Cold Spring Shops |
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Observations on economics, the academy, the wider world, and things that run on rails. "Cold Spring Shops" was the name of the primary repair and car building facility of The Milwaukee Electric Railway and Light Company ... builders of trolley dining cars and the Christmas parade train ... perhaps I can be that creative too. ![]() FREIE GEMEINDENorthern Illinois University's current Speech Code Rating: SUPERINTENDENT'S OFFICEAbout Me I Tube ![]() Previous PostsTAIL TRACK. Barring signal troubles, links to any ...SHAMEFUL. The world has learned about the way some...SETTING THE PACE FOR THE WORLD. Trains for America...THAT DIDN'T TAKE LONG. Harper's Magazine distance...STEAM TRAIN COMING. The Steam Festival in Owosso, ...WHAT PROFIT IN INFRASTRUCTURE? Trains for America...TESTING THAT HYPOTHESIS. Professor Munger has ide...ENTITLEMENT, OR EASIER COMMUNICATION. There's a n...SPONSORED RESEARCH ISN'T PREDETERMINED. Jim Hu re...LITTLE SHARK IN THE BIG WOODS. Tom McMahon has an...Suggestion Box![]() AT WARTo RememberThey Have NamesSupporting Popular Sovereignty in IraqHammorabiHealing Iraq Iraq at a Glance Just Another Soldier Magic in the Baghdad Cafe The Mesopotamian Winds of Change INTERCHANGECommon Carriers
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30.5.08|RUNNING OUT OF TRACK. What happens if freight car loadings double in the next 25 years? The missing capacity isn't only on the rails. There is likely to be political maneuvering, particularly if passenger train operators intend to add new routes. Union Pacific got that third track into Elburn as a condition of adding the Metra service. The article did not mention whether repeal of the cartel-era railroad speed limits or asking the trucking companies to pay for their rights-of-way were discussed at this conference. In the world of rail infrastructure upgrades, the Harsco Track Renewal Train is parked east of the coal dock in DeKalb. Last season, the train worked through Creston. Labels: economics, transportation policy LOSING SKIPPERS BLAME THE BOAT. And the crew and the race committee and the wind. That's the impression Newt Gingrich's Real Change left me. As Book Review No. 12, it's the other side of the reactionary progressivism of The Big Con, reviewed late last week. Again, the subtitle, if a bit shorter than Mr Chait's, summarizes the plot: From the World That Fails to the World That Works. The "world that fails" is that of government, particularly when it's in the hands of the self-styled progressives who have governed New Orleans and Detroit ... well, you get the picture. Oh, and it's a Regnery book, so the preach-to-the-converted tone typical of that publisher's offerings is there, should you already be converted and want a bit of shoring up. Well, maybe not. Mr Gingrich relies on some polling data, without discussion in text or footnotes of sample sizes, margins of error, questions posed, or anything else that might help the reader decide whether the figures he reports even qualify as ad popularum claims, to suggest that what he characterizes as "the Left" is out of touch with The People. ("The Left", of course, is quite willing to use the same tactic in popular discourse. We can do better, people.) The balance of the book is a collage of business-guru speak, a favorable retrospective on that Republican Congress better known for mistimed government shutdowns and sex scandals than for any privatization of Social Security or development of energy supplies or tort reform or any of the other "real change" Citizen Gingrich is now advocating. The book illustrates one problem he, or any other leader of the turn-of-the-century Republican coalition faces: finding common ground between the business types (for whom a strict libertarian position means no room for influence peddling and pork procurement) and the religious types (for whom a strict libertarian position means freedom to sin.) He's never able to accomplish the proper synthesis. Labels: 50 Book Challenge, decline and fall, public policy THE WORLD WE LIVE IN. Two articles from The Onion detail the positional arms race. In one, Closing Of Homeless Shelter Leaves College-Application-Padding Students With Nowhere To Turn, the losers are not the relatively few homeless people in the neighborhood. In another,Women Increasingly Choosing Dead-End Careers Over Dead-End Relationships, there's a marvelous send-up of higher education. Communism was doomed when its inmates began laughing at it, long before President Reagan correctly applied the "evil empire" tag to it. I look forward to a similar dynamic in the excessively earnest corners of higher education. Labels: academic culture, fourth turning, humor, institutions SPELL OUT YOUR LOSS FUNCTION. Fordham Law's Thane Rosenbaum contemplates the calculus of national security. Post hoc nec ergo propter hoc. All the same ... Read and understand. Labels: counterterrorism, logic, public policy A NORTH SHORE LINE MOMENT. I spent some time in the workshop this evening, with the radio approximately tuned to a talk show although a Relevant Radio affiliate's evening devotional (repeated Hail Marys and Our Fathers) came in through the cheap tuning coil on the shop radio. That reminded me the North Shore Line had a flagstop at Perpetual Adoration, near the shrine operated by the Conventual Friars of Marytown. Labels: history, interurbans 25.5.08|YOU HAVE TO OFFER SOMETHING BETTER. The subtitle of Jonathan Chait's The Big Con serves as its plot summary: The True Story of How Washington Got Hoodwinked and Hijacked by Crackpot Economics. This Book Review No. 11 suggests that omission of salient facts is not telling the truth, and a focus on culture war themes seasoned by Bush Derangement Syndrome is not a rebuttal of crackpot economics. Thus we have yet another polemic that might confirm some people's prior beliefs without encouraging others to rethink theirs. What can one expect, however, of a book that reveals the author's nostalgia for the days when "New Deal" had the force of a commandment and Republicans knew their place, which was at the country club when they weren't proposing the most modest of tweaks to the Establishment Consensus. One would not learn about stagflation or rational expectations or the unfunded liabilities of Social Security or the excesses of affirmative action or Leonid Brezhnev's buildup of the Red Army. That said, Mr Chait offers a potentially useful work for members of the Republican coalition who are not obsessive tax-cutters or lusters after corporate welfare or culture warriors. His analysis suggests that those members have not been well served by the cutters, lusters, and warriors, but it also suggests that what remains of the Establishment Consensus has little to offer. He concludes with yet another lament over rising income inequality, which he ties to cuts in the top marginal tax rates and to corporate welfare. That the government schools failed to develop the habits of highly effective people in individuals who could most benefit by them, and that the welfare state enables people in their lack he does not address, and that the Congressional machinations that fascinate Mr Chait are precisely the machinations developed by the Democratic majority in the New Deal and Great Society era, and that "limited and enumerated powers" ought not be a libertarian cliche are the things unseen in the work. Labels: 50 Book Challenge, history, public policy A NATIONAL TRAIN DAY, IF WE HAD SOME NATIONAL TRAINS. That appears to be the complaint of a New Republic columnist who mocks National Train Day and then comes in for some mocking from The Bellows. Acela doesn’t “zoom around the nation.” The Acela routes are confined to the northeast corridor. And maybe those trains aren’t fast relative to European high speed rail, but they get you from central Washington to central New York in 2 hours and 45 minutes–at least twice as fast as the bus, and not that far off from the plane (with much less hassle). Acela service is also frequent and reliable.Yes, and it uses appropriated furnds that are therefore unavailable for the rest of the system, to achieve Capitol Hill-to-midtown times not much better than those offered by Penn Central 40 years ago, and Baltimore to Boston times comparable with the Amtrak casualty Twin Zephyr linking St. Paul to Chicago, with most of the Acela-ration obtained by the simple expedient of skipping stops. In other states, the legislatures have to put up the money to have those rail options. Thus residents of Michigan and Illinois and Wisconsin get a semblance of a corridor service for which residents of the Official Region get to avoid some of the tab, while sticking the Midwesterners with their part of the tab for the Acela Expresses. I grumble because I have to repeat an old complaint. I submit that faster trains, in much of the country, are possible at much lower outlays than those feared. Labels: Amtrak, ferroequinology, transportation policy OUR KIND OF TOWN. Fast Company's U.S. City of the year, Chicago is. The real Chicago isn't so easy to keep up with. It's constantly reinventing itself. Jumpy. Agitated. Impatient. It's as if the place is trembling. Move aside. Don't linger. And if you're going to dawdle, get out of the way. But what any Chicagoan will also tell you is that the past is very much present. It doesn't go away. It shouldn't. In fact, that's Chicago's lure and its beauty: its ability to take what was and figure out what could be.And thus another reason for me to pay close attention to the Northern Illinois strategic plan. The academic pecking order in the state system is somewhat ambiguous once one gets away from the flagship institution, which has been weakened by internal dissension and state stinginess, and it matters for developing and retaining human capital that the educational institutions of Greater Chicago do their part. Labels: academic culture, Forever Together Forward, State Line 24.5.08SCRATCH A CHEESEHEAD, FIND A FARMER. Work progresses on the new Victor E. Garden. The grass mulch accumulating where the vegetables will go is the product of the lawnmower you see at the right.
The mower is the Mantis Cordless Reel Mower in the United States. Europeans would purchase the Brill ASM 380. (I looked at the builder's plate. Mine is also marked Brill ASM 380.) I got it on sale from Amazon. It's a smooth running machine, and under power it cuts quite effectively. I will have to invest in some additional battery packs in order to do all the mowing in one go. In the States, the J. G. Brill company (no relation) built streetcars and interurbans, including the famous Brill Bullet cars. Look closely at the control station on my lawnmower. With the left hand, depress the red button and with the right hand squeeze the lever. It starts cutting. As long as you hold the lever closed, the reel turns. Release the lever, and the reel starts. You have to do the depress-and-squeeze routine to restart it. The deadman control handle on a streetcar uses the same principle. (Unlike a streetcar, however, this control stand can be set up for left-handed squeezing.) IT'S NOT JUST A SUMMER JOB. A few years ago, I noted the preponderance of amusement park workers in the Wisconsin Dells from Warsaw rather than from Wausau. At the time, I suggested that homegrown collegians had it easy. Years ago, when the Superintendent was in college, chances were pretty good that if you got to talking with a kid from the sand county, he or she had a summer job in the Dells or in the cranberry bogs. In fact, I knew one kid who had a football scholarship that also drove a Duck. Perhaps the academy can get away with tuition hikes and hard to complete schedules to the extent it can because registration and records no longer has to deal with disappointed Duck drivers or cranberry cultivators who might have more of their own sweat, rather than Daddy's plastic, invested in getting finished.It transpires that I was right in part and wrong in part. First, the background. For more than a decade, eastern European summer workers at the Tommy Bartlett Show and Exploratory have been as crucial to the attraction's success as the grinning water skiers in the human pyramid.Now the policy change. Here's where I erred. That's been a traditional challenge for much of the tourism business, particularly where the college help returns for registration before Labor Day. (I remember seeing advertisments from upscale U.S. summer camps in New Zealand.) The local collegians, however, aren't blameless. The article does not elaborate on the nature of the "politics" or the "unreliable" behavior. Labels: academic culture, economics, immigration, summer, tourism FIRE AT WILL. A number of public policy books, including several that I reviewed in the last quarter of 2007, have suggested that the 1950s might not have been all that bad for the semi-skilled worker in the United States. That the remnants of Jim Crow and a different social norm with respect to female labor force participation and the other great powers rebuilding from war and revolution and the underdeveloped countries underdevelopment might all have contributed to that state of affairs generally goes unmentioned. Louis Uchitelle's The Disposable American, the subject of a long-delayed Book Review No. 10, does recognize global economic development as a source of change in the conditions facing semi-skilled workers, but when it comes to policy recommendations, once again, it's trade sanctions (in this case, if countries are not friendly to unions) and greater unionization and higher marginal tax rates. One could go directly to the policy proposals without the preceding journalism. Mr Uchitelle focuses on two case studies of plant closings that highlight the inefficiencies of that 1950s consensus while undermining his policy proposals. One is the Stanley Works of Connecticut, where managers grappled with competition from imported tools and ultimately closed the plant. Although I insist on drills and taps made from proper Ohio tool steel, there are a lot of people who will make do with lesser stuff, and much of what we used to understand as heavy industry is routine that people in the developing world can pick up. What happened to Stanley was not fun for anyone, whether they depended on the company for a paycheck or a dividend, but stronger unions or closed-border trade policy or the reincarnation of Franklin Delano Roosevelt Himself was not going to keep routine tool manufacture in Connecticut. The second case study involves a United Airlines maintenance facility in Indianapolis that was the object of much hold-up behavior between the airline and the city, the airline and the mechanics' union, and ultimately the mechanics union' and private and public social service agencies in Indianapolis. A case study involving a formerly cartelized company, with management unaccustomed to market tests, a union working for a regulated firm, and a bid for tax concessions that ultimately do not save the jobs is hardly a prototype for a new social-democratic paradigm. One line of thought that Mr Uchitelle might have developed more successfully is the loss of institutional memory that comes with restructuring, downsizing, and layoffs. He notes that several investigations of the productivity gains from such behavior turn up very little gain, much disruption of corporate routine, and a tendency of the surviving staffers to devote more time to crisis management than to thinking about the things that they were hired to think about, such as improving or selling products. To pursue that lead, however, might be to discover that market tests are much more effective correctives of restructuring (or diversification or management buyouts or any of the other business fads I've seen crash and burn over the past 40 years) than any public policy might be. Labels: 50 Book Challenge, economics, history, public policy CORPORATE WELFARE ENDANGERS CHILDREN. A Burma Shave jingle went BOTH HANDS ON THE WHEEL/EYES ON THE ROAD/THAT'S THE/SKILLFUL/DRIVER'S CODE. Apparently that code does not apply when a trucker chugs too much pop. The driver and the children will walk away from this. It's likely, however, that this cokesucker will be in the cab again, posing a continuing obstruction at traffic lights and a renewed hazard to stopped traffic. Remind me, why are taxpayers providing right of way subsidies to these companies? Labels: corporate welfare for roadhogs, transportation policy 22.5.08TEMPERING PRINCIPLE WITH PRACTICALITY. The Atlantic Monthly lament by an anonymous writing professor that University Diaries Extension brought to my attention has come to the attention of a number of commentators, most of whom confirm that which they expected to see. We'll start with George Leef at Phi Beta Cons, who sees the social waste of credentialitis. Here's an anomaly for economics researchers: if the credential is at best a noisy signal of the underlying human capital, why does it hold any value? Rod Dreher is less charitable. On the other hand, the nerdling could invent the shipping container or the mechanical stoker. The voicemail systems and what will evolve from them are not yet at the stage where they will threaten the livelihoods of the least able symbolic analysts. That, too, will come. The problem the anonymous professor is dealing with is somewhat different. His essay makes no suggestion that the health workers or first responders are in any way lacking those skills. They might understandably ask whether creative writing or teasing out hidden meanings will enable them to work better with patients or drunk drivers. (Well they might, but a newly-minted freeway flyer might not yet understand it.) "Dignity of manual labor," incidentally, isn't what it used to be. It takes a symbolic analyst to lay track these days. I reached Mr Dreher's post from a reference by In Medias Res (a better writer than I might have put that more wittily) who is in the middle of some broader strategic thinking. There was a time when I struggled with this tangle of issues a fair amount--mostly, it was back when I was teacher at Arkansas State University, trying to figure out what I, the Highly Trained Political Theorist Only a Couple of Years Out of Grad School, had to offer the good students of northeast Arkansas, some of whom wanted to get out and go on to other things, but most of whom wanted a BA (so they could get the sort of work for which these days such is a requirement), and perhaps to pick up a little odd learning along the way. I tried to figure out what my own class perspective was on all this, and ultimately I had to kind of shrug my shoulders, acknowledge my own elitism and my own contribution to an educational system that is so thoroughly a product of a globalized and technology-amplified (not to mention cheap-oil-fueled) mindset that I might as well just find a niche where I could feed my family and continue to teach in the best way I could, balancing (and perhaps even occasionally combining) the classical aspirations for liberal learning or "Humanität" which I still held (and still hold today) on to on the one hand, and the populist needs of the people I increasingly felt my greatest allegiance to on the other. I wrote: "It's not easy being an academic, especially when it seems that the internal contradictions of the whole system--and, more especially, its complicated and sometimes near-absurd relationship to the socio-economic world of America today, where an education in the elite liberal arts or research-university sense is often irrelevant to the sort of jobs most people are able to obtain and sort of schooling options available to most of their children--are promising an inevitable and total collapse."The passage appears to be an extended reaction to this observation from 11-D. These unprepared students are the product of a shoddy public education system. Community colleges are picking up the pieces for that failure. And only the invisible adjuncts know the truth.What the Atlantic columnist and the Arkansas State professor and I and a good number of other faculty members, visible or invisible, at the land-grants and mid-majors and converted normal schools and community colleges grapple with is on the one hand serving the place-bound yet ambitious student without discouraging the ambitious striver while on the other hand not enabling the time-server or the corner cutter. The hardest part of my job at Wayne State was attempting to manage that juggling act for 20 hours a week while keeping my research tools sharp enough to manage single-authored articles in top journals the other 40 plus hours. That the Detroit school system was melting down even then was part of my problem, but not the only part. Sherman Dorn reminds readers of those other parts. And for the larger argument of the article, I will just advise that everyone read Mike Rose's Lives on the Boundary, which addresses many of the same issues in much more depth and with far more compassion.That there are people attempting to better their lives against long odds nobody gainsays. That striking the right balance between compassion and discipline is difficult is captured in an anonymous missive to Rate Your Students. What's sad is that the majority of students who have perfected game-running and scams and chronic lying have made us 'toughen up' on the rest.I don't know if it's the party animals wrecking it for the strivers in difficult situations, or excessive sympathy for people in difficult situations that enables the party animals. Better socialization to proper life-management skills in the elementary and secondary schools would help. Labels: economics, higher education, public policy BE VERY, VERY AFRAID. The figure is from Greg Mankiw. ![]() I'm one of those curmudgeons who argues that fifteen to twenty times earnings is evolutionarily stable. The figure suggests some irrational exuberance left in the system. Labels: economics, history, institutions 21.5.08CONTEMPLATING HIGH SPEED RAIL. I see that Tom Bozzo is now posting for Angry Bear, and a recent post mentions my case for faster passenger trains without the huge capital outlays of dedicated electrified high-speed rail. In brief: some cartel-era speed regulations are the largest impediment to passenger train operation in the 110 mph (180 km/h) range, and I have a sequence of posts to that point. Historically minded readers might find this speed tape instructive, and I can offer a look at the infrastructure that made it happen. Labels: Amtrak, ferroequinology, history, transportation policy THEY ROLLED OUT OF COLD SPRING SHOPS. A street resurfacing project in Waukesha (which, if that village's past history is any indication, will lead to yet another reversal of direction of one-way streets in village center) includes the unearthing and removal of rails from the long-lost interurban. ![]() Waukesha Freeman photo by Kevin Harnack Spring City Chronicle, who unearthed the images, uses the occasion to take a dig at the latest light rail projects in Greater Milwaukee. Examples of the light rail line which once linked southeastern Wisconsin communities and went out of business because it lost huge sums of money and no one rode it are in the blog’s header and decorating this post. I replicate the poster's use of bold italics, where either alone would suffice. Snarking aside, the reasons for the failure of the interurban include the forced divestiture of Railway from Light under the Public Utility Holding Company Act and the use of tax money to build rights-of-way for competing bus lines and private vehicles that now creep along the roads that parallel the Rapid Transit Line's path. Some errors by the management of The Milwaukee Rapid Transit and Speedrail Company, which operated the curved-side cars as illustrated below, contributed to the demise of the line. The late Frank Zeidler was unable to obtain legislative support for a transit authority to continue its operation. Unattributed photo of Speedrail car 63 in Waukesha from Spring City Chronicle Before Speedrail, and before divestiture, the combined power and transit company operated these rather substantial cars. One history of the Rapid Transit line suggested that it would have been more successful had it been operated in the manner of a modern light rail line, with lighter, faster-accelerating cars. Those, however, had not yet been developed at the time the interurban company was upgrading the route to Waukesha. ![]() Unattributed vintage photograph from Waukesha Freeman. The interurban at one time had plans to move the cars out of the streets of Waukesha, in keeping with contemporary suburban light rail practice. A friend who worked for the regional planning commission discovered, in a survey of potential rail corridors, that one of the Wisconsin Electric transmission line rights of way uses land owned to this day by the power company, rather than the more conventional eminent-domain easement more commonly used by power companies. That right of way is exactly where one might want to run a railroad near the center of Waukesha without using the streets. Labels: ferroequinology, history, institutions, interurbans, transportation policy 19.5.08AN UNCONVENTIONAL ECONOMICS MAJOR. Arnold Kling's suggestions at Econ Log. No industrial organization? Labels: economic education AS OLD AS HILLARY. David Letterman just cracked another pantsuit joke. Labels: election follies GETTING THE MISSION RIGHT. Another post that I started some time ago was a reaction to last September's State of the University address, which continued the theme I noted, favorably, in the 2006 address. So much depends on our ability to establish and maintain a clear identity: student recruitment … alumni affiliation … corporate and private investment … the ability to attract top faculty … even the workplace value of an NIU degree. All of these imperatives depend on our ability to establish a clear institutional identity in the marketplace.The Northern Star summary of the speech is still available online. The major focus of the speech, and of much behind the scenes work on campus this year, has been on strategic planning. Task force efforts culminated in June 2007 with issuance of a report that identified four strategic imperatives to guide NIU’s planning efforts: 1) Preserve, strengthen and extend NIU’s teaching and learning environment; 2) Develop a strategy for investing in multidisciplinary scholarship and artistic clusters that complements NIU’s focus on individual scholarly and artistic achievement; 3) Strengthen and extend NIU’s global/regional impact; and 4) Make NIU an institution of ‘first choice’ for faculty, students and staff.A weekend editorial in the DeKalb Daily Chronicle suggests challenges, as well as reasons for optimism, in that strategic plan. Whereas last spring's commencement occurred less than a month after an event that served to divide the university from the community, this year's commencement took place as the university had begun to return the community's embrace.That fatal beating took place in the wake of a year of frat-boy yobbery. "University of 'first choice'" is meaningless without reference to the kinds of individuals: the ambitious, the party animals, the time-servers? who are ranking their choices. We had a different kind of trouble this year. This spring's commencement, held in the wake of the Feb. 14 shootings that took the lives of five NIU students, occurred as those on campus were making demonstrable steps to say “Thank you” to a community that had reached out to hug them back in February. Hugs are just plain better when you're hugged in return.The memorial issue of the alumni magazine includes some observations that ought be part of Northern Illinois's, or any university's strategic plan, whether there is excess demand for perceived prestige, or not. The preface notes, In 1895, at the cornerstone-laying ceremony for the new Northern Illinois State Normal School, Governor John Peter Altgeld set out the core values of the school that was to become Northern Illinois University. “Above all things,” he said, “we want this institution to stand on the basic principle that all people are born equal, and that only industry, intelligence, and effort shall lead to preferment.”That's a far cry from "all have won, and all must be given prizes." The president of the alumni association sees in our fallen students a representative sample of the people we serve. They were five very special individualswhose collective face embodied what NIU has stood for over its long, rich history. First-generation college students, veterans, and hard-working kids from middle class families seeking a better life through higher education—that’s who they represented.Far from the positional arms-race anxieties among the well-heeled, it still matters that higher education equip its charges to hold their own with the graduates of the more famous or more selective if not necessarily more rigorous institutions. Industry, intelligence, effort. Labels: academic culture, Forever Together Forward THAT EXCESS DEMAND FOR CREDENTIALS. I've been working on this post for some time. In March, a graduate of Yale and Wharton who turns students away from Stonehill College suggests that fevered applicants get a grip. The "easy for you to say" is left to the reader as an exercise. The column makes some valid points. A Greg Easterbrook article in The Atlantic elaborates, concluding with the suggestion that the status obsessed also get a life. Surely it is impossible to do away with the trials of the college-application process altogether. But college admissions would be less nerve-racking, and hang less ominously over the high school years, if it were better understood that a large number of colleges and universities can now provide students with an excellent education, sending them onward to healthy incomes and appealing careers. Harvard is marvelous, but you don't have to go there to get your foot in the door of life.Advice notwithstanding, a New York Times article reported that the excess demand for the Gotta-Get-Ins was no April Fool. The already crazed competition for admission to the nation’s most prestigious universities and colleges became even more intense this year, with many logging record low acceptance rates.Perhaps the universities could learn something about load management from the airlines, or perhaps from treating their economists properly. By May, the New York Times was reporting that the overbooking algorithms had broken down, with the Gotta-Get-Ins digging deeper into the wait list. The Los Angeles Daily News reports on overbooking and bumping in California. Now that Massachusetts is proposing to tax what its Guardians of Public Morals deem to be idle assets in endowments, can "denied boarding compensation" be far behind? Labels: economics, higher education, public policy TODAY'S RAILROAD READING. This week's Destination:Freedom has a great deal of substance. I commend in particular this interview with fellow O Scale King John Stilgoe and this squib about Norfolk Southern working with the Fitchburg Railroad. At one time, railroad policy makers envisioned Norfolk and Western absorbing Erie Lackawanna, Delaware and Hudson, and Boston and Maine as a way of introducing a second carrier into Penn Central country. That combination failed thanks to Boston and Maine reluctance as well as Hurricane Agnes erasing much of Erie Lackawanna and some of Delaware and Hudson. Now Norfolk Southern will get the old Troy and Greenfield through the Hoosac Tunnel and much of what remains of the Conn River. The conversation between John and Living on Earth's Bruce Gellerman is instructive.I'm very serious about where this country is going. My book "Train Time" deals with the problems of trucks moving from Mexico to Canada, not stopping in the United States except to fuel, clogging up interstate highways in the Midwest and high plains that never used to see this traffic, and essentially making people wonder, ordinary tax payers wonder, why this cargo isn't on the Kansas City Southern, when you can run a freight train at 90 miles an hour, as happens frequently west of the Mississippi, it feels kind of sad to be sitting in a vehicle on a publicly-built highway where the speed limit's 65 or 70. And once people see freight trains moving at 70 or 75 miles an hour, they start wondering why there can't be a passenger train.I haven't communicated with John for some time, and when we do converse, it's usually about things O Scale. All the same, we're thinking along similar lines. West of St. Louis a lot of the nation's freight railroads are now adding a third track, because there's so many freight trains moving that they have to get the faster trains around the slower ones. Once we get the freight railroads back to the condition they were about 1950, I think Amtrak will have a golden opportunity to prove itself.That might be asking for a complete change of attitude at Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern, and for better supervision and dispatching on the Chessie. On the other hand, in 1950 there were still a few 75 minute Hiawathas dispatched behind an A or F7 deputizing for a pair of E7s. To quote from a Broadway musical of about 30 years ago, one could also reach New York in sixteen hours, a lot can happen in sixteen hours. My students figured out there was overnight mail service, first class mail, between New York and Chicago, for the price of a first class stamp. Nowadays you'd have to pay a lot of money to get something overnighted. But the real key is that meant there was very frequent fast mail service between places like New York City and Harrisburg, Pittsburg, Cleveland. We've forgotten all of this.And Emergency Fast Package Service. You could order a refrigerator, for example in the evening, and it would be delivered to your house at noontime the next day. You could do that in 1929. You can't do it today.I wonder if some of those real estate inquiries the book (which I must add to the stack of things to review) refers to are looking at the interurban rights of way. Labels: ferroequinology, history, transportation policy 17.5.08I CAN CALL THE SEMESTER DONE. The three graduation ceremonies (the weather would have permitted one big one in Huskie Stadium, Wisconsin style, although the platform party would not have a chance to go to the ice bucket between events) are done, degrees conferred, bottles and kegs opened. Liberal Arts graduated a marvelous singer. Some of the academic weblogs I've visited include the usual carping about tight grading deadlines. That's a matter of course here. Grades for Thursday exams are due by 10 am Monday. It's not unknown for students to receive a diploma cover and have to sort adverse consequences out later. This year, for the first time in I don't remember how long, all of my exams were on Monday and all of my marks were in the hands of Registration and Records by close of business Friday. Next year, we're supposed to have online grade filing, which I hope means being able to enter the information once and have it available on Blackboard and to Registration at the same time. Labels: academic culture, Forever Together Forward, summer 16.5.08THE NEXT INTELLECTUAL CHALLENGE. Some cutting and soldering and fettling is in order. Click the image for a larger view. Note the divided eccentric. Labels: Andreyev 4-14-4, model railroad NORFOLK SKATE? In the matter of the Norfolk State firing of biologist Steven Aird, the Inside Higher Ed column now includes statements from Professor Aird, a dean at Norfolk State, and a graduate of the biology program. Joanne Jacobs has the story, and the bull session at her place is, shall we say, not complementary to Norfolk State. Casting Out Nines summarizes the tradeoffs of the case. Observation of the Day honors go to the dean at Anonymous Community. And as a left-leaning sort, I like the idea that a kid without the money to 'go away' to college has access to the same academic rigor as the kid with rich parents. A former colleague of mine used to say that algebra is a civil right, and I agreed with him. To offer the less-well-off a diluted product offends my egalitarian sensibilities. If we're serious about access, it has to be access to academic rigor. Otherwise we're just babysitting. The rigor should be fair and impartial, and we need to explore the right mix of support services, tutoring, and the like to help students succeed, but that's okay. At the end of the day, the best service we can do is to provide a truly higher education, even if it takes some doing. Labels: academic culture THE POSITIONAL ARMS RACE. Inside Higher Ed begins to analyze the NCAA financial statement. The article does not address the central economic puzzle, which is whether making what appear to be uneconomic investments in college sport is actually the dominant strategy. I will return to this point once I've had a chance to review the report, which, now grades are in, is a possibility. Labels: academic culture, economics, football INSTEAD OF GOING TO HARVARD, THEY ALL GO TO YALE. Greg Mankiw relays another threat point, should Harvard be subject to a Massachusetts bill of attainder. "Harvard can decide to no longer accept the children of Massachusetts residents." Meanwhile, life is likely to go on as usual at ZooMass. Labels: academic culture, economics, public policy PATE DE CITY COUNCIL. As Charlie Sykes puts it, a blow against the nanny state. Like father, like son, as the balance of the article, and the honking from the barnyard, indicate. Perhaps the urgency is to obtain the French vote for the 2016 Olympics. One wonders about the wisdom of securing this prize, possible expansion of the Hiawatha line and use of Huskie Stadium for play-in football notwithstanding. A British reader recommends this Guardian article that characterizes the London Olympics as a "financial black hole." Labels: institutions, public policy, State Line 15.5.08ON THURSDAY CAN EXAM WEEK BE PRAISED. The final final examinations for the spring semester are being graded. It appears as if we will make it to graduation day. This evening, I served as master of ceremonies for the DeKalb County Challenge Stock Market Game(TM) awards. Once again, the winning team demonstrated that you can see a lot just by looking, although simply picking the businesses along Sycamore Road with full parking lots is not as successful a strategy during a market correction. One cluster of students was preparing to write an examination in the Sandburg auditorium, perhaps the last of the classes that had to move to other quarters at midsemester. We end the semester, however, noting two Fulbright fellowships. While Northern Illinois University student Matt Konfirst is analyzing Antarctic core samples in Germany, fellow NIU student Shari Meggs will be teaching the English language to students in Hong Kong.Good going. Labels: Forever Together Forward 14.5.08WHO DO I TIME-SLIP? Consider this Easily Distracted vision of the next-generation small liberal arts college of about 2,000 students. I have tenure, but I'm only eligible for sabbatical at seven year intervals. I earned a good evaluation for research last year, but aspire to land further work in journals economists read. And today I turned in marks for three fourth-year supervisions and a master's thesis supervision. I still owe marks for 80 examinations, which will be ready in the next day or two. The dean at Anonymous Community has observations about what goes on elsewhere in the academic food chain. And thus concludes Wednesday, with exams again taking place as scheduled. Labels: academic culture, Forever Together Forward, higher education SHE'S FINISHED. David Letterman just cracked a joke about Senator Clinton shopping for discount pantsuits. Labels: election follies, humor WHERE THE EXCESS CAPACITY IS. Norfolk State University attempts to temper tough love with retention, with the expected results. Because so many students come from disadvantaged backgrounds and never received a good high school education, they are already behind, he said, and attendance is essential. Norfolk State would appear to endorse this point of view, and official university policy states that a student who doesn’t attend at least 80 percent of class sessions may be failed.But biologist Steven Aird failed to make tenure, and the article suggests his willingness to fail students was the reason. The article has provoked a wide-ranging discussion in the comments section, including a differing perspective on the Atlantic print article noted here. The column has been Instalanched. George Leef at Phi Beta Cons summarizes. Professor Aird offered a similar perspective to his students in January. "You can only develop skills and self-confidence when your professors maintain appropriately rigorous standards in the classroom and insist that you attain appropriate competencies. You cannot genuinely succeed if your professors pander to you. You will simply fail at the next stage in life, where the cost of failure is much greater.”What is Norfolk State's job and graduate school placement record? This article notes that Norfolk State's enrollment has been falling, this despite the echo baby-boom and the universal college bubble. Careful readers will note that it is also despite heavy doses of access-assessment-remediation-retention. Labels: academic culture, higher education, public policy 13.5.08TOE THE PARTY LINE, OR ELSE. At the University of Toledo, one form of identity politics cannot be held superior to another. A columnist in the Toledo Free Press, writing, she thought, as a private citizen, observed, As a Black woman who happens to be an alumnus of the University of Toledo's Graduate School, an employee and business owner, I take great umbrage at the notion that those choosing the homosexual lifestyle are "civil rights victims." Here's why. I cannot wake up tomorrow and not be a Black woman. I am genetically and biologically a Black woman and very pleased to be so as my Creator intended. Daily, thousands of homosexuals make a life decision to leave the gay lifestyle ...Leave the psychology aside and focus on the identity politics. She continues, The normative statistics for a homosexual in the USA include a Bachelor's degree: For gay men, the median household income is $83,000/yr. (Gay singles $62,000; gay couples living together $130,000), almost 80% above the median U.S. household income of $46,326, per census data. For lesbians, the median household income is $80,000/yr. (Lesbian singles $52,000; Lesbian couples living together $96,000); 36% of lesbians reported household incomes in excess of $100,000/yr. Compare that to the median income of the non-college educated Black male of $30,539. The data speaks for itself.Leave the social science aside: this is a culture war theme I've seen elsewhere. Focus, rather, on the reaction of the University of Toledo. This is the same University of Toledo that takes strategic planning beyond parody. John Lott asks, If she had written a piece say the opposite, what would have happened to her? Even if she had listed her affiliation at the university, nothing would have happened.I'm not sure what he means by "opposite?" Privileging the claims of homosexuals over those of people of color? Or suggesting that the oppressions are equivalent? Robert VerBruggen at Phi Beta Cons notes this: Perhaps more to the point, someone in headquarters could ask whether an associate vice-president's public reservations about a university policy might make her less effective at implementing that policy. As far as "supporting controversial legislation," what's new? Student Affairs and Human Resources and more than a few curriculum committees treat the provisions of civil rights laws as indecently minimal requirements, and seek to have their more aggressive practices codified as law. Thus do professors have to retrain as special education teachers. Labels: academic culture, public policy THEY SAVED LIVES. Northern Illinois University invited first-responders and community members who pitched in with everything from cookies to ribbons to a reception this afternoon. At the end of the formalities, university and community announced the debut of Huskies on Parade, where $1000 leases you two fiberglass Huskies to decorate in time for the resumption of classes in the fall. Tuesday's examinations appear to have gone off as scheduled. Labels: Forever Together Forward, State Line 12.5.08ON SATURDAY CAN EXAM WEEK BE PRAISED. I'm returning to grading jail for much of this week. Monday's exams took place with only the usual anxieties. I won't consider the semester done until I see that graduation procession on Saturday. Labels: academic culture, Forever Together Forward DON'T KNOW MUCH TRIGONOMETRY. Don't know much about algebra, despite a state mandate. In a pattern that has area math professors scratching their heads, some community colleges are seeing an increase in the numbers and proportions of entering students who can't do algebra, or even basic arithmetic.These skills require practice, they're different from riding a bicycle. As Joanne Jacobs notes, universal testing can have perverse effects. Teachers feel pressured to lower standards so unprepared students — the kids who didn’t learn arithmetic in elementary school — will move on. The math section of the state graduation exam can be passed with a 55 percent; random guessing would yield a 25 percent.The comments to her post suggest demoralization in the trenches. Wonderful world indeed. Labels: academic culture, mathematics, public policy WHERE NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND BEGAN. Via Charlie Sykes, a Dallas television station's discovery of the state of college readiness. The article notes the continued tension between teaching to the test and having the right kind of test, as well as the deleterious effects of calculators on math skills. Labels: decline and fall, education, public policy QUOTE OF THE DAY. University Diaries Extension, on the fruits of access-assessment-remediation-retention. The essay concludes, I'm not sure which hoax the article has in mind: college lite, or social promotion in elementary school, or some mix of both. Labels: academic culture, education, public policy LATE TRAINS GET LATER. Rockford Register-Star editor Chuck Sweeney takes stock of regional and inter-city developments along the Dairy Route. The guardians of the public purse, however, would rather waive the federal gas tax for the summer, ensuring that the roads will suffer even more from deferred maintenance and corporate welfare for truckers, while Congress will look less fiscally responsible than it does when it masks deficits in other accounts with surpluses in the highway trust fund. As far as the train service is concerned, CNR, the operator in due course of Illinois Central, are not particularly passenger train friendly, and Union Pacific are likely to demand that the line between Gilberts and Rockford be doubled in order to accommodate the commuter train. Labels: Amtrak, history, State Line, transportation policy 11.5.08YOU CAN ONLY WORK THE PROBLEM. The Daily Chronicle interviews Northern Illinois president John Peters. Labels: Forever Together Forward A BILL OF ATTAINDER? Perhaps it should not surprise that onetime Puritan colony Massachusetts writes a variation on the sumptuary law. Perhaps, perhaps not. It is no accident that the three states home to the most famous private universities are the "cuckoo state" (New Jersey, whose higher education policy is to take advantage of low state-university tuitions elsewhere), accompanied by the homes of ZooConn, best known for basketball, and ZooMass, best known for campus brawls. On one hand, perhaps an admissions and financial aid policy at Harvard or Princeton or Yale that did away with legacy admissions in order to appropriate five percent of the endowments might compel well-off people in the Northeast to take more of an interest in their local land-grants (if they don't turn their kids into Coasties) than as a conversation-starter in the office pool. On the other hand, perhaps Harvard could relocate. I have often wondered what the efficient scale of a university is and, in particular, whether it would be better to create a second Harvard with the university's wealth than to expand the first one. Maybe the Massachusetts state legislature will give the powers-that-be at Harvard an incentive to consider more radical expansion plans.The generalization (a merger, or a hostile takeover of Davidson?) is left to the reader as an exercise. Labels: academic culture, public policy QUOTE OF THE DAY. William Polley, on the election-year gas-tax-holiday vote buying. "Good public policy should be well outside of the neighborhood of 'pointless'." Indeed. There's an open letter from economists of all political stripes that succinctly notes what's wrong with the proposal. Labels: economics, energy, public policy 9.5.08A TIME TO REBUILD. Cole Hall will remain in service, partially as lecture hall. Here is the statement from Northern Illinois president John Peters. Our representatives support this option. The Northern Star offered a semester-end interview with President Peters. In spite of all this - we had a flood, we had a graffiti incident, we had the tragic day of February 14 – we’re having 2,500 undergraduates [and 1,000 graduate students] receiving their degree next week. That’s what we’re about and that’s a celebration. That’s the celebration of a lot of hard work, those people will have a quality collegiate degree and they're going to go out and do great things.The balance of the interview is worth your attention. Labels: academic culture, Forever Together Forward ROLLING ROADBLOCKS. Although the Law of Demand induces substitutions and conservations, drivers understand trade-offs. The article goes on to note responses by truckers, some of whom have no incentive to slow down, and some compelled by their employer to do so. One such employer, Schneider National, is resetting the governors on its trucks. The story bundles that development with some special pleading by the truckers' welfare-rights organization. What intrigues about this proposal is that it's couched in the language of "sustainability", but somewhat differently from the language of, for instance, the University of Delaware's residential reeducation program (of which more next week). Limiting cars and trucks to 65 mph could conserve more than 11 billion gallons of diesel and gasoline over 10 years, the American Trucking Associations said in announcing its sustainability proposals.A longer article offers additional details. Trucking has been deregulated for nearly thirty years, yet there are still people who think like public utility managers. Because an agreement to restrict output by slowing down trucks has the prisoners' dilemma property of any restraint of trade, one sells the restriction of output as "in the public interest." In the short term, what Schneider proposes will simply add to the snarl on the interstates. It's annoying enough when an elephant galumphing along at 70 shoulders into the passing lane to go around a triple maintaining 69. Now imagine the same process, but galumphing along at 63. Never mind: the welfare-rights organization has the chutzpah to ask for longer trucks as well, when anything over 28 feet is a menace in a thickly settled area? Perhaps in the quest of insurers for their own corporate welfare comes countervailing power. Perhaps it's time, however, to ask the truckers to raise funds for their own rights-of-way. Mr Hodges, may I introduce the controllers of BNSF Railroad and Union Pacific, who seem to be meeting a need for new freight-only corridors without raiding the public purse. Labels: corporate welfare for roadhogs, economics, transportation policy 7.5.08THE WRONG KIND OF EXCESS CAPACITY. The drug bust at San Diego State prompts alum Matt Welch to quip, "Funny, I thought that cheap access to frat-boy drugs were the whole point of SDSU.... " Now Trending opens its coverage with "With its reputation as being the biggest party school in Southern California, nearly 100 students were arrested Tuesday in a sting operation at San Diego State University." I Need to Calm Down motivates a comment on press coverage of the vice squad with "This is apparently big news because, as everyone knows, college students don’t do drugs. (I can’t even keep a straight face typing that. Is the pervasiveness of drug culture on college campuses really news? Really?)" Taken together, the posts say more about what universal college would look like than all the mission statements and strategic plans can. Labels: academic culture, public policy 6.5.08THE FRUITS OF ACCESS. Or as University Diaries puts it, San Diego State University is a School-Free Drug-Zone. Despite the university's fears about San Diego becoming the next Los Angeles (harborside downtown looks prosperous, Mission Beach manifests all the low-status symbols of the Pacific Rim) and its trendy and feel-good mission statement, the men of Theta Chi discovered a risky, but potentially profitable, way to work through college. The reaction of the fraternity's national office requires no further comment.
Labels: academic culture, decline and fall, public policy ATTEMPTING TO LEGISLATE COUTH. Professor Munger discovers that Florida is attempting (unsuccessfully, a commenter notes) a legislative ban of the pickup truck scrotum. On one hand, I've never understood the message that, er, decoration is supposed to send. On the other hand, it's useful that some people come with warning labels. Labels: decline and fall, institutions, Oddities, public policy 5.5.08POINTLESS TAX RELIEF. Greg Mankiw has Senator Clinton taking on the American Economic Association. She sounds silly. Pressed to name a supportive economist Sunday, she replied, "I'm not going to put my lot in with economists because I know if we did it right, if we actually did it right, if we had a president who used all the tools of the presidency, we would design it in such a way that it would be implemented effectively."That works in Star Wars, where either mental discipline or the power of the Dark Side makes for effortless effective implementation. That was a long time ago in a galaxy far away. On earth, complex adaptive systems do pretty much what they please. Labels: economics, election follies, energy, public policy FOR WE LIKE SHEEP HAVE KNOCKED A TRAIN ASTRAY. Seriously. With illustrations. I understand that steam-era railroaders dreaded running into a pig, because it would act like a derail. On the other hand, a Pennsylvania Railroad GG-1 once hit a bulldozer straight on and knocked it into the next section. Labels: ferroequinology, Oddities WHY IT MATTERS. A Northern Star columnist weighs in on the bomb threats and background street crime, which he suggests is inducing some students in good standing to transfer. Exactly. Administrators, rethink "access" and retention will take care of itself. Labels: academic culture, Forever Together Forward 1.5.08ON MY WORKBENCH. In order to lower the axle loadings, simplify counterbalancing, and limit the rotating mass on any axle, the senior class at the Moscow Mechanical Engineering Institute came up with a split eccentric. Labels: Andreyev 4-14-4, model railroad CORPORATE WELFARE RECIPIENTS FOLLOWING TOO CLOSELY. A promising Southern Illinois University journalist dies. Stopped for road construction. Some corporate welfare recipient is drafting for some other corporate welfare recipients, and none of those probable log-falsifiers is paying attention to road conditions. Why are we buying rights of way for such people? The article did not report whether the driver was of a piece with those whose poor driving offered previous material on this theme. The reporter who was run over by these roadhogs appeared to have a promising future. We extend our condolences to Mr Rendleman's family, friends, and colleagues at the Daily Egyptian. Labels: academic culture, corporate welfare for roadhogs, transportation policy |