COME FOR THE PICTURES, STAY FOR THE COMMENTARY. The traffic spike that began in late February reflects frequent visits from Google Images.

Site Meter chart.

By all means, look at the pictures, but read Cold Spring Shops for the articles!

Seriously, thanks for your continued interest and support.

OVERPRICED CORPORATE WELFARE? The editors at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel are not yet ready to close the St. Lawrence Seaway.

But those pushing to close the seaway - the conservation group Great Lakes United called for an overseas-freighter ban in late March - forget that the seaway provides economic benefits.

So did the North Shore Line, but when the railroad was no longer able to meet its payroll, it closed.

While oceangoing traffic accounts for only about 7% of all Great Lakes shipping, that percentage is higher for some ports and carries an economic impact beyond the small number. Port of Milwaukee Director Eric Reinelt said the annual percentage for Milwaukee is usually around 11% and has been as high as about 20%. In 2006, the port handled more than 710,000 metric tons of imports and exports through the seaway, up 99% from 2005.

Yes, and a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant can be depended on to say something about the "intrinsic worth" of his creations. That tonnage works out to about 7100 railroad cars, or about 20 car movements (some of which involve a car arriving with one cargo and leaving with another) per day. That's fewer freight cars than the North Shore Line handled in a day.

In addition, he says, oceangoing ships provide the best and cheapest way to deliver such freight as steel and wind turbines used in power generation, as well as to move grain from farmers in southeastern Wisconsin to foreign ports.

With a side order of round gobies, zebra mussels, and fish viruses. The Seaway has a positive marginal product. Whether that marginal product makes its continued operation worthwhile is another matter, and the Port Director is unlikely to say, yes, turf me out. It's up to the editorialists to give that case consideration.

SO CUT COSTS BY TOUGHENING STANDARDS. A weblogger posting as Adjuncts in Hell contemplates rising college sticker prices as a ruling-class plot to preserve social stratification.

So much social phenomena is coming to a head here. First, consider the revenge of the ruling class once threatened by a surging middle-class in the wake of GI Bill. By launching tuition rates at top-tier schools in the ionosphere, they can keep ambitious proles out and hold those pesky student-aid wannabes in check when they graduate in debt. Forget that current enrollment rates at colleges and universities hover around 45%, higher tuition (even at State U) guarantees that any middle class kid who dares to advance up the social ranks will be hamstrung by student loans. That's a twofer in places like Newton, Mass; it keeps them out of your neighborhood and their brats out of your child's private school.

That presupposes a conspiracy to restrict output and raise prices. Given the wide availability of information about the return on investment in human capital, the simpler explanation is a rightward shift in the derived demand for degrees.

It's relatively simple for socially-conscious curriculum committees and admissions offices to undo such a conspiracy, if in fact there were such a conspiracy. Hence the title of my post. The conspiracy theory has it part right and part wrong.

Second, by filling the ranks of lower tier colleges with overworked adjuncts, more and more students are deprived of the full and proper attention of dedicated professors who can focus on two or three classes. Instead, for $50,000 - $75,000 (before 7.5% interest over 20 years), they get harassed and overstressed freeway fliers who bolt in and out of eight classrooms on four campuses and consider "office hours" to be a dashed-off response to e-mail at four in the morning because they're up correcting a self-perpetuating mound of student papers. It may seem that "everyone" goes to college, but not everyone is receiving the same education. Can a students gain a first-class education at In-State Tuition U? Without question. But do they have the requisite curiosity and academic skills going in? That leads to the next issue . .

It has occurred to the poster that information about safety schools practicing the access-assessment-remediation-retention model is also widely available, and those high sticker prices (although, as at Gimbel's, nobody pays list price) at the seventy-five or so "top forty" universities simply reflect a flight to quality that could easily be accommodated by more of the seventy-five or so "next forty" universities emulating their "most selective" counterparts.

Our entertainment-addled culture is the modern equivalent of the drain-circling Roman Empire's "Bread and Circus." Business students see a bankruptcy-court-hopscotching charlatan like Donald Trump as a role model. Students spoon fed a watery pablum of pilfered Shakespeare plots turbo-charged with sex and celebrity on the WB and Fox openly disdain genuine literature and are openly hostile to books. Once they graduate, they at last discover they will not be able to afford that Hummer H-2, the trip to Cancun, a wardrobe of wage-slave-rendered Abercrombie and Fitch rags, or even a one-way ticket out of mom-and-dad's basement. When that reckoning comes, they're on the wrong side of the college walls with only a handful of dimes from selling back their Norton Shakespeare, a fuzzy idea of how punctuation works, and a nasty drinking problem. Ever really wonder why those 25-year-old second-chancers at the community college are as serious as a heart attack in the classroom? Consider them the lucky ones.

So cut costs by toughening standards.

ANTICIPATING DEREGULATION. Just before the Staggers Act took effect, Ann Friedlaender and Richard Spady published Freight Transport Regulation: Equity, Efficiency, and Competition in the Rail and Trucking Industries. I recently read through it for insights into modeling competition between two modes, one subsidized, one for profit, offering multiple products. There are a few ideas to develop further. As the 50 Book Challenge rules do not confine readers to reviewing new books (there's always somebody going to claim Ulysses or War and Peace after all) this Book Review No. 9 will focus on a few of the book's findings retrospectively. The research suggested that even under regulation, the bulk commodities were bearing a disproportionate share of the railroads' common and joint costs, despite the Interstate Commerce Commission's use of value of service pricing under which high valued finished goods were supposed to pay a higher markup over marginal cost. It's no surprise given those findings that the remaining major railroads all have substantial business in the coal fields. The rate structure in the final years of regulation was also one in which rates were below marginal costs in what railroaders call the Official Territory and what journalists call the Rust Belt. The authors conclude with a welfare-economics appeal to introduce deregulation in such a way as to cushion its adverse effects: perhaps that would have entailed a slower decline of the heavy industry of the Official Territory and a slower deregulation of trucking. (In that alternative history, would Wal-Mart have become the retail power we now know even more rapidly by integrating backward into trucking and manufacturing to take advantage of the private-carrier exemptions.)

The book completely missed -- as did all the Great Experts of the day -- the combination of intermodal cooperation and international trade under which the railroads reclaimed much of the time-sensitive high-value traffic by running van trains under contract to specific shippers. That's a cautionary tale that adaptations to rule changes cannot always be anticipated.

MAYBE SUMMER WILL COME AFTER ALL. Not a bad afternoon for a softball game.


Although an Akron player has just made a base hit, (click for a larger image and note the ball going through the box) the home team got the win.

Northern Illinois University has its own Gertie the Duck. This mallard hen decided ashtray sand was a good place to lay some eggs.


When I left the office, the hen had gone away to gather some food.


The zoom feature on a digital camera is useful for obtaining pictures at a non-threatening distance from the nest.

MAKING THE GRADE. Well done, kids.

Northern Illinois is one of only 33 Division I women's basketball programs recognized nationwide and is the only Mid-American Conference team in the Top 10 percent of [NCAA Academic Performance Rate, an index of how many athletes on a team remain students and complete their degrees] for women's basketball.

The Huskie women's golf team, which checked in with a perfect score of 1000 for the APR multiyear rate, was recognized along with 51 other teams, including MAC comrades Kent State and Bowling Green State.

WIDEN THE BOTTLENECK. Expect traffic jams well after your toddlers graduate ... from college.

After Marquette Interchange reconstruction is completed, the I-94 job will be the next in a series of regional freeway rebuilding projects that could last 25 or 30 years. It will stretch from Milwaukee's south side to the Illinois state line. Preliminary work is to start in 2009, with major construction running from 2011 through 2016.

And when that work is done, it will be time for a mid-life resurfacing of the roads currently being rebuilt. But even if the rebuilding gives us a more durable road, it's unlikely that the added lanes will really alleviate congestion. Milwaukeeans and transients may be grateful that the congestion-prolonging construction (which includes some potential safety upgrades) will take relatively few houses.

As transportation engineers refined the plans, they heard from neighbors and public officials pressing to keep the freeway within its current right of way as much as possible. Responding to those concerns, department officials said last year they had cut the number of homes to be razed in Milwaukee County to no more than 18.

That figure has now dropped to four to six, project manager Bill Mohr said. Three of those homes are near the Plainfield curve; a fourth is near the ramps linking the freeway to the Airport Spur, he said. The other two homes would be razed only if the state decides to add new on- and off-ramps at Drexel Ave. in Oak Creek, Mohr said.

Note: additional interchanges mean additional eddies in the traffic.

STAYING IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD. Garrett Wolfe, Chicago Bear.

WATCH THIS SPACE.

THE RIGHT KIND OF MARKET TEST. Tibor Machan (via Phi Beta Cons) takes issue with those who take issue with market incentives in higher education.

Indeed, in the exchange it is clear that no one likes markets in higher education. Henry Wasser, who is a former academic dean and vice president at the City University of New York, complains that a previous piece in the magazine “ignores the growing and transforming inequalities” that supposedly afflict American higher education. Among these are, of course, “the dominant commercialization of universities in function and psychology,” and “the pervasiveness of the ‘market’ model,” whatever that is supposed to mean in a profession that is dominated by government administration and funding. In response to this the original author of “Scandals,” Andrew Delbanco, replies that he has elsewhere “discussed most of the themes [Wasser] mentions,” among them commercialization and “the rise of ‘market’ values.”

On one hand, what Professor Machan is noting might be the long-standing argument that when market tests make some people rich and other people poor, that isn't automatically a desirable outcome. It's not always clear that the business fad of the moment is efficiency-enhancing. Consider a comment Russell Roberts makes about the information content of a downsizing.

Pundits everywhere decried the Circuit City layoffs as a greedy corporation trying to inflate the company's profits to ever higher levels while ignoring the human costs. In fact, they were a desperation attempt to keep a company afloat. That revelation of desperation is what caused the stock price to fall. We'll see if Circuit City can survive. The stock market suggests that the odds of survival have fallen.

He's reacting to a James Surowiecki column that notes the fad element in the business model of the moment.

On top of all this, a C.E.O. is likely to look to layoffs as a solution because that’s what almost everyone else does, too. The word “downsizing” wasn’t even invented until the mid-seventies. The waves of layoffs that began at the end of that decade and peaked after the recession of 1990-91 were largely a response to crisis on the part of manufacturing companies swamped by foreign competitors and stuck with excess capacity. More recently, however, downsizing has become less a response to disaster than a default business strategy, part of an inexorable drive to cut costs.

Never mind the loss in efficiency and institutional memory. Therein lies some of the academic discontent with business models and all the trappings of "market-driven" policies. There are more than a few trustees and legislators who labor under the misapprehension that "superior performance" equates to lopping off the poorest-performing 10% of the business after each annual review. (In investments, this policy is a misapplication of the regression fallacy: a trader with a quite satisfactory lifetime record can be awarded a large bonus for a lucky year or fired for an unlucky one. In higher education, such thinking can lead to the folly of abolishing majors in philosophy or mathematics, although a few philosophy or mathematics faculty are allowed to stay around to "service" the majors in those bits of the university that have managed not to be "right-sized" out of existence.)

MAKING GEORGIA HOWL. The History Channel has been offering a two-hour documentary including reenactment of Sherman's March. The details are as noted in previously reviewed books. The documentary gives visual learners an opportunity to contemplate Genl Sherman's ambivalence toward the contrabands who joined up with the march, as well as his responses to rebel tactics that were contrary to the established rules of war. The show includes the episodes where rebel prisoners are pressed into service as mine sweepers, with one paroled to send a message to the commander of the local insurgents, and where rebel prisoners are made to draw lots, with one man executed, which stopped summary killings of foragers. Worth watching your listings for the re-runs.

WHY IT MATTERS. A sequential group photo at a reception recognizing Jim Giles of the Department of English at his retirement.


T. S. Eliot, Wilkie Collins, Marvin and Lemuel, and a moment to honor Gustaaf van Cramphout, another always cheerful colleague, he denied the opportunity of a retirement reception.

SAIL THE LIFTED TACK. The Louis Vuitton Cup competition, otherwise known as the America's Cup challenger series, is under way.

Associated Press photo by Bernat Armangue courtesy Chicago Tribune.

RIDDLES AND MYSTERIES AND ENIGMAS. The funeral of Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin offers a capsule history of the twists and turns of Russian and U. S. history. The religious service (itself a recent development) occured in the rebuilt Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer. Josef Vissarionovich Stalin had the original removed to make way for a temple more suitable to Bolshevik traditions.

"The whole dramatic history of the 20th century was reflected in the fate of Boris Nikolayevich," Russian Orthodox Patriarch Alexy II said in a letter read aloud at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, using Yeltsin's patronymic. "Being a strong individual, he took upon himself responsibility for the fate of the country at a difficult and dangerous time of radical change."

The rebuilt cathedral was finished in the late 1990s. Among the music played at the consecration of the original cathedral was a work better known in the United States as music to launch fireworks by. Andrew Druckenbrod of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette gives the history of the 1812 Overture.

The "1812 Overture" premiered in 1882 at the consecration of a church in Moscow commemorating Napoleon's retreat from Russia. Telling the story of the end of the French invasion of Russia in musical themes, "La Marseillaise" is eventually beaten back by a rousing Russian anthem and cannon fire and church bells. When performed with full-scale replica artillery (with blanks) today, the "1812 Overture" usually requires musicians to wear earplugs.

We're happy to have the Overture as part of our own tradition, although I disagree with musicologist Leon Botstein.

"With the exception of 'America the Beautiful,' the U.S. is short of patriotic hymns," says Botstein. "'The Star-Spangled Banner' is a tongue-twister; then you have 'America,' which is really the British national anthem. Being an immigrant nation, we are not offended by using another country's national anthem."

The Overture is not the Russian national anthem, although it quotes a few bars of God Save the Tsar toward the end. (As far as U. S. patriotic hymns, I offer Stars and Stripes Forever, Columbia the Gem of the Ocean, Semper Fidelis, and Washington Post.) Mr Yeltsin did not restore God Save the Tsar, although he replaced the Stalin-era Soyuz nerushimi with a Glinka hymn. The Russians have since, in proper Khrushchev fashion, rehabilitated the Soyuz nerushimi but with new words.

In death, Mr Yeltsin rests near Mr Khrushchev.

The choice of Novodevichy Cemetery was a fitting site for the grave of the country's first post-Soviet, post-czarist leader. An avowed foe of communism who sought to outlaw the party after he came to power, it would not seem appropriate to bury him behind Lenin's tomb, alongside the honored Soviet-era leaders at the Kremlin wall.

Novodevichy holds the graves of an array of Russia's artistic elite, including Dmitry Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev and Anton Chekhov. Only one Soviet leader is buried there - Nikita Khrushchev, who was ousted from power in 1964 and whose grave is about 200 yards from Yeltsin's.

As the coverage notes,

The day's events were mixed with political symbolism - the burial at Novodevichy, religious services for a nominally pious man in a cathedral restored during his presidency; the playing of the national anthem whose music is the same as the Stalinist Soviet anthem.

Do svidanya, Boris Nikolayevich. Condolences and good wishes to the Russian people.

IT'S CALLED ELASTICITY OF DEMAND. A look at zone pricing in the early days of railroading.

[Hungarian Transport Minister Baross Gábor] argued that the loss from price cuts will be more than made up by the extra income from boosted traffic numbers. This revolutionary idea was a mirror image of one argument for tax cuts used by neolibs today, that economic growth will raise tax revenues back to the old level: instead of counting on the sustained success and goodwill of the richest, it was counting on the poorest to go trying their luck on now affordable trains.

It's also a test of the idea called price elasticity of demand. (Skip past all the calculations, they're a waste of your time, and focus on the intuition.)

A good economist is not just interested in calculating numbers. The number is a means to an end; in the case of price elasticity of demand it is used to see how sensitive the demand for a good is to a price change. The higher the price elasticity, the more sensitive consumers are to price changes. A very high price elasticity suggests that when the price of a good goes up, consumers will buy a great deal less of it and when the price of that good goes down, consumers will buy a great deal more. A very low price elasticity implies just the opposite, that changes in price have little influence on demand.

A high price elasticity implies, more precisely, that at the lower price, buying expands more than proportionately to the lower price, and total revenues increase. Small price decreases demonstrably bring in many more buyers to long-distance telephone companies, economy air carriers, discount superstores, and evidently the Hungarian suburban lines.

The supply-side tax cut relies on a somewhat more subtle argument in which the substitution effect of the tax cut more than offsets the income effect, such that net sellers of labor offer to work more hours.

FALSE POSITIVES. Why I insist that policy makers spell out their loss function.

Told to express emotion for a creative-writing class, high school senior Allen Lee penned an essay so disturbing to his teacher, school administrators and police that he was charged with disorderly conduct, officials said Wednesday.

Lee, 18, a straight-A student at Cary-Grove High School, was arrested Tuesday near his home and charged with the misdemeanor for an essay police described as violently disturbing but not directed toward any specific person or location.

Any per se rule has an element of arbitrariness. Sometimes an essay can be indicative of deep-seated grievances. "Sometimes" is not the same thing as "always."

Simmie Baer, an attorney with the Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern University School of Law, said the school's action was an example of zero-tolerance policies gone awry.

The student's father is keeping his perspective.

During a short interview at his family's two-story home in a Cary subdivision near the high school, [Albert]Lee said he felt administrators did the right thing.

He added, however, that he does not think his son is a threat to anyone.

"I definitely think that there is some misunderstanding," he said. "That's my only interpretation of this."

Lee said he was confident his son will graduate as scheduled this year with his class."With Virginia Tech, everyone is more sensitive to these kinds of issues," Lee said. "I'm sure if he wrote something last year, nothing would alarm anybody. It's just the timing."

IF YOU'RE GOING TO BELIEVE, BELIEVE. Rev. Christopher Johnson has sharp words for those who would make the Creation and the Resurrection more inclusive.

Leaving aside the staggeringly arrogant conceit that someone named Susan Anderson-Smith knows "who Jesus understood himself to be," I've got two problems with this idea. One is that, well, God kind of, well, you know, does have a "hierarchical power over things." If You're a being that can create entire universes, I've got no problem at all with calling You "Lord." I don't know about you but I certainly can't create entire universes.

Same thing with Jesus. If You die an agonizing death on the Cross to keep me out of hell, then when I see You, "Lord" is going to be the first word out of my mouth. But if Jesus was just a great teacher and God little more than a divine district manager you play golf with sometimes, I can see where the word might grate on your ears.

Rev. Johnson often refers to the "National Council of Churches Nobody Goes To Anymore." There's logic to his criticism: what's the point of having a separate organization that acknowledges only that the congregants are flukes of the universe? One can wrestle with that conclusion alone, or perhaps with others at a saloon or a coffeehouse, with little use for sermons or liturgical dances.

UNDERSTATEMENT OF THE DAY. Don't we know it?

But in terms of the time we devote to day-to-day e-mail expertise -- crafting it, managing it, we might as well be communicating in Old West Norse.

The article refers readers to some advice.

Although it has a June publication date, you can get [Bit Literacy] through Amazon now or read the first chapter free at the "Bit Literacy" site (bitliteracy.com), where you can also find the glowing blurbs he's collected from the likes of Craig Newmark (craigslist.org) and info-age author Douglas Rushkoff. And his article on "Managing Incoming E-mail," a group of bits that coalesce as a .pdf file and the basis for the e-mail chapter, is available at [Bit Literacy author Mark] Hurst's Good Experience site (goodexperience.com).

"'Bit Literacy' says bits are heavy, actually, and an infinite number of them has infinite weight, and it crushes people, their productivity, their morale," Hurst says.

I'm partial to not checking e-mail in the morning, in fact I'm partial to the general principle of never scheduling meetings in the morning, period.

QUOTE OF THE DAY. Photon Courier.

A significant segment of American academia has put itself in a state which is truly beyond parody.

Read and understand.

ONE CAN LOCK DOWN A HIGH SCHOOL. Apparently, it's not even newsworthy. What depresses, however, is the reason for the lockdown.

Hamilton High School in Milwaukee was placed on lockdown Wednesday afternoon following a series of fights involving students and adults.

No one was injured in the disturbances, which began around 1 p.m. when an irate parent showed up at the school demanding to see a specific student to "settle the score," said Roseann St. Aubin, Milwaukee Public Schools' spokeswoman.

Parental meddling in school affairs is nothing new. At one time, however, it was limited to keeping a good face on things at Hamilton High. "Our kids selling narcotics? Isn't happening. Not-so-secret keg parties deep in the Root River Parkway? Must be those spoiled rich kids from Greendale."

HOW OTHERS SEE US. Anthony Paletta at Phi Beta Cons suggests the quest for hidden meanings can go too far.

The influence of Postmodern studies is often to be rued, but it seems a very intemperate swipe to associate [the Virginia Tech shooter’s] actions with academic currents to which there is no real evidence he had any connection. If we’re going to opine from glances at the Virgina Tech catalog we might just as well assert that Titus Andronicus tipped [him] over the edge. Or Verloc, or… the Grand Inquisitor? This could be endless.

Indeed so.

NOTHING SECRET ABOUT PROBATION. The Northern Star characterizes some proper disciplinary measures as a "lockdown."

Larry Bolles, director of NIU's Judicial Office, said if the downward trend continues, a campus without Greek organizations could be a realistic future. Bolles did say, however, that he has seen vast improvements this semester.

"Everybody did what they wanted to do," Bolles said of years past. "People don't change easy. It's like trying to change a culture, and that's what you have on Greek Row - drinking, partying; they're doing what Greeks do. It's like a battleship: Battleships don't turn like a little boat. A battleship is a big thing that turns slow."

Eight fraternities were placed on suspension last fall for violations of NIU policy ranging from physical and sexual assault to more minor alcohol-related offenses.

Bolles described many fraternities as "train wrecks" that could have ended in derailed chapters, but the university began implementing rigorous policies and judicial action in attempts to prevent it from happening.

It's called putting the adults back in charge.

Since Bolles took over [from University Programming and Activities]last spring, nine Greek-letter organizations have had sanctions placed against them.

"They felt like they were being bombarded, and they went everywhere complaining to everyone about what was happening," Bolles said of the Greek organizations under judicial sanctions. "Finally, somebody came to me and said, 'Dr. Bolles, why are you doing this?'"

"I said, 'I'm treating you like everyone else. For the first time in your life, you all are starting to feel like the average student feels on this campus: You smoke dope, you fight, you beat up somebody, you sexually assault somebody - you're starting to feel exactly what [any other offender] felt.' They assume that their chapter is here for life just because they have a house and they pay rent."

It's also called maintaining standards.

National organizations worried about the future of their NIU chapters petitioned Bolles to find what they could do to turn things around. Bolles said he wanted to have alumni members in their 50s and 60s serve as in-house advisers.

Bolles chose the age range because, in the past, national organizations sent advisers who had graduated five to 10 years ago that still had a degree of camaraderie with fraternity members. What Bolles wanted were successful individuals who could instill discipline.

"I said, 'I want your time,'" Bolles said. "'You're a member of this chapter, and you were made in DeKalb. What I want you to do - I'm going to show you all the dirt - I want you to go there, and within the next 90 days, I want you to show me some significant differences in that chapter, because if you can't make a difference - I tried, it hasn't worked.'"

With their NIU chapters in jeopardy of Bolles "putting a lock on the door," all 11 organizations with deferred suspensions sent individuals to frequently keep tabs on their fraternities.

These individuals, who ranged from lawyers to successful businessmen, pushed their fraternities to do more community service than was required. However, in filtering out so-called "troublemakers" from the fraternities, the advisers often slashed fraternity enrollments by more than half, Bolles said.

"They walked people out of the houses and met with people and said, 'That's not what we want,'" Bolles said. "If they didn't change, they were out."

Mr Bolles reports progress, but he's had a busy time. (Keep following the links to find out how busy.)

LiNaSiB₃O₇(OH). Renaming Jadar as Krypton, alas, appears not to be an option. The noble gas Krypton predates the comic book planet Krypton. (Not the last time popular art imitated life: anybody else remember Prince Amex of Nasdaq?)

GET UP, GET UP, GET OUTTA HERE. We're pleased to report that Chicago Cub second baseman and radio analyst Ron Santo has been released from hospital. Mr Santo plans to return to the press box on May 4. That rates a Sprecher.

A NECESSARY CONDITION FOR THE FEDERATION. Have astronomers located a Class M planet?

Until now, all 220 planets astronomers have found outside our solar system have had the "Goldilocks problem." They've been too hot, too cold or just plain too big and gaseous, like uninhabitable Jupiter.

The new planet seems just right - or at least that's what scientists think.

"This could be very important," said NASA astrobiology expert Chris McKay, who was not part of the discovery team. "It doesn't mean there is life, but it means it's an Earth-like planet in terms of potential habitability."

Eventually astronomers will rack up discoveries of dozens, maybe even hundreds of planets considered habitable, the astronomers said. But this one - simply called "c" by its discoverers when they talk among themselves - will go down in cosmic history as No. 1.

This one isn't hot enough to be Vulcan.

POSITIVE NONPECUNIARY EXTERNALITIES. Economics suggests prudes should want to have fun.

The "More Sex" thesis: If prudes occasionally slept with strangers, it would slow the spread of STDs.

Here's how it works. One such prude walks into a bar, and he's uninfected. If he takes home an uninfected woman, great -- he distracted her from a potential disease carrier. If he gets herpes, that's also great, because he's sexually conservative and won't pass the infection along very often. Better him than someone with less self control.

Either way, society benefits when the chaste open up slightly. "Slightly" is key, because too much "openness" spreads more disease than it diverts. After studying AIDS in England, Harvard's Michael Kremer put the cutoff at 2.25 partners per year.

From here Mr. Landsburg introduces the concept that ties virtually all these essays together -- people should feel their actions' effects. A sexual conservative considers the harm to himself, but not the benefits to others, of catching a disease. One could call it a behavior-consequence gap.

The illustration, (via Andrew Sullivan) from Steven Landsburg's new More Sex is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics, doesn't really come as a surprise. There's a paper, I believe it's Buchanan and Stubblebine's "Externality," that illustrates the optimality of some people not receiving immunization shots, from which the basic argument follows. Another observation has the possibility for greater controversy.

[Professor Landsburg] also discusses the jury system at length. He's right that juries should hear all the available evidence, including past convictions: The government already trusts juries to sort out pertinent from irrelevant facts, so more information can't hurt. If juries can't put a defendant's (or even accuser's) history in perspective, we shouldn't have juries.

The problem, dear reader, as mathematician John Allen Paulos has argued, is that juries have difficulty with conditional statements. (Test yourself: which of the two following statements is more likely to be true? (A) Judy is a bank teller. (B) Judy is a bank teller and a feminist.) In trials, the mishandling of conditional statements matter. Consider (A) The defendant battered his wife. (B) Most spouse batterers do not murder their wives. Will the jury be more likely to come to the correct conclusion if they are also told (C) Most murdered wives have been battered?

I will read the book sometime in the future and have a review ready.

GENERATION PORTER. That's a special 20th anniversary Sprecher product. The program notes (for the beer) suggest my bottle came from the early batch. It has a bold fruity taste and a beery aroma and it's just the thing for Tuesday's Sprecher on Tuesday. The Crew came within one out of eighteen consecutive shutout innings pitched.

OVER? I must take issue with my friendly connection Milton Rosenberg.

Almost...says Norman Lebrecht, who mourns the passing of the record store and the rapid decline in serious recording companies. If you need an extra goad toward despair this may be just the thing!

Perhaps the end of the classical record store in favor of the CD department at Borders is reason to be troubled.

On the deadliest of nights, I'd persuade the guy behind the counter at wood-paneled Rizzoli to switch the mid-romantic mush on the store speakers for early-instrument asperities. Rarely did I leave without a chat. A record store was where you went to get enlivened, inspired and painlessly lightened of a few bucks.

If you got really lucky, you'd wind up in a bar with strangers arguing Klemperer versus Furtwaengler in Haydn's 88th. Buffs and saddos? Maybe, but record mavens cared about music.

Many people I met in record stores never set foot in Carnegie Hall or the Met. Their cultural life was lived out on disc. Few went on, like me, to make a living out of criticism. For most, the bonus of living in a city was that it admitted them to a cultural community that congregated in record stores.

On the other hand, the creation of new symphonies that might, some day, find themselves converted into parcels for downloading, goes on. Composer Kevin Puts paid Northern Illinois a visit that featured the Illinois premiere of his Symphony No. 2, "Island of Innocence." The concert, which was current director Brett Mitchell's final appearance with the Philharmonic, also included Brahms's Symphony No. 2, certainly the kind of work to argue the merits of various recordings, perhaps over a Sprecher. There will be more works by Mr Puts this Wednesday. If time permits, I may attend and file a report. If not, despair not. Symphonic music isn't over simply because a few pundits suggest it's over.

SPONTANEOUS KINDNESS. Huskies stand with Hokies.

Northern Star photo by Ben Woloszyn.

MONDAY'S SPRECHER ON TUESDAY. Last night ran a bit long with work, but there's quiet time tonight, and an extra-innings win in the Hiawatha Series to savor.

The Brewers overcame a 4-0 deficit, an injury to a key player and a bullpen running out of pitchers, yet prevailed.

THE GOOD IS OFT' INTERRED WITH THEIR BONES.

Associated Press photo courtesy Chicago Tribune.

REALITY CHECKS. Why I Turned Right, the subject of Book Review No. 8, is a collection of autobiographical musings by a variety of public intellectuals, some of whom were default secular-progressives and some of whome dabbled with more esoteric politics, who have more recently identified themselves as "conservative," broadly construed. For the most part, these are individuals better known as writers for opinion magazines rather than as government officials or as academicians. That said, it might behoove curious individuals within government and the academy to read the book, if for no other reason than to discover some of the tics, biases, and institutionalized smugness that recurs as explanation of selecting the starboard tack in several of the sketches.

CLOSE THE SEWER. A Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel article notes the growing popularity of ending one of the Eisenhower Administration's more foolish boondoggles.

[Conservationists in Great Lakes United argue] that the idea of slamming shut the Seaway to oceangoing "salties" has become an environmental and economic no-brainer, like padlocking a struggling little factory that is ruining life for everyone in town because it won't fix its oversize smokestack.

There's cost-benefit analysis involved.

Evidence suggests that the costs of the biological pollution gushing from the [transatlantic]ship-steadying ballast tanks far outweigh the benefits of maintaining the world's largest freshwater system as a nautical highway for saltwater traffic.

A draft study from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, meanwhile, indicates that recreational boats dwarf overseas freighters in terms of economic importance to the region, yet the recreation industry is entirely dependent on the very waters the salties continue to irreversibly pollute.

The infrastructure, which opened to great fanfare half a century ago, is due for renewal or retirement.

The original system of locks and channels, which are crumbling in places, cost $3 billion in today's dollars. Then there are the costs of dredging and maintaining channels and harbors in ports across the Great Lakes.

All to move a volume of export traffic in bulk cargoes such as grain or scrap metal that the railroads could easily transport to the existing saltwater ports. Let me refresh readers' memories: most of the traffic handled in the Great Lakes - St. Lawrence Seaway system is intra-Lake traffic for which ballast pumping simply transports marine life already in the Lakes to someplace else in the same Lakes.

The commercial fishery is at risk.

Nobody is precisely sure why so many fish have disappeared so quickly, but likely factors are high numbers of the planted predatory salmon, along with spiraling numbers of invasive species.

Invasive round gobies, a bug-eyed, prehistoric-looking fish known for gobbling eggs of native lake species, have been ballooning in number since they were discovered in the lake in 1993. But the pace of their expansion appears to be accelerating - the number of fish found in the survey jumped 16-fold from 2005 to 2006.

On balance, the gainers (sport fishermen, commercial fishermen, operators of waterworks, and railroads) appear to be well able to compensate a few overseas shippers for losses they might incur by closing the St. Lawrence Seaway.

TURF 'EM OUT. A Margaret Soltan dissection of special pleading by friends of Texas Southern University provides indirect support for my contention that there is excess capacity in academic bottom-feeding.

The effect is obvious. The Barbaras and Mickeys and Harolds would simply go to another university. But for the Cliffords, the Thomases and the Bettys, their opportunities for a college education may be irretrievably lost. [As it stands, Clifford, Thomas, and Betty are likely to get at TSU a simulacral education. It will end up costing them and other Americans a good deal of money.]

Put another way, Clifford, Thomas, and Betty ought learn how to ask "Want fries with that" in Chinese?

Texas Southern continues its proud tradition of welcoming students the Texas public schools have failed. And while these nontraditional students tend not to graduate within the traditional four or even six years, there is a strong indication they eventually do graduate, have increased earning capacity and contribute largely to the Texas economy. [Tend... strong indication... Here the writers must weasel their way around the profound fact of wretched graduation rates at TSU.] ...

And that the failure, dear readers, rests with the common schools. Why not allow Texas Southern to bill the common schools for all the remediation that must be inherent in the university's retention efforts, futile though they turn out to be?

DID WE DEMORALIZE HER? Long-time Illinois women's basketball coach Theresa Grentz, last featured here, has taken her pension. Fox Valley Daily Herald columnist Patricia Babcock McGraw is not displeased.

My first thought when I heard the news?

Check that. My first printable thought?

“Free at last. Free at last. Thank God, almighty, free at last.”

Finally, this program is free from Grentz’s tyrannical reign of bullying and bull-you-know-what.

This is a woman who, from my observations, systematically sucked the life out of not only the program, but its players.

Read on. I was under the impression that college sports was supposed to be for the play value, or perhaps for Title IX compliance, not about the money.

(Via Kathy at Women's Hoops, who also comes up with a column that says more than the author intends about the Faustian bargain that success at the highest level sometimes entails, leaving aside the complications of identity politics in a game that I follow for the play value. OK, a few bottles of Beck's Dark and the odd sweatshirt can buy a lot of loyalty.)

[Mary Jo] Kane, the sports sociologist at Minnesota, said she once heard a female coach say that the best coaching qualifications for a woman are to be divorced with no children. This ostensibly establishes her heterosexuality while leaving her free to hit the road on recruiting trips.

Thus the flip side of a competition in which the greatest rewards, whether as wins or as publications or as traffic generated, can be purchased by the performer's willingness to sacrifice other dimensions of her or his life.

I HAVE GOOD REASON TO BE TIRED. Last Friday, the retiring interim dean gave his State of the College presentation. The text is not yet available at the Liberal Arts homepage. In addition to the encouraging introduction of this year's Presidential Research and Teaching Professors and assorted other honorees, he presented some pie charts illustrating the share of the university's recent increased student credit hour production handled by Liberal Arts faculty. Hint: it exceeds 90%. His presentation illustrated the folly of misapplying business models, and the lesson generalizes to the private sector. In the early 1990s, the state's board of higher education decided to capitalize on the business fads of "downsizing" and "strategic planning" to trim the public universities. As a consequence, Northern Illinois was deemed "right-sized" with an undergraduate enrollment of about 16,500, a figure that reflected the tail end of the Thirteenth Generation cohort but that missed the bulging middle schools and the effect of immigration from the former Soviet Bloc and Latin America into Illinois. Many of the other colleges could invoke professional entry standards and tighten admission requirements as the entering classes grew (to a size comparable to our greatest extent in 1987-88, when the economics department had twice as many faculty members.) But each student's first two years are effectively in Liberal Arts.

I'm apparently not alone in feeling swamped.

I have a huge backlog of grading to do, a frightening amount, given that I’m teaching three courses with large (for Swarthmore) enrollments. Tremendous amount of reading that needs completion, and substantial preparations for courses each day, given how excellent and probing a lot of the discussions in each of my classes have been this semester. A whole new course syllabus needs to get out there for students to look at as they think about classes. (Almost done if you’re checking here looking for it.) A few straggler references for students need completion or sending. Many and sundry meetings of various kinds in the next week or two.

The problem we have is not limited to being overwhelmed with stuff to do. Often it is the nature of the stuff. Mike Munger's taxonomy of evaluating projects and obligations introduces two dimensions, which he classifies as "urgent" and "important." Admittedly, a 2x2 chart is easier to post on a web site. To do so, however, leaves out a third dimension that might be even more important. For the moment, classify tasks as "enervating" and "energizing." Thus, for instance, program and performance review items, which often have deadlines, qualify as "urgent, important, and enervating." Referee reports, which in economics increasingly have deadlines (and electronic mail makes the production of automated needling reminders cheaper), are increasingly "urgent," they're "important," if we're supposed to have decent scholarship, but in many cases they're "enervating" (and for all my crankiness I'm not going to put a skull-and-crossbones graphic in my response). Research tends to be important and energizing, but when grades are due, it's postponable.

I leave to the reader as an exercise what happens when the in-basket is brimming with tasks that somebody else views as urgent, although their importance is not great, and they're enervating in the extreme.

LET'S HEAR IT FOR PAPER AND PENCIL. To file taxes electronically, one has to spend money on a package that is compatible with the government's servers. There's always the possibility of something going wrong. Furthermore, I might be using the same pencil next year, and if I have to replace it, it's still going to be cheaper than next year's tax-filing package.

NOT A GLORIFIED COMMUNITY COLLEGE AFTER ALL. The University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee goes forward with its research park.

For the cost of one engineer in the United States, a company can hire 11 in India, according to the National Academies, a U.S. government advisory body. And the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a Paris-based multinational think tank, last year announced that China spends more on research and development as a share of its economy than Japan and became the world's second-highest investor in R&D after the United States.

[Milwaukee chancellor Carlos] Santiago points to a continued loss of jobs throughout southeastern Wisconsin. But he notes that Milwaukee still has an opportunity to retain its cluster of "advanced manufacturing" companies, which require a steady stream of technology workers, software engineers and research and development investment. UWM in January announced that Rockwell Automation Inc. will help UWM build a technology research program to support the region's advanced manufacturing sector.

If the region loses the advanced manufacturing sector, Santiago said, "then we lose the competitive advantage in manufacturing."

Two caveats. One, not noted by the newspaper, is that even the production function for Indian engineers is subject to the Law of Increasing Opportunity Cost. Another, incompletely noted, is that many of the benefits of a research-intensive university are appropriable private benefits.

Santiago, an economist, argues that no big metropolitan area has transitioned into the 21st century knowledge-driven economy without a research-based university at its core. He told the newspaper that he has spent weeks lobbying politicians and flying around the nation to meet with big-dollar donors from the private sector.

Past UWM construction projects have taken eight to 13 years, Santiago said, adding that he's unwilling to settle for anything longer than six to eight years for the entire engineering school expansion.

"His timetable is aggressive, but it's necessary for the metro economy to keep pace with the world marketplace," said Thomas Hefty, retired CEO of Blue Cross Blue Shield United of Wisconsin and an economic-development activist who co-chaired Gov. Jim Doyle's Economic Growth Council from 2003-'05.

But at this point, Santiago freely admits that he still doesn't have the money he needs, doesn't own the land, and has not yet begun expanding the 60 engineering-school faculty members to 100, as he plans.

One potential hitch that could derail the UWM project lies in the Madison statehouse, where some lawmakers for years have opposed increases to the state's higher-education spending.

Doyle, who endorses UWM's expansion, has earmarked an additional $10 million in the state's 2007-'09 budget for the project. If Doyle and the UW System fail to push their UW "growth" budget through the Legislature, then Santiago cannot hire new faculty, donors will go away, and the UWM project will lose momentum.

It's not simply a matter of a few anti-intellectual legislative types finding an opportunity to stiff the university system. There's still a balance between the potential spillover benefits, including keeping educated Wisconsin residents in Wisconsin without an indentured-servitude tuition provision, and the entirely appropriable private benefits, such as entry-level engineers for Rockwell who don't have to be taught on company time how to properly wire a starting circuit.

WATCH THIS SPACE.

THE WORK THAT REMAINS. In last week's tribute to Kurt Vonnegut (which might have been somewhat off point: Scott McLemee's "The Eternal Sophomore" might better capture the essence of his popularity) I noted,

In 1961, the idea of treating any possible source of difference in performance as an unfair advantage might have sounded positively dystopian: the propensity of some people to refer to "impairments" that must be "accommodated" lest the "temporarily abled" act "oppressively" renders the story somewhat more prophetic.

That propensity requires additional introspection and reconsideration in light of this week's events.

The problem with Virginia Tech's policing - and with most other college's approach to security - runs deeper than training or resources or dedication, says S. Daniel Carter of Security on Campus Inc., a nonprofit watchdog group. The problem is mindset, he says.

On a campus, everyone is a big family - the administrators, the students, the faculty and the university's security officers.

As a result, "the tendency is to overlook or downplay potential problems," Carter says. "They don't want to think that their campus community members - their students - could be that dangerous."

Carter believes that mind-set was almost certainly a factor in how Virginia Tech officers handled - or mishandled - previous complaints about Cho. And it was clearly a factor in many of the things that went wrong early on a flurry-filled morning last Monday when a campus just stirring from its weekend slumber was shaken by gunfire, he says.

But even a family has to have standards, and sometimes a parent must take a child's privileges away. That's not necessarily a police matter, as the article also notes.

Schools have to "balance the rights of students with the rights of the communities and with what parents want, and its not an easy thing to do," says Dr. Joanna Locke of the Jed Foundation, which works to prevent suicide and promote mental health among college students.

What about the mental health providers beyond campus who dealt directly with Cho? Couldn't they have done something?

Not unless Cho shared his morbid fantasies, and people like Cho almost never do, says Dr. Michael Welner, a forensic psychologist who has profiled mass murderers.

And here the mindset matters. Does the framing of a person's condition as involving "impairments" that require "accommodation" contribute? Oakland University's Barbara Oakley (via Margaret Soltan) doesn't quite say so, but she suggests something is not right.

In other words, most of the broad social “lessons” we are being told we must learn from the Virginia Tech shootings have little to do with what allowed the horrors to occur. This is about evil, and about how our universities are able to deal with it as a literary subject but not as a fact of life. Can administrators and deans really continue to leave professors and other college personnel to deal with deeply disturbed students on their own, with only pencils in their defense?

Sometimes, alas, one has to temper principle with practicality, as Timothy Burke observes at 11-D in this comment.

It's all about trade-offs. You can resource psychological support even more heavily, but it's not going to change anything until or unless you want to grant institutions and legal systems more extensive forms of authority to coercively detain and treat people who are suspected of the capacity for violence. And doing that is not an obvious fix that comes without a social and philosophical price tag.

As a first step, let's have a conversation about the loss function. What are the consequences of excluding more mildly disturbed or eccentric people from higher education? Will the effect be to exclude more Seung-Hoi Chos or more John Nashes? On the other hand, what are the consequences of doing more to turn non-conformists into conformists?

CYNICAL POPULISM. Frederic Bastiat's characterization of the state as a fiction by which each attempts to live at the expense of others can take a particularly effective form if the state takes great lengths to distinguish its insiders from outsiders preparatory to plundering those outsiders. The effectiveness of such a plunder is documented in Hitler's Beneficiaries by Goetz Aly, this evening's rather sober Book Review No. 7. Professor Aly's work is well-documented, as one would expect of scholarly work, as well as carefully edited and translated, which merits mention. The thesis is succinctly put in the preface at p. 7.

Hitler shielded the average Aryan from [the costs of waging war] at the cost of depriving others of their basic substance. To ensure contentment among its own people, the German government destroyed a number of foreign currencies -- most notably the Greek drachma -- by forcing other countries to pay ever-increasing contributions and tributes to their occupiers. To maintain living standards, the Germans plundered millions of tons of food to keep German soldiers well fed, then shipped what was left over back to the fatherland. And while the Third Reich was gorging itself on food from the countries it occupied, the German army paid its operating costs in the devalued local currency.

Much of the economic content of the book focuses on the creation of special bank certificates that the Germans used to maintain the illusion of paying vendors in the occupied countries for "requisitioned" items as well as the monetary policy manipulations used to prevent what was essentially the printing of money from turning into a hyperinflation. The presentation of German efforts to facilitate the transportation of goods acquired at requisition prices back to the fatherland despite logistical strains are also instructive. Professor Aly's evaluation of the plunder-for-the-Herrenvolk could make some people angry, but the summation (p. 323) is one worth incorporating into an examination somewhere.

The Nazi movement represented the drive to couple social equality with national homogeneity, a concept that was popular not only in Germany.

Left unanswered is why support for the regime, which was predicated on the allocation of stolen goods, did not collapse when the logistics collapsed and the Allies destroyed German housing and manufacturing faster than the occupation authorities could steal replacements.

YOUR RIGHT TO SAY IT. The New York Times visits DeKalb to cover our weekly war-related demonstration and counter-demonstration. The origins of these war-related demonstrations are somewhat unclear although they have turned into a civil and public debate about the Iraq campaign. It's not that the Times doesn't have protests and counter-protests to follow closer to home. The article appears to be part of the paper's discovery of pensioners remaining active in public affairs.

As the number of older Americans grows, retirement for many of them means a chance to devote themselves to social and political causes. They have the time, and since they no longer need to worry about employers, they can speak out without fear of repercussions. Retirees represent a potent force in political movements of every stripe and are likely to become even more important as the number of older people increases.

That is, if their pensions remain as generous as current Social Security benefits relative to taxes paid are. (Via City Barbs)

QUOTE OF THE DAY. Marginal Utility's Tom Bozzo weighs in on James Kunstler v. Thomas Friedman.

Inevitability and immutability arguments should be recognized as having little economic content. The factoid that the supposedly immutable often will give way to adverse price changes is part of the secret to the Big Bucks (or at least some fish-in-a-barrel shooting) for the econ profession.

Deeper into the post, he notes the folly of throwing more money into road construction in the hopes that somehow ethanol-based import-substitution activities will keep the car culture humming. The Illinois Tollway Authority has yet to get the message. It's spring, and the signs apologizing for the inconvenience and promising less future congestion are sprouting, this season along the eastbound Reagan Tollway through Warrenville and Naperville. Dream on. Commuters have to put up with the construction congestion, they have to put up with the inevitable congestion at the end of the widened section, if the widening is ever finished, the improved road will attract drivers who are currently using the Northwest Tollway but will find the widened Reagan preferable, and the congestion will be further exacerbated when the tollway discovers that the Northwest requires widening. As far as the ethanol is concerned, it might displace some Middle Eastern oil, but the ethanol program has turned Mexico from a net importer of corn (for tortillas) into a net exporter of corn (to the ethanol plants.) This week a few of us hosted the chairman of the economics department at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, who alerted us to the policy challenges that presents within his country and between our countries.

HOKIE HOPE.


We dedicate this Friday's post to our colleagues and classmates at Virginia Tech.

EVERYBODY IS A HOKIE ON FRIDAY.


Via King Banaian.

Virginia Tech is asking people to support its students, faculty, administrators, staff, alumni and friends by wearing orange and maroon this Friday. Given the number of colleagues I've worked with over the years that are from that fine institution, count me in, as long as I can find something in those two colors.

Friends of the University of Illinois, the Chicago Bears, the South Shore Line, and the Milwaukee Road ought to be able to do so, easily.

755. 43^o 1.821' N Lat., 87^o 58.347' W. Long. "Who was Dick Drago, Alex?"

HIGH ACHIEVERS GO TO MORNING CLASSES. Stephen Spruiell at Phi Beta Cons reflects on the Virginia Tech death toll.

One of the saddest things about this event is that the victims all seemed to be among the most accomplished and promising people at Virginia Tech. My wife was particularly distraught when she read about Librescu, who we all know by now know survived the Holocaust and escaped from Communist Romania only to be gunned down in his own classroom. I told her that I guess Librescu had to survive those ordeals so that he could save 10 lives on Monday. What else can one say when confronted with something so seemingly senseless?

Early-morning classes tend to have a higher proportion of "accomplished and promising" students precisely because that's a good time for motivated morning people to complete their schedules. There's accumulating evidence that the shooter viewed his shortcomings as the result of the successes of others: what better time than the 9 am class to take out his frustrations?

QUESTION OF THE DAY. Daniel Drezner:

A few questions to faculty readers out there, however:

1) Have you ever encountered a student you suspected of being capable of violence on [Virginia Tech] scale?
2) What action did you take?
3) What, if anything, could or should universities do to improve security?

Hie thee hence and offer contributions.

MENSCH.

Liviu Lebrescu 1930-2007.

(Via Phi Beta Cons, The Country Pundit, and University Diaries.)

VIRGINIA TECH.

We note with great sorrow today's tragedy in Blacksburg.

There will be no commentary on the events or on the commentary on the events until the story is clearer.

Margaret Soltan's University Diaries followed the events as the news broke.

The dean at Anonymous Community notes the vulnerability of campuses.

They're open, they're highly populated, they're lightly patrolled (if at all), and they're full of stressed-out people. In a way, they're almost naive, if it's possible for institutions to be naive. As I've mentioned before, they really aren't built for easy lockdown modes. Most were built before that term was even coined.

Selig sind, die da Leid tragen, denn sie sollen getröstet werden.

APRIL IS THE CRUELEST MONTH. April 16 is not too late in the season for a snowstorm.

April 16, 1961.
William Robertson photo in Eric Bronsky collection
Scanned from North Shore Line: Interurban Freight.

In another ten years, shoppers may be able to ride in this freight train's path as far as Harmswoods, although the stop will be called Old Orchard.

PLAY VALUE. Trains used to run a feature called "Would You Believe It?" where errors from the paint shop would sometimes turn up. Somebody at Weaver Models apparently set up a print pad with OHIO upside down. It's on both sides of the car.


In O Scale, the equipment is robust enough that one can sometimes use a now-illegal prototype practice to move cars and obtain a bit more clearance.


The uncoupling stick is a bit too long and too skinny to be a proper pole, but I suspect all of my switch engines will eventually be equipped with one that looks right, complete with the metal end-bands. Train crews will be advised to not use them too frequently.

PERFORMANCE RATINGS WITH INCOMPLETE COMPARISONS. A Wisconsin State Journal article on Wisconsin's run in the Women's National Invitational Tournament gets off an inaccurate dig at the field.

After all, the tournament determines the nation's 65th-best basketball team, the title can be bought by any school willing to ante up for home games and the crowds are generally limited to family, close friends and a few dedicated fans.

The observation about home-court advantages is accurate in part, with Wisconsin's two losses under the current format coming at Arkansas and at Wyoming. (Wisconsin fans turn out at the Kohl Center in numbers that suggest "few" approximates to "ten to fifteen thousand.") It's also inaccurate to refer to the cartel's tournament as comprising the sixty-four best teams: were that the case the expression "on the bubble" (which applies to teams at risk of being excluded when winners of the conference regular season make unanticipated exits from conference tournaments, requiring the pairing committee to do more work.)

The idea of attempting to construct a unique ranking among teams that sometimes have no opponents in common until they meet in a tournament poses a number of challenges. Subsequent to my griping about the cartel's tournament identifying a champion without requiring the champion to make the equivalent of a grandmaster norm I did some research on the algorithm by which the pairing committee ranks teams for selection to the tournament. There's something called the Ratings Percentage Index, which is pretty simple. The last such indices for 2006, prior to the announcement of tournament pairings, are still available online. For the men, eventual winner Florida ranked sixth, eventual runner-up Ohio State first, with UCLA, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Pittsburgh between. Eventual Invitational winner West Virginia ranked 57, with Northern Illinois 302. For the women, eventual winner Tennessee ranked first, and eventual runner-up Rutgers ninth, with Duke, North Carolina, Purdue, Connecticut, Vanderbilt, Maryland and Oklahoma between. Invitational winner Wyoming ranked 64, with Wisconsin at 86 and Northern Illinois at 116. There are other ranking methods in use, including one based on the formula for rating chess players. (Do people get paid to run these numbers, or are these hobbyists at work?) The chess method, which is current to the end of the tournament, puts Tennessee 1, Rutgers 5, Bowling Green 15, Wyoming 38, Wisconsin 44, Northern Illinois 102.

In one of the "profound math ideas made practical books" I once read, somebody used a fixed point argument to analyze the relative rankings of sports teams. I don't recall the details of the argument. It appears, however, that relative position can be sensitive to the algorithm being used.

FAILING YOUR MARKET TESTS. The latest trade-union survey of average annual faculty salaries has been released, and Inside Higher Ed presents the salient tables along with a great deal of hand-wringing.

In a new emphasis, the AAUP is drawing attention to the growing gaps between professors in different disciplines. While the trend of paying business and law professors more than those who teach literature and philosophy is nothing new, data released by the association indicate a significant growth in the gaps over the last 20 years. And association leaders want to focus more attention.

Those are the same 20 years over which the rest of the world has noticed literature and philosophy losing sight of intellectual coherence.

The disciplinary gaps are most evident comparing average salaries for assistant professors. The following table uses English language and literature professors as the base and expresses other disciplines’ salaries in comparison. Only other arts and humanities professors earn less, and a few disciplines saw smaller gains — while business professors are now earning twice as much.

Put another way, not all disciplines have industrial reserve armies of underemployed Ph.D.s.

[Research director John W.]Curtis of the AAUP said that the aim in providing this data was not to set some kind of acceptable or unacceptable salary gap among disciplines, but to promote a more open and full discussion of the topic. “The nature of higher education is changing, and has changed — and it’s not the product of any one decision, but the outcome of trends that have been ongoing for decades and that are beginning to show some stark inequalities,” he said.

The large gaps between some fields “raise questions of whether you can speak of faculty members who have a common perspective and a common situation,” he said. Curtis said he worried that those on the high end may be “more concerned about their own careers than the profession.” And while AAUP doesn’t rule out salary differentials by discipline, Curtis said that the association believes that these policies should be set by the faculty — something he does not think is always happening.

Haven't the people on the high end of any salary spectrum, whether it be within a discipline, among disciplines, or among lines of business, always been those with the best outside offers? Is a difference of perspective necessarily a bad thing? Perhaps others who have applied themselves to the task of making their work marketable to others are doing a more effective job of challenging the lowering of standards in higher education by their exit than I have by my voice, and let me assure you, difference of perspective in a curriculum committee is not the road to great popularity.

The reaction of a prominent member of an organization that has contributed much to higher education's poor image amuses.

Rosemary G. Feal, executive director of the Modern Language Association, said she wasn’t surprised by the pay gap, but was worried by it. “I’m someone who thinks the value of a society — and the well-being of its citizenry — is reflected in the value we collectively place on arts and letters. Language and literature study offers students skills that they need to imagine and build a better world, and I think that’s something we should all care about and want to reward and support.” She noted that plenty of English majors end up in medicine or law or business, so those who think they can spend less on such departments may be having an impact on the professions they worry about.

The impact, dear reader, is often in the frustration of a professor in a senior-level course dealing with the poor writing of students, whether converted English majors or otherwise. Perhaps it's time for the Modern Language Association to rethink its oppositional stance.

“We ought to be rewarding those who help us learn the lessons of Shakespeare’s plays just as we reward those who can teach us the lessons of Enron,” [Feal] said.

That is, if there are people teaching Shakespeare. Si quaeris Ward Churchill, circumspice!

And salaries do send messages, Feal said. “The gap in pay worries me because it might discourage those who want to teach language and literature,” she said. “I see some evidence that those who love language and literature and aspire to be college professors are questioning the viability of their vocation. Narrowing the pay gap is a way for colleges and universities to say ‘we value the humanities.’ Market forces are one factor in determining pay, but the value we place on humanistic learning in institutions of higher education should never be subordinated to that factor.”

Restore the trivium and the Canon and then let's talk. But bear in mind that whatever the academy subsidizes, it gets more of. Is an expansion of the reserve army of culture-studies grievance-mongers efficient or fair?

SELF SELECTION. Some people describe the world.

The introduction of Murray Sperber's Beer and Circus: How Big-Time College Sports Has Crippled Undergraduate Education divides students into four basic groups, of which only one, the smallest, being scholarly/intellectual. This group has probably always been the smallest, but has always represented the majority of the professors, with a few exceptions like Party Girl. Professors are almost set up to feel a certain disdain for their students, as the other categories are not especially attractive, as they consist chiefly of social butterflies, vocational drudgers, and slackers.

College faculty are self-selected from a different subset of the population than the great mass of students. Big deal. That's true of accountants and engineers and model railroaders and golfers and patternmakers. (I hesitate to labor the obvious: why go into a line of work that requires you to interact with a variety of curious, in all the senses of the word, young people? Get to know them as people. They'll surprise you.)

Does it have to be the case that college faculty also self-select for pusillanimity? What is the point of enjoying all the protections of tenure if the best one can do is post anonymous whinges at Rate Your Students?

So why not get involved and change things?

As a result, the general intelligence of students probably is at least somewhat lower than it was, say, 50 years ago, but more importantly, the outstanding students are simply swamped by the masses.

Why? Have your faculty councils and department chairmen acquiesced in a dilution of admission standards that somebody has sugar coated as access? Clearly, the policy isn't working. Say so. Change it.

Numerically speaking, the outstanding students are still probably around, even if they don't seem as prevalent because there are so many of those "other" students professors don't much like—the ones not in Sperber's category of intellectuals.

Did that happen by accident? Who consented to offering retakes of high school, sometimes for college credit, and defended it as remediation? What incentives were your faculty councils, department chairmen, deans, and provosts, responding to when they proliferated content-free courses and majors and explained that such offerings boosted retention? Don't go along. Speak up.

Are you complicit by your silence in the fraud? When the proliferation of image consultants, failed scholars, schmoozers and hack politicians engages in an orgy of self-congratulation and praise and refers to it as a favorable assessment, where are you? Posting anonymous whinges? Call "nonsense" and name names.

YOU DON'T SAY. Iran may be helping Iraqis build bombs.

Commanders of a splinter group inside the Shiite Mahdi Army militia have told The Associated Press that there are as many as 4,000 members of their organization that were trained in Iran and that they have stockpiles of EFPs, a weapon that causes great uneasiness among U.S. forces here because they penetrate heavily armored vehicles.

CLEANING UP THE CULTURE? I follow the women's basketball competition for the play value. It appears, though, that a rather ill-advised remark about the tournament by a radio yakker might serve to marginalize excessive behavior in entertainment more generally.

"This is the end of the shock-jock era," said Richard Levick, chief executive of Levick Strategic Communications, a crisis communications firm in Washington, D.C. "When your advertisers start abandoning this form of entertainment, it's all over."

Or not.

All three instances of failed shock humor -- Richards's, Coulter's and Imus's -- led to condemnations and calls for sensitivity from a myriad of politicians and activists; Democratic Senator and Savior Barack Obama chastised Imus for his "divisive, hurtful and offensive" words, further suggesting that no one with "a public platform" should attempt to find humor in race-based stereotypes. The problem with this viewpoint is that the majority of Americans -- of all colors and classes -- have laughed at these hideous prejudices at some point; if you try to disassociate yourself from the hordes of hatemongers, your DVD collection better not include anything with Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock, Eddie Murphy, Sacha Baron Cohen, Mel Brooks, Trey Parker or Matt Stone.

Or it's an opportunity to generalize other grievances.

Whatever the motive, the push to censor blasphemy on campus in guise of "tolerance" is extremely bad policy. It is bad because it tramples on speech and expression, bad because it promotes a religious double standard, and bad because it is an invitation for other religious groups to seek the same protections. When Muslims claim the "right" to be free from insults to their faith, Christian conservatives won't be far behind.

I'll let Janet at SCSU Scholars deliver the summation.

Ladies, you are superb athletes. What you are learning bodes well for you for your entire life. Relish in your achievements! Ignore all those who will try to put a label on you. You are first class. Congratulations on your successes! Now, move forward and play even better and harder next year!

If the public culture becomes less coarse, let's call that a spillover benefit.

YUM. Morning, noon, or night in Vienna, that's an opportunity for dessert.

Pastries and sweets are as Viennese as the waltz and the foods for which Viennese cuisine is best known around the world. Culinary connoisseurs fill the city's 2,000 cafés, bakeries, restaurants or bistros nearly every hour of every day to savor life one bite at a time.

My mistake a few years ago was to book too little time in Vienna. I mentioned the bratwursts there and on the station in Frankfurt-Main, but not the desserts. Rest assured, dear readers, they make pretty good desserts at Panhans in Semmering too.

The idea is not to eat and leave. It's to stay a while.

On the other hand, hanging out with new colleagues talking about railway history on top of the Hirschenkogel was worth it. (The chaser was beer, not tortes! Ein prosit!)

BARGAIN HUNTING. Jim Stingl of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel covers Opening Day for the Milwaukee Braves Cleveland Indians:

Pushed out of its stadium by deep snow, the team played its roam opener against the Los Angeles Angels before an astonishingly large and mostly local crowd Tuesday at Miller Park. The Indians won 7-6.

And they were clearly the favorite of the two teams. Around here, we understand how snow can mess up your life. We northerners have to stick together.

Think about it. Neither team on the field was ours, but the lines at the will-call windows were 40 people long. And that was in the third inning.

It was an unusual convergence of online and telephone buyers showing up at will call, plus the robust walk-up crowd that wanted a piece of this surreal event.

In the coverage, do I hear an echo?

The game already was an hour old, and Laura Bemus of Elkhorn finally had made her way out of the traffic jam leading to the stadium lots and was waiting in another line with her two sons to get tickets.

But she wasn't complaining.

She was here for the bargain - $10 for any seat in the joint, all concentrated on the lower two levels. Major-league baseball at a minor-league price.

Not surprisingly, cost was the top reason people gave for showing up on a cold Tuesday night to watch two teams from that other baseball league. The heavy snow made it impossible for them to play at Jacobs Field in Cleveland, so our domed and toasty Miller Park was offered as an alternative.

"We just thought a major-league baseball game for 10 bucks, sounds good to me," John Behrens said. He and his brother, Mike, both Cubs fans, drove up from Libertyville, Ill., to enjoy seats in the fifth row near third base.

One can even teach baseball fans some new tricks.

In the top of the seventh inning, the crowd of 19,031 that nearly filled the two lower decks got a wave started and had Miller Park looking like Camp Randall Stadium for a Badgers football game.

First the wave went clockwise, then reversed to counter-clockwise. On the third time around, in brilliantly coordinated fashion, it went in slow motion, and the fourth time around went as though it was being fast-forwarded on a VCR.

"That locked me up a little bit," Cleveland manager Eric Wedge said. "I've never seen the slow wave before. That locked me up a little bit. Then they sped it up." Then he had to point out, "I was watching the game. But I did see that," he said, laughing.

(See also Paul Noonan's coverage.)

A BOOT STOMPING ON A HUMAN FACE?

(AFP/Getty photo by Natalia Kolesnikova)

Russian troops march during a rehearsal for the May 9th Victory Day parade in Balashikha near Moscow on Tuesday.

REMEMBERING KURT VONNEGUT. Margaret Soltan of University Diaries prepares for a radio interview (subsequently annulled) honoring the recently deceased author.

I decided to take a sentimental old hippie approach to Vonnegut's death. I said that for people like me, in high school in 1969 when Slaughterhouse Five came out, it's a somewhat emotional occasion, since that novel is caught up with so many other things about that time...

Let me direct your attention to Mr Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron" (which originally appeared in Fantasy and Science Fiction, also known as the place to look for "Von Goom's Gambit," but I digress.)

The web site I linked to introduces "Harrison Bergeron" with "I'd like you to read this famous story and think about whether Nietzsche wasn't on to something when he criticized the naive idea of human equality." In 1961, the idea of treating any possible source of difference in performance as an unfair advantage might have sounded positively dystopian: the propensity of some people to refer to "impairments" that must be "accommodated" lest the "temporarily abled" act "oppressively" renders the story somewhat more prophetic. One source of school notes describes the story somewhat neutrally.

Vonnegut has said that he learned most of what he believes about social and political idealism from junior civics class, as well as from the democratic institution of the public school itself. A futuristic story dealing with universal themes of equality, freedom, power and its abuses, and media influence, ‘‘Harrison Bergeron’’ continues to evoke thoughtful responses about equality and individual freedom in the United States.

A critical essay (caution, site has pop-ups) suggests a different interpretation of the story.

More specifically, this text satirizes America's Cold War misunderstanding of not just communism but also socialism. To argue that thesis, this article begins outside of the text by situating it in Vonnegut's oeuvre: his fiction, nonfiction, speeches, and interviews. Then this contextualization will attend to Vonnegut's audience. Finally, the analysis will turn to the internal evidence.

If "Harrison Bergeron" is a satire against the Left, then it is inconsistent with the rest of Vonnegut's fiction. For a view of his fiction's politics in general, one need only recall Jailbird's satire on conservatism and its sympathy with striking laborers, or the endorsement of income redistribution in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. A specific illustration of his politics occurs in the dedication of Hocus Pocus to socialist Eugene Debs, which quotes him: "While there is a lower class I am in it".

The essay invokes Mr Vonnegut's sympathy with George Orwell's socialism. It is worth recalling that Mr Orwell was often more critical of individuals who might have been allied to his causes than he was of adversaries. So might it be with Mr Vonnegut and "Harrison Bergeron." The essay, on the other hand, says more about the status anxieties of lit-crits than it does about a division of labor society.

It is fitting that the athletic characters in this text are held down by birdshot and that the plot resolution comes when the chief leveler, the Handicapper General, blasts Harrison and his intended with a shotgun. As Richard Slotkin has shown, it was during the frontier expansion that America extended its racist classism in part by developing its anti-intellectualism. Also appropriate is the fact that Harrison's parents are watching a televised ballet, thereby referring to the absurd position that economic leveling means there would be no competition and nobody would be any better than anybody else. The Russian ballet and Swedish theatre (two nations often cited at the time as exemplifying the absurdity of leveling) were highly competitive; they did not hold that all people are equally talented. According to the ideology of America's dominant culture, Russia and Sweden's expenditures on the arts were perverse because they were publicly funded, while America's were pure because they were privately funded--or, rather under funded.

We really have to do a better job of explaining comparative advantage. I like P. J. O'Rourke's quip about chess being a spectator sport in Russia and they're poor and becoming poorer. We have public subsidies for the roller derby and obesity among poor children is a serious public health challenge. Undeterred, our intrepid critic persists:

So this story satirizes not just mistaken notions of equality. It also satirizes the American definition of freedom as the greatest good to the smallest number. The American myth is that only in a class society can everyone have an equal chance for achieving the greatest economic inequality.

Right. (And people earn Ph.D.s and scholarly prestige for this??)

TAX OFFSETS? I just finished my tax returns (to the accompaniment of a Democratic Saturday radio address complaining that the "alternative minimum tax" is ensnaring all sorts of families but precisely no millionaires: remember when the count of millionaires who paid no taxes served as a metric for the injustice of the tax code?) With the Internet, there might be some way for people to trade their allocation (use the simpleminded method defenders of controversial programs use: a taxpayer with a $10,000 tax bill paid only half a cent for that degenerate video) of the federal budget to others: for example, somebody could swap my share of the National Endowment for the Arts budget for his share of the Amtrak budget. Such a service could make for interesting policy analysis: which items would nobody be willing to accept others' allocation?

PROFESSIONALS STUDY LOGISTICS. Two former supply officers who were not all that well-regarded in the antebellum Army and who were initially overlooked in favor of more politically connected captains and colonels became the leadership team that quelled the Rebellion. In Book Review No. 6 I highly recommend Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War, particularly for readers who would like an overview of the Civil War that provides a balanced presentation of individuals, intrigues, campaigns, the trials that total war brings, and their triumphs and struggles after Lee and Johnston surrendered. The generals were together at Shiloh, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga and worked together on the coordinated campaign in Virginia and Georgia that gave rebel commanders more contemporaneous challenges than they had resources to meet. I've provided previous commentary on the western campaigns in a review of Nothing But Victory and see little reason to repeat previous material. I note a few snippets from Grant and Sherman. During the Georgia campaign, the Army of the Tennessee had a few problems with improvised explosive devices, which Gen^l Sherman dealt with by conscripting residents of towns thought to be harboring bomb-planters to go on bomb-clearing patrols. The book makes no mention of patrician pacifist abolition types in environs such as Boston being appalled by such practices in the service of their cause. That Army was so committed to scavenging off the land that as their boots wore out, many soldiers opted to march, and to fight, barefoot. Some even refused an issue of new boots on the eve of the Grand Review in Washington, D.C. that marked the end of major combat operations.

ON THE ACADEMIC JOB MARKET. Signifying Nothing's Chris Lawrence weighs in on dysfunction in political science.

Anyone who believes that “racist, sexist, and homophobic” attacks are solely motivated by a lack of civility—rather than being based on (quite likely falsely-held) beliefs about widespread non-merit-based decision-making in hiring, tenure, and promotion at most institutions and within APSA itself—is quite simply dangerously naïve.

Question: why is the president of the American Political Science Association following a comment thread at a weblog specializing in academic job rumors?

ON CUB WEEKEND, IT MIGHT AS WELL BE A NEUTRAL SITE. Miller Park becomes a neutral site during Cleveland's snow emergency.

The odd turn of events presented something of a logistical challenge for baseball, which has been rocked early in the season by wet and cold weather in the East. The Indians, it seems, have been hit the hardest and still have not been able to host a home opener after canceling an entire four-game series against the Seattle Mariners. And with more bad weather expected in Cleveland this week, the Indians knew they needed help.

"This is a tough situation for Cleveland," [baseball commissioner and onetime Ford dealer Bud] Selig said in a telephone interview from Phoenix, where he was in town to attend the home opener for the Arizona Diamondbacks. "We knew yesterday we had some trouble; we didn't like the alternatives. So this morning, Paul Dolan called me very early from Cleveland and suggested Milwaukee."

Paul Noonan directs your attention to "Rick Vaughn Glasses Night" and Sean Hackbarth suggests in proper Milwaukee fashion that being able to watch major-league baseball at minor-league prices is a deal.

I suppose it's too much to ask for the calendar that went file taxes - Opening Day - Memorial Day - pennant race - Labor Day - World Series - Hallowe'en - Presidential election.

IDENTIFYING CLIMATE CHANGE. Aldo Leopold's daughter continues her father's work.

Nina Leopold Bradley walked nimbly along a trail to a weather-beaten cabin that figures prominently in modern environmental history.

Bradley is 89 years old, and using a pair of hiking poles, she pointed out places where she has recorded the arrival of spring for the last 30 years. Her father, the famed ecologist and pioneer of wildlife management Aldo Leopold, had done the same before her.

But spring's advance has been so dramatic that if Leopold were alive today, he'd have to rewrite parts of his seminal book, "A Sand County Almanac."

Identifying as anthropogenic any of the changes remains a challenge.

The higher temperatures coincide with rising levels of carbon dioxide, most of which is the result of burning fossil fuels.

But there are additional explanations for the Earth's warming. Some scientists believe the natural cycles of cooling and the current warming trend have been overlooked.

Edward Hopkins, assistant state climatologist, believes that these natural cycles and rising levels of carbon dioxide are both at work.

"Nobody wants to say that we just don't know," Hopkins said. "I am willing to say that we don't know completely."

Today the majority of scientists believe that an increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is the key reason for why the Earth has warmed so quickly in the past 50 years.

The article details a number of changes in seasonal rhythms, some of which, if continued, are scary. (It will take a few more snow days in April baseball to be evidence of a reverse trend, the way long-term observation works.)

IT EVEN LOOKS LIKE A BIG ELECTROLINER. Here's Destination: Freedom on the French speed test with a specially configured TGV.

While the United States struggles to keep its passenger rail system (AMTRAK) from being dismantled by the Bush administration and continues to pour hundreds of billions of dollars into an archaic highway system that no longer meets the needs of America in a global economy, here is what’s happening in Europe:

France has unveiled the world’s fastest high-speed train that broke all records by reaching a speed of 574.8 km/h (357.2 mph).

Last Monday, France announced it would try to surpass its own record of 17 years ago - 515.3 kph (320.2 mph). On Tuesday, they succeeded. A black V150 train rocketed along a stretch of the new high-speed line between Paris and the city of Strasbourg on France’s border with Germany.

The speed is comparable to that of a freight propeller airplane.

Bernard Collardey photo courtesy Destination Freedom.

And check out that trolley spark. (I'm informed the train drew all its power through one collector, in the best Indiana Railroad tradition.)

JM Frybourg photo posted by DoDo at European Tribune.

WE'RE CARING PEOPLE. So caring that we'll make your life miserable if you don't care in precisely the way we do.

The social-work school at Missouri State is now headed by an interim director, Etta M. Madden, who is an English professor.

The report says that the school's faculty members spend "way too much time meddling in each other's business and looking over each other's shoulders," and that they "bully" and "browbeat" not only the students but one another.

It was that observation more than any other, [(Southwest) Missouri State president Michael T.] Nietzel said, that persuaded him to release the report to the public. The report indicates that faculty members demean students with ideological differences. It also says that faculty members have sufficient experience in social work, but not much experience in the classroom.

Via SCSU Scholars' King Banaian, who has additional excerpts and annotations.

GETTING THE INCENTIVES RIGHT. Via Phi Beta Cons, another rage over the alleged neglect of the undergraduate.

Ninety-five percent of each college's score is based on measures of wealth, fame and admissions selectivity. As a result, college presidents looking to get ahead focus on marketing, fundraising and recruiting faculty with great research credentials instead of investing their resources in helping undergraduates learn and earn degrees.

This problem can't and shouldn't be fixed by government regulation. Independence and diversity make our higher-education sector strong, and that shouldn't change.

The way to drive higher education institutions to stop ignoring undergraduates in favor of pursuing research is to provide more information about their performance with undergraduates to the consumers who pay tuition bills: students and their parents.

By investing in new ways to gauge the quality of teaching and learning and by requiring taxpayer-subsidized colleges to disclose their performance to the public, the federal government can change the market dynamics in higher education, creating strong incentives for colleges to produce the caliber of undergraduates we need to compete in the global marketplace, incentives to make the rhetoric of being first in the world in higher education a reality.

The problem with the policy proposal, dear reader, is that it does nothing to address the positional arms race that is driving the popularity of the name colleges. As long as the alternative to the "you teach yourself, you have smart classmates, let me find a shorter proof of Fermat's Theorem" model of higher education (itself a mischaracterization of what goes on in the best universities) is a non-challenging degree program driven by an access-assessment-remediation-retention mindset, the oversubscribed Ivies, wannabes, and state flagships are going to have no reason to do things differently.

LOWLIVES. Don't you dare call it transgressiveness.

The East Troy Railroad Museum is scrambling to repair damage done by vandals over the weekend.

Four vintage railroad cars were broken into and covered with spray-painted graffiti. Some of the cars date back to 1907.

The preservation season is about to begin, with the museum commemorating the opening of the East Troy branch of The Milwaukee Electric Railway & Light in 1907.

FIRST WE'RE GOING TO CUT IT OFF. Vicksburg, Mississippi, which I visited a month ago (during that first false hint of summer, is it really snowing in Dixie today?) was the last rebel strong point on the Mississippi River. The mind boggles at the thought of the square-riggers of the New Orleans blockading squadron making their way upriver (even on their steam propellors) past Baton Rouge to take on Vicksburg, but they did, only to be frustrated. General Grant's intended to avoid dealing with the fortifications by digging a shortcut for the river. Some traces of it remain just south of the interstate on the Louisiana bank of the river.


The embankment in the background is the current Mississippi River levee. Soldiers and contraband laborers dug a canal, but the river decided it was a good place to deposit silt it had scoured elsewhere.

Instead, the army went further south intending to isolate Vicksburg first from the south and then from the east. A small fleet of gunboats and transports ran past the Vicksburg fortifications to support the landing. The Grand Gulf Military Park is on the site of a rebel fortification that diverted but ultimately didn't prevent the Army of the Tennessee from crossing the Mississippi River and isolating Vicksburg.


There are still traces of the parapet at Fort Cobun. The river has changed course since the battle.


The fort sites, which are also home to a collection of regional history, are worth the $3 fee to visit the grounds. Many more pictures here. Among the inventions deployed during the Rebellion is an armored train. This model is inside the visitor center and museum.


The Army of the Tennessee made a relatively unopposed crossing near Port Gibson and maneuvered to secure its rear before isolating Vicksburg. Coordination between Rebel general John C. Pemberton at Vicksburg and Joseph Johnston inland left much to be desired, with Johnston never quite committed either to reinforcing Vicksburg or to providing a corridor for Pemberton to retreat. An aggressive rebel commander took on the entire XVII Corps southwest of Raymond. Although the rebel unit was driven back, Grant and Sherman opted to go as far east as Jackson to secure their rear before turning to Vicksburg. There is now a walking trail around the battlefield. The right of way of an Illinois Central branch is approximately the route of approach from Port Gibson to Raymond.


In Raymond, a classic courthouse and Confederate monument.


I'll take up the siege of Vicksburg in a subsequent post. My focus tonight is on cutting off the garrison at Vicksburg. Naval operations on tributaries of the Mississippi were crucial to the preparations. Another invention of the rebels was the maritime improvised explosive device (later called a sea mine), one of which sank USS Cairo on the Yazoo River. Some years later, preservationists raised her, and this part-original, part-reconstructed (although the reconstructed parts do not place any load on the original parts) is in the Vicksburg Battlefield Park proper, and cleverly placed where the road turns back from traversing the outer, attacking lines, to the inner, defensive lines.


There's at least one other Civil War ironclad that might be a candidate for recovery. CSS Tennessee is submerged in shallow water near Savannah.

MONOPOLY. The recent release of Monopoly: The World's Most Famous Game (not yet an acquisition, but it's a candidate for this years book challenge) attracts reviews. Reason's Nick Gillespie has a short, generally favorable review.

The author of "The Game Makers" and an executive who worked at Parker Brothers among other game companies, [Philip] Orbanes' narrative is filled with fascinating characters. Elizabeth Magie Phillips, for example, created The Landlord's Game and saw it as a way of winning folks over to the crank ideas of single-tax enthusiast Henry George. Then there's Columbia economist Rexford Guy Tugwell, who used Phillips' game as a teaching tool and who, as a member of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal "Brains Trust" pushed "for a full state-administered economy" during the Depression. And the unemployed plumber and "ordinary American" Charles B. Darrow who created - and wisely patented - Monopoly in the form we've all come to know and love.

Financier J.P. Morgan is in the tale, too: He provided the model for the game's mascot, originally known as Rich Uncle Moneybags and later dubbed "Mr. Monopoly."

He includes the obligatory praise of plentitude.

Today, Monopoly is going as strong as ever, partly because it continues to evolve in response to - and anticipation of - consumer demand. There are now versions that range far beyond the familiar streets of Atlantic City, from The Simpsons' mythical Springfield to those on the computer screen.

"Capitalism," writes Orbanes, "has many virtues, and one of the most notable is choice. For Monopoly and its maker [now Hasbro], choice has become a passion." As important, he notes, the game "is a bountiful giver of enjoyment." No wonder, then, that its future looks as rich as its past.

There certainly are lots of versions of Monopoly available today. A longer review by The American Interest's David Parlett calls out some of the limitations of corporate-sponsored product histories.

Modern board games, in contrast, arise not through evolution but by a known originator’s act of invention, a one-off product of “intelligent design” in a relatively brief period of time. They are published and subject to trade protection such as copyright. Although abstract games are still produced, they are a minority taste; modern board games are mostly thematic, overtly representational, even theatrical. Johan Huizinga, in his classic 1938 study Homo Ludens, defines play as either a contest for something, as in the play of a game, or a representation of something, as in the performance of a play. In this latter case, there is a natural tendency for much if not most of the play to take place above the board in the form of transactions and agreements with other players. Such games involve more talking, and are naturally regarded as more sociable.

From a creative point of view the most remarkable feature of Monopoly is that it actually falls into both categories, something Huizinga did not anticipate. It is now well known to have originated in a precursor called The Landlord’s Game, which sprang apparently fully-formed from the brain of a Maryland Quaker called Lizzie Magie and was patented by her in 1904. Well known, that is, to all but the compilers of Hasbro’s Monopoly web page. That page still insists on crediting Monopoly to an out-of-work heating engineer named Charles Darrow, and on dating its origin to the years of the Depression immediately preceding Monopoly’s first publication under that name by Parker Brothers in 1935.

This leaves an explanatory gap of some three decades, which, in the first century of mass communication, probably equates to about three centuries of traditional game evolution. During that period several versions of the game were published under different titles and by different nominal “inventors”, including Lizzie Magie herself. But the real point of interest lies in the fact that most of the game’s development over that time took place in colleges and private dwellings, by players using homemade boards, transmitting the game’s essential rules by word of mouth, and modifying components and elements of play as the fancy took or inspiration seized them.

Ah yes, unanticipated and unintended consequences, even in a product originally conceived (a la Social Justice Legos?) as an instrument of social transformation.

To understand why, we need to note that our inventive Quaker, far from devoting a game to the praise of Mammon, actually devised it as a moral tale showing how unfair rents could be charged by unscrupulous landlords, for which, if there is any justice in the world, they will—in the game world, at least—rightly fetch up in jail. The object of the game, as she stated in her renewed patent of 1924,

is not only to afford amusement to the players, but to illustrate to them how under the present or prevailing system of land tenure, the landlord has an advantage over other enterprises and how the single tax would discourage land speculation.

In this she was not merely following, but purposefully promoting, the tenets of economist Henry George, creator of the single-tax theory, who was convinced that property speculation formed the basis of society’s economic and social problems.

Although as she developed her concept, she unwittingly created a model of competitive capitalism that illustrates the difficulty of creating a monopoly.

I believe the answer lies in the complete originality of Lizzie’s mechanisms of play. The distinguishing mark of her prowess at game design lay in a technical invention that far outweighed her ability to appeal to a mass audience or desire to gratify popular taste.

Taxonomically, Monopoly classifies as a race game, belonging therefore to the same broad category as backgammon and Parcheesi, as distinct (for example) from the war-game category of chess and checkers. Abstract race games go back to deep antiquity; examples found in ancient Egyptian tombs are older even than backgammon. Thematic race games are historically younger, though still pretty old. They include, for example, the Chinese game of Mandarin Promotions (Tang Dynasty) and the Royal Game of Goose from 16th-century Europe. As Orbanes points out, the vast majority of “early modern” (19th-century) board games follow the Game of Goose pattern in being race games with some sort of pictorial theme, be it fox and hounds, or treasure islands, or the Game of Life itself (Milton Bradley, 1861).

What Lizzie Magie came up with were at least two ideas for which I know no antecedents. The first, as Orbanes points out, was the transformation of a linear track running from start to home into a continuous loop. You might expect to win such a race by being the first to complete a given number of laps or circuits, which of course still amounts to being the first to reach Home. In Landlord 1909, however, you win by having accumulated the most resources after a given number of laps, and in Landlord 1924 and Monopoly you do so by being the last player left when everyone else has dropped out through exhaustion—of financial resources, that is.

Second, and more significant, was the unparalleled novelty of being able to own a space in such a way as to extract resources from any other player who lands on it. In traditional race games a piece that lands on a space occupied by an adversary sends the current occupant back to start, or, in the case of Goose, to that just quitted by the interloper. In these games, occupancy of a space always ran the risk of being ousted by an incoming opponent. In Landlord/Monopoly, however, the reverse is the case. Two pieces can occupy the same space without interaction. But this clever new rule enables you to buy a space and, acting as an absentee landlord, extract resources from any opponent who subsequently lands on it. This is a totally new concept in the evolution of race games.

That the game does not have to have an end raises the possibility that many games will not end. So, also, can it be with business competition, whether as taught in the textbook or as observed in industries without strong scale economies or network externalities. With sufficiently many players, the pattern of initial ownership of railroads, utilities, and properties can be one in which no player acquires a monopoly in the first few trips around the board, and no proposed trades of properties (Boardwalk for Kentucky, Mediterranean, and $100) are mutually satisfactory. The resulting infinite loop is loosely a competitive equilibrium, although the game loses realism in that no housing gets built.

ALL THEY DID WAS BREAK AN EVIL EMPIRE. A USA Today report on the rules of engagement for professional fighting at hockey games, or is it fighting in professional hockey games, notes

But the frontier justice strikes René Fasel, president of the International Ice Hockey Federation in Switzerland, as "Neanderthal" or even "criminal" behavior.

"One of the most cherished events in American sports history is the 1980 'Miracle On Ice,' a game without even a hint of a fight. Did anyone miss fighting in that game?" he says. "Would the American victory had been more emphatic had Mike Eruzione scored a knockout decision over Sergei Makarov and sent him bloodied to the locker room?"

The professionals, however, see some entertainment value in what the league rules, bordering on anachronism, refer to "fisticuffs."

For my purposes, the hockey season ended Saturday evening, when Michigan State decided the national title in the final minute.

Then Justin Abdelkader, surrounded by two Eagles, snuck in to poke in pass with 19 seconds left. Boyle was on the ice watching his dream crumble. It was thelatest that a championship game has ever been decided in regulation.

BC had been worn down and probably didn't even know it.

Give Boston College coach Jerry York props for the hockey equivalent of resigning in a losing position after Michigan State scored an empty-net goal in the final two seconds.

"There was no sense, just let it roll," said York, who suffered his second consecutive national championship game loss. "The gloves and the sticks were on the ice. No sense in putting it all back. We weren't going to score three goals in (that amount of time)."

That despite being defeated for the second straight year, both times after starting the season a favorite.

A SHORT FIRST QUARTER REPORT. I'm a little behind the proper pace for this year's Fifty Book Challenge.

1. Scaling Down: Living Large in a Smaller Space, 17 February 2007.
2. Still Stuck in Traffic: Coping with Peak-Hour Traffic Congestion, 3 March 2007.
3. The Fallen Colossus, 4 March 2007.
4. The Merchant of Power, 5 March 2007.
5. The Godfather's Revenge, 25 March 2007.

The prolonged winter has stunted my bookworm's growth.

Oooooo

Cross-posted at the European Tribune and the Fifty Book Challenge.

PEGGING THOSE CONTROLLERS. An Occasional Train Blog by the European Tribune's DoDo has much more on the French TGV speed test, including two different videos and a lengthy conversation. Hey, the test train is two cab units and two middle units! Trolley sparks are as much a part of the TGV experience as they were on our interurbans.

GET UP, GET UP, GET OUTTA HERE. Brewers salvage one from the Cubs. Never mind that it's a school night, hoist a Sprecher.

A LITTLE HELP FROM MY FRIENDS. Mike Calvert of Gilmaur Models made up some motion brackets for the Andreyev.


Next step: create crosshead guides out of angles and channels (this locomotive has the usual pivoting crosshead and a forward, auxiliary crosshead to support the additional weight of what would otherwise be a very long piston rod and main rod) and make some pins out of round stock to mount the forward guide to the cylinders, and solder the lot together. Then set up the drill press in order to drill and tap 1-72.

CHEESEBOX AND RAFT. Opinion Journal's Stuart Ferguson recommends a visit to the recently opened Monitor Center in Newport News, Virginia, not far from the waters where Monitor checked Virginia (Mr Ferguson, a North Carolinian, describes the battle as a "draw;" inasmuch as the Blockading Squadron remained on station for the duration of the rebellion, Monitor achieved her objective.) Monitor's turret has been salvaged from North Carolina waters for conservation in the center, and there is a full-size replica on display.

[T]he USS Monitor Center is the most remarkable, informative and downright exciting history-museum experience I've ever had, with just the right combination of art, artifacts and technology. Curator Anna Gibson Holloway, her museum colleagues and the other consultants and collaborators are to be congratulated, including John B. Hightower, the museum's recently retired president and CEO, who oversaw much of the project. And the exhibition's Web site, http://www.monitorcenter.org/, is a model resource.

There is still an original hull in the Monitor pattern afloat in Budapest, although preservation efforts appear to be where they were a year ago. (I've observed a number of hits from google.hu looking for pictures -- would any of those readers be able to provide updates on Lajta or let us know if some Yankee Greenbacks would be helpful?)

THE EVOLUTION OF CONCENTRATION. A Nation writer confronts the tension between emergent distributed networks and vanguardism. A sympathetic reader of the column suggests some introspection among leading voices on the left.

Becca Golubock Watson writes about the difficulty experienced by progressive bloggers who do not have the financial resources available to a relatively small number of famous and successful bloggers on the left, and who does she quote or mention to make her case? Josh Marshall, Marcy Wheeler, Markos Moulitsas, Chris Bowers. These are the stars of the blog world; the blogs they write for or own — Talking Points Memo and TPMuckraker, Firedoglake, Daily Kos, My DD, are at the top of the liberal blogosphere’s A list.

With a minimal amount of effort, Watson could have found hundreds of blogs with only moderate or even little to no name recognition that are original, engaging, well-written, and deserving of a wider audience. Why didn’t she talk to the people who run these blogs? We are the ones who know what it’s like to be so in love with blogging that we would blog every waking hour if we could only afford to stay home and do that. We are the ones who have tried every marketing strategy from Google Adsense to affiliate programs to tip jars. We are the ones who leave comments on blogs we enjoy reading because we’ve heard it’s a good way to get noticed; who beg for reciprocal blogrolling. We work hard to polish and improve our writing, to write elegantly, concisely, engagingly — because we’ve been told and anyway we know for ourselves that top-notch writing is the best marketing tool there is.

The problem is, there are thousands of political blogs out there, and an astounding percentage of them are really, really good. Most will never get the kind of recognition that leads to $10,000 ads and the chance to quit your day job and blog full-time. And yes, one of those bloggers is me.

A number of other commentators have weighed in: see Outside the Beltway's James Joyner for a roundup.

We may be observing the phenomenon John S. McGee studied at length in In Defense of Industrial Concentration: a few economists do most of the publishing, a few actors get most of the leading roles. I'm sure there are plenty of culture-studies Ph.D.s who could do Katha Pollitt's column as well as she could, yet, there she is, month in, month out. For that matter, there are plenty of universities other than the Ivies from which The Nation could recruit interns, yet Becca Golubock Watson is yet another Harvard graduate in the annual crop of interns from the Ivies who hire out at the opinion magazines, whether those magazines are explicitly egalitarian in the Nation or Washington Monthly mold, or less concerned about such things in the Reason or National Review manner.

It's a good thing I'm standing down from class preparation for the evening, otherwise there's the germ of a question about monopolization policy in this post: is the hiring of a pundit on a long-term contract a suppression of competition in punditry? (Yeah, it's not that well-formed. I said I'm standing down.)

WHY INVESTING MATTERS. Updates to the National Income and Product Accounts can be occasion for introspection. The editors at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel avoid excessive handwringing about income inequality.

Median household income for those in their prime working years was more than $61,000 in 2005, according to U.S. Census Bureau figures. Married couples did even better. So it's not like the middle class is drying up. Instead, it's that the incomes of those at the very top - bolstered by the power of the stock market - are growing much more rapidly.

The observation is noteworthy in that it doesn't preclude the possibility of some members of the middle class putting some money into the stock market (probably not a bad idea, given the unwillingness of Congress and of state legislatures to confront the unfunded liabilities in Social "Security" and the state employee pension plans.) In that vein, it's amusing to see the editors endorsing a variation on private investment accounts.

The government can do more to encourage savings, including making 401(k) accounts mandatory and seeding them with federal money. The government also must encourage innovation by boosting funding for both basic and applied research and offering targeted tax breaks for business innovation.

I doubt that the national government has any special advantage in picking winners: why not do a little research into the incidence of business taxes?

Methinks they buried the lead.

But nothing affects income more over the course of a working life than having a good education. The primary focus should be making sure that more Americans have one.

At one time the Milwaukee Public Schools made a decent effort to socialize their students into the upper-middle class. Will the Journal-Sentinel's editors take up that as their rallying cry? Will they direct readers' attention to a discipline deficit disorder in the schools?

LOSING INSTITUTIONAL COMPETENCE. Barbara Ehrenreich grasps the error in expecting too much of cost-cutting.

Since the late eighties, corporate America has pursued the beautiful dream of an employee-free company. Imagine: no payroll except for the top executives, no benefits to provide, and of course no unions! So the pattern has been that every time a company downsizes, its stock rises and its top managers drool over their burgeoning portfolios.

Since 9/11, the airlines in particular have been shedding employees like unwanted ballast, with predictable results. As the New York Times reports, there’s been an industry-wide “thinning of staff,” meaning that in bad weather, airlines often “do not have enough people…” Which might be OK if bad weather hadn’t become so routine that it’s crowding out all other news on CNN.

The budget airlines are especially skimpy when it comes to human employees. In late 2006, [Jet Blue CEO David] Neeleman announced plans to reduce its number of full-time employees per plane from 93 to 80. He should rethink that, since the major reason JetBlue couldn’t get back off the ground after the Valentine’s Day storm was that it lacks the personnel to connect crews to their flights. Pilots and flight attendants remained stuck in their hotels while passengers slept on airport floors.

Market tests provide continuous and rigorous assessment of faddish business models, no matter how noble the goals of "productivity" or "shareholder value" might be.

SMELTING IS NOT BURNING. Television's Rosie O'Donnell is properly taking stick for her endorsement of conspiracy theories about the structural failure of Building 7 at the World Trade Center complex. That said, nowhere in this video is either the reduction of taconite to iron or the decarbonization of iron to steel equivalent to putting solid metal into a crucible and positioning it over a flame. One does not turn down the gas in a basic oxygen converter, although one can moderate the reaction -- try it -- (which includes the generation of rust: contemplate the implications of that Fe -> FeO) by adding more scrap to the charge.

ECCE HOMO. John 19 interpreted for the twenty-first century.

WHY DOES MONEY MATTER TO A "NONREVENUE SPORT" WHEN THE OBJECTIVE IS AMATEUR ATHLETICS? Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel basketball pundit Jeff Potrykus makes the case for Wisconsin's Lisa Stone.

The UW administration faces two choices during the next six weeks: Renew Stone's contract and restore the year it did not roll over last spring or fire her.

Stone has earned a renewal and an extension.

There might be athletic directors who would not view a loss in the finals of the National Invitational Tournament, playing at angels seven before large Wyoming crowds (you can only look for 1995 - 8646 -8701 in Laramie for so long) as a setback. Wisconsin apparently aspires to more.

UW's record in the last four seasons - 21-43 in Big Ten Conference play and 56-64 overall - is below the standards of Stone and the UW administration. UW's NCAA tournament drought has reached five consecutive seasons, the last season under Jane Albright and all four seasons under Stone.

Those problems, which, again, might strike many athletic directors as crying with one's mouth full, are a direct consequence of prior penny-wise, pound-foolish administrative decisions.

In May 2002, the UW athletic board declined for the second consecutive year to extend Albright's contract. Because UW decided it could not bite the financial bullet and buy Albright out for $240,000 at the time, she essentially became a lame-duck coach in 2002-'03, her final season.

That led to a 7-21 finish and a roster that lacked talent when Stone took over.

That 2002 decision, coming after a 2001-2002 season in which the Badgers went from being ranked fifth in the country in late January 2002 into a slide in the second half of Big Ten play (Cold Spring Shops sources suggest the teams tendencies were too predictable) and early exits from the conference and national tournaments, allowed other teams to use Jane Albright's status as an argument against signing with Wisconsin. (Does such an attitude put too much emphasis on personality? If Larry Samuelson leaves Wisconsin for Yale, would that be a reason not to study industrial economics at Wisconsin?)

There's a local angle to Lisa Stone's early troubles. Among those 21 losses in 2002-2003 was one at Northern Illinois, and the next year the Huskies were churlish guests at the Kohl Center. That team included first-year guard Stephanie Raymond, who Lisa Stone pursued.

[Ms Raymond's] mother told [Northern Star columnist Ben Gross] that [she] had at least two paths ahead of you before college.

One was to NIU, the other to Wisconsin.

The Badgers had a house visit set up with you. Instead of going through with it, you called them and said no thank you.

Your next phone call was to former NIU coach Carol Hammerle saying you were becoming a Huskie.

Wait, you said no to Wisconsin?!? Who does that?

Asking your mother why, she couldn't provide an answer either.

But she did tell me this one thing: "I often ask her, 'Did you ever regret not going to a bigger school?' But she has no regrets going to NIU. She's enjoyed all four years."

Two roads diverged in the wood ...

1995 - 8646 - 8701. Somebody at Union Pacific has had the decency to keep the Chicago & North Western Heritage Unit in a consist with the last two unrepainted lightning stripe GEs.

Chicago & North Western Photo of the Month for November 2006.

There's a Midwestern cottage industry tracking this consist. At 11 am on 5 April, they led a mixed freight through DeKalb. I was in the middle of converting coffee into logic at a local bagel shop and saw them, but was not equipped to grab a photo. (Lame excuse, and it's even lamer to note that I was on the backlit side of the tracks.)

ANTICIPATING THE FAIR LABOR STANDARDS ACT OF 2025. Seeking people of ability? Prepare to offer compensating differentials.

Companies' rising demand for top talent is a boon to job candidates. Compared with the not-so-distant past, candidates now are likely to get more-generous job offers, more promotions and flexible work hours.

Although overall wages are not rising at a fast clip, those in industries where talent shortages are particularly acute — such as engineering, health care and accounting — are seeing significant pay increases.

All of which means it's tougher on employers, especially those eager to hire top performers or appeal to the job market's newest demographic: workers from Generation Y, generally defined as those born from 1977 to 2002.

It's only a matter of time until the lawful "workweek" becomes 9 to 5 Monday-Thursday, and 9 to 1 Friday, at least for the individuals in greatest demand (although among those individuals will be many who will still start at 6 am and down tools at 10 pm.) That workweek will later be codified as a national standard, but, as we have discovered in France, it will not make the lot of mediocre and poor performers any better.

SEPARATING EQUILIBRIUM. The dean at Anonymous Community contemplates the collegiate positional arms race.

If Iskabibble State somehow kept its f-t faculty ratio above, say, 90%, then it could market itself as Organic Free-Range Certified, or whatever they'd call it. Whether enough parents and students would care enough to pay the economic premium to cover the costs would be sorted out in the marketplace. Colleges that don't want to take that gamble could continue on down the path of cost-cutting.

Regular readers of Cold Spring Shops will recognize that the market test is precisely a revelation of preferences for higher education that is, well, higher. The persistence of U.S. News rankings (and higher education's acceptance of them: although the public position of presidents and such is negative, you should see the stuff I get from Wisconsin's alumni relations people) is itself evidence that such information is valuable: if not, that issue would not have the advertising content it has. The dean combines ideas from three articles. I focus on his invocation of Cornell's Ron Ehrenberg.

Finally, the Chronicle has a piece by Ronald Ehrenberg in which he can't quite decide whether pricy colleges are worth it, on a cost-benefit basis. He notes an aggregate correlation between educational spending and student achievement (and starting salaries upon graduation), but notes also in passing that the correlation largely breaks down on the micro level. So rich kids tend to cluster in rich schools, leading to better outcomes for grads of rich schools, regardless of what the rich schools actually do or don't do.

It's called assortative self-selection, and, yes, the dean is correct to characterize it as class sorting. The opportunities for the less well-known precincts of higher education, however, are not as grim as the dean makes them out to be.

The relevance for higher ed, I think, is that we'll see the elite institutions become progressively more so, marketing themselves more as boutique goods – the ocean liners of higher education. (Check out the student housing at Founders College! Yowza!) The non-elites will gradually descend into commodity hell, much like flying in coach; price and (surface) convenience will trump all other considerations. The elites will reject the adjunct trend, simply because they wouldn't want to dilute the brand. The rest will continue to embrace it, to balance the books.

What drops out is the vast middle. The flagships can probably sustain themselves with research money, high-profile sports, and double-digit tuition increases. Community colleges can sustain ourselves on occupational relevance, geographic propinquity, and low cost. But the regional public campuses and third-tier private colleges – the former teachers' colleges turned state universities that top out at master's degrees – have to make a choice. Move up, move down, or move on.

In aviation, it's less clear today that cost-cutting measures have lowered fares enough to compensate for shoddy service. Likewise, in higher education, it's not obvious that "move down" is the default option for the mid-majors, particularly with the selective institutions deliberately creating excess demand in order to appear more selective. That may be in Professor Ehrenberg's microdata. One never knows who the next striver might be: the muddle of college as a repeat of eleventh grade (my formulation) or simply thirteenth grade (the dean's fear), however, does not offer the striver an opportunity to self-identify. (That's where the comparison with cruise ships breaks down: there is a very real flight to perceived quality in those excess demands for prestige degrees, and it's relatively easy to hive off the impedimenta of an access-assessment-remediation-retention academic culture that savvy parents and students can all so easily see.) On that, the dean and I are in agreement.

If the midtier schools lose their viability, then the macro-micro disjuncture that Ehrenberg acknowledges but doesn't explore^(*) could easily dissipate. It may well be that the relative unimportance of attending a high-tuition college has been based on the better-than-you'd-expect quality of the middle tier. If that middle tier hollows out, then the relative bargain evaporates, and the up-until-recently-exaggerated fears of the Amazing Girls – that failure to get into a Name College will result in middling economic prospects -- will actually become true.

Quite so, but if that happens, the mid-majors will have left easy money on the table. More than a few of the faculty members at mid-majors recognize this, if their administrators don't.

There's a followup post by Dr. Pion that I recommend prospective collegians read.

^(*)As if Ron is going to use a Chronicle of Higher Education column to fully document the findings of several research papers.

QUOTE OF THE DAY. Northern Star columnist Jenna Andriano discovers why life after college is the revenge of the nerds.

Teamwork is another gem thrown out by sadly optimistic outsiders when rattling off the non-academic positives of education. There's no such thing as teamwork. Group projects consist of one or more students avoiding work because they're incompetent and one student taking on all the work because he or she knows the other kids are incompetent. That kid gets an early taste of swimming in coffee to sustain life. I know, I was one of them. In college, the idea of working with other people is deeply disturbing.

So is the idea of contemplating income inequality, without due consideration of effort inequality.

TRADEOFFS. The managers of the collegiate women's basketball tournament confront a big one.

The women went from 16 sites to eight predetermined sites for the duration of the tournament three years ago.

"I'm not sure we're ready for neutral sites," [Tennessee coach Pat] Summitt says. "That's my biggest concern."

Despite some poorly attended regional games this year — 3,046 saw the regional final in Fresno — NCAA officials don't expect to eliminate the predetermined sites.

"I think that we're so intent to continue to try what we're doing because we feel like it's one of the only ways that we can grow our fan base," says Judy Southard, chairwoman of this year's Women's Basketball Committee for Division I. "I'm not sure that it would serve our game well to just be isolating ourselves to the five or six communities in the country that have demonstrated their support for the game."

According to Southard, attendance for the first and second rounds was up 25,000 compared with last year.

That boost could be a good sign for the women's game, which has struggled more recently at the gate. In 2006, average attendance for tournament games in the first two rounds was 3,770, down 33% from 2005.

It's amateur athletics, it has nothing to do with money. The tradeoff, however, is in scheduling games that appeal to the fan base at times television wants.

Talks with more than two dozen administrators, coaches, media representatives and players netted one constant: the need for better TV exposure.

They'd rather compete with The Masters or the start of baseball season than with the men's Final Four.

That's only part of the problem: television might want those 9 pm starts on the east coast to offer something in prime time, and the spectators might include those pensioners and kids who would like to be in bed at a decent hour. Full arenas or enhanced advertising revenue: pick one.

KUDOS. Northern Illinois senior point guard Stephanie Raymond, second round pick of the Chicago Sky.

THE RIVALRY CONTINUES. Although the Electroliner no longer sets passengers down at Addison Street, there is still a pennant race involving the Cubs and a Milwaukee team. Wisconsin Sports Bar has accessories to go with your Sprecher.


(Be careful opening the link: some of the entries are not safe for work.)

A PIONEER PASSES. Grambling football coach Eddie Robinson, February 13, 1919 - April 3, 2007.

"The greatest man I've ever met," said former Detroit Lions cornerback James Hunter, a Grambling graduate. "I've been in the corporate world for a few years now, and I haven't met anyone there who could move me the way Coach Rob did."

Knowing that he had that impact on his players meant more to Robinson than any of his victories.

"When you take a long hard look at the guys that you coached, what kind of men are they? This is the thing," he would say.

"I can't go to a football meeting and talk all Xs and Os. We're talking about drugs. We're talking about going to class. We're talking about
studying.

"When you're into this business, it's hard to tell what coaches what, what they're in the business for. Are you for the glamour? Are you for the wins? Or are you trying to make the people with whom you're working better people for having participated in the game?"

What does it say about the world we live in that the next quote uses the expression "old school?"

Robinson was from the old school of coaching. He was a hands-on guy who was involved in virtually every aspect of his team. He thoroughly enjoyed his work.

He'd go through the dormitory at 6 a.m., ringing a bell, waking up the team for breakfast. During practice, he would demonstrate the proper drop back for his quarterbacks and show receivers the correct way to run pass patterns.

"When you love a profession, when you're doing something that you love every day, it differs from when you're just doing something," he said.

Precisely. When it stops being fun, find something else to do.

The end of de jure segregation also meant the end of a Grambling recruiting edge.

After Grambling was 5-6 in 1987 and lost to archrival Southern in the Bayou Classic, Robinson hinted he might retire because "he wasn't putting people in his pocket anymore."

Grambling rebounded with an 8-3 record in '88 ,followed that with a 9-3 mark and a SWAC championship and I-AA playoff appearance in '89. However, Robinson and Grambling fell on hard times toward the end of his career.

The Tigers had losing records each of his last three seasons, a first for Robinson, and he was forced to retire.

Robinson made Grambling a household name in college football circles. He produced more than 200 professional players. In 1971, 43 Grambling players were in training camps, a pro football record that still stands.

On the one hand, expansion of pro football. On the other hand, expansion of opportunities for players with African ancestry. Those opportunities were enhanced by Grambling's, and coach Robinson's teams', successes.

JUICED. If you want to go fast on rails, go electric. The French have set a new rail speed record (via Best of the Web) with a specially equipped TGV train.

(AP Photo from the Indianapolis Star.)

You don't just switch a random consist out of the coach yard and turn it loose. There's this little thing called back electromotive force to overcome, which more voltage will do.

For its mission to break the speed record, the train was modified with a 25,000-horsepower engine, and adjustments also were made to the track, notably the banking on turns. The rails were treated so the wheels could make perfect contact, and electrical power in the overhead cable was increased from 25,000 volts to 31,000 volts.

The V150 was equipped with larger wheels than the normal French TGV - or "train a grande vitesse" - to cover more ground with each rotation, said Alain Cuccaroni, in charge of the technical aspects of testing. French TGVs normally cruise at about 185 mph.

I wonder if somebody in France learned about the field shunt tests (another way of overcoming that back electromotive force) with the Electroliner in which a train got up to 111 mph on jointed rail at nominal line voltage collected through a trolley pole. After the test, master mechanic Henry Cordell (what's French for who vas th' motorman?) had the field shunts disconnected: the train was too fast for the road crossing protection, and the relatively small wheels were turning too fast in Mr Cordell's judgement. (The bigger wheels squeeze more velocity out of the same motors: there is this phenomenon called "balance speed" at which additional power is exactly offset by additional back electromotive force and the motors spin no faster, but if the motors are spinning bigger wheels, the train goes faster, provided the added rotating mass isn't a burden.)

Despite improvements in train technology, some things don't change.

Outside, the train roared by like a jet, sparks spit from the overhead power lines and a trail of dust sprayed out behind.

On the Chicagoland interurbans, that's often a trail of snow. But I like this Electroliner image from a book I just received, Chicago North Shore & Milwaukee: Point of No Return (not enough text for a book review.) Also check out Streetcars and Electroburgers by the same author.


The book also mentions the late Lew Burdette. It's a sobering thought, Cub fans, that two different Milwaukee teams have lost the World Series since the Cubs last played in one. Look closely at the picture: those are the National League and American League standings on the flag hoists. None of this divisional stuff: one league, one pennant race, one World Series, and North Shore Line liberty specials to Great Lakes. Back to the speed record ...

It's still obligatory to have the fourth estate chasing trains with aircraft.

Then, near the village of Le Chemin, we hit the record of 357.2 mph. The train was speeding far faster than a passenger jet taking off. In fact, we kept up with planes flying overhead taking photos.

That used to be easier.

Indiana Historical Society image.

The context for the picture appears in an essay about the Cincinnati and Lake Erie interurban line that was part of the 2001 Interurban Symposium.

It is time to hoist a Sprecher Doppel Bock in tribute to the French speed record, and to Middle America's traction pioneers who started the tradition of fast running, electrically.

THEM THAT HAS GETS. There are no more nets to cut down. The last top seed standing in the women's tournament, Tennessee, ousted a Rutgers team that had ousted inter alia Duke and Louisiana State. A Mid-American team made it to the round of sixteen. In the men's tournament, Florida handled Ohio State pretty roughly in a tournament field that was set up to take away most of the surprises.

The reality is that the tournament selection committee carefully set up this year's bracket to minimize the possibility of an overachieving mid-major.

This tournament was George Mason-proofed before the first tip-off.

When you look at the 16 remaining schools, what do you see? All four No. 1 seeds, three of the No. 2 seeds, three of the No. 3 seeds, a No. 4, and three No. 5 seeds.

The presence of sixth seed Vanderbilt and seventh seed UNLV hardly constitutes the inspirational, anything-can-happen element that makes the tournament special. It just means a couple of good teams were underrated, or two other good teams (Washington State and Wisconsin, in these instances) either were overrated or simply laid eggs.

The structure of a tournament can influence the outcome. I've considered the advantages of a Swiss-system pairing for the tournament (9 at 1, 10 at 2, ..., 16 at 8) to make it more likely that the winner of the tournament would make grandmaster norm to win it.