FOURTH TURNING ALERT. John Hawkins at Right Wing News offers sobering thoughts about the latest attacks on Israel.

The road to a lasting peace in Lebanon leads through Iran and Syria. When they start to become afraid that this fighting will hurt them, they'll tell Hezbollah to cool it.

The post also suggests that Hezbollah is losing.

Which side wants an immediate ceasefire? Lebanon, right? They're losing. Which side wants to continue fighting? Israel, right? They're winning.

A commander will not propose to fight it out on that line if it takes all summer if that is not a good line to fight it out on.

WHO'S ON FIRST? As of this morning, look who's No. 1 in the Blogshares International Economics Industry. Yes, it's all funny money, but thanks for the attention all the same. Brian Gongol's Traffic Rankings (via Newmark's Door) lists the Shops among the sites with no public referrer logs along with the likes of Crooked Timber, Marginal Revolution, Voluntary Xchange, Freakonomics, and Atlantic Blog.

It's a hobby and I'm not going to worry about potentially unreliable referrer logs. Sitemeter identifies about 100 visits a day and 130-150 page views, whilst the Ecosystem (with a revised counting algorithm) reports about 90. But I put in a cheap counter that suggests a slightly larger visit count.

MOST MINIMUM WAGE WORKERS ARE NOT WORKING POOR. Most working poor earn more than minimum wage. That's something I learned working through a paper I had to comment on at the Western Economic Association conference in San Diego. (Yes, there were responsibilities that intruded on the sightseeing.) There's a summary of what we know about these non-overlapping subsets of the work force at Betsy's Page that I recommend you read through (with the cross-references. Disregard the polemics.)

At about the time I was packing to leave, there was a bit of posting about the economics of the minimum wage at Marginal Revolution and Cafe Hayek, much of which focused on ideologies when it wasn't focusing on econometric niceties. Cafe Hayek's Don Boudreaux points to a column he wrote for Tech Central Station that suggests the econometric niceties might be, well, not so nice.

First, a higher proportion of empirical research in the social sciences is subject to legitimate -- oftentimes irresolvable -- dispute. Second, as a consequence, in the social sciences theoretical considerations inevitably play a larger role in navigating around these disputes and in forming judgments about desirable public policies.

And so it is with the minimum wage. Almost any empirical study of this government mandate can be challenged for ignoring this variable, for mis-identifying that variable, for focusing on an inappropriate time period, or for countless other possible errors. Therefore, following Tyler Cowen, we are justified in being extraordinarily skeptical of empirical findings that are inconsistent with widely accepted theoretical foundations.

Minimum-wage studies that find no negative effects on the employment prospects of low-skilled workers are whoppingly inconsistent with basic economics -- a fact that means that they are probably inaccurate.

On the other hand, there might be room for further research. (There's always room for further research. There is no shortage of interesting questions in economics. Tractable in a way that survives scrutiny is another matter.) Take that "inconsistent with widely accepted theoretical foundations." That could mean "the four or five technically proficient theorems that satisfied referees at American Economic Review and Econometrica." What's that John McGee line about "never heard of Williamson and Scherer and simply blunders in" with respect to strategic behavior? Perhaps agents are acting under different constraints or facing incentives that haven't been as well thought through yet. (High occupancy toll lanes exist despite any number of theorems about the optimality of a single price for all users of a congestible facility.) That "no negative effects" merits further review as well. The effect of a minimum wage on hours worked might be "negative but not statistically significant," a phrase that often substitutes for thought. (On the other hand, we may have more precise estimating methods as part of the quest for theoretically pure data that yields the right results.) But does that phrase suggest that fewer people are working, yet total compensation to minimum wage workers has increased? Room for further research, indeed.

AN IRRELEVANT ALTERNATIVE? Capital Times editor Dave Zweifel reviews the National Strategy to Reduce Congestion.

The federal government's Transportation Department has just issued a "white paper" on reducing traffic congestion in the country and guess what? It doesn't include a word about how improvement of either passenger or freight rail in America might be able to help.

Once more, the powers-that-be in Washington are determined to put all the nation's transportation eggs essentially in one basket more and bigger highways with a small sop to improving some airport traffic control systems.

Mr Zweifel would like to see more reliance on the railroads.

Why leaders of this administration can't understand that to put 500 people on a train essentially removes 500 cars from the highway is nothing short of perplexing unless, of course, road builders just have better connections and more money.

I'll yield to nobody in my enthusiasm for passenger rail. All the same, I'll not let that enthusiasm blind me to bad policy analysis. First, 500 people on the train need not be the equivalent of 500 cars on the highway, allowing for families traveling together. Second, under the circumstances most favorable to that one-to-one correspondence, namely the morning commute, 500 cars might not be on the highway to the central business district, but those cars are probably headed to a parking lot near the train station. (In Chicago, even if Metra were able to path a few more Naperville Zephyrs of a weekday morning, it is unlikely that many additional passengers would be able to locate parking near the train. And parking lots represent idle capacity and environmental degradation of a different form than the traffic jam.) Outside of the few cities where one might speak of a central business district, the investment in new commuter trains and latter-day interurbans might be misguided (insufficient travel to the few destinations the service touches to be cost-effective or to have much of an effect on traffic.)

A more comprehensive analysis of congestion released by the Federal Highway Administration suggests that two perpetual sore points with me, maltimed traffic lights and work zones, contribute more to road congestion than the few hundred people who might have occasion to ride a train to work. The former are often a consequence of ill-thought-out privatization (a developer builds a shopping center and helpfully pays for the traffic lights controlling mid-section access to the parking lots, but those lights are never timed with the timing of the signals on the existing section roads.) The latter is often a consequence of public decisions to rebuild an obsolete highway network under traffic. Why obsolete? Consider some observations by Samuel Staley of the Reason Foundation.

Travel demand has outstripped road building by 3 to 1 since 1980. Simply bringing capacity up to current levels of demand will go a long way toward reducing congestion.

But this is only part of the solution, and perhaps not even the most important. Simply laying more asphalt won't pave our way out of our slowing productivity and congestion mess. We need to pay a lot more attention to what kinds of roads we build, where we build them, and when they get built.

This is a bigger job than most people realize. In essence, it calls for a whole scale reconfiguration of our regional highway system.

The basic design of the current system—its DNA—was established by the federally funded Interstate Highway System laid on top of incremental expansions of local roads. This established a "hub and spoke" design, where large volume highways (spokes) would funnel people into a central employment center (the hub). Often, an outer beltway (rim) was created to connect the spokes leading to the hub.

I'm going to be a bit harsher than that. The Interstate Highway System we have today is the trunkline railroads of the 1920s. Think about it: Pennsylvania + Rock Island + Union Pacific + Southern Pacific = I-80. New Haven + Pennsylvania + Richmond, Fredericksburg & Potomac + Atlantic Coast Line = I-95. (The rest of the map is left to the reader as an exercise.) As Mr Staley notes,

This highway system served the needs of the mid-20th century city well when most people still worked and lived in the central city. The post-World War II era of suburbanization changed all that.

Now, fewer than 20 percent of travelers during peak periods are commuters. Most of those trips are not even going into the central city. Suburb-to-suburb trips dominate travel patterns. Central cities are no longer the economic drivers of regional economic growth. Indeed, the growth of suburban cities and "edge cities" has created more balanced regional economies.

Our transportation system and network needs to be similarly balanced. The hub and spoke system isn't suited for a modern economy where technology and employment allows for flexibility and decentralization, and where travel decisions are based on personal needs accommodated by the customized travel flexibility offered by the automobile.

That last sentence notes the real problem passenger rail advocates face. If there is a train headed for Real Chili in time for lunch, or toward the museum campus with convenient return times when the kids are ready for a nap, or to and from the office in a central business district, there is a potential public interest in providing those trains, or at least in not providing inefficiently many (or inefficiently few) roads. But it's a bit much to attribute the preferences of a study of traffic congestion to malice on the part of the highway lobby.

WE CAN DO BUSINESS WITH THEM. The 2006 "Rippers" for best rail transport agencies are up.

Awards are totally arbitrary, based in part on the quality of Construction Documents, relationships with Suppliers and Contractors, quality of Completed Projects, perceived value of their Patrons, and other totally subjective factors. Awards are limited to those agencies operating in the United States.

RUNNING ON NINE CORONAS? Coverage of the Brewers' come-from-behind win on Cerveceros Night includes the most important sports report.

In what might have been the biggest upset of the year in any sporting event, the new fifth sausage, the Chorizo, came in a weak third in the nightly race. The crowd on "Los Cerveceros" night booed heartily.

So what excuses do the experienced also-rans in 4th and 5th have?

EXCESSIVELY SELF-REFERENTIAL? Blogger has been hitting me with a "word verification" request as I make postings. Their help site explains that a weblog with lots of references to itself fits the profile of a "spam blog." Whatever. It takes me a lot longer to cross-reference the previous posts than it does to make the verification and publish the posts.

THE ELBURN 400. After the excitement of the Pacific Shoreliner and Southwest Chief adventures, I had to calibrate the experience properly. An inspection of the Hiawatha line was in order.

Chicago's North Western Station has a commuter concourse north of Washington Street.


By midmorning, the dashing commuters are pretty much at their destinations, and unobstructed photography is possible. This concourse has been simplified and automated under Metra. At one time there were concessions here, and the train indicators were high-tech for the Harriman era, with a clock face up top and brass hands that could be set to show the departure time, and the destinations were on wooden slats. (I suspect the railroad maintained a full stack of slats for each train, rather than requiring the gate attendant to separate the Winnetka and Wilmette from Wheaton and West Chicago each time a train left. I have no idea how many slats might have gone home as unauthorized souvenirs.)

Amtrak Hiawatha 333, Chicago to Milwaukee, 21 July 2006: P32 locomotive 5, Horizon coaches 54542, 54581, 54554, 54517, cabbage car 90219 (which I understand is properly a Non-Powered Control Unit.) Leave 10:20, Glenview 10:41:24 - 10:42:54, slow order for track work south of Wadsworth, stop Wadsworth, slow order north of Wadsworth, Sturtevant 11:27:26 - 11:28:15, Milwaukee Airport 11:43:28 - 11:44:44 ("This is the ONLY airport stop"); arrive Milwaukee 11:54:50, six minutes down. (The Five-Spot is a good number for The Milwaukee Road. I can think of two significant Fives in their history.)

Consider this post a onetime resident's view of tourist Milwaukee. Not far from the station is a small park that was un-named for a long time and then it was called Marquette Park. It's since been renamed Zeidler Union Square.


In addition to the trees and benches, there is a decorative chain with numerous slogans, some from the history of union organizing, some purely pragmatic.


Two women were having an animated conversation in a Slavic language, quite possibly Russian. They may have learned this motto as "Proletarii vsekh stran, soedinyaytes'"

The park used to be the Transportation Common of Milwaukee, with interurban stations to the east and west and the Milwaukee Road's gateway to the racetrack on the south. Preservationists have listed the Public Service Building as what came before WE Energies used it as general offices.



The Third Street frontage has been rebuilt with replicas of the doors that once enclosed the departure side of the interurban station.


An interurban awaits departure.

John Karlson photograph, June 1940.

The same backdating has been applied to the arrival side on Second Street. (Milwaukee Electric's cars were set up with a motorman's cab at the front end only.)

You may have learned to read with a little help from Gertie the Duck.


The Iron Block is also a listed building. The hot dog cart is rather popular with office workers.


Milwaukee Street may not offer as much in the way of outdoor dining as San Diego, but the storefronts are spruced up.


City Hall is getting a new roof.


Along the riverfront, the Oneida Street power plant is now a theater. The Milwaukee Electric Railway and Light Company demonstrated the use of pulverized coal as boiler fuel at this powerhouse. The Wells Street streetcars passed their powerhouse here.


Across the river, the Germania Building shows off its Prussian theming.


Marquette Park is now along the riverfront, at approximately the landing of the Marquette-Joliet Expedition in the Milwaukee area. The park commission has invested heavily in harp-case streetlights.


Pere Marquette is facing west, warding off Badgers.


A Holstein cow ruminates over historic Third Street. (No, the tanners haven't figured out how to use these for saddle shoes.)


To the north, developers are reusing the Commerce Street power station and the Schlitz Brewery.


Ist das nicht Gus Mader's ...?


Ja, das ist Gus Maders, but they're no longer selling Schnitzelbank posters.

This alleyway entry has been prettied up.


The problem with living in a city is that one sometimes gets into a routine and misses some of the events that are suggested for tourists, including the fish fry at the Turn-Bezirk.


The Turner Hall is also a listed building. The kitchen and bar are open. The club still has classes in floor exercises.


Fred Usinger's store still looks much like it did years ago.


These elves were painted 100 years ago.


A few packages of frankfurters are enroute home with me. Milwaukee's station, which is being renovated, is rather busy with Hiawatha passengers, people meeting passengers off a late-running eastbound Empire Builder, and passengers arriving well ahead of time for the westbound Builder. There's a healthy contingent of Mackinac sailors riding the train.


Amtrak Hiawatha 338, Milwaukee to Chicago, 21 July 2006: cabbage car 90368, Horizon coaches 54547, 54525, 54551, 54067, P32 85. Temperature 69 degrees (F) and overcast, with dry rail. Leave Milwaukee 3:00. The Hiawatha gets the tight curves out of the way at the start of its run, with the Menominee Draw east of the station and Florida Street where the yard lead joins the main line. Factories and tanneries are giving way to lofts.


The foundry that blocked the view of Allen-Bradley is gone.



Historically, the Hiawatha had a better shot at a fast run to Chicago if it could make a good run up Lake Hill. The Airport station is near the top of Lake Hill. Today's performance is creditable despite the stops. Milwaukee Airport 3:09:13 - 3:10:42, Sturtevant 3:24:56 - 3:26:19.


Sturtevant for Racine looks close to ready to open. Rain moves in from Pleasant Prairie to Rondout. Despite the weather, the train is running well. Glenview 4:01:24 - 4:02:15, pass Mayfair 4:09:50, Pacific Junction 4:13:33, Western Avenue 4:18:20. This run might well have been as fast as any I have timed had the dispatcher not held our train outside Union Station to allow the commuter trains to leave on time. Arrive Union Station 4:27:45.

During the evening rush, Metra runs some limited-stop trains, including one that calls only at Wheaton, Winfield, Geneva, and Elburn. (Has Metra considered assigning one of the beverage cars to this train? These stops are the more affluent quarters along the line.)

The two Chicago and North Western coaling towers at the California Avenue engine house are in the way of other projects. One of them has just been removed.


Near LaFox, the Elburn 400 meets a Union Pacific freight.


And so homeward bound, with the frankfurters headed for the 'fridge.

NOT PHOTOSHOPPED. The picture is in a recent communication from the Inland Lake Yachting Association.


That's an A Scow towing a wakeboarder. The "M" on the sail refers to the Minnetonka Yacht Club. I have seen video of an E Scow towing a waterskier, as on one ski.

Ultimate one design, forsooth!

THE FLAGSHIP IS SWAMPED. Editorial writers at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel want the University of Wisconsin system to stop sending promising youngsters out of state.

Too many of the state's top high school seniors are finding the doors to the top University of Wisconsin campus shut to them. As a result, they often leave the state to pursue their degrees. The danger is they won't come back - contributing to the state's brain drain.

(Weren't the policymakers and pundits fretting a few years ago about how many graduates got their degree and then pursued opportunities in other states? Current company included?)

Their recommendation: take away some of the sting of being rejected at Madison.

Officials must reverse this trend by expanding the number of Wisconsin students the Madison campus accepts and raising the stature of the Milwaukee campus.

But no matter what course you take, there will be unpleasant choices. No doubt the LaCrosse or Eau Claire campuses will weigh in with arguments for an upgrade from destroyer escort to heavy cruiser.

Both courses require the Legislature to put more money into the UW System, reversing the trend for cutbacks in state support.

And, presumably, making Milwaukee's research expectations, course standards, and faculty responsibilities more like Madison's. No doubt there will be some skepticism about expanded Ph.D. production.

Yes, once the Madison campus did admit more students but found the huge number stretched its resources too thin. Students attended too many large classes, and difficulty getting into required courses kept too many from graduating on time. So the university, with the blessing of the Legislature, trimmed its enrollment.

While perhaps a reasonable decision then - in the late 1980s - it's now time to change course, but in a way that doesn't lead to crowding. There are two choices: Expand the resources - specifically, the class space and the faculty. Or cut down on the number of out-of-state students on campus. Even the latter choice requires more state support since out-of-state students pay more than three times the tuition of in-state students.

The late 1980s and early 1990s were a convenient time to embark on such cutbacks, as the relatively small Thirteenth Generation was finishing high school, and the corporate fad of the era was downsizing and restructuring. But the downsizing mentality has persisted despite rising enrollments and rising premiums for technical degrees. And now the option of cutting back on offerings to scare away the Coastie money means higher state appropriations or higher tuitions (read smaller subsidies to people who will be earning more money.)

The editors, not surprisingly, favor more resources being spent on the Milwaukee campus.

Madison's undergraduate enrollment exceeded 30,000 altogether when officials determined to cut back. But they never did Step 2 of their plan: Make UW-Milwaukee a viable alternative to Madison, among the top research universities in the nation. Officials never gave the Milwaukee campus sufficient resources. They must do so now so that Wisconsin students have options.

As it happens, Chancellor Carlos Santiago is seeking to drastically step up research at UWM - a goal that dovetails nicely with the idea of making the campus a stronger alternative to Madison for top students. Lawmakers and UW officials must support that goal.

Carlos's problem is one of emulating Wayne State on a good day, something that is going to be difficult given the differing wishes of the business community, the local schools, and Milwaukee area public officials, let alone residents outside Milwaukee. Have the editorial writers in Oshkosh and Platteville weighed in with their wish lists?

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE. This evening the Milwaukee Brewers will wear "Cerveceros" jerseys, perhaps to make the racing chorizo feel at home. Real Debate Wisconsin has a picture (and a discussion thread that suggests it's not just angry Minnesotans that ought to lighten up.) The Journal-Sentinel's Jim Stingl subjects readers to extreme punishment. Dennis York (via Charlie Sykes) finds an illegal immigration angle.

ACROSS THE FIELDS. The mountain passes are behind us, and the Southwest Chief is on the home stretch on July 6. I'm up and about as the train is leaving Lawrence, a few minutes off schedule. The approach to Kansas City is slow, as the freight railroads are about their business exchanging cars. It's a good time for breakfast, much of the time spent making a stop that's included in the employee timetable at the fuel racks. Arrival at Kansas City 7:56:42 Central Daylight Time, again this is an approximate time. A small Southern Pacific 2-8-2, No. 745, and some cars of the Louisiana Steam Train Association are west of the station.

The Western Auto sign is a sure identifier of a Kansas City picture.


On the adjacent track is the consist of the afternoon St. Louis Mule, which provides the rail connection to Missouri River towns as far east as St. Louis. The Ann Rutledge for those towns as well as Alton, Springfield, and Chicago leaves at 7:30, a few minutes before the Chief's scheduled arrival. That's not quite as bad a gaffe as Amtrak's initial schedule, in which the National Limited for St. Louis, Indianapolis, Columbus, Pittsburgh, and New York left a few minutes ahead of the Chief, and there was no corridor train later in the day. But Amtrak and the railroads could do more for their credibility by scheduling trains to connect, and enforcing the discipline to make the connections more reliably. (Amtrak will not guarantee a connection with less than two hours between trains in Chicago. Although the Europeans pin Vienna to London in a day on six minutes in Cologne, there has to be a better solution. Send the Rutledge twenty minutes after the Chief arrives and make sure the connection stands up. There's an hour layover in St. Louis. There are neither border crossing formalities nor the Missouri Pacific handing off a train to the Alton. Come off it.)


A number of sleeping car passengers disembarked here, as did a sizeable troop of Scouts from Philmont. Departure from Kansas City at 8:16:32, 31'32" down.

Some steam servicing facilities remain at Marceline, Walt Disney's home town and supposedly the prototype for the Main Street portion of Disney theme parks.


La Plata 10:18:43 - 10:21:09. (The engineer reported his times as "sixteen-eighteen.")

The final stretch stop before Chicago is Ft. Madison, which is still a major terminal on Santa Fe.


Fort Madison 11:28:02 - 11:35:00. East of the station, one of the Santa Fe's big 4-8-4s, No. 2913, is preserved.

The last call for lunch comes out of Ft. Madison. The on-train service was exemplary. Special recognition to sleeping car attendant Sharon, who kept cheerful despite a bad cold, and to lounge car attendant Teresa, whose "I'm going on break so stock up now" and "I'm back from break and getting lonely" were helpful. Those positions are probably the most difficult to do well as the car attendants might be subject to call at any hour and the lounge car is open from 6:30 to 10:30 with short meal breaks.

Near Wyanet on Burlington tracks is the Hennepin Canal overpass.


This canal was an early application of concrete casting technologies later applied on the Panama Canal. Unfortunately, the Hennepin was built bigger than the old Illinois and Michigan canal and smaller than the Mississippi or Illinois River locks, rendering it uneconomic. It's a good linear park, with a towpath suitable for hiking or leisurely bike riding. You might want tires a bit more robust than those on a commuter bike and you'd probably have trouble training for a triathlon on it. (Perhaps a Hennepin photo study some day as it's practically in my back yard.)

The train was about 30 minutes late out of Galesburg, Princeton, Mendota, and Naperville, but there's a recovery margin from Naperville into Chicago.

The Sears Tower guards the south approach to Union Station.


Arrival Chicago about 3:16, four minutes to the good.

SPEAKING OF CHORIZO. Some Thursday night food-blogging. Miller Park may now have a racing chorizo. There is also a soy-based chorizo that makes a decent taco filling. The cilantro, peppers, and lettuce are fresh out of the Victor E. Huskie Garden.


And so to suppertime.

JOINING THE DEBATE. The dean at Anonymous Community responds to my suggestion that higher education go out of the remediation business.

The mischievous part of my mind likes it, which is usually a sign that it’s a bad idea.

For reasons that boil down to the Stiglerian argument that, no matter how much of a mess higher education is in, it is the best of all possible messes. Perhaps so. There is a strong presumption that the existing configuration of an industry, including a service industry, is an efficient configuration in the presence of sufficient choices. Newmark's Door reminds us, however, that alternatives, even alternatives that look bad, are sometimes out there against the day when they might be desirable.

Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.

(Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, courtesy John J. Miller on The Corner.)

Messy as reality might be, the reality also is that higher education is in a crisis in which people engage in positional arms races to get away, not always successfully, from the remediation muddle. The dean recognizes some of this, yet comes off sounding much like a curmudgeon ("They despise change, even though they complain about the status quo.")

First, and most obviously, it’s unenforceable. How far back do we go? What if the student goes out-of-state? What if a cc raises its tuition, and the high school doesn’t have the money for the increase? What if the student only needs remediation in one subject, but needs to take 12 credits for the coveted “full-time status” that keeps them eligible for financial aid and/or their parents’ health insurance? (This is incredibly common.) How long before evil proprietaries swoop in, and offer to allow students to do an end-run around the forced march to the cc? (I ask that one as a former employee of a proprietary.) How many four-year schools would have the intestinal fortitude to send half of an incoming class away? How many would they actually get back? (In reality, we’d see exceptions for athletes, then for legacies, then for people willing to pay extra, then for the litigious, then for…) A college forced to choose between teaching remedial courses and laying off swaths of employees would probably choose the former, if past practice is any guide.

He's buried the lead in that "in reality" parenthetical. These are the steps by which higher education became corrupted. But corrupted it has become, and perhaps it is time to root out the current corruption before having conversations about how much integrity ought to be compromised in favor of better alumni relations.

On to the substance, point by point: When the flagship campuses are encouraging out-of-state enrollments, sometimes with merit scholarships, the first objection strikes me as of second-order importance. I could turn the second question around: Why aren't there futures markets and insurance and long term purchase-of-service contracts available against rate increases? Similarly, why aren't there concurrent registration contracts available? The tax status? Many universities offer no-credit remediation courses (Wisconsin's Math 099 comes to mind) which might be why the rule is twelve credits rather than fifteen or eighteen. The proprietaries? Why are those evil? The mistake many a mid-major has made in the past ten years has more often been attempting to emulate Phoenix rather than become more like Illinois or Wisconsin. (An aside on Wisconsin's efforts to steer applicants to campuses other than Madison: students and faculty will make common cause to make LaCrosse or Oshkosh or Whitewater more like Madison in research emphasis rather than a Phoenix or Wayne State on a bad day.) The lack of intestinal fortitude and the willingness to become College Lite? That's why we're in this pass in the first place.

Second, the taxpayers are still paying twice. Public high schools get their money from the taxpayers. If the high schools are suddenly billed by the cc, they’ll pay the bill with money raised from…wait for it…taxpayers. The substantive issue still stands.

Or suffer Tiebout migration or tax-limitation initiatives. Taxpayers are not passive sources of funds, work on migration-proofing public policies notwithstanding.

Third, what do we do with students from other countries (which probably wouldn’t honor the tuition agreement)? Older students? Students with GED’s? Who do we bill for a high-school dropout? Someone who graduated before the new rules kick in? Someone from the neighboring county or state? (If they’re exempted, I’d expect to see informal exchange programs suddenly flourish. Online teaching makes that possible.) Are ESL courses properly considered ‘remedial,’ if the student was never taught English in the first place?

In the language of Robert Ringer, interesting details, worthy of consideration and negotiation, but not deal-breakers.

Fourth, if No Child Left Behind has taught us anything, it has taught us that high schools with financial guns at their heads are willing to play all kinds of games with numbers and tests. Entire states are lowering their standards to avoid the federally-mandated penalties for not meeting state standards. Add college tuition to the penalties, and the cheating will skyrocket. You heard it here first.

With the end result being employers, some of whom are already requiring college board scores along with college transcripts, skipping the collegiate job fairs completely, recruiting out of the high schools, and setting up their own alternatives to universities to provide job-specific, and ONLY job-specific training. Like my colleague, I criticize much in higher education because there is much that I see worth protecting.

Fifth, an enterprising principal would do everything in her power to keep the risky kids from applying to college in the first place. Incentives cut both ways. I agree that college isn’t for everybody, but the opportunities for racial bias or linguistic bias or disability bias or just about any other bias you can name are just too glaring. Right now a high school can encourage each kid to go as far as his ability will take him; shift the incentive to reward early pruning, and early pruning ye shall have.

Complex Proposition alert! The problem in higher education is not one of insufficient entry, the problem is one of excessive entry, excessive remediation, and reality checks deferred but not diminished.

Sixth, the most powerful predictor of test performance, statistically speaking, is parental income. Overall, the lowest-income high schools would have the highest percentage of tuition penalties. Draining resources from the bottom of the economic ladder is not the way to improve academic performance there.

We have "lowest-income" high schools because school quality comes bundled with expensive houses in neighborhoods with snob zoning. Hence the popularity of school vouchers in poorer quarters of Milwaukee and Cleveland. It is precisely the high schools in the poorest districts that require the greatest inducements to better prepare their students. The current experiments, whatever they are, are unproductive.

And I’m all for constructive incentives, coupled with resources, to do that. I just don’t think this idea, as much fun as it is to think about, would work. The incentives, seemingly so straightforward at first blush, actually get pretty screwy if you try to apply them to messy reality.

That's the spirit in which I offered my original thoughts and the spirit in which I take these comments. That changes may appear "pretty screwy" is not necessarily reason to stop thinking along those lines, particularly when the status quo is not working.

TU QUOQUE? The Corporate Crime Reporter looks at Mayo Clinic v. Dakota, Minnesota & Eastern.

Running right next to the Mayo Clinic campus in Rochester is a rail line.

And a small railroad -- the Dakota, Minnesota & Eastern Railroad (DM&E) -- with powerful political connections wants a $2.5 billion loan from the federal government.

DM&E's president Kevin Schieffer wants to turn his little $220 million-a-year pipsqueak railroad into a major $1 billion-a-year coal-carrying behemoth.

He wants to carry the mega-tonnage of coal from the Powder River Basin in Wyoming through South Dakota and Minnesota and on to Chicago and then to coal-burning plants throughout the United States. The 2,800-mile line would run right through Rochester, Minnesota. Home to the Mayo Clinic.

And so, Dayton, and Forbes and Ryan gathered last week at the National Press Club to make their points to the national media.

The DM&E is an unsafe railroad, they said. In fact, they claim it has the worst safety record in its class of railroad. They say its accident record is more than double that of all railroads in its class. And it is one of only two railroads in America operating under a safety compliance agreement the Federal Railroad Administration.

Yes, its rail line currently runs right next to the Mayo Clinic. Trains run by there now, they concede -- but at a slow speed -- 10 to 15 miles per hour. If the company gets the loan to upgrade the line, the trains will run much faster than they run now -- 40 to 50 miles per hour.

In addition to carrying coal, they will carry hazardous materials. What if this accident-prone railroad has a hazmat accident, and there is a spill, or an explosion? Our patients, who fly here from around the world, would be put at risk. Can't you see?

And then Stephen Ryan of Manatt Phelps slaps DM&E with a Red Card: "This is an island of socialism in a sea of capitalism."

By which he means that DM&E is seeking a $2.5 billion government loan.

And so we asked Manatt's Ryan: Mr. Ryan, Manatt Phelps is a powerful Washington, D.C. law firm. Isn't it conceivable that Manatt Phelps has in the past represented other corporate entities who have sought bailouts from the federal government?

"No," Mr. Ryan says.

No?

A five-second search found at least one example -- Manatt represented US Airways before the Congress in the post-9/11 bailout of the airline industry.

Maybe it's just a sea of corporate socialism?

Isn't rent-seeking wonderful? Mayo have their own history of misplaced corporate welfare.

Further into the report comes the possibility of a compromise. The DM&E system includes bits of the old Milwaukee Road. The coal could be routed off the Winona and St. Peter at Owatonna, and onto the Iowa, Chicago & Eastern's ex-Milwaukee line by way of Calmar and Marquette. That routing, however, does not offer as easy a connection to Canadian Pacific as the Rochester routing. (The Rochester routing also gets closer to Union Pacific and the Santa Fe, but those co-owners of the existing Powder River line are unlikely to short-haul themselves, Northern Tier politicians or not.)

AY, CHORIZO. The fifth racing sausage will be uno chorizo. The Electric Commentary's Paul Noonan is pleased.

As you all know, the single most enjoyable part of any Milwaukee Brewers' home game is the sausage race. The sausage race is great. Aside from being highly entertaining, it also teaches us that Germans wear lederhosen, Italians have gigantic mustaches, and Polish people where sunglasses and Freddy Krueger sweaters. I don't know why they do this, but apparently they do.

Today, the Brewers and Klement's Sausage Co. announced that they're adding a fifth sausage, the Mexican Chorizo. I'm extremely happy with this decision. For the most part, people of European ancestry do not get angry about their stereotypes. Italian people occasionally get ticked off about Mafia references, but that problem usually takes care of itself, if you get my drift.

I think it's a good choice, but I also remember Harvey's Wallbangers, which suggests a possible British candidate should a sixth sausage be contemplated.

PROTECTING COMPETITORS IS NOT PROTECTING COMPETITION. A Wisconsin retailer avoids offering shoppers a price break on gasoline.

Woodman's Food Markets, which operates 11 stores in Wisconsin and northern Illinois, next week will end its program of shaving the price of gasoline by 3 cents a gallon for those who show a Woodman's grocery receipt when they buy gas. Instead, drivers will get $1 off when they buy $30 of gas and show a $50 receipt for groceries.

Woodman's President Phil Woodman said the company made the change because the state Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection would not give it a clear answer on whether its policy adhered to the minimum markup statute. That Depression-era law was designed to keep large gas retailers from squeezing out small ones.

Politicians are acting like, well, politicians.

The law requires that gas at the pump be at least 9.18% above the price at the terminal. Retailers can go below that markup to meet a competitor's price, however.

Democrats and a handful of Republicans in the state Senate defeated a measure in May that would have ended the minimum markup law. Woodman's lobbied for the bill; Kwik Trip lobbied against it.

Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle supports the repeal of that law. A spokesman for Republican U.S. Rep. Mark Green of Green Bay, who is running against Doyle, said Green would support changing the markup law if doing so would lower gas prices.

(Via The American Mind.)

Chicago aldermen are also supporting their constituents' right to pay higher prices at independent retailers. John Kass quotes a dissenter.

Chicago aldermen blew out all the pretty candles in a 35-14 veto-proof vote, passing the big-box ordinance that will lead to a $10-per-hour starting salary for unskilled workers at select Chicago stores.

The measure was backed by the city's labor unions and opposed by Daley, who had never lost a vote to a council that he has, until Wednesday, appointed, intimidated and dominated.

As public policy, the big-box ordinance is certainly unconstitutional. It is an insidious attempt by Chicago politicians to squeeze businesses that hoped to open new markets--particularly underserved minority neighborhoods--while providing tax revenue and thousands of desperately needed jobs to unskilled workers, many of them black and Latino.

"I've got these white liberals telling me what's good for my community. But this big-box thing will cost black people jobs," Ald. Ike Carothers (29th) told me during Wednesday's pontifications.

The mayor recognizes the incentives.

At his news conference afterward, Daley said Chicago is in dire need of sales tax revenue that flees to the suburbs as big boxes open up on the city's borders.

"I have to keep sales tax here somewhere," the mayor said. "It can't be all on Michigan Avenue."

Your law. My bargain. We shall see which is stronger.

SO STAY HOME AND GRIPE. It's summertime, and we can depend on Minneapolis Star-Tribune columnist Susan Lenfestey to go someplace and be miserable.

Back home in Minneapolis I start the day with the media equivalent of bran and hardtack. My teeth grind, my stomach knots and the little needle on my rage meter pings over to the red zone.

Up here I take my coffee looking out at Lake Huron, a sweep of clear, fresh water that shimmers over the distant horizon like the world's biggest infinity pool, which in a way it is. After the religious wars and the oil wars -- if there is an after -- they say it'll be the water wars, which puts those of us situated in the middle of the five Great Lakes sort of in the catbird seat. Or in a war zone.

But she has the misfortune to go holidaymaking on Mackinac, with what appears to be the Detroit to Mackinac about to finish.

Every year hundreds of sailboats race up Lake Huron to Mackinac Island, a trip taking anywhere from one to three days, depending on the wind and the size of the boat. The 80-foot turbo yachts finish first, looking like something out of a bad Kevin Costner movie with their sinister high-tech ash-black sails, and then the smaller boats with old-fashioned white sails straggle in, crisscrossing the straits like flittering moths.

It's all very pretty, except for the TV news choppers whirling overhead and the cannon that fires as each boat crosses the line.

These sailors come ashore with an all-too-familiar swagger of privilege, claiming dehydration and sexual deprivation from their weekend ordeal on the open water. Unlike their less lucky counterparts stuck in, say, the 115-degree heat of Iraq, these guys have free Bacardi rum and a whole slew of sturdy Michigan Girls Gone Wild, bare midriffs and breasts billowing like spinnakers, to slake their various thirsts.

Cry. Me. A. Great Lake.

Shot in the Dark was also less than impressed with the column.

"DON'T YOU PEOPLE SEE? THERE'S GOING TO BE A WATER WAR! RIGHT HERE! QUIT HAVING FUN! IF YOU'RE NOT OUTRAGED, YOU'RE AN IDIOT!"

"AND KNOCK OFF ALL THAT DRINKING AND SEX! CONCENTRATE ON POLITICS!"

Creepy, indeed. More at Kool Aid Report.

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION FOR THE RICH. The results are in for the Mackinac Race. There is a prize for getting there first.

Windquest, an 86-foot vessel that was the largest in the fleet of 300 sailboats, arrived in Michigan early Monday morning to capture the Royono Trophy in the 98th running of the Chicago Yacht Club Race to Mackinac.

The trophy is presented to the first monohull across the finish line regardless of boat size or category.

Strong headwinds on Lake Michigan limited the pace of the race that began Saturday in Chicago, and when Windquest reached Mackinac Island at 1:23 a.m., the elapsed time for the Tom Giesler-captained boat owned by Illinois' Doug DeVos was 34 hours 43 minutes 23 seconds.

That was about 11 hours slower than the 2002 record set by Pyewacket.

Windquest was cheered to shore by a small group of fans, more than six hours ahead of the runner-up, Chicago-based Nightmare.

Windquest also finished ahead of a storm that buffeted most of the other boats still on the lake.

"They beat the rain," race spokeswoman Christie Kirchner said. "They had headwinds the whole way. The winds and seas made for a challenging race."

Yes, a 333-mile beat is work. Windquest apparently set a record for velocity made good. But after handicapping, neither Windquest nor Nightmare win the race.

Eagle, owned by a family from Chicago, has won the Mackinac Cup, the top prize for the larger boats finishing the 98th running of the Race to Mackinac.The boat, owned by Jerry and Shawn O'Neill, finished the 333-mile race with a time of 43 hours, 28 minutes, 1 second.

Time adjustment rules. Pah. I'll stick to one-designs, where second place is first last. Check out the ultimate one design!

CARNIVAL CALL. Carnival of Education No. 95₍₈₎ calls at Text Savvy, where the sidebar is almost as intriguing as this week's bannerline.

QUOTE OF THE DAY. University Diaries, on David Brooks.

Brooks, on view in today's New York Times, is a realist. He doesn't think you should - like most European countries - throw money at your university system and then look firmly away from the results. He thinks Americans, for instance, should notice that despite all sorts of government money, the college graduation rate remains unchanged:

Yup. (And thanks for the reference!)

UH-OH. The Tour de France, otherwise known as Better Riding through Chemistry?

Tour de France champion Floyd Landis tested positive for high levels of testosterone during the race, his Phonak team said Thursday.

The statement came a day after the UCI, cycling's governing body, said an unidentified rider had failed a drug test during the Tour.

The Swiss-based Phonak said in a statement on it Web site that it was notified by the UCI Wednesday that Landis' sample showed "an unusual level of testosterone/epitestosterone" when he was tested after stage 17 of the race last Thursday.

It was on that mountain stage where Landis staged a stunning solo breakaway to overcome a huge deficit and put himself in position to win the Tour.

"The team management and the rider were both totally surprised of this physiological result," the statement said.

Phonak said Landis would ask for analysis of his backup "B" sample "to prove either that this result is coming from a natural process or that this is resulting from a mistake."

Landis has been suspended by the team pending the results. If the second sample confirms the initial finding, he will be fired from the team, Phonak said.

And Mr Landis has gone missing from two races. (Via Drudge, where Tour de Dope is getting second billing to a rocket attack on an Israeli cemetery.) Developing.

A DIFFERENT MANIFESTATION OF NOSTALGIA FOR THE FIFTIES. Fortune's Marc Gunther gripes, "the explosion of choice has left us poorer." In particular, the end of concentration has been bad for journalism and politics.

I think the explosion of choice has left us poorer in at least two arenas. The first is journalism. (Yes, as a Fortune writer, I've got a stake in the health of the mainstream media, which bloggers call the MSM.) The network evening newscasts, big-city newspapers and the national news magazines once had the money, access, skills, commitment and power to deliver lots of original reporting and put important issues on the national agenda. Today, they are all diminished.

That rates a dissenting thesis on Newmark's Door.

Why do I suspect that the real complaint here is that yes, Conservatives more or less used to have to read the New York Times and the Washington Post and watch ABC, CBS, and NBC, but now--damn it all--we don't?

Or, as a commenter to the post suggests, Fifties nostalgia isn't just for conservative white folks. The "excessive choice" hypothesis must have been breakfast conversation at the Newmark house, as Betsy's Page is similarly unimpressed with the "excess choice" argument.

I always laugh at these people who moan and groan about how bad it is that we have more choice and competition in any market. Just go into any grocery store and note how many new products there are that weren't there 10 years ago. They might not be choices that you like and I'm sure Coke and Pepsi would prefer that we only had two major beverage suppliers, but the rest of us benefit. And if all the choices are paralyzing you, just go back to buying the same old stuff you always bought.

Economics, unfortunately, has not yet come up with robust welfare analyses of choice. The standard competitive model achieves Pareto efficiency with multiple sellers of interchangeable products serving multiple consumers. The most precise formulation of this problem has infitesimal producers of identical products serving a continuum of consumers. Product variety introduces efficiency losses. Concentrated industries (Coke and Pepsi, Westinghouse and G.E., three major networks, six flag-carrier airlines) can lessen competition, collude at Dirty Helen's, or share monopolies. But that hasn't stopped economists from contemplating the socially optimal level of product differentiation (Kelvin Lancaster, 1975) or optimum product diversity (Avinash Dixit and Joseph Stiglitz, 1977) or possible social inefficiencies in free-entry markets with standard products (N. Gregory Mankiw and Michael Whinston, 1986.) [Superintendent's note: texts of the articles require a JSTOR subscription.] That a diversity of models of product variety exist hints at the difficulty of characterizing allocative efficiency away from the limiting case of infinitesimals on a continuum. Reality is a bit more lumpy.

But economics might have something to say about Mr Gunther's second complaint.

The second arena where we are worse off is politics. This is related to journalism, as the moderate and responsible (okay, bland) voices of the MSM get drowned out by partisan, opinionated cableheads and bloggers.

Politics in America has become polarized for many reasons, but a big one is the fact that people can now filter the news and opinion they get to avoid exposure to ideas with which they disagree. Anderson suggests that this could well be a temporary problem, and that if the major parties continue to move to the extremes and the quality of debate continues to deteriorate, the Internet could well enable a new party or parties, to arise.

Not necessarily. The existence of new political media cannot by itself cause political parties to move to the extremes. The median voter theorem suggests that a party wins by catering to the median voter and all voters holding views ranging from slightly more extreme to the most extreme left or right of that voter, leading to minimum differentiation. In consequence, there's not a dime's worth of difference between two major parties. Governor Wallace recognized what Harold Hotelling and Anthony Downs made rigorous.

But the median voter theorem is the consequence of an undercutting problem inherent in simple preference mappings such as "prefer the party whose position is closest to mine." Make the voter's preference mapping one in which the distaste for a party increases with the square of the difference between the voter's position and the parties, and minimum differentiation is invalid but polarization is an equilibrium (C. d'Aspremont et. al., 1979). Consider more subtle specifications of the preference mapping and something other than polarization is the equilibrium, but minimum differentiation is still lost (Nicholas Economides, 1986.)

ON OTHERS' WORKBENCHES. The Thomas Institute has called out Roundhouse Roundup No. 2. Modelers in smaller scales are reporting in, as are families bringing up the next generation of train enthusiasts.

The next Roundhouse is called for August 28, and there might be some progress from down cellar to bring to their attention by then.

THE WATER IS SAFELY INSIDE AND OUTSIDE THE FLUME. A commenter to this report on flooding at Knoebels Grove asks whether the park will have to add a new high water mark. Knoebels are open for business, with a picture page showing the midway under water, the cleanup the next day, and open for business two days later. The water does not appear to have risen as high as it did during Hurricane Agnes or a flood during the 1930s. I looked, without success, in my photo files for pictures of the high water marks, which are near the covered bridge that's at top right of the park's flood page. If memory serves, those high water marks are above the bridge railing. High water at the end of June is several feet short of that.

IF THEY DON'T WIN IT'S A SHAME. No posting Monday because I had a sausage race to attend.


Rumor has it there will soon be another racing sausage.

The chorus of The Beer Barrel Polka.


One could almost use rapid transit to reach Miller Park from the easterly reaches of the parking lot. The old County Stadium was well west of the freeway, with almost all parking between the freeway and the stadium. Miller Park is on the old parking lot, with the freeway relocated a bit to the east, and parking lots on both the Milwaukee Road arrival yards and the site of the old coach shop.


The Highland Cardinals from a small high school near Madison were recognized for winning the Division 4 softball championship.


There was a major league baseball game amidst all the peripheral entertainment. The Brewers prevailed 12-8. Here's the ritual after one of Bill Hall's two home runs. Carlos Lee also hit one.


This conference, either to buy time for the relief pitcher to warm up or to determine the location for the post-game pizza, occurred after another home run.


It was a pleasant evening for baseball, with the roof open all night.

UH-OH. The Northern Star interviews new provost Raymond W. Alden III.

NS: What changes do you want to make at Northern?

RA: I think what I heard during the interview process was an interest in developing more strategic plans so that as we go into the future, we focus on certain areas that are agreed upon as areas that need to have greater development. I think that's an important aspect of higher education in general, particularly during times nationally when there's financial difficulties, so that when resources are relatively scarce, you make sure you maintain excellence and you grow in areas that are particularly important for the institution and for the state.

Catch that Divine Passive "that are agreed upon?"

NS: Where do you see NIU in five years?

RA: I think a lot depends on the strategic planning process because that's the first thing you start asking once you have a mission statement, a statement of strategic goals. Then you start to build what your direction is, where you're going to want to end up. I think it would be premature for me to say, "This is the game plan," because that represents the entire university community, starting with the president's vision, all the way through the faculty and it has to be done in a shared manner. So I see the strategic planning process as not top down. It is everybody kind of reaching a consensus with this mission and vision in mind... I think that's part of what needs to be done over the next year or two, to engage students, faculty, staff, obviously the president's cabinet in those kind of discussions of "Here we are now. What do we want to be? What are our areas of strength? What do we want to be known for in 10 years?" What do both the student population and the university community in terms of faculty and staff and the external stakeholders want the university to become?

The problem with a consensus is that it has to be too bland to constitute much of a commitment, unless it's administrative fiat.

But if anybody asks me for ideas, I'll offer a few.

NS: You said that you liked the growth of NIU when you were being interviewed for the provost position. What were some of the things that stood out about NIU's growth?

RA: I think there are a number of things obviously. Even during times of financial hardship, there were great things happening - some of the connections we've talked about in big science and a lot of the opportunities of looking at a student population whose characteristics are improving in terms of having better graduation rates, retention rates and so forth and yet still having the outreach opportunity to make sure that individuals who may have been disadvantaged because of socioeconomic reasons or preparation reasons in the K through 12 system are still given the opportunity to come here and given the infrastructure to help them succeed.

I think having some of those characteristics, having the potential to develop the research connections and the engagement in this tremendous community stood out. You can drive around and see the technology quarter coming out from Chicago and obviously NIU could be an effective anchor for that. You have a growing population and lots of potential in terms of serving that population. So, I think research engagement and academic excellence stood out.

Quite frankly, when I spoke to the students, they were all very excited. I think that's the one thing that stood out. Everybody seemed quite positive despite financial hardships and I know that in some institutions, that climate and culture is just not there.

Many of these things have happened despite anybody's efforts to add or detract. Don't mess it up.

NS: How would you describe your leadership style?

RA: I believe in building consensus. I think to get input from all stakeholder groups is important, but I think leaders have to be willing to make the hard decision when the time comes. You can't be just laissez-faire and let things happen. I think that doesn't produce any sort of forward movement or productivity. I think it's a combination of things. I think I'm a good listener and I think I can read situations pretty well, just because I have experience in that area. Yet I do know that at some point in time, provosts and other leaders of universities do have to make hard decisions. You have to be willing to do that, but only after you've gathered all the evidence and made the decision on what's in the best interest of the institution.

We shall see.

A sidebar notes that the new provost's favorite book is The World is Flat, which I reviewed last August, and which UCLA's Edward E. Leamer has treated less than favorably for the Journal of Economic Literature. (Leamer review link courtesy Newmark's Door.)

ARBITRAGE WILL OUT. In the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, bread could be obtained more cheaply from the bakery than feed grains could be obtained from the Ministry of Agriculture storehouses. Collective farms purchased the bread for use as animal feed, contributing to bread shortages. (On .pdf, scroll down to page 3.)

In the Sweet Land of Subsidy, things work a little bit differently, according to a Washington Post report linked by Marginal Revolution's Alex Tabarrok.

When a drought left pastures in a handful of Plains states parched in 2003, ranchers turned to the federal government for help. Officials at the U.S. Department of Agriculture quickly responded with what they considered an innovative plan.

They decided to dip into massive stockpiles of powdered milk that the agency had stored in warehouses nationwide as part of its milk price-support program. Livestock owners could get the protein-rich commodity free and feed it to their cattle and calves. The milk would help ranchers weather the drought while the government reduced its growing stockpile.

But within months, the program spawned a lucrative secondary market in which ranchers, feed dealers and brokers began trading the powdered milk in a daisy chain of transactions, generating millions of dollars in profits. Tens of millions of pounds of powdered milk intended solely for livestock owners in drought-stricken states went to states with no drought or were sold to middlemen in Mexico and other countries, a Washington Post investigation found.

This activity was completely illegal.

One government inspector stumbled upon huge cargo containers being loaded with the milk at the Port of Houston. The destination: Europe. A New Zealand official complained to USDA officials that American brokers were flooding her country with the powdered milk, undercutting local dairy suppliers. Still other records show the milk going to the Netherlands and the Philippines.

"The milk was being bought and sold, bought and sold. Some of it was probably ending up in dog food and pet food," said Matthew J. Hoobler, a Wyoming official who oversaw the distribution of more than 60 million pounds of powdered milk in that state. That trading was possible, he said, because "there was no enforcement."

Tons of the surplus milk entered the commercial market in one of two ways. Some states ended up ordering more powdered milk than ranchers could use and then auctioned the rest to brokers. And ranchers sold powdered milk they didn't want or need back to feed dealers, who marked it up and sold it to other dealers or brokers.

In its contracts with eligible states, the Agriculture Department required that the milk be used to feed cattle within the state's borders. The trading itself was not illegal, but shipping the milk outside of the states violated the rules.

Even when agriculture officials learned that the product was being diverted, however, there was little they could do. The USDA had allocated the milk directly to the states, and state officials did not have the resources to track the middlemen. In any case, penalties were nonexistent.

Your law. My arbitrage opportunity. Penalty? Discuss.

THOSE NONCOGNITIVE SKILLS AGAIN. Tapped's Ezra Klein:

If we spent one tenth the energy working on high school graduation rates, we'd have both a more powerful impact on the truly disadvantaged and a more significant impact on college attendance. The problem is, the middle class and the upper class aren't worried about their kids graduating from high school, and so talk of those problems doesn't resonate with large swaths of the electorate. And that all points to the underlying dynamic here and elsewhere in Democratic rhetoric: Progressives now try to address poverty in the context of the middle class -- they seek out economic issues which could aid the poor but have plenty of relevance up the income ladder. In doing, they ignore the most destructive and entrenched pathologies and problems, as those tend to be rather rare among higher income earners, and for that reason much more damaging to those caught in their grip. The ultimate problem here is that the poor rarely votes, while the middle class does, and it's damn hard for politicians to figure out how to focus the electorate on things that aren't their problem.

But it is their problem. Residential self-segregation and housing premiums for good school districts and restrictive zoning codes to limit the enrollment in the high schools and the positional arms races to get into the fifty or so colleges claiming to be in the U.S. News top ten are all reactions to those "destructive and entrenched pathologies," no?

WHAT REPUTATION ARE THEY PROTECTING? Greg Lukianoff at The Torch discovers there is no administrative ukase beyond the possible.

I have been working in this field for a long time now, and I would like to say that nothing surprises me anymore, but today’s release about a college professor denied promotion explicitly because of his outside writings criticizing the university’s student conduct code, affirmative action, and student conduct policies is really something else.

I am not exactly shocked that a public university would engage in viewpoint discrimination against a professor or student for voicing unpopular opinions. Sadly, this happens all too often. Nor am I particularly surprised that a professor was denied a promotion because of his political point of view—I receive frequent reports of this behavior.

Some specifics:

[Stephen] Kershnar, an associate professor of philosophy, was nominated for promotion to full professor in January 2006, with strong support from his colleagues, department head, and top administrators, because of his outstanding professional record. An outspoken member of the Fredonia community, Kershnar writes a bi-weekly column for the local newspaper, in which he questioned Fredonia’s affirmative action practices and examined the lack of conservatives in higher education. In 2005, Kershnar publicly condemned a new rule that targets students who fail to report violations of the student conduct code. He was quoted in a Buffalo News article saying the new policy would “turn the student population into a group of snitches.”

SUNY Fredonia President Dennis L. Hefner issued a letter to the university community defending the conduct policy against “media misrepresentations.” Kershnar e-mailed the SUNY Fredonia faculty e-mail list on the following day to say that he had criticized—not misrepresented—the policy. Hefner replied to that e-mail by warning Kershnar, “You need to start acting like a responsible member of this campus community.”

There is more, and less, to this case than meets the eye. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education sees an unprecedented crushing of dissent. Perhaps so.

“President Hefner made Kershnar’s academic promotion—which should by all accounts be based upon his merits as a professor—dependent upon his public statements about the university,” Lukianoff stated. “FIRE, along with others who care about academic freedom, will not stand idly by as a public university punishes a professor for speaking his mind and then requires him to relinquish his constitutional and moral right to express his opinions.”

On April 27, Hefner sent Kershnar a letter denying his promotion. Hefner explained that although Kershnar’s “teaching has been described as excellent,” he would not be promoted because of his “deliberate and repeated misrepresentations of campus policies and procedures…to the media,” which Hefner claimed “impugned the reputation of SUNY Fredonia.”

But the promotion-denial letter is instructive. Professor Kershnar was put up for early promotion, which usually means associate-to-professor in fewer than seven years. President Hefner vetoes the promotion on grounds of uncollegiality. "One item listed as a positive in your submission, membership on the Student Judicial Board, was actually a negative, as you were disruptive and a non-helpful participant. Requests were made that you not be reappointed." So at Fredonia Elementary, "plays well with others" is more important than effective teaching and scholarship?

QUOTE OF THE DAY. A Daniel Drezner doubleheader.

In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Mathew H. Gendle engages in one of the more useless acts of self-flagellation about globalization I've seen in quite a while:

Like many liberal-arts institutions, the university where I teach [Elon] places a heavy emphasis on the freshman year, and all new students are required to take a class called "The Global Experience," taught by faculty members drawn from departments across the campus. One of the central objectives of the course is to break students out of their bubble by forcing them to think about the interconnectedness of our world...

Professor Drezner asks the question the author doesn't ask.

If Gendle wants to make his Elon students really ponder their consumer behavior, here's a question worth asking -- what is the welfare effect of not purchasing goods and services made in the least developed countries?

IN TIME FOR BACK TO SCHOOL. Via Charlie Sykes, "Shut Up and Teach," by The Right Brothers.

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU ASK FOR. The Santa Fe Railroad went to a great deal of trouble to secure the Raton Pass crossing of the southern Rockies in order to secure a route from Kansas to the north end of the Santa Fe Trail. The bad news, however, is that the railroad had to chop its way across Glorieta Pass to get close to Santa Fe. (The Denver and Rio Grande, Santa Fe's rival for the Santa Fe Trail traffic, did secure the Royal Gorge and built a narrow-gauge line including a very long straight track from Alamosa into Santa Fe.)

Continuing passengers have reboarded Train 4, and we're ready to go, but first a Roadrunner.


Passenger Rail reports that the Albuquerque commuter trains went into service July 14. We leave Albuquerque 12:48:56 (Mountain Daylight Times approximate. I was not able to find a standard clock in Albuquerque to set my watch properly.)

Lamy for Santa Fe 1:52:18 - 1:56:22.


East of Lamy, the ascent of Glorieta Pass, which was the location of a pivotal battle in the War Between The States, begins.


Both trains are close to time, and the meet with westbound 3 that left Chicago on 4 July is just after 2 pm.


The station at the summit of Glorieta Pass is now the town's post office.


Down the east slope, through some small canyons, across some flats, start climbing again. There is a double-horseshoe curve near Ribera that rates mention in the route guide.


By this time, the lounge car had filled sufficiently with train experts that everybody was ready for their snapshots of the second turn to the east.


Passenger loads were fairly heavy. I didn't have occasion to walk through the coaches but did notice large numbers of people strolling at the designated rest stops. The sleepers were sold out. One family disembarked at Williams and another got on ... not much time to change the bedding there. Some passengers expressed a preference for the sleeping cars to the crowding in coach (on western trains, often a rougher crowd) and the trials of attempting to sleep when there is constant traffic through the aisles, even on the long stretches between stops.

Las Vegas 3:48:37 - 3:49:35

A few of the original Harvey Houses remain at trackside. The Castaneda, one of the larger hotels, is derelict. (Albuquerque's bus station complex is a re-creation.)


There's another flat stretch east of Las Vegas before the assault on Raton Pass begins. The Wagon Mound is a prominent landmark. From the sides it looks a little like a stylized wagon and team. Close up, it has the cross-section of a prairie schooner.


Raton 5:30:00 - 5:36:07.

Raton is the station for the Philmont Scout camp, and there were a few uniforms in coach from here east. It was raining rather heavily on the pass and I had a 5:45 dinner reservation (grilled chicken) thus no pictures.

The Santa Fe appears to be using Raton as a staging area for baretables. That is probably the best use of what is to them becoming a superfluous property. Baretable trains and the two scheduled passenger trains can run at comparable speeds. The Pass itself has some of the steeper grades on any mainline railroad, and it is flanked on both sides by tracks once maintained for 100 mph running. The legislation creating Amtrak required Santa Fe and successor companies to maintain the tracks in that condition for 25 years. The line has since been downgraded to a 79 mph operation with automatic block signals, including a few upper quadrant semaphores, and track warrant control. It's likely that Santa Fe will again ask Amtrak for a re-route. Perhaps some compromise in which Santa Fe builds a loop line into Albuquerque from the Transcontinental Corridor and Amtrak provides money for some strategic triple tracking on the Lawrence-Amarillo-Belen (the historic route of the San Francisco Chief) is in the offing. (Yes, and American League pitchers will bat.)

Despite the toned-down schedule, the overall running time is still close to the old Super Chief, and there's again an ample recovery margin coming off the mountain.

La Junta 7:55:34 - 8:25:25. My notes show "2-6-2 1024 on display." A number of these passenger Prairies are preserved along the Santa Fe.


The engine crew had ample time to compare notes and hand over the train and the on-board train crew time for a stretch and a smoke. (I'll have more to say about the on-board service, which was very good, in the final post in the series. For now I note that the car attendants and the snack bar tender have quite an endurance test on a transcontinental train, with the snack bar open from 6:30 to 10:30 and the car attendants potentially subject to call at any time.)

I purchased a half-bottle of wine with dinner, and a quarter-bottle on departing La Junta. All of that put me in the mood for an early turn-in.

Lamar 9:12:18 - 9:16:51. I heard the train crew copy a warrant before we left.

(To be continued)

YOU HEARD IT HERE FIRST. The University of Wisconsin is getting more selective.

Flash back 25 years at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and you'd find admissions standards that are sure to shock aspiring Badgers of today.

The university guaranteed admission to all high school graduates in the top half of their class. It accepted more than 80% of applicants.

That was in the depths of Jimmy Carter's recession. It was also when the Thirteenth Generation started enrolling in college, and there was plenty of excess capacity built for the baby boomers.

Now students are discouraged from applying without a grade-point average from 3.5 to 3.9, an ACT score of at least 26 and a class rank in the 85th to 96th percentiles. The acceptance rate for Wisconsin residents is 65%. No student is guaranteed a spot in the freshman class, no matter how good his or her grades are.

"I had a student who was denied admission last year with a 3.7 GPA, six Advanced Placement courses and a 27 on the ACT," said Curt Cattanach, college adviser at Whitefish Bay High School. "We're frank with our students: UW-Madison has become very selective."

Why?

"Middle- and upper-income families became engaged in an arms race with their neighbors to prepare their children for college," said Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. "You started to see crop after crop of amazing applicants."

The state's flagship university became especially attractive as the cost of private universities rose higher and higher.

Between 1985 and 2005, annual in-state tuition at UW-Madison jumped from $1,391 to $6,284. The cost of a four-year degree at a typical private university climbed to more than $100,000. Top students in Wisconsin who once would have set their sights on elite private universities began opting for the bargain instead.

Can you say regressive transfers?

"We didn't want to become elite," said Rob Seltzer, UW-Madison's director of admissions. "We were forced to become more selective."

But not all students faced tougher odds. The acceptance rate for students from outside of Wisconsin and Minnesota increased from 61% to 76%.

Seltzer said that was because only a quarter of out-of-state students who are accepted decide to enroll, compared with 63% of in-state students and 45% of Minnesota students.

But there is another reason why students from out of state have had an easier time getting in: The university has been working to enroll more of them.

Non-residents pay about three times the tuition that students from Wisconsin and Minnesota pay. UW System policy allows up to 25% of UW-Madison undergraduates to be from outside of Wisconsin and Minnesota. The university has yet to reach that limit.

With state support becoming a shrinking percentage of its budget, the university needs non-resident tuition to help pay the bills.

Sound familiar?

THE BALL AND BAR. Union Pacific has unveiled a heritage painted diesel in a modified Chicago and North Western lightning stripe paint job. (Cynics would say Union Pacific has launched another preemptive strike against its constituent railroads' trademarks becoming public domain.)

Aggieland Rail Scene offers additional pictures.

IF YOU BUILD IT, THEY WILL COME. But when Ends of the Line goes to Manhattan, what "it" and "come" refer to aren't clear.

At the Metra station, built in 2005 to extend the line out from Orland Park, 16 cars sat in a parking lot built to accommodate 260. And there's room for expansion to 500 spaces. The station isn't staffed but has time locks that open 15 minutes before arrivals and stay open 15 minutes after the train leaves.

The caption to this Chicago Tribune photograph by Bob Fila explains why I'm not likely to file a Manhattan trip report any time soon.

Trains to Chicago stop at 6:02 and 6:52 a.m., with return trains stopping at 6:27 and 7:07 p.m.

Ends of the Line is next going to use the interurban time machine.

SEEKING SEWER SOCIALISTS. A Chicago Tribune editorial includes this bit of what might most charitably be called slacker logic, or as my dad would put it, "Why compare yourself to the worst?"

The garbage is picked up on time. In the winter, the streets are plowed quickly after each snowfall. In the spring, an army of gardeners nurtures the flowers budding in hundreds of municipal planters across the city.

Chicago is an efficient city. Decisions are made and carried out with dispatch.

If memory serves, one machine-anointed mayor was voted out of office for failure to manage the snows correctly. And what was I saying about never lacking for work? Efficiency is identifying and acting on all possible games from trade. Decisions can be reached quickly, but they don't have to be efficient, or even effective? Can you say Reign of Terror, dear reader?

That's the way it works in a one-party town, particularly in a place with one-man rule. No pesky debates to worry about. No need for compromise or consensus. No messy democracy to get in the way.

There is a price to pay, though: Corruption.

Yes, and heads sometimes roll, mon ami (tovarisch, for my readers in Piter.) But I don't recall anyone ever suggesting that Frank Zeidler, or his successor Henry Maier, were on the take. But the trash and garbage were picked up, and the parks were tidy, and the snow was cleared (the rubbish trucks doubled as plows.)

And let's not conflate corruption with public choice.

When there's no opposition party to provide checks and balances to the ruling group, corruption is unavoidable. There was corruption in the Soviet Politburo, and in the court of Queen Elizabeth I, and in the inner circle of Roman Emperor Nero. If Attila the Hun had kept any records, they'd surely show skullduggery by his aides.

Sure, because conspiring to fleece the taxpayer is more rewarding than doing the taxpayer's bidding. (Therein lies the Republican coalition's discontent with the Republican Congress. There's plenty of money for the districts of influential Members, but little progress on deregulation for the libertarians or abortion for the believers and some of the recipients of corporate welfare still vote Democratic.)

But that doesn't stop the editorialists from engaging in flights of fancy.

In a two-party city, debate would happen. Things wouldn't run as efficiently. That might impact garbage collection and snow removal. Not so many flowers might be planted.

But it certainly would make it harder for officeholders to lie, cheat, steal and defraud.

Maybe that would be its own kind of efficiency.

I've heard my friendly connection Milt Rosenberg sometimes advance this "Chicago works because there's corruption" argument. But there might be a good Extension 720 program (no, Sean, I'm not going to do a regular show prep feature here) on whether corruption is either necessary or sufficient for municipal services to run well.

YOU MEAN THE PRINCIPLE OF SUBSTITUTES WORKS? Amtrak ridership in Illinois tracks upward.

A record 955,529 passengers rode Amtrak trains that were financially supported by Illinois in fiscal 2006, an increase that officials attributed partly to soaring gasoline prices.

Amtrak posted an 11 percent increase in riders overall during the fiscal year on routes serving Chicago that are partially funded by the state, officials said Friday. It marked the second straight year of record ridership gains on the Amtrak routes.

It helps to provide additional services.

The Hiawatha trains operating between Chicago's Union Station and Milwaukee led the way with a 13 percent ridership increase. More than 569,000 passengers rode the line between July 2005 and June 2006, according to Amtrak. Hiawatha operations are supported by the Illinois and Wisconsin Departments of Transportation.

North Shore residents are sometimes able to get from their well-off suburban homes to the security screening at Mitchell Field, including parking and waiting for the train, in the time it takes them to drive to Mannheim Road near O'Hare. I'm going to have to look at Airport-Glenview ticket sales once data become available.

(I'm also a little behind on my train reporting, but there are some new tales to come.)

I'LL NEVER LACK FOR WORK. Joseph C. Burke of the Rockefeller Institute for Higher Education Research contemplates the tradeoffs confronting public higher education.

Competition among research universities for national ranking increasingly fuels a conflict between peer prestige and public purpose. Governors and legislators rail about public purpose, while professors and administrators rave about peer prestige. Can public research universities pursue both public purpose and peer prestige? (Can the University of Virginia meet the dual directive of its Board of Visitors to raise its proportion of economically disadvantaged students and its U.S. News & World Report ranking among national universities?) As currently defined, achieving both goals remain an impossible dream, for public purpose is not a byproduct produced automatically while pursuing peer prestige.

We can start unpacking this paragraph by considering the Principle of Derived Demand. Peer prestige is of little value unless someone is willing to make use of it in some way. I'm sure there is still a prestige hierarchy in divining the future in the entrails of a sheep, but the laws of physics and the equilibrating tendencies of markets are more useful if one is curious about eclipses or the weather or the development of petroleum substitutes.

Peer prestige suggests high standing in academic circles. Public purpose means serving the collective good. Defining prestige and purpose for state universities is too important to be left either to academics or the public, for each is better at defining wants than determining needs. Universities deliver both ends and means. They represent ends when discovering enduring ideas and insights and means when these discoveries spur innovations and inventions that improve our lives. Academics and the public must agree on an agenda that embraces both educational and societal needs.

Again, let's unpackage. It's not clear that "collective good" is useful as a policy objective. That quip about one two many "greatests" in "greatest good for the greatest number" comes to mind. But Mr Burke has not yet spelled out what he has in mind by prestige or by collective good or what the right ends are to be achieved.

Some leaders of government and business, and increasingly even presidents and professors, would leave prestige and purpose to the market. But market demands and the public good are not synonymous. Market demands are often short term and respond to individual wants, but public goods are usually long term and reflect collective needs. For example, markets — through the salaries they generate — favor physicians in the latest medical specialties, though society needs more primary care doctors and nurses. Markets encourage MBA research scientists, while society desperately needs science and math teachers. Rising markets often mark momentary fads, but public universities must continue critical programs that society needs. The nature of markets is to abandon the old in favor of the new, but higher education while discovering the new, should look for the lasting things in life.

Huh? Has this guy ever heard of the Optimality Theorems of welfare economics? Has he ever considered something called the Welfare Economics Paradigm, under which the existence of spillover benefits not priced in markets provide a case for a public subsidy? Is he ignorant of tournament models, which might shed some light on why there might be extremely high rewards to the most successful people in some fields as a way of eliciting quality? Is he aware that one potential downside of a tournament market is the presence of a lot of frustrated participants ("and all the stars that never were / are parking cars and pumping gas.") Has the Rockefeller Institute not considered the possibility that people are not available for science and math positions because school districts are not able to pay compensating differentials (for lousy working conditions) or scarcity differentials (the scarcity of math teachers relative to poetry teachers might be ameliorated by a higher relative reward to the math teacher.) For the matter, has the Rockefeller Institute ignored all of the external and internal criticism of the academy for abandoning old ideas (core curricula, strict grading scales) in favor of noble-sounding but unsound notions including access fictions, diversity boondoggles, and beer-and-circuses (the Devil's Triangle that never fails to vex me?)

Peer prestige represents the resource and reputation model of excellence, with its trinity of student selectivity, rich resources, and faculty reputations. That model relies mostly on inputs of students, resources, and professors and says little about the public purpose of the quality and quantity of graduates or the contribution of research and services to states and society. It depends more on the resources received than the results achieved and treats campuses like computers as mostly matters of good in, good out.

Bunk. If graduates of the most famous campuses can't find their way to the bathroom without having to ask the old heads, the employers quit going to the job fairs. "I graduated summa cum laude in entrail-divining from the Delphi Institute of Futurology." Want fries with that?

The resource and reputation model dominates the national rankings of colleges and universities. U.S. News & World Report devotes three quarters of its rating for national universities to this model: peer assessment (25 percent), faculty resources (20 percent), student selectivity (15 percent), spending per student (10 percent), and alumni giving (5 percent). A measure called retention does allocate 20 percent of the total score Unfortunately, on many campuses, retention results reflect admission standards more than improved performance. A criterion on graduation rate performance does control for student preparation and institutional resources, but it receives just 5 percent of the total score.

The paragraph says more in one sentence than I have managed to get across in four years of griping that "retention" problems are a consequence of admitting unprepared students in the first place.

Public purpose is the defining characteristic of all public universities, but what does it entail? A review of the external demands on state universities reveals a long and daunting list. They must become more accessible to economically and educationally disadvantaged students and enroll a racially diverse student body without setting targets. Their tuition must remain affordable despite declines in state support and inadequate need-based financial aid. They should graduate the great majority of their students — most of them in four years — and demonstrate their growth in knowledge and skills from entry to exit. Public universities should actively assist the reform of public schools and produce graduates in critical fields who are prepared mentally and ethically for work and citizenship. Their research and public service should spur the economic growth and civic development of their states and communities.

Well, if you're going to encourage economic growth, you might want to start by understanding some economics. Perhaps the most salutary reform the public universities could obtain would be to announce something like "Effective 15 April 2007, admission to Enormous State University (flagship, land-grant, compass-direction alike) is contingent on passing the mathematics and writing placement tests. Enormous will no longer offer no-credit remedial mathematics, writing, and speaking courses for high school graduates who have not really received a high school education. Furthermore, Enormous State's Office of Institutional Research will report placement test passage rates by school district." My sometimes sparring partner at Anonymous Community would no doubt be a bit unhappy to receive additional remedial students at the same time that his state is griping about having to pay for the same courses twice. Fine. As part of the reform, bill the school districts for those remedial courses and reimburse the community colleges. Principals now have a choice: offer token academic courses and suffer a budget cut, or spend money to improve their academic content. Some school districts might choose to outsource those classes directly to the community colleges. Fine. Outsourcing is a way of exploiting comparative advantages. Economics again.

And I'm still waiting for the leader of a state university system to stop apologizing for tuitions. It's quite clear that some people view the full fare at a state university as a better bargain (with no real diminution of the return on the investment) than a private university slot, even with some financial aid. Hence Wisconsin's "Coasties" and Illinois's changed mix of in-state and out-of-state admissions.

The answer to the current conflict is not to abandon either peer prestige or public purpose but to broaden the first to cover the public mandate of state universities and to narrow the second to public needs, not wants. State universities should stop competing with private universities on student selectivity. Private universities can become as selective as their markets allow. The mandate of accessibility denies that choice to public universities. State universities should admit a range of undergraduates that past experience shows can succeed on their campuses. Provider-driven institutions will use all of the admission spots to raise their SAT or ACT scores, but public research universities should use some of those places to correct poor preparation that stems from economic disadvantage. Our nation has a growing gap between the prosperous and poor. Great public universities should close rather than reinforce that undemocratic divide. Is the price of a few points on entrance scores at public universities worth the social cost to American society? Can public research universities remain relevant while leaving the issue of equality and accessibility to community colleges and regional universities? Public research universities should also expand the criteria of prestige by assessing the value added of the knowledge and skills acquired by graduates and the impact of research and service on states and society. Surely, greatness for universities should depend more on what they produce than on what they receive.

What a muddle. I submit that much of the popularity of the U.S. News Overpriced Forty is the Nash equilibrium of a positional arms race among the prosperous to get their kids into an enviroment in which, even if the professors are only visible at the head of a large lecture class, and then only to get an entire three-course teaching responsibility out of the way in one go so as to have more time for funded research, and even if their kids are exposed to the same silly fads that have crowded out learning everywhere, at least they are more likely to meet other pushed-to-achieve kids rather than the unprepared who mingle with the poor-but-striving admitted under the rubric of "access" at Enormous State (again, irrespective of Enormous's type.) So according to Mr Burke, the status quo is generally OK, it just takes more "access" and more of the "we're not Harvard or Northwestern so why bother pushing" mindset?

Mr Burke and I, however, are not that far apart on what we'd like to observe.

The category of preparation might include a measure on the percent of first year students with rigorous college preparatory courses in high school. Such a measure would stimulate school reform rather than stress student selectivity. Another indicator could include the number and quality of teachers graduated, especially in critical fields, such as science, math, and English as a second language. Participation should include the percent of college age students in the state enrolled by race, gender, and income. Trends in transfers from community colleges could check on their transition to baccalaureate degrees at the best public universities. Affordability might include a measure showing tuition and fees, minus financial aid, as a percent of state median family income. Completion should compare actual with predicted graduation rates based on student preparation and aptitude. Benefits might cover degrees granted in critical fields, as well the usual sponsored research and faculty publications. Student learning represents a challenging area. As a start, it might include evidence from surveys such as the National Survey on Student Engagement and alumni surveys that probe the value added in student learning.

My preference would be to use the information on high school performance as an additional performance indicator for high schools, but I'd like to have a better measure of which school districts are less productive users of resources (profit-and-loss sounds harsh, but both profits and losses are signals of social utility.) I have some stake in better teacher preparation, but here I'd like to go beyond the raw numbers. It does no good to turn out more "math" teachers if their transcripts are full of "Theory of Mathematics Instruction in the Multicultural Classroom" and "Social Justice Mathematics" but they cannot summarize in one sentence the reason behind

xⁿ + yⁿ = zⁿ: no nontrivial solutions in integers for n > 2.

(Regular readers probably know what that sentence is.) And that affordability data would certainly help support or rebut the hypothesis that public higher education is a net regressive transfer.

CHEESEHEAD 102. The Alpine Kiwanis has a fundraiser called Brat Days for Rockford area charities. Johnsonville, which at one time was a storefront operation out of Johnsonville, (d'oh) Wisconsin, has a semi set up as a grill for fundraisers and other occasions where mass grilling of bratwurst is in order.


The six tips will enable any reader to match my efforts.

ROLLING THROUGH BAGHDAD. My ride on the Surf Line was both investigative and practical. At Los Angeles, I changed to the Southwest Chief. The economy bedroom is a comfortable way to get away from it all, and I mean that literally (this post will refrain from too much glee at the passengers who were frustrated with the lack of cell phone service in away from the big cities.)

Timetables, ticket ready for the conductor's inspection, scanner, PJs, two bottles of water provided by Amtrak.

Climate controls, reading light, bathrobe on hanger, also a slightly damp bathing suit.


Amtrak Southwest Chief 4, Los Angeles to Albuquerque, 4-5 July 2006: Genesis locomotives 141, 163, 148, baggage car 1716 (converted from a Heritage car), Superliner transition sleeper (crew accommodation) 39043, sleepers 32050 (my car, rebuilt with additional wood paneling, very Hiawatha) and 32031 (with the traditional carpeting halfway up the walls), diner 38055, Sightseer Lounge 33014, coaches 34063, 34117, 34107. I've adjusted my watch, it's about 40 seconds off.

Leave Los Angeles 6:47:01.

The rapid transit shops are trackside near the station.


These viaducts over the Los Angeles River have ornamental towers at each end.


Fullerton 7:16:33-7:22:50.


The steam train to the Dells evoked the Boston and Maine with those red window bands. In a collection of vintage coaching stock at the Fullerton station is the real Boston and Maine Salisbury Beach, one of a series of 6 section, 6 roomette, 4 bedroom cars built for the Bangor and Aroostook, Boston and Maine, and New Haven.

Riverside 8:04:34-8:10:25.

The last time I rode the Southwest Limited, as it was then called, the train used the Santa Fe's passenger line via Pomona and Pasadena with a stretch of median-strip running and some impressive viaducts. Tonight's line (new mileage!) was used by some Santa Fe passenger trains up to Amtrak. It has since received a commuter train line as far as San Bernardino.

It was dark by the time we reached San Bernardino, but not yet prime fireworks time. I saw a few impromptu efforts around San Bernardino but there weren't many pyrotechnicians at work on Cajon Pass.

Overnight, I was asleep through Baghdad and the alphabet cities, finally awakening and deciding to start the next day somewhere east of Winslow, Arizona. Overnight, the train managed to fall thirty minutes down on its schedule.

Once out of the San Francisco Peaks and onto the high desert, we were rolling in fine fashion, with Interstate 40/Route 66 to the north. Don't these cross-country trucks look puny rolling along, one little load at a time, from a train going 90 mph?


Gallup, New Mexico, 5 July, 8:56:40-9:10:45. The yardmaster at Gallup had his troubles, with some grain hoppers derailed and broken on the west end of his yard. It didn't cramp our style getting through town. The disadvantage of the digital camera is in the startup and shooting lag; had I brought the 35 mm to breakfast with me (tacky, tacky) I might have obtained a grab shot of the derailment.

East of Gallup, the Red Cliffs of New Mexico. I didn't see any coyotes lurking on the pinnacles.


Although there's now centralized traffic control on two main tracks through here, the train was observing the traditional left-handed operation dictated by the construction of the mountain crossing out of Needles. In places, the two tracks diverge. Here's one of multiple intermodal trains that met us, sometimes at speed, sometimes holding for maintenance reasons. Makes those trucks look really puny.


The schedule allows ample margin for recovering time.

Arrive Albuquerque 11:29:48 (against a schedule time of 12:22, presumably there are no intermediate time points east of Gallup or ample recovery margins between the last time point and Albuquerque.)

The diesels are refueled. With Albuquerque no longer on the primary freight main, there are no fuel racks at the station.


A few traders are selling Mexican and Southwest crafts, snacks, and tamales. (Yum. Also replenished the larder for the continuation of the journey.)


Two classic names in transportation surround the plaza. The flag confirms who has sovereignty, if not stylistic influence. But the bus station is closer to the tracks than the Amshack, which is behind me and farther from the tracks than the Milwaukee Airport or Sturtevant for Racine stations.


The inside of the bus terminal is tidy. Buses are accepting passengers for destinations in Texas and Mexico.


(to be continued)

RETHINKING AUTHENTICITY. Columnist Youssef Ibrahim has had enough of vanguardism.

Yes, world, there is a silent Arab majority that believes that seventh-century Islam is not fit for 21st-century challenges. That women do not have to look like walking black tents. That men do not have to wear beards and robes, act like lunatics, and run around blowing themselves up in order to enjoy 72 virgins in paradise. And that secular laws, not Islamic Shariah, should rule our day-to-day lives.

He's on a roll.

And yes, we, the silent Arab majority, do not believe that writers, secular or otherwise, should be killed or banned for expressing their views. Or that the rest of our creative elite - from moviemakers to playwrights, actors, painters, sculptors, and fashion models - should be vetted by Neanderthal Muslim imams who have never read a book in their dim, miserable lives.

Nor do we believe that little men with head wraps and disheveled beards can run amok in Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Iraq making decisions on our behalf, dragging us to war whenever they please, confiscating our rights to be adults, and flogging us for not praying five times a day or even for not believing in God.

He's taking some real chances going public with such sentiments. The diversity boondogglers and identity-politics hacks in universities may say and do foolish things, but they have not, as yet, issued fatwas with a price on my head. But it's always salutary for someone to say "Enough" to those who would like to deprogram the cult of authenticity. And removing the "medieval crazy" perception of Islam is likely to have better consequences for the world than, say, removing the "street thug" perception of professional basketball.

WHY OP-ED PIECES ARE SUSCEPTIBLE TO FISKING. Daniel Drezner links an article that summarizes in one paragraph the difference between an op-ed comment and a refereed article.

We know that use of that ever-loaded term "democracy" in a journal article entails a commitment of four or more pages of literature review in order to dodge the finely honed machetes of peer reviewers. In an op-ed you can explain democracy in a sentence, and readers will get the gist of your definition. Indeed, getting to the gist of things is all you need in editorials.

But it's precisely that getting to the gist that makes an opinion piece, no matter how wittily posed, and no matter how carefully those 1000-3000 words are chosen, important things will be left out for others to nit-pick.

Consider a recent Paul Waldman essay at TomPaine contributing to the continuing efforts of the heirs presumptive to the New Deal to reframe their project.

Ask a conservative what the biggest problem in America is today, and you’ll get answers like overtaxation, a sexualized culture, lack of respect for authority, insufficient church-going or big government running amok. But if you then asked the conservative what the real source of the problem was—the beating heart pumping blood to each and all of these socio-politico-cultural wounds—you’d get the same answer: liberalism.

He goes on to complain,

As everyone knows, conservatives have succeeded in making “liberal” an epithet, something they throw at their opponents—who try desperately to dodge the label. The demonization of “liberal” has been successful in part because conservatives have effectively created what social psychologists call a “schema” with decidedly negative features around the term. A schema is a set of ideas that are connected in people’s minds, such that activating one idea—“liberal”—activates a whole set of related ideas, like lights on a Christmas tree. We assemble schemas as a way of storing and categorizing related information in memory. In this case, the related ideas are things like “soft on crime,” “weak on defense,” “sexually permissive,” and so on. The ideas liberals would like to pop right up in people’s heads when they hear the term liberal—“wants prosperity for everyone,” “supports universal health care” or “stands up to powerful interests”—are farther away from the schema’s center.

But it takes more than the allotted 1,500 words to explain that Franklin D. Roosevelt is different from Hubert Humphrey and both are different from Ralph Nader, and that Herbert Croly is not the same thing as John R. Commons and both are different from Barrington Moore, jr., let alone Ward Churchill. And it likewise takes more words to address the incompletely-resolved tensions between addressing the root causes of crime, including expanded economic opportunities (which brings in its train yet another set of tensions over how best to accomplish that expansion) and ensuring that the most incorrigible criminals are kept away from law-abiding citizens. It's relatively easier to address the tension between providing for a proper defense and avoiding corporate welfare, or public pork in the form of obsolete military facilities in the districts of powerful Representatives or Senators, some of whom are quite vocal about "fighting" for "universal health care" and generally claiming to be on the side of the angels.

Easier to suggest that the opposition is venal or stupid. That fits on a bumper sticker, it can be punched up to work in a 1,500 word column, it preaches to the converted, but it gives people who disagree material to work with.

For example, a commenter to a Virginia Postrel post on a somewhat related topic has parts of such a rebuttal.

[Mickey Kaus] seems to think that anti-gay = ignorant. That's part of it, but a bigger chunk are the people who see a real problem in America with sexuality (teen pregnancy, STD's, idiots who shouldn't have children breeding like feral cats). They lump gays in with all sorts of failed "alternative" families -- so they generally disapprove of "gay rights" as part of a sexual liberation movement they see sending the country down Satan's toilet. The gay rights movement and the left has (generally) helped to fuel this by refusing to suggest any sort of reasonable sexual morality to replace the traditional sexual morality we seek to tear down.

The net result -- Plano -- where parents rationally fear their teenage daughters getting knocked up and irrationally fear their sons wearing dresses.

Post-hoc and all that, but Mr Waldman has left himself open to precisely this kind of rebuttal. His kind of bumper-sticker liberalism has not properly distinguished the desirable from the undesirable consequences of the policies his Establishment, when it was the Establishment and its ideas were the curriculum in the Ivy League and the op-ed pages of the Eastern dailies and its policies were enacted by urban Democrats. And as Ms Postrel's correspondent notes, the failure of what remains of that Establishment to disown some of its loopier allies and to consider the downside of some of their reforms pushes people in what the popular perspective perceives as a conservative direction. (But that, again, requires about four pages of literature review to distinguish the traditionalists from the libertarians from business interests.)

Instead, Mr Waldman waves the bloody shirt.

Liberals need to embrace the culture war, because we’re winning. The story of American history is that of conservative ideas and prejudices falling away as our society grows more progressive and thus more true to our nation’s founding ideals. Conservatives supported slavery, conservatives opposed women’s suffrage, conservatives supported Jim Crow, conservatives opposed the 40-hour work week and the abolishment of child labor, and conservatives supported McCarthyism. In short, all the major advancements of freedom and justice in our history were pushed by liberals and opposed by conservatives, no matter the party they inhabited at the time.

He's right, these policy disputes are about something other than partisan politics. But let's break this out. As the prospectus alerts investors, past performance is no guarantee of future results. (Should the Roman Catholic Church get a free pass on priestly misconduct because its leadership has an intellectual tradition that goes back to the Apostles?) Slavery: good for landed aristocracies, not good for entrepreneurs. Which conservatism is he speaking to? (We'd need another few pages of literature review to address the differing perspectives entrepreneurs seeking to develop local industry and landed aristocrats growing cotton for export would have on tariffs, and the tussle over the proper division of authority between a federal and a local government will persist up to the Big Crunch.) Jim Crow? The classic Establishment rhetorical trump. (Or must I issue an Aging Hippie Alert?) But there is room for serious debate, again, over the proper division of authority between federal and local governments. It's one thing to say that government shall not prohibit people from associating with each other; quite another to use the power of government to compel people to associate with each other. To what extent does residential school choice by moving to an exclusive community reflect well-intentioned school busing policies? Women's suffrage? Prohibition on one hand, safer streets and schools on the other. I'm hard pressed to classify the consequences of campaigning to women voters as what "conservatives" feared or "progressives" hoped for. The forty hour work week? Another few pages of literature review on the consequences of imposing such constraints on the ability of employers to offer a different kind of pay packet to a particularly desirable worker, or on the ability of eager-beavers to put in more time on their task. See also France, sclerotic labor markets in. Child labor? Did the laws codify adaptations that were already in progress. Put another way, did the laws, as written, condemn children to menial agricultural jobs or to delivering papers and mowing lawns, and do they interfere with the ability of precocious children to make money as web designers? McCarthyism? Yes, one point of agreement among libertarians, entrepreneurs, and traditionalists was that Communism was evil. Would Mr Waldman like to disagree? More to my point, might there be some area of agreement between some members of the current conservative coalition and some remnants of the Liberal Establishment that Communism was undesirable and that a Red Scare was not the most effective way of making that point? But again, that uses too many words to fit on a bumper sticker.

To some extent Mr Waldman gets it.

Winning converts isn’t just about convincing people you’re right on the merits of issues, it’s also about showing them that your side is one they want to join, and the other side is one they want to avoid.

But to do so requires logic and content, something that's missing in his column, exactly as it is missing in the visible right-wing punditry he refers to in his allotted words. He hasn't addressed a salient selling point of the Right, which is that the old Liberal Establishment has all too often been willing to demonize and question the motives of its critics, rather than consider the possibility that some of its policy changes have had unanticipated and undesirable consequences. That goes for the current Right Establishment too.

REVEALED PREFERENCES. A Milwaukee area radio station looks for evidence that gasoline prices are inducing conservation, and comes up empty.

According to the numbers provided, the price of gas doesn't seem to lead to people buying less. In fact, if anything is true, it's the opposite. As prices are rising, people are buying more gas. Out of every month in the past four years, the month when people in Wisconsin bought more gas than any other was September of 2005. That's the month following Hurricane Katrina when prices spiked to well above three dollars a gallon.

Again, I could probably use the title "I'll Never Lack For Work" on about 75% of my posts. Increases in demand lead to higher prices and higher consumption ..., oh, never mind. There's also this thing called substitution along different margins to consider.

Erin Roth, who represents big oil companies in Wisconsin, says they thought three dollars a gallon would change people's habits but it didn't. "It doesn't appear that people are adjusting their driving habits. They may be adjusting other purchasing habits, but we're not seeing it in the transportation fuels," Roth said.

Economic hysteresis, putty-clay, optimal inertia, break out the calculus of variations. Oh, and $3 a gallon today is the equivalent of $1.10 or so a gallon in 1982. And shifts happen.

It appears the time of year has more to do with demand for gas than price. For years, big oil companies have blamed increased summer driving for higher prices during the summer. So while demand may be driving up the price, it doesn't appear the price is driving down demand.

Harder problem: is the effect of the seasonal shift different? Perhaps people are responding at the margins. The last couple of days I've found myself fuming about sluggish pickup trucks taking their time making left turns on cross streets, and at stop signs, a few sluggish pickup trucks, improperly spaced, add up to a long wait.

We'll know that conservation behavior is kicking in in a more substantial way when we see Priuses tailgating Escalades and Miatas blowing the doors off Hemi Rams and cutting in aggressively.

THE JIB BUNNIES WILL GET THEIR EXERCISE. The early weather forecast for the Chicago to Mackinac Island race is for generally northerly winds, which will make the race a bit more of a test of skill than it sometimes is. (Those downwind starts where the yachts have their spinnakers drawing make for prettier photos but they're not as good a test of boat-handling as an upwind start with a line that is approximately square to the mean wind.) The weather conditions have the potential to affect the outcome of the race, in which the first boat across the finish line is not necessarily the winner. There is a form of affirmative action for keelboats in which each yacht's time is adjusted for its waterline length, sail area, and other arcana of naval architecture. (The Inland scows evolved under a rule in which the rating depended on the waterline length, which was measured when the boat was level. So you build a lot of overhang above the waterline and sail it on the slant, increasing the waterline length and reducing the wetted surface a la a catamaran. So you rewrite the rules to specify the same hull shape for all scows of a given class.) The formulas for adjustment are based on the yacht's optimized performance on all points of sail (beating, tight reaching, power reaching, and running.) But some yachts do better under the handicap on the run, and others do better on the beat, although good crew work on the beat can offset indifferent crew work on a yacht favored by the formula. Or that's how a one-design skipper sees things.

The race, should you wish to follow its progress, has live tracking this year courtesy the Chicago Yacht Club.

THE VIRTUES OF PEER REVIEW. David B. Kopel wrote Antitrust after Microsoft: The Obsolescence of Antitrust in the Digital Era under the auspices of the Heartland Institute. In Book Review No. 22, I will focus on the differences between scholarship-as-polemic and scholarship-as-required-for-effective-teaching-and-publishing-to-please-the-deans.

Mr Kopel has affiliations with several public policy shops that generally view competition policy as prone to stifle inventiveness and protect competitors. It's certainly legitimate to argue from that perspective, but it misleads readers to rely heavily on arguments published by sympathetic policy shops to suggest that monopolization policy is baseless. The point of the policy is to balance the benefits of consolidation (in Microsoft, a standard operating system that continues to evolve, much as the Standard Oil Trust offered improvements in the distribution and packaging of kerosene and the Aluminum Company of America embraced new opportunities) against the benefits of competition (a range of choices available to consumers and continuous improvement of a variety of products: what happens when the dominant firm stagnates?) Perhaps after all that monopolization policy is a form of corporate welfare for small business, but it's crucial for critics of the policy to understand the limits of polemics. Doing it well is not for everybody.

Under the Sherman Antitrust Act, the holder of a patent may not use that patent strategically to exclude competition from others. United Shoe Machinery was required to surrender some patents to the public domain; something similar happened in the consent decree breaking up the old Bell System, and the Microsoft settlement places more of Windows code in the public domain. Last week [October 2002], President Bush raised the issue with drug companies, seeking more rapid diffusion of generic drugs.

There is a research paper or two in here for somebody, particularly somebody a bit more familiar with the economics of strategic deterrence than I.

Doing it polemically might be more fun, but it's not necessarily doing it best. The theory of path-dependence has come in for a beating, particularly by critics of the Microsoft ruling such as Mr Kopel. There's a book called Winners, Losers, and Microsoft that's popular with critics of path dependence. It's a useful collection of possible counterexamples to the path-dependence argument. But that's not quite the same thing as a refutation of the argument itself. I have a somewhat more technical book, Bandwagon Effects in High-Technology Industries in the stack of summer reading. Perhaps a review by year's end.

Perhaps monopolization policy is misguided, or obsolete. Jeffrey Miron posts nine theses about antitrust policy that will reward careful study and might stimulate some discussion along those lines. There is certainly material for a few of my patented "no right answer" exam questions there. It would do students a dis-service, however, to assign Antitrust after Microsoft without either a well-reasoned opposing polemic or a solid grounding in the theory of scale economies and the practice of antitrust.

CAMBRIDGE MIDDLE SCHOOL. Inside Higher Ed reports on an investigation at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology into a senior faculty member making too public his opposition to the appointment of a promising post-doc. The article provides the Quote of the Day.

“In a healthy department, you are looking to hire the smartest people you can, and you want them to be at least as good as you and preferably better than you, and senior people want to work with them and collaborate with them,” said Cary Nelson, Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences and a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors, has written extensively on power relationships in higher education in his books Will Work for Food: Academic Labor in Crisis and Academic Keywords: A Devil’s Dictionary for Higher Education.

He said that his department has always been one to welcome young talent, but that as he travels around the country, he’s sad to find out how common it is for departments to be “armed camps” where senior people abuse junior people (or at least certain junior people). Nelson said that it is important for departments to take responsibility for such situations. If there is one professor causing problems, a department should make sure a new hire can work effectively around that person. “This should be settled before someone arrives in a department,” he said.

When that doesn’t happen, many people say young scholars should run. Most senior people who are opposed to a new hire aren’t going to change, said Christopher J. Lucas, a professor of higher education at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville and co-author of New Faculty: A Practical Guide for Academic Beginners (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). “You really need to know what you are getting into here. And this could be so disruptive at a time you don’t have much traction, that you would be ill-advised to take this position,” he said.

There's nothing quite like an established faculty member, let alone a clique of established faculty members, whose real agenda is to make sure that nobody better than them ever gets tenure (preferably ever gets hired) to kill a department, and their attitudes are likely to poison the university. And they're not likely to have that good a department. Pat Summitt (one of the most successful coaches in basketball, both sexes considered) has that among her management commonplaces.

Surround yourself with people who are better than you are. Seek out quality people, acknowledge their talents, and let them do their job.

I'm not sure whether the manifestations of professional jealousy and insecurity at so-called prestige institutions reassure or discourage.

WHEN YOU SMELL SOMEBODY BEHIND YOU, AND THERE'S NOBODY THERE. According to Admiral Gallery, that's when it's time for a submariner to hit the showers. Modern submarines might have nuclear power plants, with diesels used only for auxiliary power, but the paucity of showers and the depletion of fresh foods are still realities in the submarine service. The nuclear power plant means "on patrol" equates to "submerged," thus no more opportunities to do a bit of fishing while the diesels are recharging the batteries.

An aside: much of The Hunt for Red October appears to draw on Admiral Gallery's memoir.

CALL FOR POSTS. The Thomas Institute solicits your submissions to the second Roundhouse Roundup. The first Roundup featured posts from The King of Scales up to 1/4 actual size. We know there are people working in those smaller scales. Show us your stuff. The closing deadline is 11.59 pm (Central?) on July 24.

HIGHER EDUCATION OUGHT TO BE HIGHER EDUCATION. The Spellings Commission on Higher Education has released a second draft report that Inside Higher Ed characterizes as "offering far more praise and far less criticism of colleges" than the first draft. I'll reproduce the findings and the recommendations without further comment. There is sufficient material in the draft for a follow-on post.

First, the findings.

1. In today’s knowledge-driven society, the value of and need for higher education has never been more important.


2. There is insufficient preparation for, participation in, and completion of higher education nationally – especially for underserved and nontraditional groups who will be the major source of new workers as the baby boom generation reaches retirement age.


3. The system of financing higher education is increasingly dysfunctional: state subsidies are declining; tuitions are rising; cost per student is increasing faster than inflation or family income; need-based financial aid is not keeping pace; the student aid system is playing roles it increasingly can’t support; and public concern about rising costs is contributing to the erosion of public credibility in higher education.


4. The entire financial aid system – including federal, state, institutional, and private programs – is inefficient, duplicative, and frequently does not direct aid to students who truly need it.


5. At a time when we need to be increasing the quality of learning outcomes from a college education, there are too many signs that suggest we are moving in the opposite direction.


6. There is inadequate transparency and accountability for institutional access, quality, and cost.


7. There are barriers to increasing institutional capacity and investment in innovation which will significantly affect our ability to address national workforce needs and compete in the global marketplace.

Can you say tradeoffs? The report pays some attention to the failures of K-12 to prepare their students for university. I hope that this report will stimulate a conversation on the potential disadvantages of using the same theories of pedagogy that have turned K-12 into a disaster area as models for higher education. If we'll see the last of "learning objectives" and "assessment" as a consequence, it will not be too soon.

The recommendations also suggest that tradeoffs matter.

1. To meet the challenges of the 21st century, higher education must change from a system based on reputation to one based on performance. We recommend the creation of a robust culture of accountability and transparency throughout higher education. Every one of our other goals, from improving access and affordability to enhancing quality and innovation, will be more easily achieved if higher education embraces and implements serious accountability measures.


2. The nation should establish postsecondary education as an opportunity for every student. We recommend, therefore, that the U.S. commit to an unprecedented effort to expand college access and success by improving student preparation and persistence, addressing non-academic barriers to college and providing significant increases in aid to low-income students.


3. Higher education is becoming increasingly unaffordable for students, their families, states and the federal government – and too many low income students are shut out from college altogether. In order to address the spiraling cost of a college education and the fiscal realities affecting government’s ability to finance higher education in the long run, we recommend that the entire student financial aid system be restructured and new incentives put in place to improve the measurement and management of costs and institutional productivity.


4. With some exceptions, higher education has yet to address the fundamental issues of how academic programs and institutions must be transformed to serve the changing needs of a knowledge economy. We recommend that America’s colleges and universities embrace a culture of continuous innovation and quality improvement by developing new pedagogies, curricula, and technologies to improve learning, particularly in the area of science and mathematical literacy.


5. In order to prosper in an ever more competitive global economy, America must ensure our citizens’ access to high quality and affordable educational, learning, and training opportunities throughout their lives. We recommend the development of a national strategy for lifelong learning designed to keep our citizens and nation at the forefront of the knowledge revolution.


6. The United States must ensure the capacity of its universities to achieve global leadership in key strategic areas such as science, engineering, medicine, and other knowledge-intensive professions. We recommend increased federal investment in areas critical to our nation’s global competitiveness and a renewed commitment to attract the best and brightest minds from across the nation and around the world to lead the next wave of American innovation.

It is difficult to take seriously a list of recommendations that begins by suggesting "reputation" can exist independently of "performance." The specifics go on to recommend that the Department of Education provide a public database for evaluating "institutional performance." Corporate welfare for U.S. News?

The pundits at Phi Beta Cons have had some opportunity to digest the report, with the expected observations. Anne D. Neal is disappointed.

The report stresses the need to ensure that students graduate with the skills they need to function in an increasingly competitive global economy—but fails to address the fact that students don't graduate with those skills because the undergraduate curriculum is not designed to ensure that they acquire them. The report also fails to note that today's truly educated American needs more than skills—he or she also needs a strong grasp of what democracy is, what citizenship means, and why they matter.

Again, it matters that higher education be, well, higher education, not a make-up of high school. The value of this report will be in both stimulating conversation and encouraging action such that the common schools do their job in order that the colleges and universities be able to do theirs.

George Leef takes a dimmer view.

The trouble with American higher ed is not "access" or the want to innovative teaching methods or insufficient attention to math and science.

The big problem is that huge numbers of kids go to college for four or five or six years to enjoy the beer-and-circus atmosphere (to borrow the title of Murray Sperber's book) and then graduate with little or no gain in knowledge and skills compared to when they entered.

Then, usually burdened by debt, they end up doing the same kinds of jobs that any typical high school student could easily learn to do.

Our low and declining academic standards should have been a centerpiece of the report, but it's hardly even a bit of garnish.

Perhaps what is required is for strong voices in higher education to say Enough to doing the work of the high schools, because the high schools failed to do their work. In the absence of that concrete action, Mr Leef is likely to be correct.

DECONSTRUCTING THAT TEN-MINUTE MISCONDUCT. Although some French soccer player got himself disqualified for a block that might have annoyed Vince Lombardi, that hasn't stopped wags from using their digital editing techniques to offer diverse perspectives on the incident. Market Power's Phil Miller offers examples.

TRAIN THEM UP RIGHT. Tightly Wound has a promising son.

The Boy shows no signs of outgrowing his love of trains. We will hopefully purchase a larger home in the next year or so, and I am already mentally setting aside a room for the tables and fake terrain of the truly train-obsessed.

One of these days Southerners will get the concept of "basement."

SIXTEEN HABITS OF HIGHLY EFFECTIVE FACULTY. Inside Higher Ed's pseudonymous Shari Wilson offers advice for Moving Past Survival, particularly in those required courses that pay the freight yet can become a burden on students and faculty alike. The entire essay is worth careful reading, but consider in particular point 7.

While first teaching developmental English composition at an urban community college, I was given a peer evaluation by a senior professor. He confronted me in the hallway after class and said, “You’re teaching compare and contrast, and classification modes to students at this level?” I replied, “Sure. Aren’t we supposed to?”

Yes, we are.

HUSKIES, HANDEL, BOURBON STREET. Tuesday night, the DeKalb Municipal Band offered Northern Illinois University's tribute to DeKalb's sesquicentennial, including remarks by President John Peters and soloes by Cecelia Kafer. The concert opened with the Huskie Fight Song (.mp3), and the band director recognized composer Francis Stroup, who was present at the concert. The current song became the university's fight song in the early 1960s. Different bands handle the same tune differently: the Municipal Band sound is not the Huskie Band sound. Although retired Professor William Studwell places the Huskie Fight Song well down on his list of the top 25 college fight songs, I'd rate it as at least as listenable as anything around the Big Ten other than On! Wisconsin! and I credit the Huskie Band for not playing it on every occasion, unlike some bands that ought to know better. (Yes, Michigan and UCLA, I'm talking about you!)

It pays to go to these concerts and learn something, such as the Canadian Brass' The Saints' Hallelujah, a convex combination of Hallelujah Chorus with I Want to be in That Number (When the Saints Go Marchin' in!) that was composed for a command performance by Queen Elizabeth II who wanted Hallelujah Chorus and the Brass intended to offer her Saints. It's available on Celebration. The fireflies were at it tonight, despite the somewhat cooler drier night (a welcome relief after nearly a week in the tropics.)

THE OTHER CORRIDOR. After the Western Economic Association conference adjourned, I made time to explore Amtrak's Pacific Surfliner service, which offers frequent trains San Diego-Los Angeles and a respectable schedule north to Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo, the end of water-level running on the Coast Line.

San Diego's Santa Fe station is receiving yet another makeover. Most of the Santa Fe-era tilework is in pretty good shape, but there are some rearrangements being made to the baggage and office space. The towers behind the station are relatively new.


The Surf Line ends two blocks from the harbor. This cruise ship, which docked overnight, is much larger than Midway, moored at the next pier north.


If anybody at Kalmbach is reading, this trolley is for you!


For many years, the San Diego Gas & Electric generating station got into pictures of San Diegans, trolleys, and the freight trains that still work the neighborhood. The shell of the building is being saved, but the innards are gone in favor of a condo tower.


Although the Santa Fe referred to this as the "Surf Line" and Amtrak's service is now Pacific Surfliners, there are some operational impedimenta to this line matching either the speed or the precision of the Hiawatha line or the Northeast Corridor. The San Diego station is at water's edge, and there is beach access from Solana Beach to San Clemente. But there's no easy way out of San Diego. The train has to come to grips with Soledad Canyon.



Some stretches of the line are posted for 90 mph running, but the canyons, some tight curves along the beaches, and a number of junctions in the Los Angeles area, where the Surf Line was stitched together out of several smaller railroads, impede our progress. Amtrak at one time offered a Metroliner on this line, but gave up on the idea as impractical.

It's the Fourth of July in California. A beach party was shaping up near San Juan Capistrano.


The Burlington line passes several municipal parks between Westmont and Western Springs. Locals headed for the pools and tennis courts tend to leave a bit more to the imagination, and they're less likely to display tattoos they'll regret later. Different noncognitive skills, again?

Some kind of pre-firework festivities were in progress in San Clemente. As is the case on the Great Western's sea-wall stretch through Dawlish, the train has to proceed at restricted speed thanks to tight curves. There's little point in opening up to 90 only to have to back off for the curves or the grades.


Trackside at Los Angeles Union Passenger Terminal (to use the old name), where the train will pause for a few minutes before reversing direction to San Luis Obispo.

Inside the station, the old ticketing positions are preserved as if the nave of a church. This portion of the station is closed off to public access. The waiting room has comfy lounge chairs. There are few station services compared to Chicago's Union Station, although Los Angeles's Chinatown is a few blocks walk away.

The train was full most of the way north. The high-level coaches load and unload reasonably quickly. Passages to adjacent coaches and the cafe car are on the upper level. I saw one rake running with a Superliner coach as strengthening.

Amtrak Pacific Surfliner 775, San Diego to Los Angeles, 4 July 2006: cab car 6951 Point Loma, coaches 6411 and 6452 Mission Beach, cafe 6301, Pacific Business Class 6851 Balboa Park, F59 458 pushing. Temperature in the low 80s, clear skies and dry rail. Most seats taken out of San Diego, full out of Oceanside. I did not have occasion to synchronize my watch with a standard clock. Leave San Diego 12:01:19, Solana Beach 12:33:03-12:34:36, Oceanside 12:48:11-12:50:09, San Juan Capistrano 1:23:50-1:25:54, Short stop between San Juan Capistrano and Irvine to meet 774, Irvine 1:38:30-1:39:47, Santa Ana 1:48:43-1:50:10, Anaheim 1:57:45-2:02:50 (heavy traffic off and on) Fullerton 2:10:00-2:12:10, Los Angeles 2:42:39, on time within the margin of error of my watch.

IN THE ABSENCE OF PROFIT SIGNALS. USA Today offered a point-counterpoint on the merits of highway privatization. The editorial board used the reality of clapped-out congested interstates to suggest there might be a better way.

In the past decade, usage of interstates rose by more than 30%, according to the Department of Transportation, while additions of routes and added lanes increased capacity by only 4%. The problem is simple. Gasoline taxes and tolls, already unpopular, provide a fraction of the money needed to keep traffic from getting worse.

That's only part of the problem. Congress has used tax revenues intended for the Highway Trust Fund to reduce the federal government's operating deficit. It also passes transportation bills that provide visible projects to help influential Representatives get re-elected, without necessarily adding useful capacity. Cars with stingy gas mileage and heavier and heavier trucks affect both the tax take and the wear on the roads. Market tests, the editorial board argues, might be an improvement.

A number of states, most visibly Indiana, have proposed leasing major toll roads to private companies. By doing so, they can raise billions of dollars needed to make road improvements elsewhere.

Ideally, such leases would not be necessary. Governments would give highways and public transit systems the funds they need, and they would not shy away from raising the requisite money from the people who use them. That would ensure a network of efficient, carefully integrated transportation systems in ways that a more piecemeal approach cannot. But given the extreme resistance, which dates back decades and shows no signs of abating, leases are the best option for easing gridlock.

But the editors envision turning the private company into the heavy, collecting sufficient revenues to repair the roads where the federal, state, and local governments dare not. (This ploy is an update on the old technique of using the regulated public utility as a tax collector. Look carefully at your telephone, electric, or gas bill. You may no longer be paying for the Spanish-American War, but you're still buying a lot of stuff for the governments.)

The higher tolls that private companies will charge in return for their big payments inevitably will be unpopular. But unless the laws of supply and demand are applied to road capacity, drivers will pay in the form of lost productivity while waiting in traffic.

The editors could have done better than asking Indiana legislator B. Patrick Bauer to offer the dissent.

There is concern about the role privatization plays in operating programs that benefit a state's general population. A private company's primary motivation is to earn a profit. If profits are not being earned, a company reduces costs by cutting personnel and services.

That's the best he can do? As if school districts don't cope with shrinking enrollments by furloughing teachers and closing schools? As if highway commissions don't cope with shifting populations by deferring maintenance on less-travelled roads? Tollway privatization is no panacea: a regulated toll corporation that is not allowed to earn the replacement cost of its capital will be no more use than a tollway authority that earns insufficient revenues to rebuild the roads or a highway trust fund that does not allocate funds efficiently. On the other hand, this debate might be a good one to start. The freight railroads have recently begun to earn the replacement cost of their capital. Is it too much to ask that the highway system pass a similar test?

DEVELOPING THOSE NONCOGNITIVE SKILLS. Leonard Pitts reminds Shawn Carter that possessions do not equate to respectability.

I feel sorry for Shawn Carter. I know I shouldn't, but I do.

It seems that in recent weeks, Carter, a rap star and music executive known professionally as Jay-Z, has pronounced himself angry with the makers of Cristal champagne. Cristal, you should know, is frequently referenced in rap lyrics as a synonym for the high life, for pimping and drug dealing your way into an existence where the women are always willing, the luxury cars always gassed up, the sheets always satin.

This prompted the Economist magazine to ask Frederic Rouzaud, president of Champagne Louis Roederer, parent company of Cristal, whether it might hurt the brand's image to be associated with such a coarse, outlaw culture. Rouzaud's reply: “That's a good question, but what can we do? We can't forbid people from buying it. I'm sure Dom Perignon or Krug would be delighted to have their business.”

The quotation requires a bit more context. For the time being, the Economist article remains available online.

The Russian tsars adored Louis Roederer’s Cristal, a taste that is shared today by rap singers Sean “P.Diddy” Combs (Puff Daddy) and Snoop Dogg. Welcome to the world of prestige cuvées—the very best and most expensive of champagnes, which go for anything from $100 to over $600 a bottle.

When ordinary mortals want to celebrate, the question is less likely to be Cristal or Krug, than whether to drink champagne or sparkling wine. Once the choice is made in favour of real champagne—produced only in the Champagne region of north-eastern France—it becomes a question of brand. Should you go for one of the big reliable names like Moët & Chandon or Veuve Clicquot; or maybe something a bit cheaper or more adventurous from a lesser known grower? If you feel like splashing out, you might plump for a vintage champagne. But for a select band of people—a mixture of champagne fanatics and the super rich—only the very best will do. Thus the need for “prestige cuvées”.

Just who these ultra-fancy champagnes are aimed at is a slightly sensitive issue. Cristal was originally created exclusively for the Russian tsars. Jean-Claude Rouzaud, who managed the Louis Roederer winery until his retirement earlier this year, once said: “We make our champagne for that 3-5% of consumers who really know wine, and who take the time to taste it correctly.”

Romanovs and rappers. I love it. Such talk seems made to order for Thorsten Veblen or John Kenneth Galbraith. And that's where the president of Louis Roederer put his foot wrong. But the article qualifies his comments.

Both Dom Pérignon and Krug have had their share of unwelcome attention, too. The late President Mobutu of Zaire, a notoriously profligate dictator, was said to be a devotee of Dom Pérignon’s rosé champagne. Naturally enough, Rémi Krug, the chairman of the champagne house, prefers to emphasise the more cultured devotees of Krug—drinkers, like the late Ernest Hemingway or the painter Francis Bacon, who are “creative individualists who never follow the crowd, and have strong tastes of their own.”

As is the case with other luxury brands, some consumers are nevertheless motivated more by the sheer ostentation of the product. For many years, the most famous consumer of Krug in Britain was Jeffrey Archer, a novelist, politician—and, ultimately, prison inmate, after being convicted for perjury. His insistence on serving Krug, and nothing but Krug, to guests at his summer parties was regarded as a tad flashy—a little like his reported instructions to guests about how to find the lavatory (“Past the Picasso, left at the Matisse”).

But without New Money, how would we know what constituted tacky? Plastic flamingoes and reflecting spheres? Please.

The tsar was annoyed that his champagne looked and tasted identical to that drunk by his courtiers. He wanted a wine that was made with particular care, in a flashier and more distinctive packaging. And so Cristal was created, a particularly fine champagne in a clear bottle of crystal glass with a gold label. The design, which made Tsar Alexander one of the earliest exponents of bling, had a practical advantage: the clear crystal glass made it easier to check whether the champagne had been poisoned.

I rest my case. The Economist reports on a taste test, to mix metaphors.

Back in London, your correspondent served Krug blind (that is, with its label covered up) to some dinner guests, along with a vintage champagne from another house called Nicolas Feuillatte and Pelorus, the finest sparkling wine made in New Zealand. Gratifyingly, they all much preferred the Krug—although none regarded it as utterly different from the other champagnes they had tasted.

Mr Carter has taken offense at Mr Rozaud's remarks and seeks to put Cristal in the same odor as the Birmingham buses and Greensboro lunch counters. Mr Pitts is less than impressed.

And here, it might be worthwhile to observe two facts.

One: Cristal has managed to thrive for most of 130 years without Jay-Z's endorsement. Indeed, the brand is manufactured sparingly and is perpetually sold out around the world.

Two: Cristal retails for upward of $200 a bottle. How, exactly, do you launch a boycott of something most people can't afford? Might as well ask me to boycott Gulfstream private jets while you're at it.

It is, on both sides, a silly contretemps. Still, there is something poignant in Jay-Z's apparent surprise and hurt at Cristal's blithe rejection of hip-hop's operating ethos: that acceptance can be bought.

There has never been an entertainment form that placed as much faith in the healing virtues of materialism as rap. From the days when Run-DMC first extolled the virtues of Adidas shoes, rappers have invoked brand names and branded themselves with talismanic fervor. Timberland! Hennessy! Lexus! S. Carter!

They seem to feel that when you can afford these things, it makes you, I don't know ... complete. As if, with Tims on your feet, Hennessy in your glass and a Lexus in your garage, you're good, you're covered, you're in the club.

For an art form whose artists and fans are largely young, largely black and largely from poor, bullet-scarred neighborhoods, it is a powerfully attractive fantasy. But it is a fantasy nevertheless.

Which is, in so many words, what Frederic Rouzaud just brutally explained to Shawn Carter: that he is not in the club. That no matter how much Cristal he buys, he will never be in the club. Sure, kid, we'll take your money. But don't mistake that for respect. Not while you're young. And black. And reeking of nouveau riche. And representing values that are anathema to our own.

So yeah, I feel sorry for Carter. But at the same time, what's it tell you that he was even surprised?

Among the many lies of hip-hop, this whole notion that wearing or imbibing or driving the proper brand will make you whole is in some ways the most infuriating. It represents a corporatization of cool that would have made Miles Davis ill. In his era, after all, cool meant being an iconoclast, a visionary threat to the status quo. In Jay-Z's era, it is a brand name, it has a sponsor, it can be bought off the rack.

Rap could have been, should have been, a truth-teller and world-shaker. Instead it has largely contented itself with being free advertising for corporate titans, selling fake cool, sometimes with corporate assent, but often, without even a thank-you.
Brand names, it says, will make you whole.

The Washington Post's Jabari Asim suggests the Cristal boycott is misplaced.

Boycott. Now that's a word you don't hear so often these days. Hard for me to encounter it without thinking of Rosa Parks and brave Alabamans walking and carpooling their way to justice. But I suppose it applies just as well to millionaires whose sensibilities have been offended. A bottle of Cristal, it should be noted, can go for $300 or more. That's a lot of bus fare.

So that does it. No more bottles of this high-priced bubbly for me. The next time I'm at Plumm, the swank Manhattan nightspot, I'll tell the waiter to fill my flute with Dom P. Rose, a variety Jay-Z is experimenting with these days.

Seriously, though, I'm not mad at Jay-Z for expressing his displeasure. Just as with women and others who have taken offense at his sexist, misogynist lyrics, he has a right to be peeved by what he sees as disrespectful treatment. But there are far bigger alcohol-related problems among the urban population that helps keep his tunes at the top of the charts, and he would probably be
quick to agree.

For instance, while Cristal seems hesitant to embrace young black consumers, the makers of malt liquor are more than eager to establish a relationship. They are among the alcohol manufacturers who target African-American youth, according to a new study by the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth (CAMY) at Georgetown University. The analysis, an update of an earlier study, found that alcohol ads on radio and television and in magazines in 2003 and 2004 reached more African-American youth ages 12 to 20 than youth in general on a per capita basis.

Pro Hip Hop, an occasional host of Carnival of the Capitalists, has been following this story since it broke, with a more recent roundup offering this observation.

It's a little silly to call someone racist for not wanting to be associated with musicians who brag about their criminal past and, in some cases, appear to be continuing their criminal activities. Just a thought.

LACK-OF-STATUS SYMBOLS? Illinois banks have discovered some of the identifying symbols of bank robbers and other low lives. Stickup men have become more active, and they don't dress like embezzlers.

Against that backdrop, the Illinois Bankers Association about a month ago began urging institutions to adopt a program to encourage customers visiting their branches to take off their lids, pull down their hoods and remove their shades.

"This is in response to the rising number of bank robberies we've seen in Illinois," Linda Koch, chief executive of the association, said Friday at a bank robbery seminar in Chicago.

The purpose appears to be to reduce a relatively unobtrusive form of robbery.

The IBA believes the campaign will particularly curb incidences of so-called "demand note" robberies, where a person, usually working solo, comes into a branch and, in low-key and typically non-violent fashion, hands the teller a note demanding money. They want to get out as quickly as possible and don't want to be recognized.

Years ago, "wardrobe engineer" John T. Molloy used his experience as the muggee to make a case for what he called Dress for Success (since updated.) He noted that none of the usual suspects in the police department's facebook were wearing ties.

The "do your own thing" and "capitalism is repressive" crowd has not yet weighed in on this policy, but I expect they will.

QUOTE OF THE DAY. Market Power's Phil Miller reacts to a petition to exclude a faculty member with a different perspective from the National Mathematics Advisory Panel.

Doing research and making claims. Having others criticise that research and provide evidence against the claims. The back and forth. That's the process of discovery. That's what true academic researchers do. But it's things like this petition where researchers have their career aspirations hampered by taking unpopular positions that hampers the process of discovery that should be the focus of academic research.

Read and understand.

GETTING THE RIGHT TOOLS FOR THE JOB. The depreciated lawnmower now has a proper replacement.


At left, the lightweight mower that isn't cut out to cut grass, crated up and ready to be returned to the vendor. In the middle, the life-expired mower. At the right, its replacement. I found it at Menard's ... fifty bucks cheaper, maybe that "Save Big Money" is accurate. If there's not a Menard's in your neighborhood, Amazon will sell you one ... same Menard's price, plus shipping.

The new mower is very smooth through the grass and it has some components in common with the old one, which I will strip for replacement parts before it goes to scrap.

IT'S HARD TO STOP A TRAIN. Via David Foster, a progress report on the recovery of India's Western Railway. Trains were running again four hours after the train bombings.

SELLING YOUR INTEGRITY CHEAPLY. One of Northern Illinois University's Saturday afternoon football games has been rescheduled ... for a Sunday evening.

Northern Illinois will make its ninth television appearance of the 2006 football season when the Huskies face Miami (Ohio) on Sunday, Oct. 8 at 7 p.m. (Central) in Oxford, Ohio on ESPN, NIU Athletics Director Jim Phillips announced Wednesday. The game was originally scheduled for Saturday, Oct. 7 at 2 p.m. at Yager Stadium.

"This is a tremendous opportunity for our football program and for our entire university to be showcased on national television as the only college football game that evening," Phillips said. "You can't put a price tag on the exposure and attention this will bring to the university. It's invaluable."

The things we'll do for TV.

The national Sunday night airing marks the ninth of NIU's 12 regular season games in 2006 to be announced for telecast. In addition to the ESPN Sunday night game versus Miami, the Huskies' Nov. 7 Tuesday night home contest versus West Division rival Toledo will air on ESPN2, while the 2006 season opener at Ohio State will be televised by ABC with kickoff at 2:30 p.m. (Central). ESPNU will carry Northern Illinois' home finale versus Central Michigan beginning at 7 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 17.

Five NIU games will be televised live on Comcast Sports Net, including home contests with Ohio (Sept. 9), Buffalo (Sept. 16), Indiana State (Sept. 23) and Temple (Oct. 21) and the 2006 regular season finale at Eastern Michigan (Nov. 24).

Put another way, four of Northern Illinois's twelve games have been scheduled at non-traditional times for the benefit of TV. (I'm cutting the university a bit of slack here, including the Saturday evening games as "traditional." In these parts, it can stay hot late into the day well into fall.) Specifically, the September schedule provides the scheduling God and Harry Stuldreher intended: Saturdays at Ohio State, Ohio here, Buffalo here in the evening, Indiana State here, and at Ball State in the evening. October has been defiled: at Miami of Ohio on a Sunday, at Western Michigan the following Saturday, Temple (choosing the Buffalo route to Beer and Circuses?) here, and at Iowa, both on Saturdays. November ... got your polar suit? Toledo here on a Tuesday, Central Michigan here Friday of the following week, then a trip to Eastern Michigan the day after Thanksgiving. Invaluable exposure?? When, as former Northern Star sports columnist Nick Gerts, now with the DeKalb Chronicle, notes, the time slot was available because ESPN no longer had the Sunday evening professional game?

ESPN flexed its almighty muscle once again this week, dangling anything and everything to get back in the national spotlight on Sunday nights. The victims are not only two Mid-American Conference programs, but also every student-athlete competing in the NCAA Division I-A for football.

Northern Illinois and Miami hold the dubious honor of opening the Bristol, Conn.-based company's Sunday Night Football on Oct. 8. Unfortunately, the RedHawks sacrificed the traditional Saturday Homecoming celebrations to have the game televised on a network self-proclaimed as the “Worldwide Leader of Sports.”

But it's amateur sport. Not.

One person inside the Northern Illinois Athletic Department, who did not want to be quoted or identified, was disturbed by the move to Sunday.

Sure the exposure is tremendous. There isn't a university out there that wouldn't bite at the chance to play in front of millions of people for the sake of promotion. But there has to be a time where someone says enough is enough.College athletes have been prostituted around on television for numerous years, and ESPN solidifies that by moving college football to Sunday.

The Mid-American Coference is equally to blame for not stepping in and saying no as well. Given the chance, the conference would most likely agree to having a televised football game on at any
time of day, whether its at noon the day before Thanksgiving or when the clock strikes midnight on New Year's Day.

However, exposure - and money - comes at a cost.

The MAC's decision to go along with ESPN could alienate its already small fanbase. The abensce of a Saturday Homecoming game against the Huskies now gives Miami just two Saturday home games. The university already has problems trying to fill Yager Stadium, which was the 100th best in the country in attendance last year with an average of 15,241 a game.

And as Mr Gerts notes, the scheduling is unlikely to help the Mid-American or Northern Illinois deal with the academic probation they've found themselves in, resources to help build the new locker room notwithstanding.

CARRYING ON FOR THE NORTH SHORE LINE AND THE MILWAUKEE ELECTRIC. Friday's Chicago Tribune "Ends of the Line" features Kenosha. There's a somewhat longer slideshow than previous efforts.

Metra's former Chicago and North Western North Line reaches Wisconsin as it is cheaper to retain the terminal at Kenosha rather than build a new terminal at Winthrop Harbor. For most of its run, the North Line is immediately west of the Shore Line Route of the North Shore Line, and it inherits the North Shore Line's tradition of transporting Navy from and to Great Lakes and Army from and to Fort Sheridan, although the latter's role as a military post is much reduced.

Chicago Tribune photograph by Nancy Stone.

At one time, Kenosha Electric (later Milwaukee Electric, streetcars were moved among the Kenosha, Racine, and Milwaukee networks over the years) streetcars would receive passengers off the C&NW scoots and 400 Streamliners. The Kenosha heritage trolley loops within a block of the Metra station.

Chicago Tribune photograph by Nancy Stone.

The upcoming "Ends of the Line" will go to Manhattan, the one terminus of the Metra network that cannot be reached from downtown Chicago with a return trip the same day. Orland Park may be a possibility for a Cold Spring Shops excursion some day.

TECHNOLOGY COMMERCIALIZATION TROUBLES? In March, Wisconsin-Milwaukee's vice-provost for research and graduate school dean Abbas Ourmazd had high hopes.

Ourmazd's arrival was a coup for the university, said UWM Chancellor Carlos Santiago, who recruited him. Santiago wants to transform UWM into an "entrepreneurial university" that acts as a piston of innovation for a blue-collar metropolis that has been hard-hit by global competition.

Santiago and Ourmazd agree that the stakes are high. Milwaukee ranked 48th among the nation's 50 biggest cities in a University of Kansas index that rates each city's economic prospects according to its volume of research grants, venture capital and stock offerings in new companies.

"He was courted by other schools" that already boast fully developed research programs, Santiago said. "We're trying to build this from the ground up. He was very excited about the potential, and that's what attracted him."

The arrival last July of Ourmazd, 51, an Oxford-educated scientist who has been a close colleague of several Nobel Prize physicists, adds momentum to Santiago's vision. In his two years as chancellor, Santiago has begun overhauling how the school allocates its research budget, with the goal of rewarding entrepreneurship. With influential UWM alumni, he has launched fund-raising initiatives to finance new resources, salaries and eventually a new state-of-the-art engineering building.

He noted that more resources would be required to follow through on the research his colleagues were doing.

The biggest problem, [engineering professor Nikolai] Kouklin said, would take place if and when he publishes any breakthrough research. Universities with more advanced facilities would recognize its applications and advance Kouklin's research beyond what UWM can support.

"It's like the old prospector who finds gold but gets muscled out by the bandits," Ourmazd said. "We cannot afford that."

In July, he's simply Professor Ourmazd.

Abbas Ourmazd, vice chancellor of research and dean of the Graduate School at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, is threatening to resign unless he receives more support from Chancellor Carlos Santiago.

In addition to the downside of technology commercialization, which is that every upwardly mobile university is trying it, there is the downside that the education and humanities and theoretical mathematicians also have research ambitions.

Ourmazd, whose contract allows him to assume a faculty position in the physics department, would not discuss in detail the reasons for his resignation, saying only that the "processes and resources" had not been aligned with the chancellor's research mission.

But Rita Cheng, the university's provost, disagreed.

"The campus community and I have been fully supportive of the Chancellor's research agenda since the time of his arrival at UWM," Cheng said in an e-mail. "I believe we have accomplished a great deal in a short period of time and have great potential for continued research growth."

Translation: departments other than physics and engineering want theirs, too. And they have votes on the university council.

The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee was roiling in shock and confusion Thursday to news that its research czar had threatened to resign, with the administration sending mixed messages about whether the resignation was final and the rank and file expressing mixed feelings about leadership of the university.

It's not simply about "credibility," these paragraphs notwithstanding.

But Ourmazd cracked that credibility when he informed Santiago and the Graduate School earlier this week of his intention to resign and told the Journal Sentinel that the "processes and resources" had not been aligned with the chancellor's research mission.

It revealed divisions within the administration and the broader campus over the direction of the university.

"Changing the course of the Titanic is not easy," said Virginia Carlson, a professor of urban planning. "Bringing on board someone like Abbas raises conversations about the direction of UWM within the administration."

Reading between the lines: technology commercialization and advanced physics and graduate students uses resources that might be used for general studies and retention and remediation efforts, and doubtless other projects -- last June the string quartet -- that have influential friends outside the university and votes on the university council. Carlos is not the only colleague who is up against those pressures. It's his responsibility to make the final decisions. Professor Ourmazd, as a successful inventor and grant-getter, has greater free agency value. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel continues to show its irritation with the University of Wisconsin system, using the "backup job" rhetoric to describe Professor Ourmazd's return to faculty.

Ourmazd, who will assume a backup job on the UWM faculty as a physics professor, said in the statement: "I came to UWM to help build the research initiative. I am pleased with what we have accomplished and believe that, going forward, I can best serve the university in the capacity of a contributing member of the faculty and an active researcher. I look forward to working with world-class colleagues in our Department of Physics. I remain convinced of Chancellor Santiago's vision for UWM and will continue to support him in every possible way."

He's a free agent. Anybody want to wager he isn't raided by February? But the "backup job" language grates. Under university rules, deans are members of a faculty. (Associate and Assistant usually; anything with "vice-" in front of it is suspect.) That fewer of them are temporary administrators in the Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain model does not mean the rule has lost its utility.

OUT OF GAUGE? Preliminary investigations by the National Transportation Safety Board focus on wide-gauge track contributing to last Tuesday's derailment in the Lake Street subway.

IT'S JUST LUNCH. Jessica Biel, filming near her Boulder hometown, gets involved in a fundraiser for a Denver teen.

The event dubbed "Mollypalooza" to help Molly Bloom's family with medical expenses is scheduled for Tuesday at the Rock Island Club, organizers told The Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News.

Ms Bloom is in hospital after bad things happened at her prom.

Bloom was run over and dragged about 38 feet by a Hummer stretch limousine, police said. Limousine driver Stanley D. Sample, 38, faces a misdemeanor charge of careless driving resulting in serious bodily injury.

What's up with these positional arms races for middle-school graduations and high-school proms? One can wish the young lady well, and one can hope that the lunch date sells for a good price, and one can also concede that slightly-intoxicated teens driving their own cars to post-prom is also a good way to get hurt. But is the hired stretch limousine an improvement?

SUNDAY IS ICE CREAM DAY. Three cities vie for bragging rights as birthplace of the ice cream sundae. Two candidates are not far away. Closer to home, the local custard stand (there is a difference between custard and ice cream) has a promising July lineup.

COASTER COLLISION. 20 Injured in Swedish Roller Coaster Crash.

Two roller coaster trains collided at Sweden's largest amusement park Saturday, injuring about 20 people, police said.

It was unclear what caused the accident at the Liseberg amusement park in Goteborg, Sweden's second largest city located on the country's southwestern coast.

I'll do some more research on this story and report back. There are still some roller coasters in Sweden that have a brakeman controlling the train. Modern control systems sometimes prevent one train from being released to the chain lift while there is another train somewhere between the lift and the brake run.

THE RITUALS OF SUMMER. The old grill was also worn out. For just in excess of $10 including sales tax, I found one with somewhat more robust legs (the parts of the old one that went first.)


Some assembly required.


This blister pack looks a bit wasteful compared to the usual plastic bag of components, but each blister is labeled with the part letter, and some of the wing-nut, lock-washer, and machine-screw assemblies were packaged together. That's really thoughtful.


After about 15 minutes of assembly, and checking the instructions, it's ready to go. Load the charcoal, plug in the electro-igniter, do 30 minutes of reading.


The bratwursts come from a butcher shop in Elburn that won the National Grand Championship for bratwursts a few years ago.


You're looking at the double brat, modified Southeastern Wisconsin style. I butter the roll and toast it for two or three minutes, then serve it with heated sauerkraut and brown mustard (none of that phony imitation yellow stuff at my house ... go to a Chicago dog store for that.)

MAN WHO CAN STOP FIREFLY WITH DIGITAL CAMERA. It's a bit less difficult than catching a fly with a chopstick. There's one at the base of the tree.

Here's another one low to the ground.


As it gets darker, the camera stays open a bit longer. There's a blurred one to the left of the tree.

I can see two advantages to the digital camera: these three shots are culled from nearly thirty that I shot, and all three are further enhanced in the computer. The idea of tossing 27 negatives (I know, the pros will do that) is contrary to my Prussian, let alone my Puritan roots and I never did master the darkroom tricks that one could do to tweak both the negative and the print.

As with any other photographic tool, the secret is to practice and get to know what the equipment can do. Now to master the shutter lag ...

THE DOWNSIDE OF UP FROM THE RANKS. A few days ago I contemplated the adverse consequences of entry-level workers seeking greater pay and responsibilities without first paying their dues. As with any other resource-allocation problem, there are tradeoffs. The dean at Anonymous Community is struggling with the consequences of excessive dues-paying.

My college, like every college in the known universe, has plenty of standing committees. Most of the committees on the academic side are peopled with stalwarts – department chairs who have held their positions since the Carter administration, mostly, and their hangers-on. Since everybody has dirt on everybody else, and everybody has been trapped in the same sandbox for far too long, protocol has become increasingly baroque.

Since the only thing everybody can agree upon is process, process has become a goal unto itself. I’ve seen, and I’m not making this up, a committee spend the first half-hour of its meeting going over the minutes of the previous meeting.

Yes, I've served (until I can manage my escape) on committees like that. But there's something more at work. The dean is too kind (or too young?) to use the "Silent Generation relics" rhetoric I deploy here (even when I'm not into my second Sprecher.) But that "held their positions since the Carter administration" and some remarks he's made elsewhere about the age profile of his institution suggest he's confronting the worst of two worlds: a cohort that enjoyed relatively easy access to jobs (the Millenials balking at making copies) that has also come up through the ranks at his institution. It's not just an institutional memory problem he's dealing with, it's a Musical Chairs game that ended badly. A colleague, now retired, told me that in the early and middle 1960s, Higher Education didn't fret too much about tenure. If a department wanted to get rid of a colleague, the salary committee would simply not recommend that person for a pay raise. Tenure or not, that person could usually obtain a more lucrative offer someplace else. But that game of Musical Chairs ceased to be fun about 1970 (in other words, just about when I was writing the college boards.) And when the music stopped, Anonymous Community was stuck with people who ... would stay there. (The same phenomenon was in effect everywhere. The only saving grace elsewhere in the food chain was, to use the words of another now retired colleague, that the piss-ants at least were "intelligent piss-ants." More so at some places than at others.)

So to break the deadlock, my friendly connection somewhere in the east endorses the ad-hoc committee.

Yesterday I attended a meeting of an ad hoc committee that had been convened to address a new issue. The meeting was just over an hour, and insanely productive; it was probably the single most productive meeting I’ve seen here. I actually congratulated the chair when it was over.

I concur with his recommendation, further down, that there be sunset procedures for standing committees. I'm less enthusiastic about the creation of ad-hoc committees, particularly during the summer, for their potential to serve as rubber stamps for the administration and to be filled with people who have no research plans for the summer.

WHY THE BADGERS RAN OUT THE CLOCK. Chris Lawrence picks up a New York Times story of independent study abuse in Auburn University's football program (last seen downing a punt at the Wisconsin 1 with nine minutes to go in the game only to watch Wisconsin take a knee inside the Auburn 10 as time ran out.)

Eighteen members of the 2004 Auburn football team, which went undefeated and finished No. 2 in the nation, took a combined 97 hours of the courses during their careers. The offerings, known as directed-reading courses, resemble independent study and include core subjects like statistics, heory and methods, which normally require class instruction.

The professor for those players and many other athletes was Thomas Petee, the sociology epartment’s highest-ranking member. The star running back Carnell (Cadillac) Williams, now playing in the National Football League, said the only two classes he took during the spring semester of his senior year were one-on-one courses with Professor Petee.

At one point, Professor Petee was carrying the workload of more than three and a half professors, an academic schedule that his colleagues said no one could legitimately handle.

“It was a lot of work,” Professor Petee said. “And I basically wore myself out.”

Proper universities have rules to prevent this sort of thing. I may be critical of the Northern Illinois University administration on a regular basis, but that's because I see this university as a place with the potential to shine by doing the right thing. In directed study classes, for example, economics department rules prevent any faculty member from supervising more than two of them in a semester. Professor Lawrence has referred to my suspicion that some programs might be less rigorous than the traditional social sciences. True enough, but university-wide there are restrictions on how many directed studies a faculty member may teach, and it is contrary to university policy to offer a directed study class in lieu of a scheduled class. (The faculty member with the responsibility for scheduling has some responsibility to ensure temporal dispersions of courses such that students with scheduling constraints, whether they are working full time or on athletic scholarships, have opportunities to complete their degrees.)

At Auburn, it's apparently a different story.

THE TRIPCOCK DID ITS JOB. The preliminary investigation of the CTA derailment under Lake Street reveals that the train derailed in such a way that the brake tripper activated and stopped the train.

Investigators had not yet determined what caused the fire, but they said they think a train trip switch, located at the back of each railcar, likely opened during the accident, said Kitty Higgins, a member of the NTSB. The switch is designed to work in conjunction with the signal system and activates the brakes if, for example, a train operator doesn't heed a red light, they said."We believe the derailment essentially tripped the train trip switch. When the car went off the tracks, it hit the ground, the ties, the concrete, something with enough force that it opened this up," Higgins said, holding the small device.When the trip switch opened, the electrical current was interrupted and an emergency brake system was automatically triggered, she said.

Higgins said the trip switch is not designed to open in a derailment, and the NTSB's investigator-in-charge, Mike Flanigon, said he's never seen a trip switch open in a derailment in his 20-plus years of experience.

Rapid transit equipment often has a trip switch designed to operate in conjunction with a track trip sometimes referred to as a "rooster" that is interlocked with an absolute stop signal. It rises when the signal is at stop, to activate the trip switch and stop the train. (Mainline railroads cannot use this device as the mass of a heavy road locomotive can overwhelm the rooster, and an extremely sensitive trip switch -- the obvious response -- is prone to stopping the train at the least provocation. Rapid transit trippers and roosters can be optimized to the weight of representative trains more easily. That does not preclude false deployment. A story has been passed along from the North Shore Line, which was required to cut in the trippers on the Rapid Transit. A large rabbit that was running between the tracks ahead of the train ran afoul of the trip switch, which interpreted the rabbit as a rooster and activated the brakes.)

EIN PROSIT. Mayor Zeidler, this Dopple Bock is for you.

QUOTE OF THE DAY. Margaret Soltan's University Diaries.

The entire integrity of the university rests on this serious truth-seeking, so that any incursion into it by unreasoning fanatics is a deep wound, to itself and to its reputation.

More immediately, each unreasoning fanatic in the university represents a demoralizing uselessness within it, an active, daily erosion of its students' capacity for free and rational thought. As the fanatic vehemently expounds his conspiracies in front of the classroom, some students may mistake his passionate intensity for impressive conviction, his rigid deadly dullness for fascination.

Ayup.

YA GOTTA KNOW THE TERRITORY. The Chicago Tribune's Becky Yerak enjoys a little cross-border Schadenfreude.

At least it did in Milwaukee earlier this week when two fender-benders occurred, four people were arrested for disorderly conduct, and three policemen were sent to a hospital as a precaution after getting splattered by one person's bloody nose.The occasion for the fuel freebie: Northbrook-based Allstate Corp., the nation's second-largest auto insurer, wanted to reward the citizenry of Milwaukee--for its safe-driving record, no less.

"We've had four events like this over the past two years with more than 2,800 motorists receiving free gas," Allstate spokesman Mike Siemienas said Thursday. "This is the first time that any incident has occurred."

It bears repeating: Milwaukee is the city where residents buy their Christmas cards and replacement lightbulbs on December 26 -- it's worth storing them in cellar or attic for a year to take advantage of the lower prices.

But in Milwaukee, hundreds of drivers waited for hours for a free 10-gallon fill-up that Allstate sprung for at one station. The line, two miles long, spilled into a residential neighborhood, stranding some homeowners in their driveways when they needed to get to work.

A police spokeswoman told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that based on Allstate's past experiences, officers didn't arrive for traffic control until 5 a.m. At least 400 people were lined up before Allstate turned on the pumps at 6 a.m.

The article charitably notes that such traffic jams have occurred in other thrifty regions of the country.

TONIGHT'S MODEL RAILROAD READING. California model railroader Mike O'Brien visited Greater DeKalb for a recent round of operating sessions including the Fox Valley O Scalers. He posted a collection of photographs of the Fox Valley club, including a panoramic photo that respects the tradition that the man at the left of the photo is also the man at the right of the photo. Sharp-eyed readers will be able to locate State of Maine Northern boxcars in three of the photos.

QUOTE OF THE DAY. Grandmaster and World Champion Garry Kasparov.

WHEN observing the West's conciliatory dealings with Russia, I'm reminded of a quotation often attributed to Winston Churchill: "However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results."

Via Milt's File, where there's a link to a look at Kasparov the man.

IN MEMORIAM. Trains (for subscribers only, sorry) reports the death of locomotive manufacturer executive and rail photographer Bruce R. Meyer.

Bruce R. Meyer, 70, a 40-year Electro-Motive Division employee who was a prolific black-and-white railroad photographer during the steam-to-diesel transition in the late 1950's and early 1960's, died of cancer at home on June 29.

Mr Meyer looked well enough at the March Meet, where I purchased these pictures. They exemplify his interests.

"I like dramatic detail shots," Meyer said in the Spring 2003 CLASSIC TRAINS "Great Photographers" series entry on him, written by John Gruber. Several years ago, Meyer donated his collection of EMD paint and lettering diagrams to the National Model Railroad Association because "I am a steam lover and not a diesel man." He proved that by trekking to China to see 2-10-2's as recently as 2001, following prior trips to not only China but Germany and Poland.

The Chinese QJ class 2-10-2 steamers have a lot of Soviet design features. The vestibule cab is close to that used on the Andreyev.


The wind break between the coal pile and the locomotive is as useful on Jingpeng Pass as it was in Siberia.

Meyer is survived by wife Bonnie, son Jeffery, and brother David.

Our condolences to the family.

FINDING THOSE MISSING MEN. The editorial board at USA Today have been running a number of point-counterpoint editorials addressing controversies that interest me. I'm taking these out of the order in which they're appearing. First up, from the July 11 edition, an exchange on the changing sex ratios at universities. The context is a growing imbalance between men and women completing college in the California State University system. The editorial board sees reason to be troubled. Their position:

Two girls for every boy sounded good to Jan and Dean, but it's not a healthy ratio for America's colleges and workplaces.

More specifically,

Among high school seniors who have at least one parent who graduated from college, 23% of the boys read at "below basic" levels on national tests, compared with only 7% of the girls. At many nearly all-white high schools, girls dominate the academic honors and run the prominent student activities.

On Tuesday, the American Council on Education reported that the biggest slide on campus has occurred among lower-income white males and Hispanic men. Among white students from all income backgrounds, the report found, gender gaps first emerged in the late 1990s and have widened each year since then.

Boys from higher-income families continue to go to college at high rates, mostly because there's a college for anyone whose checks don't bounce, even C-average boys. But too many of these boys end up in unchallenging courses or drop out because they were poorly prepared for college work

College matters because workers with bachelor's degrees earn salaries that average 62% higher than full-time employees with only high school diplomas. More important, in a global economy a bachelor's degree just gets you to the starting gate.

The blue-collar jobs that once supported families are drying up, affecting males more than females. So if a focused effort isn't made to address boys' needs, as was done successfully a generation ago for girls, many boys' futures will be grim, and the nation's ability to compete will slide.

Anybody remember something called "internalization?" It was wrong, we were instructed, to engage in stereotyping of people in order to prevent those characterizations from becoming self-fulfilling prophecies? And to point out shortcomings consistent with stereotypes was to engage in blaming the victim?

Apparently those rules don't apply to contemporary boys, who can be dosed with Ritalin on the slightest provocation, or regarded presumptively to be louts or rapists. (I exaggerate, but I have encountered enough of such thinking to be more than a bit displeased when it arises.)

The counterpoint sees a different problem.

More women than men have been enrolled in California's public four-year colleges since 1983, and two decades of female majorities on college campuses haven't yet undermined society or changed the fact that men earn more than women on average and hold the majority of business and political leadership roles.

Further, women's growing share of college enrollment is due almost entirely to more women going to college. The number of men going to college hasn't fallen; it's higher now than in the 1990s.

Why have women's college-going rates risen faster than men's? No one knows for sure. Cultural, educational and physiological factors all likely play a role. Researchers have also found evidence that the economic benefits of a college degree — and the risks of not getting one — have grown more rapidly for women than men in recent decades, meaning there may be good economic reasons for more women than men to go to college now.

Rather than gender gaps, Californians should be worrying about racial and class gaps in college enrollment. More than 42% of Californians are black or Hispanic, but only 25% of UC and Cal State students are. We should also be worried about how poorly California's high schools are preparing students for college. Only 35% of high school graduates complete the curriculum needed for admission to UC or Cal State.

While more girls than boys complete the curriculum, we're still preparing far too few students of either gender. Instead of focusing on differences between male and female college enrollment, California's educational energies would be better spent making sure students of all genders and races have the education and opportunities they need to realize their potential and contribute to California's economy.

There's really little disagreement between the two editorials. Perhaps the failure rests with the common schools. Perhaps the failure is in the common schools to develop the right mix of non-cognitive skills (which I maintain has much in common with bourgeois virtues) particularly outside the traditional middle- and upper-middle-income households. One thing that struck me about much of Southern California on my most recent visit is how downscale much of the region has become.

The New York Times reports on the phenomenon, using some of the same evidence and some of the same sources as USA Today. But it appears as if social dynamics are already at work.

[Jen] Smyers, ... at American, said she recently ended a relationship with another student, in part out of frustration over his playing video games four hours a day.

"He said he was thinking of trying to cut back to 15 hours a week," she said. "I said, 'Fifteen hours is what I spend on my internship, and I get paid $1,300 a month.' That's my litmus test now: I won't date anyone who plays video games. It means they're choosing to do something that wastes their time and sucks the life out of them."

Further into the article is evidence that perhaps Ms. Smyers's date figured he could get away with such conduct.

American has no engineering school and no football team; it is a campus where the Democrats' organization is Democratic Women and Friends; "The Vagina Monologues" sells out at annual performances; and almost 1,000 people turned out for the Breastival, a women's health fair.

The faculty is attracting more and more women: a majority of the professors now on the tenure track are female.

Women on campus say there is great female solidarity. What there is not much of, said Gail Short Hanson, the director of campus life, is a dating scene.

Said Ms. Hanson: "If there's a dance, like the Founder's Day dance in February, do the women get their hair done? Yes. Do they get their nails done? Yes. But do they have a date? Probably not. So who do they dance with? Whoever wants to dance."

Future Desperate Housewives in training?

But in North Carolina, the same basic social dynamic is at work.

They and many other women at Greensboro say it is not bad to be on a campus with twice as many women as men because it encourages them to stick to their studies without the distraction of dating.

Maybe, said Ashleigh Pelick, a freshman who is dating a marine she met before college — but she teased a friend, Madison Barringer: "You know you'll go crazy if you never have another boyfriend before you graduate."

Ms. Barringer, a 19-year-old whose parents did not go to college, laughed. But she did acknowledge the gender imbalance as a possible problem.

"I know it sounds picky, but I don't think I'd marry someone without a college degree," she said. "I want to be able to have that intellectual conversation."

Admittedly, colleges exist for purposes other than assortative mating, but we have the makings of yet another "prepare to retire with your cats" scare to hit the national news magazines in a few years.

Creating a balance of men and women is now an issue for all but the most elite colleges, whose huge applicant pools let them fill their classes with any desired mix of highly-qualified men and women But for others, it is a delicate issue. Colleges want balance, both for social reasons and to ensure that they can attract a broad mix of applicants. But they do not want an atmosphere in which talented, hard-working women share classes with less qualified, less engaged men.

Laura at 11-D is troubled by the article.

I expected that the next generation would have the family and work thing figured out better than we do. I expected that more guys would spend time thinking about how to balance their responsibilities as a parent with their work obligations.

It seems that college girls are more aware than I was of the difficulties of combining ambition with family, but their answer is to work harder and more strategically, which I guess is somewhat an improvement, but an unsatisfying one. It's sad that girls are forced to be serious so early. And it seems that boys are still not planning for parenthood, despite the strides by guys in our generation.

The article, however, suggests the outlines of a solution.

Still, men in the work force have always done better in pay and promotions, in part because they tend to work longer hours, and have fewer career interruptions than women, who bear the children and most of the responsibility for raising them.

But if the ladies are being more selective in managing their personal lives, they are developing the skills to compel the guys to behave more like gentlemen, and perhaps we will see couples establishing more careful delineation of responsibilities as the twentysomethings marry.

THE CENTIPEDES' PROGENY. The latest issue of Trains has reached the Shops, with lots of good railroad reading. The Locomotive News describes RailPower's entry into the road switcher market, the model RP20BD (as .pdf). (Quoting from page 20, the magazine is not available on line.)

RailPower determined it would be right in the middle of the 2,000 hp EMD GP38/GP38-2 market. Could RP build a replacement? [Executive Vice President Gary] Eelman believes the RP20BD, powered by three German Deutz engines rated at 670 horsepower apiece is the answer.

The people at RailPower have been doing their homework. (Hey, if this occurred to me, people who do this stuff for a living ought to have thought of it years ago!)

The advantage of the small gensets is that with modern control systems, the engines can be fired up or powered down as required, reducing the emissions compared to the standard single-engine driving one alternator. [Baldwin designer Max] Essl didn't have that technology at his disposal.

Here's the marketing advantage Mr Eelman sees.

"Ultimately the Class Is will replace the GP38s," he said. "It boils down to economics. The GP38 is probably the finest locomotive ever built for its time. And while it's well-loved, at the end of the day, it's still got a big 16-cylinder prime mover. When a GP38 is running in the 8th notch [full throttle and parallel shunt] it's efficient, but for anything else it's not."

The RP20BD has three engine-and-alternator skids mounted longitudinally, rather than the six or eight modules installed transversely in Mr Essl's patents. The concept appears to admit of further scaling up.

REPLACING DEPRECIATED TOOLS. I recently took delivery of a new lawn mower, shown at the left. It's an offering from Improvements. The one it is intended to replace is at the right. It's an American Lawn Mower Model 1403-14 that I bought from Ace Hardware eighteen years ago. The local lawn mower service center advises me that it's now beyond further sharpening or adjustment. But it stood up well for eighteen years, and that included a rather rough breaking-in period when I used it to remove the weeds that were growing where the Victor E. garden now is. (One of the hazards of buying a house in the summer is that the current owners have no incentive to maintain a garden that will yield vegetables after their departure date.)


The new mower pushes much more easily on concrete, but it doesn't push through the grass as well. I may make a few adjustments, but it's possible that I'll exercise Improvements' 60-day return policy and purchase the 1404-16 from American.

THE LIGHTER SIDE OF A CONFERENCE. The recently concluded Western Economic Association conference in San Diego used the Manchester Grand Hyatt as headquarters hotel. The hotel is in the middle of a convention center district that not too long ago was an area of light industry and the docking area for the fishing boats. The view from my hotel room is of a transit corridor and tourist area. The conference shared the Hyatt with Bernina University, which served sewing machine sales representatives and technicians as well as a goodly number of -- I hesitate to say hobbyists, but the attendees didn't appear to be taking in tailoring for the rent money. There was also a large Irish dance gathering of some kind at the convention center. Perhaps the eight-to-ten set had occasion to propagate variations on "I don't wanna be a chicken, I don't wanna be a duck" during breaks.

Some convention-goers might have been bothered by the crossing bells ringing for all the trolleys, and the horns on a few freight trains that rolled through here. All in a night's sleep in DeKalb.


I pushed the zoom on the digital camera to get this view of the trolley's combined Cold Spring Shops and Kinnickinnic Station. The baseball field is in the middle distance.


Swing the camera the other way; there's a view of the channel to the Navy Yard and the Coronado brige. The marina has replaced the fishing port. A few fishing boats are docked closer to downtown.


The conference offered a dinner cruise as an extra-fare option. We stayed in the inner harbor, where U.S.S. Midway, CV-41, is now a museum. More about the carrier in a forthcoming book review.


The Maritime Museum of San Diego is at a nearby pier. Star of India, an early iron-hulled ship, is the most notable ship in the collection.


H.M.S. Rose, a re-creation of a British frigate, (see the Rose page for an illustration of Tower Bridge doing what it was designed to do) is probably the most frequently viewed ship in the collection in her role as H.M.S. Surprise. (In my research, I discovered this frigate simulator. May check it out.)


On the other side of the pier is Californian, a replica of a revenue cutter. We'll see her in action later. Between the tall ships is Berkeley, a Southern Pacific passenger ferry rendered obsolete by the Golden Gate Bridge.


The conference also offered a baseball game, which I passed on, but strolled over that way for a leisurely dinner. The Giants provided the opposition, and the parking lots and streets are filling up in anticipation of the first pitch.


City stadiums with an entertainment district nearby have much to recommend them. The ambience around the new stadium (I forget the name of the corporation that has the naming rights for this one) is not quite that of Wrigley Field, but there's a lot more life than I recall around Tiger Stadium, and Miller Park might as well be in Portage for eateries and watering holes nearby.) This picture is from the front porch of a taqueria in a somewhat more populated area than Antioch.


I had to remind myself that I was in San Diego on business. A relatively new replica of America is now homeported at San Diego, with some cooperation from Manchester Resorts.


Wisconsin Dells has its Ducks. San Diego has a Seal that operates on the same principle. It's built on a Ford truck chassis with an inboard-outboard motor astern. The pilothouse has more than a passing resemblance to a seal, and there are seals and sea lions sunning themselves on the buoys.


On one particularly busy day, the wind was blowing rather smartly. I resisted the temptation to blow off the conference and hire a sailboat to see how close to the wind I could go or coax a screaming reach out of her. This one would suit.


Stars and Stripes 76, from the 2005 defense debacle, was offering 2 1/2 hour cruises all weekend. The timing of those cruises conflicted with commitments I had made at the conference. Californian is also carrying passengers. "A marvelous bird is the pelican. Its beak can hold more ..."

But this is the way things were.

Race 5, May 16, 1992.

San Diego is still a Navy town, yuppie encroachments notwithstanding. This monument to the carriers stands near the entry to Midway. Note that the two training carriers IX-64 Wolverine and IX-64 Sable are mentioned on this monument. (In researching this post I just discovered a weblog devoted to the Great Lakes training carriers that mentions a museum not far from the Glen of North Glenview Metra Station. The weblog also recalls a naval aviator named George H. W. Bush who learned how to land on Sable.)


A U.S. Navy Memorial homecoming statue is to the south. This one was dedicated August 13, 1998.


This naval activity is not far from the San Diego railroad station, which is in the middle of yet another makeover. It is now home to the Coaster commuter trains, and a trolley stop.


But after the conference adjourned, it was a different kind of coaster I was after. The Prior and Church Earthquake is still running at Belmont Park. The digital camera fits in a cargo shorts pocket, the digital camera goes on the coaster, but I'm no longer daring enough to take photographs on the coaster.


This yellow submarine was offering a more sedate ride.


San Diego has been working on its transit, with efforts to provide reliable connections between the buses and the trolleys and the trolleys and the scoots, with an Amtrak connection downtown. The station supervisor at Old Town even pressed a protection bus into service to protect the schedule between Old Town and Mission Beach.


Some new low-floor cars are in service on the northern line. I didn't see any of these downtown.

DOING RIGHT BY YOUR NEIGHBORS. Official and workaday Milwaukee bids farewell to Frank Zeidler.

As members of Redeemer Lutheran Church, Frank and Agnes Zeidler made it a point to go to every funeral for parishioners, even if they sometimes were the only ones there.

A simple gesture and the right thing to do.

That was the Frank Zeidler remembered Wednesday by mourners at the church - a simple man who, as mayor of Milwaukee and in the four decades since, always seemed to do the right thing.

The church was far from empty, though, for the funeral for Zeidler, who died Friday at 93.

Mourners filled the 12 rows of pews, plus the 36 folding chairs set out in back. They squeezed in with the choir in the balcony and lined the brick walls and packed into the foyer, finally standing in the doorway and spilling down the stairs.

How things have changed in the years since he left office.

"He will be missed, we already miss him," said Jeanne Zeidler, the youngest of six children and now mayor of Williamsburg, Va. "If Frank Zeidler were here, he would know exactly what to say. He always did, in any circumstance."

Here is what was said Wednesday:

Frank Zeidler, who served as mayor from 1948 to 1960, oversaw a growing and expanding community. He was dedicated to improving public services, building public housing for the poor and for veterans returning from World War II. After leaving office, he remained vigorously engaged in his community, even as his 93 years were catching up with him.

He was the last Socialist mayor of a major U.S. city and in 1976 was the party's presidential nominee. An older brother, Carl, was mayor before Frank. He was killed in World War II.

In some ways the city is still living off that postwar inheritance.

In the next 12 years, the size of the city doubled, the population hit an all-time peak, horse-drawn garbage crews received their first trucks, nine new firehouses were built, the size of the Central Library was doubled and the Milwaukee Arena built.

[Richard] Leonard, a former editor of the Journal, recalled the time Fortune magazine labeled Milwaukee the second-best managed city in the nation.

"Frank was furious," he said.

He wanted the top slot.

The mayor was a transit advocate to the end.

There were past political figures, such as former Ald. Don Richards and former Milwaukee County Executive F. Thomas Ament, and current ones. Nearly the entire Common Council came, with some taking the No. 30 bus back to City Hall.

Zeidler would have approved.

Indeed, a bus ticket was folded into the red, white and blue flowers that sat on the front seat of the hearse, which led a procession of family and friends to Forest Home Cemetery.

One wonders, though, what this cartoon says about the Milwaukee County Transit System.

Stuart Carlson cartoon from the July 11, 2006 Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, linked without permission.

Mayor Zeidler's successor Henry Maier was able to create the transit authority in 1974, by which time The Transport Company had sold off the streetcars to buy the trackless trolleys, and then sold off the trackless trolleys to upgrade the diesel bus fleet, and when those buses wore out, the farebox receipts were insufficient to buy new ones.

OWNING HOCKEY IS GOOD. Owning a reputation for hiring moonbat faculty that distresses the editorial board of the (shall I take a play from the New York Times and describe it as the ultraliberal?) Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel is not good.

Kevin Barrett should not be allowed to teach at the University of Wisconsin-Madison - and it's not because a large swath of the population finds his contention on who authored the 9-11 terrorist attacks odious.

He should be barred because academic freedom doesn't mean teachers get to teach fiction as fact - even in a university.

For that, please see the blogosphere or subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Monthly. In a classroom,
particularly one funded with tax dollars, the public should have a reasonable expectation that what's taught has fact and truth as foundation.

The snark at the competition notwithstanding, the editorial recognizes a fundamental difference between academic work, including teaching, and posting on a weblog. It's called peer review. The editors get it. Mr Barrett is doing for Middle Eastern Studies what Ward Churchill has been doing for Native American Studies.

The view that Americans - or Israel, for that matter - perpetrated the 9-11 attacks is very real in the Muslim world. A Pew Global Attitudes Project survey this year found Muslims believe that Arabs didn't carry out the attacks. Knowing this has value.

What doesn't have value is teaching something as patently false as the idea that the Bush administration purposely killed the 9-11 victims - even if it is taught with the word "probably" acting as convenient caveat. This is tantamount to teaching gravity probably doesn't exist or that up probably is down.

[Wisconsin provost Patrick] Farrell said, "We cannot allow political pressure from critics of unpopular ideas to inhibit the free exchange of ideas."

Agreed. But Farrell apparently failed to recognize the fundamental issue: standards - for what's taught and who's teaching.

The concluding paragraphs suggest they are particularly distressed both with the hire and the university's defense of the hire.

Not only should Barrett, after review, have not been allowed to teach this course, he shouldn't have been hired to do it in the first place. No freedom, including academic freedom, is absolute. There are limits.

We have many problems with how President Bush led this nation to war in Iraq, but making the leap that his administration murdered on 9-11 crosses a line.

Ouch. More evidence that the editors are angry takes the form of a guest column from an attorney who holds an adjunct appointment at Marquette.

Kevin Barrett, a University of Wisconsin-Madison lecturer who believes that the U.S. government carried out the 9-11 attacks, will get to include his "unconventional" theory as part of a class on
Islam.

Provost Patrick Farrell explains that this is all part of the "continual and fearless sifting and winnowing of ideas." Board of Regents President David Walsh lauded the decision, and Barrett called it "a great day for academic freedom and freedom of speech."

It is a new day, indeed, on campus. I look forward to the UW biology department hiring scholars who support the scientific claims of the intelligent design movement and former Harvard President Larry Summers' views (more accurately, suggestions) regarding the innate differences in mathematical ability between men and women.

The column is not tightly written; it manages to get in all sorts of digs at all sorts of people (including some Da Vinci Code references of which I hope to add more in the form of some book reviews.) That the editors chose to run it as a guest column rather than a letter to the editor suggests some generalized discontent with developments in Madison.

The continuing curricular follies at Wisconsin are not likely to provide even a curriculum that the women's and men's hockey teams can take pride in (to adapt a bit of sarcasm some of my Southern colleagues have applied to their sometimes state flagship campuses.)

LIVING IN A COMPANY TOWN. The dean at Anonymous Community notes that in a number of industrial cities rendered obsolete by air conditioning (or rendered unattractive by the welfare state?) the largest employer in town is a university. He is, correctly in my view, skeptical about viewing the university as an engine of economic development.

I foresee some public favor for research universities and community colleges, but rough sailing ahead for the nondescript four-year colleges. CC’s are cheaper than everyone else, and open to everybody. Research universities can sell the prospect of generating the next Dell. The local nothing-special former teacher’s college can, um, uh…

Up to a point. (That's from the perspective of a long-time faculty member at a converted teachers college with a few things going for it that is the largest employer in its home town, but its home town is now the westernmost suburb of Chicago.) There are two problems with selling your university as a local research incubator. The first is that Everybody Is Doing It. There may still be a few signs along the Reagan Tollway referring to the "Illinois Research and Technology Corridor," otherwise known as "Silicon Prairie," but those signs and access to Lake Michigan water and the rail grid get the region started ... what does Binghamton or Rochester or Elmira or Worcester have that compares? The second is that Not Everybody Knows How To Do It. That's one point in University Inc. (reviewed here) that I have no fundamental disagreement with. Research-lab chasing crowds out other desirable features of a university. So does building corporate-welfare stadiums and Coastie-welfare climbing walls.

HE WOULD NOT BE WORTHY OF RICHARD T. ELY. Milwaukee's radio webloggers will not let go of the error in judgement the University of Wisconsin committed in hiring Kevin Barrett to cover a Middle Eastern Studies course. Jeff Wagner has a jaw-dropping exchange between a reader and Regent Jeffrey B. Bartell, who defends the hiring, kookiness notwithstanding, in this way.

I regard the 9-11 conspiracy theory of Mr. Barrett to be absolutely preposterous. Maybe that's partly because I received an excellent education at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. But I don't believe that an otherwise qualified teacher (he has received very good student evaluations) should be banned from the classroom on the basis of his controversial, even bizarre, views. What are "falsehoods" to you may be credible truth to someone else. And I don't want to rely on "Popular Mechanics" as the ultimate arbiter. U.W. students have the intelligence and analytical powers to sort out fact from fiction and paranoia -- the University's cherished "sifting and winnowing". We should allow them that same learning experience you and I had.

Once upon a time, that learning experience included professors active in research taking the time to read the bluebooks, and they may have marked down for grammatical errors ... not some guy off the street who cannot distinguish serious research from speculation. Apparently at least one Regent has the same problem. (And if you don't want to regard Popular Mechanics as definitive, read Henry Petroski. Same conclusion, with peer review.)

Jeff Wagner also has this gem.

Barrett is so far out there that Milwaukee Journal Sentinel cartoonist Stuart Carlson, himself no stranger to Bush Derangement Syndrome, has taken to mocking Barrett. Having it suggested that you are a "tin foil hat wearing nut case" by Stuart Carlson is like being called untalented by Paris Hilton. It's got to hurt.

[Superintendent's note to the webmaster at the Journal-Sentinel. Fix. The. Link.] More substantively, Mr Wagner observes,

In the first public comment on the matter by the Board of Regents, Board President David Walsh defended Barrett arguing that Barrett should be able to share his views in the classroom. I guess Walsh would also have no problem with a Holocaust disbeliever teaching a survey course in World War II or a supporter of slavery teaching a Civil War class? Yeah, right.

The point is that teaching that "2 + 2 = 6" or that "the world is flat" isn't about academic freedom at all. Instead it's about academic ignorance. Teaching that 9/11 was an "inside job" falls into the same category.

True, up to a point. There ought to be room in the academy for a Civil War class to make sense of the evidence from Time on the Cross that slaves were fed more nutritious diets than free men ate.

Evening hostess Jessica McBride posts an electronic interview with Mr Barrett in which he lays out a potentially coherent course outline.

One such debate is occurring in the academic community, both here and abroad, and there are several defensible positions, including:
* extremist attack by a very dangerous foe--this means war
* extremist attack by a wildly over-rated foe that got incredibly lucky--the 9/11 death toll was the equivalent of a month or two's traffic fatalities, and you're more likely to get hit by lightning than get killed by these terrorists
* "blowback" hypothesis -- this is the natural result of American imperialism
* "inside job" or "complicity" hypothesis

Mr Barrett has weakened his case, however, by so publicly and incoherently pushing the inside job hypothesis. His obligation as professor or designated replacement is to present such material in such a way that the student cannot tell whether he is sympathetic with the neoconservative position or with the Arab street.

WILL IT BE THE DAYTON-HUDSON PAUL BUNYAN'S AXE SOMEDAY? Two months ago I made mock of the University of Minnesota (motto: ten thousand ways to surrender the Axe) building a new outdoor football stadium to play college football on Saturdays the way God and Harry Stuldreher intended.

Years ago, the Minnesota Golden Gophers played college football on Saturday afternoons at a field called Memorial Stadium. It occurred to some marketing genius to play home games on Saturday evenings in something called the Metrodome. Until a new genius came along.

At that time, the mix of tax, student fee, and corporate sponsorship money to pay for this new location for looking at, but not touching, the Axe, was not known. The details of the corporate funding are now public, and they're not pretty. University Diaries has fun with the announcement.

The University of Minnesota’s prostitution continues apace.

In exchange for paying for much of the university’s new football stadium, TCF Financial gets to harass ticket holders with debit card offers to its heart’s content (ticket holder addresses are supposed to be private, but the university is giving them out to its special friend), plus much, much more ...

Just read it.

CALL FOR PAPERS. Seeking the next David P. Morgan.

Amtrak and Lionel are partnering this summer for the seventh annual Lionel Kid’s Essay Contest. This marks the second year that the contest includes 43 Amtrak trains nationwide along corridor and long distance routes.

Children ages 12 and under will have a chance to win the grand-prize, The Santa Fe El Capitan™
toy train set, by describing what they like best about riding Amtrak.

Fourteen lucky first-prize winners will receive The Polar Express™ train set. Winners will be judged on content and originality by a panel of Amtrak judges. The contest begins this month and continues through August 31, 2005.

[Superintendent's note: That deadline is August 31, 2006, no? Fifteen days layoff for the proofreader.]

Entry forms are available on Amtrak trains everywhere East and West.

SHE'LL GET SOME CONDITIONING BENEFITS. I tease my European friends and acquaintances by describing soccer as a game that is popular with eight year old girls in the States, and adult males everywhere else. Apparently the popularity of the game even overcomes skepticism in the Banaian household.

Littlest Scholar took up soccer this year. I am not a big fan of the professional game, and am even less of a fan of youth soccer. The sight of thirty-somethings shouting "Go Jenny!!!!!!!" to their seven year old in a glob with eighteen other seven-year-olds suggests to me nothing short of the end of civilization-as-we-know-it. And for her first ten years on the planet Littlest agreed, and we referred to the kids on the field as "the herds" the fields near our house that from three blocks away can be heard during the height of summer with soccer parents shouting as "the herd prarire."

But this spring LS announced she would like to try the game after all, and so we went. While her interests have changed mine have not, and despite seeing my own child dart and weave around the field -- at least at this age the herd-like behavior sort of disappears -- I confess to being utterly bored with the games.

Perhaps so, but the muscular development of soccer players is aesthetically pleasing, almost as much so as the muscular development of dinghy sailors.

Alas, youth soccer Minnesota style includes overweening cigar-phobia, with probably hidden tendencies to favor metric measurements and European tax rates.

MORE CHEERFUL RAILROAD READING.
A Chicago Transit Authority train derailed and caught fire in the Lake Street section of the Dearborn Street subway. All passengers made it out alive. The photograph, by Paul Beaty of the Daily Herald from USA Today, shows rescue vehicles and a Metra suburban train on the north approaches to Union Station at the Clinton Street level crossing.

Too much grim news tonight. Perhaps the opportunity for lighter fare after some rest.

PRESIDENTIAL SHOES SUPPLANT THE FISHERY. President Bush made a brief visit to Port Washington and Milwaukee to endorse Allen-Edmonds shoes.

At the plant, company president John Stollenwerk presented Bush with a custom-made pair of red, white and blue shoes. Initially, Bush just showed them to the gathered press, then emerged wearing them for brief remarks on the economy.

Bush has bought Allen-Edmonds shoes in the past and said Tuesday: "I occasionally wear something else, but it's my main brand. I like quality."

The President also attended a fundraiser for Mark Green, the Pach gubernatorial candidate.

HE'S NO RICHARD T. ELY. The best person the University of Wisconsin could find to cover some Middle Eastern Studies courses was ... Kevin Barrett, who has attracted all sorts of attention for offering untenable conspiracy theories about the September 11 terrorist attacks. I saw his interview on Hannity and Colmes last night. Ann Althouse, who is more au courant with Internet tricks, has the video. (The comment section is tending to infinity.) She's also keyboarded the best characterization of Mr Barrett's national TV appearance.

From the moment he begins speaking, Barrett twitches and jerks around quite oddly and speaks in a breathless, excited way. He tries to unload a torrent of words about the theory and won't stop to give Colmes a chance to get through his series of questions, which are quite clearly designed to put Barrett in a positive light. Barrett, however, is so keen on his theory, he'd rather spout conspiracy. He looks nutty even before Hannity starts the questions that are meant to trash him. That is, Barrett's a witness who mucks up the direct examination. It doesn't take cross-examination to bring out the problems.

When Hannity takes over, Barrett interrupts him in the middle of his first question. When Hannity insists on finishing the question, Barrett smugly goes "Yeah, yeah, finish up." On Hannity's show! As if he thinks the only people who are watching are folks who think Hannity's a jackass. Hannity asks him if he really believes 9/11 and other terrorists attacks were "an inside job." Barrett, inspiring no confidence that he will allow students to debate with him, says sharply, "I don't believe, I do know that 9/11 was an inside job." Barrett then tries to lay out the details of the theory.

One hopes this man's class presentations are more coherent. But to invoke Morgan Reynolds as an authority on building collapses and to then cite polling data as a justification for his position? Professor Reynolds had some standing as an expert on health economics. I know just enough about polling to understand that one can design questions to elicit just about anything (a good pollster could design a survey in such a way that 80% of the respondents would say the Moon landings were staged in the Mojave Desert) and suggest that argumentam ad popularum might convince a few sixteen year olds.

Why does Wisconsin continue to do such embarrassing things? It's sad having to tell the kids who ring me each year on their fundraisers that their administration is doing things that I cannot support. Donna Shalala, viewpoint diversity, now a lecturer in Middle Eastern Studies who is clearly out of his depth.

BASTARDS. Another rush hour, another train bombing, this time in Mumbai, India.

Eight bombs exploded in first-class compartments of packed Bombay commuter trains Tuesday, killing 190 people and wounding hundreds in a well-coordinated terror attack on the heart of a city that embodies India's global ambitions.

Again, the bombers synchronized their efforts.

Security was tightened in cities around the world from New Delhi to New York after the eight blasts, which struck seven trains within minutes of each other during the early evening rush hour. The bombings appeared timed to inflict maximum carnage in this bustling Arabian Sea port of 16 million, more than 6 million of whom ride the crowded rail network daily.

The Press Trust of India news agency said early Wednesday that police had increased the toll to 190 killed and 625 injured. In the hours immediately after the attacks, officials put the toll at 147 dead and 439 injured.

For the short term the terrorists, whatever their motives might have been, achieved one tactical goal.

Some residents returned to ride the trains to work early Wednesday, but there was not the usual crush of passengers. In many first-class cars - the target of the bombings - there were fewer than half the usual 60 to 70 people.

"Our trust in Bombay has been shattered, we had always thought trains were safe, but what can we do - in this city trains are the lifeline," said Brijesh Ojha, 35, who boarded the train at Bandra station, where the first blast occurred. "They can't scare us this way."

These terrorist attacks have identified a vulnerability in the mobile 'phone network.

The mobile phone network collapsed, adding to the sense of panic across the city. With train services down until midnight, thousands of people were stranded without any way of reaching their
families.

Something goes wrong, everybody who has a mobile 'phone attempts to use it, the network can't handle it. One doesn't have to knock down the repeater towers, a side effect of the World Trade Center attack, to disrupt the network.

No doubt some fourth-rate Barrington Moore will see the unfortunate necessity of blowing up the first-class accommodation.

The Press Trust of India, citing railway officials, said all the blasts hit first-class cars - a sign the assailants were targeting the professional class in a city that has come to embody India's 21st century ambitions.

Bombay, also known as Mumbai, is the center of India's booming financial industry and the home of Bollywood, a city that presents itself to the world as a cosmopolitan metropolis where bankers dine with movie stars and fashion models party until dawn.

While that image captures one side of life in the city, Bombay is also crowded and largely poor. And across the city, the prosperous and downtrodden worked together to aid survivors.

I can see the argument already: until there is first class for everybody, there ought not be first class for anybody. Some people got tired of talking about it and decided to do something.

Insta Pundit has his usual comprehensive battlefield coverage. Counterterrorism Blog's coverage includes a map of the suburban lines. Mumbai is a very thickly settled metropolitan area. India Uncut has extensive coverage. There's a new Blogspot weblog called Mumbai Help that is attempting to reunite survivors and locate injured people. (The hotshots might snark at those free Blogger basic weblogs, but the service comes in quite handy at times like this when getting something out in a hurry is what matters.) Updates on available train service are also available online.

Spare a moment for the residents of Mumbai, who may have just been drafted into the war on Islamofascism. I will be following this story and any fundraising responses that emerge.

THE EQUIVALENT OF TWO MAJOR PENALTIES? Italy won soccer's World Cup, aided by French captain Zinedine Zidane's headbutt of Marco Materazzi.

Reuters photo from Sports Illustrated.

The champions of soccer are an Italian team that held the United States team to a 1-1 tie after regulation despite two ejections of U.S. players, and survived to hold the French team to a 1-1 tie after regulation (and regulation itself is as flexible as an Illinois speed limit) then to win the title on a tiebreak more bogus than college football's first-and-goal from the 20.

Fox News's John Gibson has it about right.

One crummy little head-butt and you would have thought the world had ended. I've seen worse in peewee hockey. Much worse in baseball, basketball and football.

Heck, eight year old State Line girls get into their soccer more aggressively.

LANDING HERRING AND COD. Brian Fagan traces the evolution of the fishing industry in Fish on Friday: Feasting, Fasting, and the Discovery of the New World, providing Book Review No. 21. Christian tradition provided some of the impetus for eating fish (the great expense of raising meat, which is still a rather costly way to convert grain into human food, and the short growing season also contributed) although Professor Fagan uncovers no evidence that the Catholic fish tradition was a favor by the Pope to fishermen. (Economists have investigated the effect of the end of the mandatory Friday fish fry, still a Wisconsin tradition, on the price of fish, with an article in American Economic Review (on JSTOR) that was reprinted in The Daily Economist.) Anglican Britain, on the other hand, saw some benefit in continuing the fish days as a way to stimulate their merchant marine and provide experienced hands for the Royal Navy.

Professor Fagan does not offer a learned disquisition on

P= KQ^aY^bS^cI^dC^eL^fZ^g(P-B)^h,

a rather cumbersome regression of the ex-vessel price of fish at New England ports to estimate with the computing technology of the mid-1960s. Rather, he focuses on the two principal fisheries of the Middle Ages and their evolution, one in which shipwrights learned how to build for the open ocean, fishermen learned of the best fishing grounds, and fishing fleets might have made passages to North America well before Christopher Columbus and John Cabot mapped the Atlantic coast of the Americas. (And "Brasil" was the fisherman's version of the Big Rock Candy Mountain.)

Ocean fishing began close to the shore, often using tidal nets called "kiddells," leading to the expression "different kettle of fish," and the earliest catches were often eel or herring, a fish with a spawning run that resembles that of the Great Lakes smelt. Herring, however, were difficult to preserve. They had to be carefully cleaned, and required a great deal of salting to retard spoilage, yielding a not terribly appetizing product that Alexander Dolgun and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn would recognize as the stuff used in the Soviet Gulag to conform to regulations that prisoners-in-transit be fed while ensuring that they would be miserable. Because they could be relatively easily harvested, people worked on methods to improve preservation, leading ultimately to what the Baltic peoples call "matjes" herring. This recipe sounds different from our Great Lakes marinated herring.

A little pick-me-up for the night's posting.

I'm still looking for something close to the taste of Smith Brothers' Appe'Tang pickled herring, no longer in production.

Further offshore were the cod, a larger fish that could also be preserved more easily. (Clean it, extract the oil from the liver, dry it and salt it and you have something called "stockfish" that keeps indefinitely and can be made tender with a bit of water.) Better ships, better nets, and better navigational methods expanded the cod fishery, although keeping the monasteries and the masses provisioned with sufficient fish was still a struggle. Global climate changes affected both the location and the access to the fishing grounds as the Medieval Warm Period gave way to the Little Ice Age (global warming and cooling without SUVs or nuclear weapons?)

The discovery that falling water could be used to power mill stones and woodworking machinery inspired some people to use the millponds to raise carp. These farms provided many a costly lesson in circulating the water and keeping the fish healthy, lessons that contemporary fish farmers contribute to.

Despite preservation and inland farming, getting the fish to market in the days before refrigeration was a struggle against spoilage. Fish on Friday has numerous references to the fast horses and teams relaying wagons to hustle the catch to monastery and palace, a tradition that survives in the Class C parcels and fish headcode and Henry's "Flying Kipper" on the Island of Sodor, and some hot refrigerator trains out of Boston on the New Haven.

The book ends with the development of the New England fisheries and the triangular trade of the early colonial period. It is in the discussion of trade relations that the book disappoints. First, a relatively minor complaint. A book about fishing and fish markets requires good maps. Yet the few maps offered to depict "locations mentioned in the book" often leave out locations mentioned on adjacent pages, such as Scarborough, the site of a major fish fair (was the parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme to mask the smell of overripe herring?) and Bristol and most of the Hanse ports. It's in the discussion of Hanse management of the fishing trade where Professor Fagan, (emeritus anthropology) demonstrates the utility of interdisciplinary cooperation. The Hanseatic League (the name, much like "Soviet Union," doesn't translate well into English) united international trading enterprises called Hanse as a sort of proto-customs union with protection of the sea lanes that is today provided by nation-states, sometimes by treaty. Here's a complaint Professor Fagan levels at the Hanse, page 176.

The colder conditions of the Little Ice Age shortened cereal-growing seasons throughout Norway, especially in the north. Occasional food shortages, made worse by the Black Death, raised the specter of famine. The opportunistic Hanse arrived in Bergen in cogs bulging with grain from their home ports. The same ships departed crammed with stockfish. The Hanse monopoly had few benefits for Norway, but it broadened the market for stockfish and provided a relatively secure return in grain.

Sounds like mutually beneficial trade to me. Were the terms of trade unfavorable to either party?

Fish on Friday includes a number of recipes, some so ancient the authors recommend modern cooks not attempt them, others modified to reflect the greater availability of seasonings today (the medievals, let alone nineteenth century farmers, would be startled that salt and pepper are boring.) Most of the recipes are somewhat upmarket: here, from Peasant to Palace, p. 5, is a recipe that brings to mind a song. The recipe may have occurred to a frugal Russian contemplating a stockfish operation.

RASPUTIN'S JELLIED FISH HEADS.

Codfish heads (use 6 to 12, depending on size)
1 cup finely chopped onion
1/4 cup wine vinegar
Salt and pepper
Grated fresh horseradish

If purchasing whole fish, clean and remove heads, save fish for soup [or stockfish??] and place heads in heavy saucepan. Add water to cover and bring to boil over medium heat. Add onion and wine vinegar, and salt and pepper to taste. Cook gently about 15 minutes. Let cool, then chill until natural jelly forms. Serve cold with horseradish.

THIS MORNING'S COLLEGE SPORTS REPORT. I picked up the USA Today and found what looks like the police blotter inside. First some sad news.

A New Mexico State football player who was set to be one of the Aggies' starting linebackers this season has died.

Shana Leaupepe, 21, died Friday in Long Beach as a result of a drive-by shooting, New Mexico State coach Hal Mumme said Saturday. Leaupepe was visiting family in California when he was killed, Mumme said.

Also sad is Mr Leaupepe's path to college football.

Leaupepe was the leading tackler in 2004 for West Los Angeles College. With 56 tackles, he led his team to a 7-3 mark and a conference championship. In his two years at the college, he tallied more than 100 tackles and was named an all-conference selection twice.

At West Los Angeles, no football player is left ineligible. (Coastal California looks more and more downscale with each passing year. I'll have some observations on that score in a few days.)

There's also cheerful news from the east coast.

The captain of the Harvard football team was indefinitely suspended and could be kicked off the team after he was accused of breaking into his former girlfriend's dorm room and assaulting her.

His career at Harvard may be over, if he's convicted, and the evidence is somewhat more compelling than that in the Duke lacrosse cases. but he has eligibility if West Los Angeles is interested.

There are some mundane transfer and transaction announcements, way down the page.

DIVIDING THOSE GAINS FROM TRADE. Via Joanne Jacobs, news of lamentations from Corporate America that young hires aren't interested in paying their dues.

Employers and hiring experts say the younger generation no longer approaches the first job as a nest for the next 10 or five or even three years.

"There's no longer a stigma in changing jobs frequently," said Eileen Kohan, executive director of USC's career center. "It's not unnatural for someone to have several jobs in their first five years out of college."

That revolving door is costly to employers. Every recruit gone after a year or so represents the loss of about 1.5 times the worker's salary for costs associated with recruiting, training and the like, according to Saratoga, a San Jose-based unit of PricewaterhouseCoopers. "The war for talent has shifted," Saratoga director Scott Pollak said. "You still want to recruit, but the new challenge is, how do you keep the best people? Retention is now a big issue."

I have trouble mustering much sympathy for employers that compete for people with skills only to leave them unused.

But while the job market may have changed, corporate culture hasn't.

Many entry-level positions still require making copies, fact-checking reports and taking the blame when the manager messes up. In industries such as Hollywood, no matter how many calculus classes the wunderkind has taken, the new kid on the block will still be asked to get coffee.

And new hires may not be ready for that kind of sacrifice.Generation Y "tends to want, and want it now," said Carol Hacker, president of Carol A. Hacker & Associates in Alpharetta, Ga., a corporate consulting and seminar company.

"They don't want to take the time that it takes to work up. They expect that that's going to happen pretty quickly," she added.

Much of Corporate America still exhibits the mindset under which a billing clerk could become president of a railroad? That was also the mindset that kept the railroad from adapting where that was called for.

Apparently some non-cognitive skills require further development.

With young workers just stepping out of the classroom, the more specific the expectations, the better people respond, said Carol Cincotta, senior vice president and human resources director at New York-based Ketchum, an international public relations agency.

Ketchum uses in-house training and consultants to teach its young associates about core practices of the business and even whether walking around the office with iPod earphones is frowned upon.

"No one teaches that in school," Cincotta said.

Perhaps there's room in the curriculum for teachers and professors to explain (perhaps in light of assignments that look like busy-work) that some of those apparently mindless tasks such as proofreading the documents and making the coffee are opportunities to demonstrate an aptitude for taking on the more challenging tasks. (Is there a way of using the National Income and Product Accounts to trace the strength of the entry level job market and the aptitude of corporate-level managers thirty to forty years on? There was a strong job market for collegians in the early 1960s, so strong that newly graduated lawyers could insist on pro bono opportunities as a condition of employment. That cohort is now of an age to be occupying the corner offices.)

IN MEMORIAM. Frank Zeidler, the third Socialist mayor of Milwaukee, has crossed the final summit. Mayor Zeidler had something of the polymath about him.

Zeidler didn't drink, didn't smoke, didn't drive a car. He read relentlessly, loved statistics and collected fossils. He rewrote Shakespeare in contemporary language but didn't like going to shows or plays very much.

An editorial tribute from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel places his socialism in perspective.

He was never a Socialist the way modern, political sleaze-mongers would surely portray him as.

He was a "Sewer Socialist," part of a political breed that emphasized public works and mass transit and the environment, but also came to see themselves as Libertarians of a sort, concerned about government infringement on personal rights.

Sewer Socialists were not Marxists - although nowadays, when everything is a label, he would no doubt be slandered as one.

Another editorial suggests that neither "sewer Socialism" nor good-government notions envisioned public choice.

In an editorial in 1997, we remarked on the "sewer socialism" that seemingly motivated the socialists who occupied the mayor's office in Milwaukee. We defined this as a movement that had as its roots "an emphasis on direct, tangible benefits for working people, such as sewers and good government, rather than abstract and radical social theories."

Zeidler was undoubtedly a practitioner. We note that the "sewer socialism" that marked its 100th anniversary in 1997 also marked a period in which Milwaukee government was considered clean, honest and efficient.

In these times of indictments and convictions of political figures in Wisconsin, the unquestioned integrity that Zeidler brought to the task of governance is ultimately his most striking legacy.

What the news reports and the editorials and the Journal-Sentinel's slide show do not tell you is that Mayor Zeidler also attempted to set up a transit authority in 1951 to keep the Rapid Transit line running, and that his name appears, along with William K. Walthers and Albert C. Kalmbach, on the documents establishing the Model Railroad Club of Milwaukee (where the alert visitor will find a campaign poster for his brother Karl) and he played a role in establishing the National Model Railroad Association.

CHICAGO HAS ITS TASTE, MILWAUKEE HAS ITS SUMMERFEST. My body was telling me to take it easy after last week's adventures (of which more, there will be travel guides and book reviews aplenty.) Byron, Illinois, where the Milwaukee Road once crossed the Chicago Great Western, has a somewhat smaller street festival that combines the eating and the live entertainment.


The festival operates on the tickets-only basis to simplify cash handling (and provide fewer targets for the sticky fingers?) The lines are a bit more manageable than Taste of Chicago, and the food is less expensive.


Does this refer to a pancake house run by Swedes or a pancake house that serves Swedish pancakes? (There is a difference.)


Might be worth a road trip to find out.

The Zipper continues to be an attraction at traveling carnivals.


Its design does not permit quick loading, which is why they aren't at amusement parks.


The operators were leaving some of the cars empty. Has some operations researcher figured out that one can make more money loading fewer passengers and offering slightly longer trips? In my experience, one spends a long time being jiggled up and down as the ride loads, then one gets about five rotations clockwise and five rotations counterclockwise, then one gets jiggled again on the unload.

Whatever the reasoning, there was a bit of a wait for the ride.


State Line kids understand the value of leaving a few things to the imagination. (We'll do a compare-and-contrast with California next week, to California's disadvantage.)

Portable fun houses still draw crowds. Brunnhilde and a slightly tipsy Kaiser if you know where to look.


The portable freefall ride offers theme-park-like productivity ... load twelve, hoist, drop, unload.


I'm getting the timing of this digital camera down ... hit the trigger as the car dropped.

East of Byron is this battle monument in Stillman Valley. It has the look of a northern Civil War monument except the uniform doesn't look quite right and (note the sun angle) the musketeer is not facing south, as is obligatory for Civil War monuments in these parts.


It's possible to lose a battle and have a community named after you, if you have the right friends. Reflect on this monument the next time you hear a reference to the "tribal areas" of the North West Frontier.


The monument marks the location of a battlefield cemetery. A captain named Abraham Lincoln was present at the interment of these troops. Language elsewhere on the monument suggests that at the time it was built, some people's emotions were still a bit raw over his subsequent murder by a different kind of insurgent.


The Dakota, Minnesota, and Eastern's Iowa, Chicago, and Eastern (do they also aspire to buying Pennsy and Erie lines?) passes through Byron and Stillman Valley toward Chicago. These diesels are near Davis Junction.


Rochelle is not far away. After a taste of Byron, a bit of train-spotting. First up, a hot intermodal train on BNSF.


Union Pacific had this nearly ex-works 8487 on a stack train.


Severe clear, warm temperatures, a bit on the muggy side, the rains have not yet materialized.

THE SECOND QUARTER REPORT. I have added another twelve book reviews to the 50 Book Challenge for 2006. The first eight are indexed at Cold Spring Shops or European Tribune or the 50 Book Challenge site.

9. David Haward Bain, The Old Iron Road, 14 April 2006.
10. Mary Evans, Killing Thinking, 18 April 2006.
11. Alvin Kernan, The Unknown Battle of Midway, 20 April 2006.
12. Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully, Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway, 23 April 2006.
13. Jennifer Washburn, University, Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education, 18 May 2006.
14. Richard H. Hersh and John Merrow, eds., Declining by Degrees, 21 May 2006.
15. Dan Brown, The DaVinci Code, and
16. Simon Cox, Cracking the DaVinci Code, 31 May 2006.
17. Catherine Merridale, Ivan's War, 7 June 2006.
18. Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas, The Book of Hiram, 9 June 2006.
19. Michael Schumacher, Mighty Fitz, 17 June 2006.
20. John McPhee, Uncommon Carriers, 22 June 2006.

I managed to read a few more books on the recent road trip, and expect to offer a few more reviews in the next week or so. (Cross-posted at European Tribune and the 50 Book Challenge.)

The bookworm has some more segments.

Ooooooooooooooooooooo

TO PRESERVE THE UNION. On these pages, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain's name has often been invoked as an explanation for the academic administrator holding a faculty position, not as a backup job, but as a regular job from which he or she is temporarily serving as administrator.

Independence Day passed while I was marked off. Power Line's Scott Johnson invokes Colonel Chamberlain along with the 20th Maine he commanded, and the First Minnesota as instrumental in stopping the Rebels on July 2 at Gettysburg, a development that along with Vicksburg's surrender on July 4 persuaded United States leadership (at levels subordinate to President Lincoln) to begin thinking about victory.

MARKETS EXIST TO DIVIDE GAINS FROM TRADE. There are two important parts of the title. There must be gains from trade, meaning benefits to the buyer and the seller, and there must be an acceptable division of the gains between the buyer and the seller. For many years, this site has maintained that the one-contract-fits-all labor market, in which the employer pays a skilled worker a lot of money in exchange for all of that worker's waking hours (and many of the overnight hours as well) is inefficient, particularly for working moms.

Corporate America is catching on.

Baby boom moms largely worked out the details of flexible hours, telecommuting and the like with their bosses one at a time, behind closed doors, for fear of setting an apple-cart-upsetting precedent.

Their daughters, the current mothers of young children, are putting their expectations squarely on the table. Employers can respond with flexwork options, or they can look for someone else. If they don't offer flexwork, they might be doing a lot of looking.

So rather than look, some employers are considering a different division of the gains from trade.

"For many young mothers, it just didn't work for them that their mothers went to work. I hear that all the time: 'I'm not going to do that to my kids,' " says Susan Seitel, president of Work & Family Connection Inc., a publishing and consulting firm in Minnetonka, Minn.

Young moms say that they've got flexible attitudes about flexibility: They'll make it work for their employers, if their employers will make it work for them.

Such arrangements do not have the "stick-it-to-the-single-or-childless" property of mandatory leave policies for some people.

"I talk about this all the time with my friends from college and business school," says Slaughter, a 2005 graduate of the University of Chicago Business School who is an internal consultant with Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Co.

Instead of being forced to accept or decline a job with non-negotiable hours and work culture, she says, "for our generation, we hope that there's the opposite - creative ways to make it work."

Each department at Northwestern Mutual offers a combination of work-life programs that meet its business demands, says Jean Towell, a company representative. Managers can decide if and how to use options such as job-sharing and compressed workweeks.

Some employers show understanding of the concept that the outputs, not the inputs, are what matter.

"All of the managers are doing the flextime," [Pyra Max Bank senior vice president of marketing and human resources Monica] Baker tells a reporter. "If someone wants to do four 10-hour days, they can. It's just the culture now, as long as the work is getting done and the bank is profitable."

Now to do something about that proliferation of vice presidents ...

RIDING THE SCOOTS. While I was away, the Chicago Tribune explored the end of the Milwaukee Road's Fox Lake line.

Fox Lake is a gift of the glaciers that scoured this section of northeastern Illinois. The town is the lake and the lake is the town. It seems every other driveway has a boat on a trailer in the driveway. The gentle hills and the water lend a feel of northern Wisconsin right here in Illinois, including a seeming abundance of taverns and, incredibly, Packer fans."

The glaciers were no respecters of something as mundane as 42 degrees 30 minutes North latitude (the approximate location of the Cheddar Curtain,) which gives northeastern Illinois a little bit of the Lake District.

Chicago Tribune photograph by Chris Walker.

This week, Aurora, where artistic dinosaurs roam.

There are overachieving young wizards here at the Illinois Math and Science Academy, and at least two famed, though fictional, underachievers in Wayne and Garth of "Wayne's World." Aurora's Paramount Arts Centre is listed in the National Register of Historic places, while its Hi-Lite 30 drive-in movie theater from the '50s is likely doomed.

Aurora contains more than 130 authenticated Sears homes, making it one of the largest concentrations nationally. Sears homes, made between 1908 and 1940, were designed to be shipped broken down and assembled on site, with shipments timed to arrive in coordination with construction scheduling. As a railway town, Aurora was a natural site for these buildings.

"Little boxes on a hillside and they all look just the same" antedated those Fifties gripes about soul-less suburbia. The vanishing drive-in theater is a canonical illustration of opportunity costs at work. A drive-in theater might provide local kids with remunerative work and the owners with a good living on three or four months of receipts, but real estate hustlers see all sorts of potential for putting up 130 or 200 descendants of those Sears houses on the infield.

Chicago Tribune photograph by Michael Tercha.

Aurora is the outer terminus of the Burlington line, route of the Naperville Zephyrs. The service sets the world standard for moving commuters in large numbers and relative comfort. Other suburban services might deliver more than 2000 passengers per train on four-minute intervals during the morning commute, and return similar numbers on similar headways in the evening, but not as expeditiously and generally not with the expectation of a seat, which is almost always available somewhere on the train.

THE WINONA, ST. PETER, AND PACIFIC. Granger railroads are no longer the weaklings of the industry. Ethanol production and distribution has the potential to provide a modern version of the elevator-and-red-boxcar system of years ago. Powder River Basin coal is a reality. At present, Union Pacific and Burlington Northern ("BNSF," meaning nothing, and "CN," also meaning nothing, are only slightly less obnoxious than the designated-hitter rule) jointly operate the one rail link from the coal fields to the rest of the rail network. Dakota, Minnesota and Eastern, the owner of several Chicago and North Western and Milwaukee Road secondary mains in the upper Midwest, including the Winona & St. Peter, intends to build its own line to the coal fields. The expected increase in traffic is not sitting well with all the railroad's neighbors.

[A] plan by the Dakota, Minnesota & Eastern Railroad (DM&E) to run mile-long trains loaded with coal through here daily has fueled a bitter eight-year battle pitting [Rochester's Mayo Clinic] and its hometown against a growing railroad.

On one side is DM&E, which is based in Sioux Falls, S.D. It wants to expand into a 2,762-mile network carrying coal from Wyoming's Powder River Basin. DM&E President Kevin Schieffer says eight coal trains could come through here daily.

Dozens of towns, farm bureaus, electric utilities and economic development groups support the expansion. Schieffer says it "serves a compelling national interest."

On the other side are Rochester's Chamber of Commerce, city and county governments and the Mayo Clinic — this city's biggest employer. They say as many as 34 trains could come through a day, blocking traffic and emergency vehicles. Because the trains could carry hazardous materials as well as coal, they also worry that a derailment would prompt Mayo's patients to go elsewhere, which could ruin the local economy.

"If a spill should occur, it would be international news," says Kenneth Brown, chairman of the Olmsted County Board of Commissioners. "Then when somebody needs to go to the doctor, they'll say, 'Maybe I should go to the Cleveland Clinic or Johns Hopkins.' "

Thirty-four trains is no big deal, and perhaps the folks at the Mayo Clinic ought to look closely at the New York Central Lakefront Line, through Cleveland, or Baltimore & Ohio's tunnels under Baltimore, and read some of the stencils on tank cars going there, before fretting about a few more coal trains, and potential competition on unit train rates.

The potential choke point on the DM&E is likely to be Mankato, where the lines cross, rather than Rochester in any event. College towns with lots of trains ... we know how to cope with that. With the opening of the Rochelle container yard, there are close to 100 movements a day through DeKalb, many of which are picking up speed after a lunch break (otherwise known as the dispatcher hasn't been working well with the yardmaster.)

More to the point might be the pricing problems to emerge as regional railroads challenge Burlington and Union Pacific. The completion of the Union Pacific led to competition among the existing Chicago-Council Bluffs railroads to haul the coastal traffic, competition that was sometimes tamed by collusive agreements, collusive agreements that were undone by additional railroads, additional railroads that sometimes offered shippers at intermediate destinations a break on rates by the construction of branch lines, leading to additional collusive agreements, which under one interpretation of history midwived rate regulation, ostensibly in the public interest, in practice to turn the collusive agreements into cartels. Those that do not remember the past ...

KEEPING A SPRECHER FOR A BAD DAY. I was a bit tired on my return last night and decided against the traditional celebration of a Brewer victory, another Chris Capuano shutout of the Cubs. That's one favorite thing banked against a down day to come. The Cubs continue to have troubles with Milwaukee's racing sausages. (Was it Steve Bartman's fan interference or former Pirate Randall Simon's interference with the Polish sausage that kept the Cubs out of the World Series?)

When Aramis Ramirez was taking some cuts in the on-deck circle before the start of the seventh inning Thursday at Miller Park, he nearly was run over by one of the participants in the Sausage Race.

Milwaukee manager Ned Yost is keeping the proper perspective.

Milwaukee manager Ned Yost maintains that beating the Cubs is really no big deal for the Brewers."We don't get up for this one any more than we do any other game," Yost sai