks have to spoil it all with their sense of entitlement for drunken parties.

University Diaries goes one better, discovering a royal who still understands noblesse oblige.

Despite Lady Gabriella's academic and romantic success in America, there is, however, one aspect of campus life that she may warn Beatrice about. Shortly before she graduated, she wrote about the social life at Brown University, documenting her fellow students' alcohol abuse, drug taking, sexual licentiousness and all-round bad behaviour.

She said she thought that it would be like living in Dawson's Creek, the American television soap opera featuring clean-living teenagers, but, in fact, she was confronted by drunken students, who indulged in "week-long vomiting sessions", and the widespread use of cannabis.

"Young men and women limp to classes bleary eyed from the previous evening's excesses," she told an interviewer. "In England everyone gets this out of their system at 14 and I can't help feeling that younger teenagers have more dignity in their disgusting alcoholic exploits than these supposed adults."

It's more difficult for Michigan's teachers to instill the notion that education matters with the most indulged participants in the system behaving so badly. And it's not a problem confined to the best-known universities. It has trickled down to the mid-majors. Here's Ms Newmark.

Not that they're much different from kids in colleges all over the country, but it's always disappointing to read about how these kids act. And if the Duke basketball teams play as predicted, I don't anticipate this behavior getting much better. I'd expel a few kids and maybe they'd get the message. Don't be a jerk!

Here's the anecdote from closer to home.

On Friday night in DeKalb, instead of going to bars, partying with friends or watching the White Sox game, I sat in a squad car with DeKalb police Sgt. James McDougal patrolling the streets and watching the police try to keep the peace.

My high expectations of police activity did not go unfulfilled.

That's Homecoming weekend. The post hoc disclaimer applies, but with the student affairs types promoting the football experience and closing some of the dorm dining rooms to encourage attendance at a Greek-system recruiting picnic earlier in the term, does this surprise?

LET'S MAKE A PROPER CASE FOR TRAIN SERVICE. Amtrak's Sunset Limited, the United States's only truly transcontinental passenger train, will not operate east of New Orleans for at least the next six months.

The Sunset is a canonical example of what my grandfather called the "try-weakly" train. It goes to Jacksonville and tries weakly to get back. Its advocates are going to have to do better than this.

The stop in Tallahassee was added in 1993 and now accounts for as many as 3,000 passengers a year.

The Floridians spoil more than 3000 presidential ballots per election. To put those loadings in perspective, Metra's Zephyr Corridor (Burlington Northern Santa Fe, if you will) loads as many as 3,000 passengers an hour at Naperville each workday morning and returns them that evening. Timekeeping tends to be better, too.

PRICELESS. Doxagora is not impressed with the New York Times's pay site. It's worth going over there, to see inter alia the public Paul Krugman characterized as "Atrios with a John Bates Clark medal."

LOOKING FOR THOSE MARKET TESTS? Easily Distracted reflects on tenure, alternatives thereto, and the difficulties of offering the higher education.

The problem in a way is that American universities and colleges don’t, can’t, think in any centralized way about what allows them to function well, what maximizes their internal productivity and generativity.

Some of it is the result of very deep-seated internal contradictions about what kinds of productivity is meant: productivity of knowledge, of engagement with the world, of numbers of “student units” churned out, of reputation?

More of the problem is that the consumers of higher education and its products (whether students, employers or the public sphere) don’t really know how to evaluate the relationship between external reputation and internal process (something that some of the discussion of Drezner’s case illustrates). They don’t know what goes on inside a university, or what it is that faculty do.

For some of these things, there are market tests. Consider the performance of equally capable graduates twenty years hence. The usual metrics for prestige have no effect on their salaries or occupational status, ceteris paribus. For other dimensions, it's harder to evaluate. Consider the time spent by faculty testifying before legislative bodies or acting as expert witnesses? Does that detract in any way from their research? Or are they making more productive use of their research.

Consider, further, that there are enormous common and joint costs. A professor does some reading. That turns into a course revision and an article. To what cost center shall we charge the reading? Or does it matter? The article attracts the attention of someone at another institution. That turns into a job offer, or an opportunity to participate in a seminar, or perhaps into a public service opportunity. Again, to what extent does that reflect well on the internal organization of the university?

AUTHORITY AND AUTONOMY. Photon Courier has advice for managers.

One could simply say "for best results, combine individual entrepreneurship with a high degree of teamwork." But I think de Grandallana says it much better.

That's a rule written in blood, in this instance the blood of French and Spanish sailors prior to Trafalgar.

An Englishman enters a naval action with the firm conviction that his duty is to hurt his enemies and help his friends and allies without looking out for directions in the midst of the fight; and while he thus clears his mind of all subsidiary distractions, he rests in confidence on the certainty that his comrades, actuated by the same principles as himself, will be bound by the sacred and priceless principle of mutual support.

Accordingly, both he and his fellows fix their minds on acting with zeal and judgement upon the spur of the moment, and with the certainty that they will not be deserted. Experience shows, on the contrary, that a Frenchman or a Spaniard, working under a system which leans to formality and strict order being maintained in battle, has no feeling for mutual support, and goes into battle with hesitation, preoccupied with the anxiety of seeing or hearing the commander-in-chief's signals ...

More Trafalgar posts to come. This upcoming Friday is the bicentennial of that battle. (Was that the last major fleet engagement before the Steam Era?)

R. A. N. E. S. T. K. S. Game theory older than law and economics? Consider Robert Aumann and Michael Mashler, "Game Theoretic Analysis of a Bankruptcy Problem from the Talmud," 36 J. Econ. Theory 195 (1985). Here's what one observer has to say.

The Babylonian Talmud is the compilation of ancient law and tradition set down during the first five centuries A.D. which serves as the basis of Jewish religious, criminal and civil law. One problem discussed in the Talmud is the socalled marriage contract problem: a man has three wives whose marriage contracts specify that in the case of this death they receive 100, 200 and 300 respectively. The Talmud gives apparently contradictory recommendations. Where the man dies leaving an estate of only 100, the Talmud recommends equal division. However, if the estate is worth 300 it recommends proportional division (50,100,150), while for an estate of 200, its recommendation of (50,75,75) is a complete mystery. This particular Mishna has baffled Talmudic scholars for two millennia. In 1985, it was recognised that the Talmud anticipates the modern theory of cooperative games. Each solution corresponds to the nucleolus of an appropriately defined game.

The article puts into perspective the famous Solomonic divide-the-baby solution (1 Kings 3:16) that many economists refer to as an early manifestation of incentive compatibility (the true mother prefers to give the baby to the false claimant rather than have him killed.) Apparently the rules of division predate Solomon. Somebody who pays closer attention to this than I notes,

[Solomon] even pretended to apply the well-known law of dividing disputed property. If two people come to court holding on to the ends of a piece of clothing, and each claims it to be his, the court divides it and gives each one half. King Solomon seemed to pretend to be ignorant of the many complicated details of this law, and to think that it applied to babies as well, which would have been ridiculously simpleminded. No judge would ever make such a foolish mistake. Yet, he succeeded in convincing the two women that he was serious.

Nonetheless, he was careful not to let the trick go too far. He specifically commanded his servants to bring the sword to him, not to give it to one of the guards.

Presumably the guards hadn't figured out incentive compatibility. The complications the commentator refers to, however, are complications that can be cracked using game theory. There are three conflicting principles to resolve. First, if the smallest complaint exceeds the property to be divided, it is divided equally. Second, only the disputed part of the property is to be divided (thus, if one person claim the whole cloth and the other half, one shall be given 3/4 and the other 1/4; Solomon's baby follows immediately.) Third, some disputed properties can be divided in proportion to the claims. Equal division comes into conflict with proportional division. The contribution of the cited paper is to suggest a theoretically consistent basis for allocating a property among contested claims in such a way that (loosely) no coalition of claimants is capable of obtaining a more favorable division.

JUMPING ON THAT TENURE TRACK? Bryan at Econ Log suggests a Ph.D. in Economics has a lot of upside potential. Read it, read the comments, draw your own conclusions.

BLOCK THE PUNT 'ROUND MINNESOTA. TOUCHDOWN? SURE, THIS TIME. It's been a wild weekend for college football. I made sure to spend some time grading and mowing the yard, but managed to catch some of the action. The highlight, at least for a displaced Cheesehead, was Wisconsin's theft of a win from Minnesota, a team that committed far too many special team mistakes to win, starting with a punt-'n-fumble (that old "Little Eight" standby) on their first series nullified by a false start on the punt. Minnesota put on a Badger-style clock-killing drive, scoring for a 10 point lead with just over 3 minutes to play. Wisconsin got a touchdown. A Minnesota defender tackled the receiver in the end zone and got the face mask and 15 yards. Wisconsin on-side kicks. Minnesota recovers close to their goal, and punts on fourth-and-one. Bad snap from center. Blocked punt. Three white jerseys on the ball before it rolls out of the end zone. Minnesota still not out of bad special-team plays. A Wisconsin cover man strips the return man on the kickoff. Badger ball. Take a knee. Game over. Axe stays in Madison.

Elsewhere, Michigan and Penn State put on their best imitation of a Mid-American second half, with the lead changing hands, each team running up consecutive scores, Penn State grabbing a lead with just under two minutes to go, and Michigan scoring on fourth-and-four with 0:01.xx on the clock to win. That ended just after Eastern Michigan and Northern Illinois put on their best imitation of the Big Ten, with Northern Illinois (the place that pioneered homecoming) winning homecoming, 24-8.

Other webloggers had eventful football weekends. Irish Trojan has live shots of Southern California stealing one from Notre Dame. The game was played at the east end of the South Shore. Blogs for Industry surveys a number of eventful games from around the country. I like his characterization of some normally big games being overtaken by events.

STORED SERVICEABLE. Public Brewery announces an embargo on posting for the present.

The past nine months of blogging have been fun, but it's time for me to take a break. Now that I'm directing a graduate program and trying to write a book, I find that I don't have the energy to keep up with the blog.

That terminology does not suggest a service ready for the Scrap Line, hence I use a different category from the valuation reports.

It's been a bit quiet around the Shops this weekend, as I decided to procrastinate from grading by doing some modeling and enjoying some college football. The grading is now done.

CARNIVAL CALL. The Carnival of Education returns to Jenny D.'s lot.

AYUP. Tom McMahon produces a series called "Four Block World." Today's is particularly apt.

NOTICE OF LINE RELOCATION. Fruits and Votes now has a URL that matches its name.

CARNIVAL CALL. The Carnival of the Capitalists returns to Business Pundit. I'll attempt not to invoke the "terrible twos ..."

PEOPLE RESPOND TO INCENTIVES. The Superintendent commends two articles on the nature of scholarly publishing. One, at The Valve, continues the reaction to Chicago's thumbs-down to Professor Drezner. There's a lot to recommend in this article. Read it. I'll be here. There is an excerpt I wish to expand upon.

A less obvious issue is the way the existing tenure system may negatively affect diversity and liveliness of academic thought. To some degree, the charge that tenure is mainly a system of credentialism that rewards the expression of acceptable opinion is an old one. What’s new in the humanities and many of the social sciences is the vast oversupply of academic labor. Departments hiring from overstocked pools find it easy to replicate themselves, making it more likely that they’ll grow more intellectually and politically homogeneous over time. The tenure system potentially worsens this situation. Tenure battles are notoriously unpleasant and time consuming. (Indeed, the whole system of review and evaluation diverts considerable resources away from teaching and scholarship.)

Focus on that topic sentence. Now consider the boiler-plate in any department's formal statement of its tenure policy. Such things exist. Sometimes they're easily gotten to; other times they're safeguarded by laity who will pull them from the relevant file should the archbishop be called before a legislative inquisition. The statement will likely include language about "establishing a reputation" or "established a reputation" as a qualification for tenure. The criterion for promotion to professor will further define the nature of that reputation.

Pull out the catechism.

How does one establish a reputation?

Publish in reputable journals?

What makes a journal reputable?

Other people read and cite the articles in them.

Any other people?

People in leading departments.

Can you quantify that?

Yes.

Here comes the problem. Newmark's Door recommends an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (this may be embargoed to the paid side shortly) on the consequences of researching to the quantification. It's easy enough to note who is citing whom (compare and contrast with the Blog Ecosystem) and count which articles and which journals are more frequently cited. In the world of scholarly journals, the Higher Mammals have higher impact factors.

Impact-factor fever is spreading, threatening to skew the course of scientific research, say critics. Investigators are now more likely to chase after fashionable topics — the kind that get into high-impact journals — than to follow important avenues that may not be the flavor of the year, says Yu-Li Wang, a professor of physiology at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. "It influences a lot of people's research direction."

That influence has also led to a creeping sense of cynicism about the business of science publications. Journal editors have learned how to manipulate the system, sometimes through legitimate editorial choices and other times through deceptive practices that artificially inflate their own rankings. Several ecology journals, for example, routinely ask authors to add citations to previous articles from that same journal, a policy that pushes up its impact factor. Authors who have received such requests say that the practice veers toward extortion and represents a violation of scientific ethics.

But landing a paper in a high-impact journal is not per se evidence of a high-impact paper.

The measurement is just an average of all the papers in a journal over a year; it doesn't apply to any single paper, let alone to any author. For example, a quarter of the articles in Nature last year drew 89 percent of the citations to that journal, so a vast majority of the articles received far fewer than the average of 32 citations reflected in the most recent impact factor.

So what is an academic, particularly one starting out, to do? Consider this:

"You're a better scientist if you're a happy scientist."

Interpret it this way. If we really knew what the answers were, we wouldn't have to do research. Therefore, we can choose to research something that appears to be fashionable even if it makes us miserable. The top journals might not take it anyway, and a lesser journal that takes it with the hope of raising its impact factor might be disappointed. Or we can research what interests us and enjoy the work. The top journals might not take it anyway, and there are sufficient lesser journals that a few iterations of shopping it will publish it. There is no guarantee that your work will become a hot topic in the future. But do you really want to be in the position of the woodpusher who is attempting to stay one move ahead of Kasparov in the King's Indian rather than enjoy the game? Or would you rather be cheerful, and quite likely more productive than you would be chasing the current high-impact topics? (That quest, by the way, is likely to be futile if you're not at one of the forty departments claiming to be in the top 25. By the time the high-impact stuff is released as a .pdf or published out of such a place, the folks there have had two years worth of seminars and coffee chats to push it beyond what you're starting on.)

THERE ARE LIMITS. Phil at The Sports Economist notes efforts by the race committee at NASCAR to limit the size of any racing team's stable. That sounds like a variant on the rule the America's Cup Challenge Committee adopted, limiting the number of boats any syndicate could build (and I think limiting the money that any syndicate could spend, but that may be incorrect.) That after Bill Koch built five boats for America³'s successful 1992 defense and Prada bought five boats for their unsuccessful 2000 challenge.

DESTOOLING THE CHIEFS. University Diaries reports that American University's Benjamin Ladner will no longer be indulging himself like a medieval archbishop on American's tithes. As part of her research she discovers another destooled chief, Towson's Mark Perkins. The news report suggests something more disturbing at work.

It is easy to lampoon such scandals as bizarre sagas of individual excess, the acts of latter-day Louis XIVs who have figured out how to game the system. But there is a common thread that suggests another dynamic is also at work. All four presidents were employed by workmanlike institutions striving to raise their reputation, and all four were encouraged by trustees to lead a life of luxury, in hopes that this would help project a positive image for the institution. If the presidents crossed the line, their trustees acted as enablers in nudging them near it.

One wonders how effective such a strategy is, or whether it's confirmation of a remark Paul Fussell made years ago about universities serving as the modern version of salons and courts. I think of the early Nucor Steel. For years, this company rented headquarters somewhere in North Carolina. They may still be there for all I know. Their in-house engineering staff kept working away at a thin-slab caster, with which the company hoped to recycle high-grade scrap into sheet steel suitable for appliances and automobile brackets without having to build a two-mile long rolling mill complete with walking-beam reheat furnaces and sufficient stands to mash a slab as thick as a mattress suitable for a medieval archbishop. Bethlehem Steel, a company that indulged its ranking managers in a manner the Upwardly Mobile universities seek to emulate, gave their in-house engineering staff a project. Evaluate the thin-slab caster. The engineers came back with a 1 1/2" thick report, replete with bullet points and executive summary and heavy-grade paper suitable for an illuminated manuscript ... detailing why the thin-slab caster wouldn't work.

Anybody seen Bethlehem Steel lately?

Where is the university president who will ask the trustees not to spend the money on additional janissaries and space grabs for the deans and other trappings of Bethlehem Steel?

This observation defies parody.

Sheldon Steinbach, general counsel for the American Council on Education, says there is something to Ladner's defense. College presidents today are expected to spend so much of their time fundraising that universities are justified in picking up many of their expenses, and in paying for the kind of luxury that will impress a potential donor. This is especially true in Washington, he said, where the bar for entertaining is very high.

"Prospecting for donors is an expensive venture. An institution has to invest money to get money," he said. "It's an attempt [by schools] to break through whatever academic ceiling they have by raising more money. By having a larger endowment you can have more financial aid, so you can get better students and you can get better faculty."

If memory serves, part of the difficulties the academic units face is the reluctance of the universities that have endowments to dig into them.

What is the university's equivalent of the thin slab caster?

THE POLISH POST OFFICE COMES TO MINNESOTA. King at SCSU Scholars compares, unfavorably, the sale of now required to be behind-the-counter but non-prescription cold remedies with the routine sale of cheese, assuming there was cheese, in the old Soviet Bloc. Office Max does something similar with printer cartridges, but the cartridges are in a bin behind the checkout counter, which means one exchanges the ticket for the cartridge, if it is in stock, and pays for it.

He asks, Is that socialism? More likely, it's the consequence of failure to socialize. Cheese, assuming there was cheese, in the old Soviet Bloc was likely out the door to go unpaid. (How's that for an East German construction?) Office Max may have discovered that cartridges are similarly mobile. What's the deal with the cold remedies? Have Minnesota pols decided that letting cold remedies be sold off the rack as feedstock for party drugs is contrary to the public interest?

DIG DOWN. The season of giving comes early this year. California Yankee has suggestions for where to send money for earthquake relief in Southwest Asia.

IS A WEBLOG HAZARDOUS TO AN ACADEMIC CAREER? Chris at Signifying Nothing has been following the reaction to Chicago's decision not to put Dan Drezner forward for tenure. Lots of links. His reaction to the hypothesis that the weblog sank the case:

I probably need not point out that plenty of tenured faculty take advantage of the security of tenure to spend more time with their families, stagnate scholastically, dodge professional responsibilities, and/or bed undergraduate and graduate students. Somehow the idea of Dan potentially doing research on blogs post-tenure seems like a de minimis concern compared to the other possibilities.

Jim at Blogs for Industry takes a more balanced position.

My reaction is that the fact that he was genuinely surprised suggests that the quality of the junior faculty mentoring at the U of C was piss-poor. Maybe I'm wrong, but everything in Dan's blogging is inconsistent with someone who would be in denial about the warning hints that he should have been getting if his senior colleagues - and especially his department head - had concerns about his tenure case.

Some faculty don't share my views about the need to mentor our junior colleagues. I think it's wasteful to hire talented people and then not help them succeed. I also think it's unfair to lead people on. Others take the view that if you need the help figuring out what to do or where you stand, then you don't deserve to succeed.

That last might be the case at Chicago. Some years ago, before the Internet, the Chicago Tribune did a feature on life in the economics department, this during that department's run of Nobels. Two anecdotes stand out. One related the ability of one economist to email another economist with a question and get a response within 10 minutes ... at 0100. The other described an untenured faculty member who asked whether a department meeting might be winding up soon as his wife was waiting in the car and he didn't want her to contemplate divorce. One of the older heads said "You'd fit in better if she did." Apocryphal? I don't know. The mentality at the most famous research departments is one in which people put aside other interests to wrestle to some sort of resolution challenging problems, because those challenging problems are of greater interest than, oh, having any kind of outside interests. Some people are more suited to that work than others. It's also the case that tenure decisions are among the more political decisions departments at any level make. A strong publication record is necessary but not sufficient. I've been at institutions that have had the opportunity to pick up good people simply because a department or a dean had a vision that did not involve the skills of the person under consideration.

The mentality also comes out in a Boston Globe article recommended by 11-D that reports on flexible tenure-track options available to academic moms.

Schools have to confront bias ingrained in the academic culture against people who don't put in grueling hours. They have to consider what to do about people who can't afford a half-time salary because they are divorced or live in an expensive real estate market such as Boston. And they must wrestle with the delicate question of whether it's possible to do groundbreaking work, especially in the sciences, without working long hours.

Is it bias, is it tradition, or is it a positional arms race among the most ambitious researchers? Believe me, I could make lots more progress on the railroad by putting the numerical analysis away, switching to machine-graded exams with fewer assignments, and blowing off all the committees. I won't be that irresponsible. Perhaps that dynamic is at work among tenure-trackers with the flexible-track option.

In a 2003 survey of Ohio State assistant professors, one in three women and one in five men said they would be interested in reducing their work hours to have more time for family and personal needs. And yet, by May, only 23 of the university's 3,000 faculty members were taking advantage of the part-time option, on the books since 1996. Of those 23, Irwin was one of only two who worked part time before tenure, suggesting that some professors did not view it as a viable option.

And note this.

"My experience in science is that great work is done by people who are pretty much over-the-top committed to it," said Nancy Hopkins, a biologist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Yes, that's the biologist who took umbrage at Harvard President Larry Summers's hypothesis about the relatively few female science professors. But she's right. The best in their fields are at it all the time, because they enjoy doing it.

Note also the time commitment of a flexible tenure track.

But [an Ohio State flex-tracker] had to work 35 to 40 hours a week, part time by the standards of academia, for half her former salary and full benefits. She recently started working 70 percent of full time and said she and her husband, a professor in the same department, are lucky to be able to afford her reduced salary.

That's about right. What's that Mungowitz End line about academic leisure means picking the 70-80 hours of the week you're on task?

RECOGNIZING ECONOMISTS. This year's Nobel Memorial Prize winners are Robert Aumann and Thomas Schelling, for their work on coordination. Props to my chairman, who was suggesting Professor Aumann as a possibility. Years ago, he had received intelligence that the committee had been considering a four-way award to Nash, Aumann, Selten, and Harsanyi (note the acronym) but there's apparently a tradition of recognizing no more than three people.

Kieran at Crooked Timber makes this observation.

From an outsider’s perspective, and speculating a bit on the politics of it all, the result seems like an interestingly balanced way to mark the rise of game theory in economics. While Schelling’s work is analytically acute (and the man himself is famously sharp in discussion), it is not presented in a technical mode. You can sit down and read the essays. Aumann, on the other hand, represents a much more mathematized wing of the field, proving theorems and developing new conceptual tools with precise formal properties. So, for instance, while Schelling can write essays like “Strategic Relationships in Dying” and “The Mind as a Consuming Organ”, Aumann’s papers have titles like “The Bargaining Set for Cooperative Games” and “Subjectivity and Correlation in Randomized Strategies.”

Yes, but Aumann also worked on a rather strange mishna involving the division of property. The title is "A Game Theoretic Analysis of ... Talmud ..." (it's in one of my stacks of stuff but I'm not sure where.) That's in addition to his pioneering work modeling an economy with a continuum of agents, such that each agent, whether producer or consumer, is truly infinitesimal and unable to affect the price. Price-taking is a convenient assumption, but modeling it in a meaningful way is not easy. Tyler at Marginal Revolution studied with Professor Schelling and has numerous posts. Just scroll. If memory serves, the "I'll meet you under the clock at noon" New York coordination equilibrium originated with Schelling. Hit the trackbacks to this post for more commentary.

WILL YOU LOOK THIS GOOD AT 97? The East Troy Railroad put Sheboygan Interurban 26 into demonstration service over the weekend.


That cheap digital camera does not work real well with large subjects and bright lights. Here is the same car a year ago, before the motors and control equipment were installed.

The car makes all the proper traction noises as well as the creaking you'd expect of a wooden-bodied car. On the other hand, if it's the arks you prefer, the railroad had the two-car South Shore train out running.


The featured car is South Shore No. 30, now running as East Troy Electric 30, having regained its original number rather than the 1130 it ran as for some years. It's a Pullman box smoker with the original leather-covered bucket seats and wood-panelled locker and toilet doors.

WHAT WAS I WRITING ABOUT READING COMPREHENSION? A diarist at Daily Kos who writes as J. R. Monsterfodder was hunting around for posts on Wal-Mart, found my observations on an exam question involving Wal-Mart, and decided to lodge a gripe.

Many Wal-Mart fights are in suburbs these days, do they count as a metro area or are they their own communities? What if the small business objects to Wal-Mart on political rather than self-interested grounds? Is that even possible under the premise of your question?

Furthermore, the premise of the question is completely wrong. Large cities have been the site of some of the strongest protests against Wal-Mart. One of my favorite anti-Wal-Mart blogs is run out of a very large community called New York City by a group called The Neighborhood Retail Alliance [Hi Matt!]. Small businesses have been part of broader anti-Wal-Mart coalitions in other cities such as Cleveland and Chicago too.

The real person behind J. R. is one Jonathan Rees, a Wisconsin Ph.D. now professing history at Colorado State, Pueblo, who has written on labor relations in the intermountain steel industry. His reaction to the 1920 verdict acquitting U.S. Steel of monopolization might be worth buying a Sprecher to hear. But let's return to the question itself. My gripe was with the common schools failing to equip my charges to parse "are not ... why not?" My sense is that a conditional probability question would be child abuse. And somehow, an alliance of protected-status rent-seekers does not a quorum of the Chamber of Commerce make.

Perhaps we're talking about introductory political economy, or labor institutions. The introductory political economy texts I've seen are not sufficiently daring to raise a question such as "Are small business owners offering goods the chain stores don't offer acting contrary to their class interests by not protesting the entry of chains?" Then there might be a real gem. "A Wal-Mart opens near a major railroad yard. Did the railroaders' union err in not protesting the store?"

But the question addresses a simpler phenomenon, which the local press noticed.

Despite the worst fears of some, Wal-Mart's impact on Belvidere's retail community appears to have been most helpful.

Boone County Administrator Ken Terrinoni looks at his county budget and believes the county is far better off with Wal-Mart and the other new retail establishments that came with it.

Boone and Belvidere sales tax receipts closed the 2005 Illinois fiscal year up 28 percent and 25 percent, respectively. Wal-Mart's August opening ran almost parallel to the state fiscal year that ended June 30.

Post hoc disclaimer applies, but read on:

Tony Dal Pra, a local attorney, businessman and outspoken opponent of Wal-Mart, maintains that with the arrival of Wal-Mart has come a shift in the business environment that he does not believe is all that positive.

However, Dal Pra stopped short of saying Wal-Mart has had a negative impact on Belvidere's business community.

"In our case, we have managed to sustain ourselves and are doing quite well," said Dal Pra, as he talked about Pacemaker grocery in Belvidere, one of his business interests.

"We have a stronger perishable department than Wal-Mart. It has had some modest effect on our business, but our meat and deli sales have actually increased. I believe some of our departments are prospering because of the quality of the products we have."

Downtown Belvidere is another animal. Turnover of small mom-and-pop stores is somewhat common, but thus far it appears that downtown has sustained minimal impact as a result of Wal-Mart.

And I knew of some of this last week, when Professor Rees lodged his protest, but waited for the story to be published.

Stephen Karlson, professor of economics at Northern Illinois University, acknowledges that small businesses where "everybody knows your name" are at a disadvantage when it comes to trying to compete with Wal-Mart. But they often withstand the challenge Wal-Mart presents by creating extremely high standards of customer service and by serving niche markets that Wal-Mart often is not interested in.

One of Monsterfodder's readers gets partial credit. Here's the full story.

"When Wal-Mart comes into bigger cities, it's more likely to have an effect on other national chains and less of an impact on smaller businesses because in large suburbs and cities, smaller businesses already are catering to customers that Wal-Mart is not after," Karlson said. "For example, if you are looking to buy an O-gauge model train, or any model train for that matter, you are probably not going to go to Wal-Mart."

So. Logic. Evidence. Media interest. But why let such mundane things get in the way of a good rant?

And a special note to Professor Stephen Karlson of Northern Illinois University should you ever Google yourself and come upon this: You really should make sure that you have the slightest idea of what your talking about before you find it necessary to insult your students' intelligence. Your arrogance gives all of us in academia a bad name.

I've had my share of scathing referee reports, but at least those showed evidence of making an effort to read and understand my argument.

WE GET REFEREE REPORTS. View from a Height comments on my homework.

I would also add two things: 1) Karlson implies the solution in his post: deregulate refining the way that we deregulated trucking. 2) My sympathies are not with the existing or big oil companies, they are quite selfishly with me, the consumer. What I want is increased capacity, whether it comes from StartupOil, or ExxonMobilChevronShell.

It's possible for a citizen to make either of those inferences. I'm in a somewhat more restricted position. Those comments were prepared testimony for a legislative hearing. I held myself to the same standard in that testimony that I attempt to maintain in the classroom. On matters of public policy, it is easy to identify inefficiencies. Sometimes, as is the case with the 1980 Motor Carrier Act, which ended a trucking cartel, it is possible with benefit of 25 years of hindsight, to claim a win for the economists -- and bipartisan support. (Transportation deregulation began during the Carter administration. Senator Kennedy, Cornell's Alfred Kahn, Chicago's Milton Friedman, were among the supporters.) Past performance, as they say, is no guarantee of future results. I don't want to be indoctrinating either my students or the legislators who were kind enough to invite me either for open-market policies or for more stringent environmental protection. Thus, I can raise the possibility of refiners using regulatory policy to impede construction, or I can use supply-and-demand to suggest that increased capacity lowers prices (and, to the extent that newer retorts are less polluting, reduces the environmental impact of the refinery although it might stimulate additional driving) but others make the call on rewriting the rules.

DISAGREEING, WITHOUT BEING DISAGREEABLE. Cold Spring Shops ordinarily leaves the war coverage and commentary to others. The Superintendent recommends, however, three posts touching on different aspects of the buildup to Operation Iraqi Freedom and the aftermath.

First up, Don at Cafe Hayek lays out a libertarian case against the war.

The world is full of evil tyrants. But given the nature of government, it’s not the role of government A to sit in judgment of government B. The most legitimate role for any government is to protect its own people from violence. Whenever Uncle Sam unleashes his mighty military in foreign countries for the purpose of protecting foreign citizens from their own governments, he weakens his ability to protect Americans.

He goes on to note that perhaps Iraq had a dictatorial government for a reason.

Why was Saddam Hussein ruling Iraq? Were Iraqis just incredibly unlucky that such a vile dictator somehow grabbed power and ruled ruthlessly for so long? Or was Hussein’s tyranny at least as much a consequence as a cause of a dysfunctional cultural, political, and economic situation? If so, then removing the dictator does not remove the complex underlying causes that fueled his tyranny.

Removing a dictator is child’s play for a military as awesome as that of the United States. So Hussein is now history. But because the underlying causes that put him in power to begin with are still in place in Iraq, that country likely will soon revert to another dictator – one different in name and different in style, but a brute nevertheless.

Mitch at Shot in the Dark makes an instructive point. Perhaps root causes can be rooted out?

If there was ever a country that seemed less amenable to democracy than the world of extremist Islam, it'd be Japan. Its State Shinto religion was as insane as extreme Wahabbism, and it controlled an entire nation, complete with one of the most modern militaries on earth. It preached suicide bombing and rule by terror as effectively as the worst of Islam. And there was no "moderate shinto" nation to counter it, as with Indonesia or India or Senegal or Mali. And yet our occupation created, in one generation, a democracy from one of the most insular, clannish, warlike, chauvinistic, hive-like societies on earth. Because of occupation, not in spite of it.

That occupation, however, followed a total war brought to an end by a "rain of ruin from the air" with consequences the managers of the current war are attempting to avoid. It's important to spell out your loss function.

Russ at Cafe Hayek is also thinking about the loss function. Go read the whole essay, but note the money quote.

Should Bush have ignored the behavior of Saddam on the grounds that the whole thing was probably a hoax to enhance his self-image? I don't think so. That certainly turned out to be a mistake with Osama. His talk wasn't cheap.

Do your own research. Read the essays, read the comments, follow the trackbacks.

BUMMER. Professor Drezner was not recommended for tenure by his department. (Via Signifying Nothing.) One of his observations touches on the possible perils of being a public intellectual.

From a strict cost-benefit analysis, one could argue that the doors that blogging opened could have been deferred for a few years in return for the annuity of a tenured position at Chicago. That said, if I did things only for the money, I never would have entered the academy in the first place. And I’ve enjoyed the psychic rewards of blogging way too much to regret my choice.

That's a very professional statement from someone who has right to be disappointed. Read the entire post, and the bull session. Developing ...

PLAYING FOR LEASTER? Which state has the more burdensome business taxes, Illinois or Wisconsin? Illinois businesses find lower costs in Kenosha County.

THE REAL AMERICA'S TEAM STANDS UP. Poor New Orleans. First the city floods, then the city government gets in a spat with the state government gets in a spat with the feds, then the city floods again. Then the Saints have to play their home games in Houston or Charlotte. Today, they had to play an away game. On the Frozen Tundra. Against a troubled but resilient America's Team. Packers 52, Displaced Saints 3. The other black and blue division teams are also struggling.

DELAWARE CORPORATIONS, WYOMING UNIVERSITIES? University Diaries continues her useful service identifying states that offer a friendly environment for proprietary universities of dubious rigor. Apparently state officials in the Equality State are troubled with taking equality to extremes.

“There will always be people who want the credentials with a minimum of effort, and there will always be those who will provide them with a pretty parchment with ribbons in exchange for money,” [Wyoming president Tom] Buchanan said at the annual honors convocation of the College of Arts and Sciences.

“At the University of Wyoming, we know we are not a business.”

I don't have time to fact-check that today, but I suspect I can find lots of retention boodle, diversity boondoggling, and athletic support quickly. Is Mr Buchanan prepared to back up his faculty if they take a hard line on grading?

Then to the reality. In a world where presidents and deans in the mid-majors routinely tell the story about the famous, but nonexistent, Princeton College of Law, how carefully are employers checking the credentials of their applicants? Perhaps the trainees with the diploma-mill credentials are no worse than those with the imprimatur of Enormous State or Expensive Ivy?

THUD. Wisconsin's football team gets a reality check at Northwestern. Despite that, the Badgers make Sports Illustrated's fall all-sports top ten.

The 10th-ranked women's volleyball team imporved to 10-1 with a weekend sweep -- upsetting fifth-ranked Minnesota on Friday and Iowa on Sunday. The victories gave seventh-year coach Pete Waite a career record of 162-47 in Madison, making him the all-time winninggest coach in Badgers history.

(Via Newmark's Door.) Has Pete Waite been away from Northern Illinois that long?

GOD HELPS THOSE WHO HELP THEMSELVES? Betsy's Page links to this story.

No evidence suggests that the deadly earthquake that rocked Pakistan on Saturday injured or killed the world's top terror leader, Osama bin Laden.

I thought it was the jihadis who were praying Allah to send Category 5 hurricanes into the Gulf Coast, and domestic fundamentalists who were arguing that God took offense at the strip clubs and casinos there. No word of reaction to the earthquake from those quarters yet. We will be monitoring the internet for fund raisers for earthquake relief. It looks like the season of giving begins early this year.

SECOND SECTION. Repent, for the time is at hand.

FISCAL SANITY? The editorial board at the Chicago Tribune sees a "Category 5 fiscal storm."

Congress should not take as gospel the vast promises of relief and rebuilding for the Gulf Coast that the president made in a recent speech to the nation. The government has already stepped in in a big way. But those promises, like all federal spending, should be scrutinized for their value and efficiency.

Beyond that, the government could take two actions that would reflect Americans' willingness--at least their stated willingness--to sacrifice and would signal that every benefit has its costs:

- First, cut spending now. Delay (better yet, repeal) the Medicare drug benefit. Slash the energy and highway bills with an ax, not a scalpel. The highway bill alone contains $24 billion in pet projects. They could all be delayed--including Illinois' $1.3 billion in goodies--and the country would survive.

- Second, the president and Congress should raise the federal tax on gasoline. This idea is unpopular, but it would substantively and immediately alter behavior in a way that would have lasting economic and national security benefits. It would raise money and reduce American consumption of, and thus dependence on, foreign oil. It would directly link consumer choice to the cost of that choice, and it would be faster and more effective at curbing demand for gas than the chief alternative: raising federal mileage standards for new vehicles. It could be phased in over time and its impact softened with refundable tax credits for low-income Americans.

Anyone who doubts the effectiveness of higher prices to change behavior need only look at how consumers responded to the post-Katrina gas price spike. Sales of large sport-utility vehicles plunged in September, while sales of some of the more fuel-efficient cars rose. A president unaccustomed to promoting fuel conservation is urging Americans to drive less. A higher tax would help accomplish that goal.In the short run, these actions would yield only a down payment on Katrina. But they would demonstrate that this nation recognizes the Category 5 fiscal storm that's fast approaching.

They've left out one possibility for replenishing the fiscal reservoir.

WHY AM I HERE? Today, a subcommittee meeting of the all-university committee on teacher certification that I first mentioned here. It transpires that although several members from Liberal Arts are useful for political purposes, I don't get to vote. But it gets better. We're working with some recently amended by-laws amended by an ad-hoc committee on something called "endorsements" to initial teaching certificates (don't hold your breath waiting for me to post excitedly about figuring this out) including the following.

4.23 The Curriculum Committee shall review all curricular proposals specific to initial teacher certification that

• Change catalog descriptions at the University or program level,
• Create or modify courses offered by another NIU unit as a service to programs,
  or
• Relate to associated endorsements.

The language is supposed to refer to endorsements created by units (notionally colleges, but the language is sufficiently general as to allow, say, the Provost, to set up a free-standing unit) rather than endorsements created in individual courses. Or something like that.

Oh, we also had to approve a renumbering of a course with the provision that the numbered course appeared in a list of criteria for the issuance of tuition waivers. It's good that there is some institutional memory here. The two delegates from Registration and Records both hold acting positions. The associate dean of the graduate school responsible for funding external speakers, as well as two staff secretaries in her office, are currently on interim appointments.

It's in light of all of this, which I learned only today, that I commend some advice from the dean at Anonymous Community about the problems of filling committees, and solving those problems by becoming an administrator.

The easiest method is to go back, again and again, to the few good soldiers (and/or the folks who don’t have tenure yet). It works great the first time you do it, but over time, it’s not sustainable. Picking mostly on the untenured means that you lose the benefit of experienced voices, and you ratify the cultural expectation that tenure means on-the-job retirement. Picking on the few good soldiers effectively punishes them for being helpful, and rewards the laggards for lagging. Over time, the ranks of the willing thin out.

Now you are beginning to catch on, young apprentice. I suppose the problem is ensuring that the hotshots and the journeymen alike will remain equally willing to do a hitch on a committee or as chairman, in order that the burdens be shared (and I remember Wisconsin, years ago, simply naming a different senior economist as chairman for three years, with the understanding that after three years he'd return to faculty in the Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain tradition.) Oh, and at the R1 or the Upwardly Mobile, if you're not tenured and you don't turn down a committee request from time to time, you're not properly socialized. There are those out there who will offer the tenure-trackers committee appointments as a way of getting a read on their commitment to scholarship. Those that are too cooperative reveal a disinterest in research. Say no, politely, to some such requests.

This additional advice for aspiring administrators is instructive.

From a dean’s perspective, the chance to avoid a really unpleasant dilemma is very, very tempting. If a junior-ish faculty member steps up and asks to help with outcomes assessment, or a retention initiative, or whatever, my dilemma evaporates immediately, and that professor gains the kind of experience that helps make a subsequent leap plausible. S/he also gets a chance to find out if administrative work is actually more to her/his taste, which it isn’t for most.

If you want to test the waters, dodge the draft, and volunteer.

That's interesting. Those are precisely the projects that do the most damage to the university's credibility. Those are also the tracks to the administrative ranks? Implications left to the reader as an exercise.

POLICY TRADEOFFS AND BYPASS. Illinois makes it more costly to be a trucking company, truckers react.

Trucking firms are leaving the state and they are not likely to come back anytime soon, said Midwest Truckers Association Executive Vice President Don Schaefer.

"We are at a point in time in Illinois where it is very hard to run a business that makes money because of all the fees," Schaefer said. In the last year more than 12 percent of trucks have not renewed their registration in Illinois.

The DeKalb toll plaza, along with others in the state, increased the rate it charges trucks from $3 to more than $9 in January. At that rate, some companies are opting to bypass the tollway and take local roads.

Roy’s Transportation, a 43-year-old company in Rochelle, has nine 18-wheelers but can only afford to put eight on the road."I told my drivers to take local roads until they pass the DeKalb toll because it costs so much," said Pat Burch, owner of Roy’s Transportation. "I would like to take the tollway because it is safer and faster but it is just too expensive right now."

Higher overhead in Illinois are allowing firms from Iowa to compete with Roy’s to haul freight to Chicago.

"My license fees have gone up, my fuel costs have doubled and the tollway price has tripled," Burch said. "I cannot even pass my costs on to the companies I am hauling for because of the competition."

I think that last sentence summarizes the reality of a price-taker. The toll authority makes a less-than-spectacular rebuttal.

The fee at the DeKalb toll is in line with the with the rest of the tollway system, said Joelle McGinnis, spokeswoman for the Illinois Tollway.

"We base our fee on the number of miles traveled between tolls," McGinnis said. "The large fee for the DeKalb toll is because there are less toll stops on that stretch of tollway."

There's more to this than distance. Weight-based truck tolls increased on January 1. In addition, there is a special surcharge during peak hours in the Chicago area. Both changes are consistent with allocative efficiency. The existence of non-toll state and U.S. highways paralleling the toll roads provides a powerful incentive for truckers to bypass the toll roads and pound the two-lanes to pieces faster.

There's a project in Texas called the Trans-Texas Corridor under which separate toll lanes for trucks and automobiles will share a right of way with freight and possibly high speed passenger railroad tracks. Such a project might be of use as a way of providing additional capacity on the Chicago-St. Louis and Chicago-Carbondale corridors, as well as attenuating the unsafe practice of mixing trucks and passenger automobiles on the same roads.

TEACHABLE MOMENTS. The Instapundit's Tech Central column is up.

Today's sport-utility fad (now fading in light of high gas prices) was as much the creature of government policy as of consumer preference: Sport-utes took the place of the big station wagons favored by an earlier generation of suburbanites, not least because CAFE standards applied to station wagons but not to "trucks," a class that included sport-utility vehicles. (They also got a break on safety rules, and more favorable tax treatment). I suspect that the Law of Unintended Consequences will apply to any future regulatory efforts along these lines, too, and that the best thing to do is to let the market decide. If people still want sport-utes when gas is pushing $3.50 a gallon, they must feel that they're pretty worthwhile.

Likewise, proposals for more commuter-rail lines seem to miss the point. The problem with "commuter rail" systems is that they presuppose commuters, and the changing U.S. economy makes traditional commuting -- in which armies of workers flock from suburbs to downtowns in the morning, and back home in the evenings -- less significant. While there are still plenty of people who commute this way, there are a lot more people who work in edge cities, or from home, or who keep irregular hours and run a lot of errands, for whom commuter rail systems aren't likely to do
much good.

In the introductory course, we started with the Principle of Substitutes today, with the Principle of Complements to come on Friday. I continue to do some thinking, in the odd spare moment, about the economics of suburbs. Irreversible investments and dual immigration tracks first.

BLOW YOU OLD BLUE NORTHER. Game over, fans headed home, rain clouds in advance of the cold front rolling in, and just a few minutes ago a vigorous and dry westerly stirring things up on the porch as I post. Enough with the tropical conditions, we're at 42 degrees North and it's approaching mid-October.

SECOND SECTION: Three feet of snow expected in parts of the Dakotas???

THE BEGINNING OF A BENEVOLENT ASSOCIATION. The Chicago Tribune runs a story about an eatery in Los Angeles called the Homegirl Cafe.

There is the food, Mexican with a twist. But it's the help that makes the difference. Where else can your frothy bowl of fideo soup--noodles, peas and cilantro--be prepared by a girl from the Lynwood gang, served by a woman from the Maravilla gang and cleared from your table by a smiling mother from the 18th Street gang?

It's in such establishments that ethnic benevolent associations such as the Polish National Alliance begin. That, and a little tough love.

Whether serving food or chopping onions, the girls can be slow and inefficient, causing customers to wait. But Zarate pushes them: Move faster, clean more, smile often.Sometimes they push back with stares and shrugs and snickers.

When they go too far, as one did when she showed up singing loudly and smelling of alcohol, Zarate fires them. Politely."It's not all roses, you know," Flores said. "It's not easy money, like I'm used to. . . . That's something new. The main thing is: You have to work hard for this, like Patty works. Be patient. Just try."

The food sounds interesting as well.

Most of it was Mexican, but much of it was vegetarian. All of it was light and healthy. She used basil, lentils and filo dough. "Japanese mushrooms and tofu," said Romie Armenta, one of the scores of parishioners who grew enchanted with her cooking. "Tofu with mole sauce? We'd never heard of that."

DISRESPECT BEGETS DISRESPECT. The Phantom Professor has troubles.

"Will you tell us what's going to be on the test?"

"Do I really need to know this?"

"Can I retake the exam if I don't do well?"

But she's not alone.

RV (in her usual sweet voice): May I help you?

Einy: I'm in your class today.

RV: Which one, and who are you?

Einy: Einstein Student. I haven't been in class because of my work schedule.

RV: Well, this is the end of week four, and you've already missed one quarter of the class. Based on the work that we've done, you will have to drop as you cannot pass.

Einy: You can't give me a break?

RV (now in the Twilight Zone): No.

In the first example, it's an adjunct who does a great deal of the teaching at a university with ambitions, in the second case, an ABD tenure-tracker. Both women. Perhaps there are gender differences in the way students treat faculty.

"Generally, it seems to me, it's harder to embody professorial authority as a woman. I'm lucky-- as a white man I start with an advantage. I'm already the embodiment of the image of establishment authority. It doesn't take much for me to assert enough authority in the classroom to squash many a potential rebel and troublemaker. ... my symbolic power makes my life easier. As for Jane, it's hard to see her deal with the crap she has to deal with."

I used the term "gender" deliberately. My sex is male. My gender is Non-Quiche-Eating Real Guy. That might have an effect. I get very few questions of the type that annoy so many of the weblogs I read. Students have told me I'm "scary." But it's not as if I was sonarman on a fast-attack to attend college on the G.I. Bill or had a gig as a wrestler or transferred from the Police Academy to Wisconsin. Perhaps some female colleagues could get feistiness pointers from Deb Patterson (to name one; I can recommend others.)

There might be something further at work. Many of the difficult student horror stories come from anonymous adjunct faculty at unspecified institutions. It might be the case that Northern Illinois draws from a better application pool. (I'll put our best against your best in any quiz bowl you want.) It might be self-selection. My reputation precedes me.

There is one additional possibility. Nothing makes an impression on one's charges quite like mentioning testimony before a legislative task force or giving an interview to the fourth estate or referring to topical research. Put simply, professors have clout in ways temps, whether active in research or not, do not, emulating George Patton or the Superintendent of Motive Power or Deb Patterson or not.

Thus, a hypothesis: the students have some sense that a faculty heavy on temporary faculty is an expression of the institution's attitude toward teaching -- we get it on the cheap -- and react accordingly. The employees least respected by the institution accordingly face the resentment of their students toward the institution. Cost cutting for its own sake is not without consequences.

SECOND SECTION: Wagering on the response of the class miscreant.

NEW YORK. BOSTON. MONTREAL. TORONTO. DETROIT. CHICAGO. I awakened this morning to news that the National Hockey League begins play, with all thirty teams in action tonight.

WHY IT'S DIFFICULT TO DEFINE PRICE GOUGING. This week, NBC Nightly News originates on the Gulf Coast. Tonight, a Mississippi woman tells viewers that she sold for $170K an intact house with a pre-storm asking price of $140K. In New Orleans, a substantial share of the housing stock, including a lot of rental shotgun shacks, will have to be demolished.

Big money is headed this way as housing prices soar in the most devastated region of America. In New Orleans, where unofficial estimates say more than 100,000 homes could be demolished as a result of Hurricane Katrina, dwindling supply is fueling huge demand and housing price hikes of 10 percent to 40 percent.

Much of the price spiral is driven by companies and government agencies involved in the city's long-term recovery and rebuilding. But when evacuees return with insurance checks, probably next year, price inflation could be even greater, real estate agents said.

Does that make the owners of intact houses literally windfall profiteers?

Some sellers who had their homes on the market before Katrina have either raised their asking prices--in some cases despite the homes' condition--or pulled them off the block temporarily in anticipation of prices going even higher.

But some verities are eternal.

[Real estate executive Arthur] Sterbcow said the rebuilding of New Orleans probably would be a decade-long effort. People who used to buy homes in New Orleans grew up playing Monopoly, he said. The new generation of buyer grew up with Sim City, the computer game built around constructing new cities.

There is no telling where prices will level off, Sterbcow said, but he is confident the market forces will determine the appropriate price."Pigs get fat and hogs get slaughtered," he said.

And the building material market is national in scope, with spot shortages of materials in DeKalb.

IT'S OVER. Northern Illinois 38, Miami 27. I still don't like Wednesday night for college football.

WEDNESDAY NIGHT FOOTBALL. With 11:37 to play in the game, Northern Illinois 35, Miami of Ohio 24. It's hot and sticky and everything is wrong with this arrangement. But it has nothing to do with money.

Jim Phillips, director of intercollegiate athletics, does not feel a weeknight game is any different from a Saturday away game that requires students involved in games to leave Friday morning and potentially miss classes.

"We have what I would consider a tremendous relationship with ESPN," Phillips said. "Part of that relationship involves some weeknight games. It gives us a chance to showcase not only the football team but our entire university. Teachers and faculty have been extremely understanding of the complexity of students’ schedules. They realize some of these students have jobs or athletics or other activities beyond just classes and homework."

The football schedule is largely dependent on ESPN, which works out schedules in advance to make sure all the schools’ schedules line up and the network has a full broadcast schedule.

Sorry, I don't buy the analogy. Sunday morning is for recovering from Saturday's pounding. (I'm referring to the pounding I used to take from cans of Pabst. What the guys on the field go through is entirely different.) The Wednesday games imply Thursday is for recovery by the players and the more enthusiastic spectators. Everything is wrong with this.

Not only that, the university's efforts to promote school spirit appear to have brought some adverse consequences in train.

Recent reports of violence and vandalism in this area have made some wonder if Hillcrest is a safe place to party.

There has not been a recent increase of police officers on duty in the Hillcrest area, said DeKalb Police Lt. Jim Kayes.

Arrests also often lead to disciplinary action by the university.

"We can govern behavior outside of campus; it is our role to monitor," said Terry Jones, associate director of the Judicial Office. "We have a good relationship with area police departments."

Depending on how serious the situation is, police will decide whether to report a crime to the judicial office, Jones said.

Minor incidents are often not reported.

"If someone is arrested on a fairly serious offense we’re going to report it," Kayes said. "But we can’t make a report for every single underage drinking arrest or ... open container violation."

Homecoming weekend is one of the times in the semester when many students party at night.

One of the times?? Enough, already. And now it's 35-27 with 9:37 to go.

TURNING THAT CRANK. Book Review No. 41 is Laura Penny's Your Call is Important to Us, which I obtained by drawing down my Book of the Month Club credits. The price was right. The author correctly summed up her purposes. "I am not a problem solver. I am a crank." That might be about right. On the other hand, the author was not sure whether she wanted to be P. J. O'Rourke or David Hapgood.

Newmark's Door points to a recent column that's vintage O'Rourke. Ms Penny falls short. Her pharmacopeia is a pale shadow of what the foreign affairs correspondent for Rolling Stone in the Seventies would understand. One "ginormous" or "spondulicks" or "Soviet Canuckistan" (the last offered in an ironic way) works, but repetition annoys. Her use of profanity is Thirteenth Generation crude, meaning little variety spewn freely. And the politics are not as consistent as Mr O'Rourke's.

But it's not clear that Ms Penny wants to be O'Rourke. Much of the book touches on the same themes, and the same purveyors of confusion, that David Hapgood addressed years ago in The Screwing of the Average Man. (In some places she revisits themes made famous in Vance Packard's Hidden Persuaders.) Investment pushers, Big Pharma, and insurance come in for many of the same criticisms that Mr Hapgood made. Like Mr Hapgood, Ms Penny sees the effects of adverse selection on insurers, and their efforts to buy off their most difficult cases. (Mr Hapgood advised readers that if an insurance company offered a lump-sum settlement, the best strategy was to refuse it as the company expected to pay out more over the life of the claim.) But neither book looked at the moral hazard present where insurance permits greater risk-taking.

And perhaps the moral hazard extends to the higher learning, where Ms Penny earns her keep.

I spend long hours with people's children. Don't worry, by the time I get my hands on them, they are in college, almost adults, and already ruined. Many are working way too many hours outside the classroom just to pay for class, or putting themselves into major hock before they've had their first legal bender. Plenty have no desire whatsoever to be there, and are merely in school because that's what you gotta do to get a good job. Several emerge from high school without a clue about stringing together a paragraph or reading and interpreting a complex document, and many of them view reading as chore, rather than a necessary survival skill, or one of the world's great pleasures. I'm not saying your kids are dumb or lazy. Most of the kids I've taught, from the D students to the A pluses, have been perfectly delightful. They have just been marinating in ease, soaking in fun and cool, and so what's boring and hard is all the boringer and harder.

Put another way, the elementary schools punted the reading and writing to the secondary schools, who punted the same to the colleges, who sometimes punt the same deficiencies to employers, who devote more resources to remediation. Somewhere there will be a major employer that will hire graduates out of high school and do the remediation, bypassing the colleges. Or perhaps Ms Penny has unwittingly put her finger on the real cause of the Wal-Mart labor policies she deplores (In an inversion of Henry Ford's policy of paying workers enough to buy his product, Wal-Mart drives wages down so people can afford to shop only at Wal-Mart.) Perhaps Wal-Mart has tasks suited to the marinated at ease?

And apparently I'll never lack for work clarifying the Say Aggregation Principle. First we read this.

The gilded notion of mid-century family values has everything to do with the fact that Mom could stay home with the kids and Jesus, baking pies, because Dad made enough dough to provide for the whole brood. One of the great Republican conundrums is that their aggressively pro-rich economic policies have made it virtually impossible for anyone to live in the kind of good old-fashioned family that their social policies strive to create.

As if greater labor force participation by women, some informed by The Feminine Mystique, some simply seeking something different from the fifties track, plays no role. In Your Call, all of that is simply magic.

The money was coming from somewhere. First, more people joined the workforce, as women went off to work in increasing numbers, and a double-income family became the norm.

This as part of a generalized gripe against corporations that obtained a temporary boost to their bottom line by downsizing, although with a concomitant loss of institutional memory. There are more coherent accounts of the Eighties and Nineties elsewhere.

RAIDING THE MID-MAJORS? In my mailbox, and apparently in several colleagues' mailboxes today, an opportunity to supplement my income?

Teach part-time as a university instructor via the Internet.

What does it say about the state of the profession that the University of Phoenix suggests I can earn supplemental income, teach part-time without interrupting my full-time career, expand my own expertise, and experience the satisfaction of making a difference.

Heck, I wonder if they'd pay me to evaluate a differential? Alas, when I go to the site, I see this.

We appreciate your interest. The system is temporarily unavailable. Please try back again at a later time. If you continue to experience issues, you may contact our Technical Support ...

What's with this "experience issues" nonsense? Why not say "Please call Technical Services in case of system failure." I did a bit of additional exploration and failed to uncover any interest by this university in experienced energy economists.

ANNOYING CELL PHONES, ANNOYED PROFESSORS. One annoyed professor gets even. (Via Poliblog.)

LET'S GO RED. Wisconsin seeks to color the world red.

STILL WORK TO BE DONE. The Northern Star takes an interest in gasoline prices. I referred the reporter to the legislative testimony. The reporter also found an economics major to interview. Apparently we still have some work to do.

Due to rapid demands in China and India our supply has diminished.

Um, not quite.

CARNIVAL CALL. The Carnival of the Capitalists finishes two years, with Drakeview setting up the bannerline this week.

WHEN IT'S A TIE AT THE RAILROAD CROSSING, YOU LOSE. The investigation of last week's fatal collision between a car and an Acela Express near New London, Connecticut raises the possibility of an incapacitated driver.

According to an eye-witness report from a town official who was waiting in his car behind the closed crossing gates on the north side of Miner’s Lane in Waterford, the Ford Taurus rolled under the closed gate on the south side of the crossing and directly into the path of the train, which was traveling 71 mph at the time according to Amtrak spokesman Cliff Black.

Witnesses said all four gates at the crossing, and all lights, were working, as well as the ringing bell which signals the approach of a train.

The Ford Taurus pushed under the gate, forcing it up, and then the rest of the car rolled onto the track, the witness, Waterford Town Planner Thomas Wagner reported.

That doesn't make the consequences any more pretty.

Photo courtesy of National Corridors

You're looking at the effect of an Acela Express smashing a Ford Taurus at 71 mph. I was once flagman on a 52 ton interurban car that hit a station wagon at 5 mph. No effect on the interurban car. You do not want to mess with a train.

STICK CLOSE TO YOUR DESKS, AND NEVER GO TO SEA. President Bush has nominated White House counsel Harriet Miers as Associate Justice of the United States. I'm no lawyer. Heck, I don't claim any special knowledge of Law and Economics. But I have yet to find a site hailing this choice as one for the ages. On the other hand, a lot of what I'm reading reminds me of this.

I always voted at my party's call,
And I never thought of thinking for myself at all.
I thought so little, they rewarded me
By making me the Ruler of the Queen's Navee!

And here I thought of W.H. Smith only as a good place to buy Steam World ...

FAIL SAFE? Mikhail Suslov and Yuri Andropov organize a special KGB operation to take command of a Golf-class diesel ballistic missile submarine, mimic a Chinese provocation and nuke Pearl Harbor. According to Red Star Rogue, which will be Book Review No. 40, what saved Pearl Harbor was the KGB team's inability to override a U.S. designed auto-destruct circuit that would fire the implosion charges of the warhead one by one in the case of an unauthorized use of the missile. Secondary fuel explosions broke the submarine's back and it sank.

It is true that Soviet diesel submarine K-129 sank somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, and that the Central Intelligence Agency commissioned Howard Hughes to build a special ship called Glomar Explorer that raised some parts of a sunken submarine.

The book advances the hypothesis that Soviet spy John Anthony Walker provided the Kremlin with information suggesting the prospect of a submarine launched Chinese strike on Pearl or the West Coast frightened the U.S. military. Andropov and Suslov recognized an opportunity to fake a Chinese attack (Soviet diesel submarines could launch submerged at longer ranges than the Chinese could launch on the surface only) leading to a U.S. retaliation that would render the ongoing trans-Ussuri squabble over who is the more Marxist moot.

The official explanation for K-129's loss depends on who one asks. The authors of Rogue suggest that escorts of a Soviet fleet exercise later detected and sank SSN-589 Scorpion in retaliation for the sinking of K-129 by collision with SSN-579 Swordfish. As the book alludes to highly placed anonymous sources and documents not yet declassified, it's up to the reader to decide.

It does, however, provide a teachable moment in the logic of conditional statements. The authors obtain a statement by Ambassador Malcolm Toon to a Yeltsin-era commission on war prisoners and troops missing in action (Page 262.)

"At my request, U.S. naval intelligence searched the logs of all U.S. subs that were active in 1968. As a result, our director of naval intelligence has concluded that no U.S. sub was within 300 nautical miles of your sub when it sank.

Technically, that answer was correct.

The ambassador's revelation of this heretofore secret information about the precise location of K-129 should have been a bombshell for the ex-Soviet military men. By stating that there were no American submarines within 300 miles of the doomed K-129, the Americans revealed startling information that the CIA had struggled for years to keep secret. The ambassador did not say 750 miles, or 1,700 miles, which, under various cover stories, had been floated as the distance of the wreck site from Pearl Harbor. He instead acknowledged that no American submarine was within 300 miles of the sunken ship. Ambassador Toon had, in effect, revealed more accurately the true location of the rogue submarine.

Really? Suppose that the sub wrecked 1,700 miles from Pearl and the nearest sub was at Pearl. Then it is equally true that no sub is within any distance s less than 1700 nautical miles, including s = 300 nautical miles from Pearl. The authors might have bitten on an attempt by the Ambassador or the Agency to mess with Russian minds. Alternatively, suppose the nearest sub was not at Pearl, but was shadowing K-129 at a distance exceeding 300 nautical miles, using information obtained by other National Technological Means (I think that's the term of art.) The statement is still truthful, but discloses nothing about the capabilities of the antisub technologies or the sonar suites on the subs themselves, or that K-129 was less than 1,700 miles from Pearl.

The book does note some diplomatic and technological developments in the months following the sinking, including the opening with China, the research on anti-ballistic missiles, and Leonid Brezhnev getting closer to his field marshals. It might also shed some light on why President Reagan spoke so harshly of the Andropov government, media fascination with Yuri Vladimirovich's interest in jazz notwithstanding.

THERE IS CONCLUSIVE VIDEO EVIDENCE. Thus the phrasing by which the referee can overrule the back judge's call of an incomplete pass and credit Wisconsin with a touchdown. Badgers 41, improving Indiana 24.

In other sports news, the Brewers will not have a losing season this year, but that 82nd win is proving elusive.