FILTHY LURES FROM THE WEST. Charles Paul Freund praises the role of popular culture as a lubricant for freedom.

INELIGIBLE RECEIVER UPFIELD. Quarterback Jeff Garcia of the 49ers bounced two passes off of his blockers today. The first bounced into the hands of a defender, who lateraled to teammate, whose run set up a touchdown. The second hit the ground, setting up a fourth-and-seven near the goal line with seconds remaining after the penalty was declined. The fourth-down pass also went wild. Packers 20, Niners 14.

GRADES ARE DONE. I may be able to pick up the slack for those academic webloggers now heading into final exams, on the other hand a big can of Foster's sounds like a plan. It's been kind of a stressful semester, but if the kids are keeping me busy with good questions, that's good stress. The introductory economics class lived up to the encouraging note on which they began, and the policy class made progress from where they began.

New academics: savor such semesters. There will be variations in classes. Enjoy the good ones, and keep working the challenging ones.

It helps that the fall sports teams acquitted themselves well and no administrators or faculty members made national spectacles of themselves.

HE'S OUT. Vice President Gore will not be running in 2004. That is likely a positive development for the Democrats, as they now have an opportunity to find someone who can more credibly appeal to the median voter in the campaign.

PLAY VALUE. Tonight's CBS Christmas special, "The Man who Saved Christmas," might just be a Christmas heart-tugger, or it might be a shameless ploy for paid family leave, day-care at the office, and saying no to the overtime treadmill, or it might be Franklin Roosevelt's first opportunity to say happy days are here again, but it is based on a real person. There was an A. C. Gilbert, and his company did make Erector sets, and later the American Flyer line of S gauge toy trains (they did make some three-rail O Gauge as well). Gilbert's inspiration for the Erector sets is the latticed metalwork installed as part of the New Haven Railroad electrification, according to this source, and American Flyer might be the only toy manufacturer to have named a series of railway coaches. The lightweight coaches manufactured for the New Haven and assorted other railroads by Osgood-Bradley were simply intended as full-length streamlined coaches. Because many of these coaches ran through New Haven, the Gilbert Company built models of them for their American Flyer line and offered them for sale. Enthusiasts often refer to the full-size coaches as "American Flyer cars," although as far as I know no railroad ever referred to them in those terms.

Endorsement: there are six of the new Weaver coaches as well as four from other sources now running on the railroad. The Weaver coaches are a good buy for the money although some might want to modify a few things to achieve full prototype fidelity. I will allocate time to building the diners and parlor cars to go with them.

ONE DIAGRAMMATIC PROBLEM left to score. Should be able, insh'allah, to work out the grades and leave the grade rolls in the department office and post same to the secure server before the Packers kick off the late game.

I RESEMBLE THAT REMARK. "German professors are mean," complains Rachel Lucas. Perhaps so. Hers evidently never distinguished measuring inputs from measuring outputs. The last instruction I'd give is to fill at least five pages of a bluebook. Perhaps if I were teaching history, my attitude would be different, on the other hand if one of my students made an assertion, and correctly supported it with the right five sentences, and went on to the next problem, I'd be well pleased. My own students sometimes get confused about this, when I am able to explain what is to them a strange concept in two or three well-chosen sentences (hey, if I couldn't, what business have I teaching it?) or when I say that a term paper has to be long enough to make its point. OK, that last sentence was Germanic enough, nicht wahr? Now, to put it in train dispatcher form: if your term paper is four paragraphs, that's almost certainly superficial, but if it runs 40 pages, you haven't edited it well enough. Long bluebook answers for their own sake are a misallocation of everybody's resources, especially the time it takes to read them.

CLEVER MATH TRICKS from Professor DeLong.

INTERSERVICE RIVALRIES. Misha reports that the Atlantic article referenced here is now available online. Still no word of agreement among the services on whether to use seconds, or thousandths of a minute, as the standard for coordinates.

THESE ARE THE GOOD OLD DAYS. $300 for a bag of flour, less nutritious than the bag Virginia Postrel bought at 69 cents for five pounds, reports Brad DeLong. Heck, you probably couldn't buy a bag of flour for any price at Plimoth Plantation.

ACADEMIC MISCONDUCT? Juan Non-Volokh observes, "I have no reason to believe that academics, as a class, are substantially less prone to sloppiness or deception than people at large. I do not mean to suggest that most academics are scoundrels. Rather, given the number of academic researchers, even a relatively small proportion of incompetent, lazy, or dishonest researchers would produce a large corpus of bad research. Thus, I find it hard to believe that for every Bellesiles that is uncovered, there may be dozens who remain undetected." Quite possible, given how unimportant replication of results is compared to the production of new results. Also quite possible, given that referees almost never ask for the research notes or computer output. That's all up to the honesty of the writer. And an editor who is familiar enough with the data base, as this one is (an economics editor at that), is an exceedingly diligent editor. It would be easier to simply say, "I don't believe it," and reject the paper.

There is a great deal of useful information about academic publishing, particularly involving the law reviews, at Volokh Conspiracy today.

PILGRIMS' PROGRESS. Jeff Jacoby found this Judd Patton exegesis of Governor Bradford's History of Plimoth Plantation.

BACK TO WORK. The stack of exams has a lot more red marks on it. Just a few more hours ...

IT'S NOT A CORRIDOR. Tim Cavanaugh is not pleased with the alternatives Amtrak offers to flying from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Dissecting Leftism (scroll up) picks up the story, and comments, "[T]rain travel in the USA is still slower and more expensive than air travel or road travel. It is much the same in Australia. When will people accept that government subsidy is no long-term solution to ANYTHING?" The ball comes out of the scrum, and Transport Blog runs with "Amtrak's ludicrous San Francisco to Los Angeles run. It is almost as if Victorian governments had chosen to subsidise the horse and cart."

Please be advised that, although Amtrak has not done as effective a job with its corridors as it might have (see this evaluation of the Chicago-Milwaukee service) it is a faster service than driving in most of the Northeast most of the day, and a faster way from the Loop to Milwaukee on many days, and it's faster than flying from Capitol Hill at least to Philadelphia, or Providence to Manhattan, and don't even think about flying from Chicago to Milwaukee.

Please also be advised that the San Francisco-Los Angeles is not the West Coast Main Line. A train headed from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara has to climb the Chatsworth Hills, and there's another nasty hill just beyond San Luis Obispo. The other service ends at Bakersfield rather than go through Tehachapi Pass, it's spectacular railroading but darned slow.

Perhaps there is a reason not to subsidize passenger railroading Amtrak style, but wouldn't it make as much sense to further question the subsidized provision of roads and airways? Perhaps some private-sector version of the Chicago-New York Electric Air Line or the North Shore Line would be a more attractive investment then. And such a railroad (consider a Japanese Tokaido Line with trains that meet North American crashworthiness standards) would move people through California more quickly. However, the Los Angeles-San Diego is a more promising location for such a project.

ONLY LOCAL LANGUAGES. The a-building Hiawatha Corridor light rail line in the Twin Cities will have multi-lingual ticket vending machines. "Somali will be added to the English, Spanish and Hmong options on ticket machines for the Hiawatha corridor light rail. The Metropolitan Council agreed yesterday to spend an extra 117-thousand dollars to add Somali to the ticket vending machines," reports KNSI radio's online service. It's thoughtful to take local immigrant populations into account in providing vending machines, why not take into account tourists as well? I appreciate the convenience of being able to choose English or German on cash machines in Taiwan or the UK, are the only tourists in the Twin Cities frustrated cheeseheads?

SUPPORT ISRAEL, BUT NOT IF YOU'RE NOT JEWISH. I'm only embellishing things slightly. Two poor excuses for professors at St. Cloud State University objected to the content of an information kiosk set up by the local College Republicans.

"The kiosk displayed a 39-page list of the names of all of those killed by terrorists from Jan 2002 through Oct 2002. It also included a display, which profiled some of the terrorist groups operating in and around Israel and Palestine and some literature that symbolized Israel’s right to defense and self-preservation. Above the kiosk flew a replica of the Israeli national colors."

The flag antagonized the two abusers of their tenured status, because as Jews, they objected to an Israeli flag being displayed by Gentiles. So far, so identity politics. One of the two role models further took exception to one of the students taking pictures of another student who was responding to their objection, going so far as to attempt to grab the camera. The St. Cloud Times has the story. According to the tenure-abuser, "Yes, I immaturely went for the camera, but I didn't harm him. I didn't grab his neck ...It looked a lot worse than it was. I did not try to hurt the man. Am I sorry? Yes. Do I regret it? Yes. Did I assault him? No."

Excuse me, that's a pretty good description of a mugging, by Milwaukee, Detroit, or Chicago standards. Does this role model deserve sensitivity training? No. Ten days plus a year of community service would be about right for an attempted mugging.

The students are taking the university administration to court Monday. Developing ...

ENOUGH PROCRASTINATION. The second stack of exams beckons.

STUPID FRATERNITY TRICKS. The television is running, and an early story on the CNBC nine o'clock news reports a Time article on Senator Trent Lott active in keeping his fraternity (the national, not his chapter) segregated. Say what you will about the power of the blogosphere, Big Media's effect is nontrivial. That story has yet to load on my computer. Perhaps tomorrow.

JANUARY MADE ME SHIVER. January of 1963 is infamous in railroading circles as the month the North Shore Line went out of business. It was particularly cold and snowy in northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin, and there are plenty of pictures of the last days of the North Shore with the snows and those very blue winter skies. That was also a rather brutal January in the British Isles, reports The Railway Magazine (old news to my UK readers, but that issue just arrived these shores today, as if I had enough distractions from the exams) with temperatures below freezing (below zero for long stretches, in fact, and deep snow, and probably not a single rotary snowplow on the island.

TRUNCATION BIAS. Discourage the weaker students from writing the SATs, and, presto!, your district's College Board standings improve. Number 2 Pencil is not happy with the idea, she'd prefer that students take the test, and discover for themselves whether or not they're college material.

There is a research project in here: to what extent did tracking, years ago (when I was in high school, judge how long ago that was by a picture posted below ...) discourage many students from writing the College Boards, and does that make some of the much-ballyhooed decline in test scores an artifact of truncation bias? If I'm stating the obvious, please let me know where it's published.

HOKEY SMOKES. The Cranky Professor reports the death of animator William Henson, who brought Rocky, Bullwinkle, Boris and Natasha to life.

CELEBRATE DIVERSITY, NOT CHRISTMAS. So appears to be the intent of a memorandum from Human Resources at St. Cloud State. I wonder, if somebody displays a red-and-black Korean monad, is that insensitive to Great Northern or Burlington veterans?

THE FIRST LIONEL is a knock-off of The First Noel. It's also something instrumental in the development of model railroaders.

Stainless steel models, indeed!

EMERGENCE: "Basically, blogging's main value as a networking tool is that it enables emerging talent to get organized more quickly than it would offline, and not as a mysterious, credentialized club, but in a merit-driven environment in which new members are initiated all the time," writes Patrick Ruffini. Yes, but will Pareto's Law manifest itself in time, as it has with emergent radio, railroads, newspapers, Protestant religions, and dairy cattle?

TAKE THIS QUIZ. "Cultural and political disorientation, violent resistance to the intruder and attempts to recapture a lost golden age are natural reactions to this. We see all of this today." We are watching
a. National Socialists
b. Dixiecrats
c. Islamists
d. Zhirinovsky Communists
e. University administrators.

Answer here.

HUDSON TERMINAL REDEVELOPMENT plans expedited.

BIG NEWS a year ago.

SLEEPLESS NIGHTS. Woman Holding Baby Killed by Train. The baby will live. She's six months old. The engineer will be having nightmares for a long time.

RAIL BARONS. Thom Hartmann sounds the alarm: those rail barons responsible for modifying the legal status of corporations are back in Government. But is Secretary of the Treasury nominee John Snow heir to Jay Gould or to James J. Hill? The Superintendent has not been too impressed with CSX's dispatching, based on some recent train rides on their lines. Is forgetting that a train will be arriving on the territory at 8 pm symptomatic of sloppiness at the corporate level?

ENOUGH PROCRASTINATION. Time to add up the scores and get the grades on the secure server.

REPUTATION EFFECTS? How closely does any business pay attention to the fallout of PC follies at universities? The SCSU Scholars conjure up the before-and-after job interview small talk, with gruesome possibilities. To what extent is "who knows you" still more of a key to getting the interview than the reputation of a school, sight unseen? Is there any evidence that fewer recruiters call at universities where the administrators have done something three or four standard deviations above the mean level of mendacity?

WORKING TOO LONG? I was just typing up brief answers to a final exam (yup, in addition to returning papers and exams in a timely manner, I compose new exams each term, and post answers someplace, and let students keep the question sheets and retrieve the answer sheets and bluebooks after grades are done) and typed the line "allowed the sail of commercials." That's been corrected for the public version but clearly my mind is on something else. You sail the knocked tack, and I'll sail the lifted tack, and I'll cross the finish before ye, And when you look up, to find the weather mark, where the ocean meets the sky I'll be sailing.

PRICELESS. I'm grading some economics of public policy exams, and one of the questions is, "Briefly explain why the creation of a collusive agreement creates an incentive to cheat." Here's an answer. "Collusive agreement creates an incentive to cheat according to the Coarse theorem, it's better to cheat when to firms come to an agreement and the other person see's an incentive to gain a higher profit, he will take that extra step."

ENOUGH PROCRASTINATION. The first stack of bluebooks beckons.

HIT AND RUN. No, that's not an Operation Lifesaver topic, it's Reason's new web log, likely to be recognized as a Common Carrier.

PROGRESSIVE INTOLERANCE. Mean Mr. Mustard diagnoses it properly.

REUTERS, IMPLODING? For reaons other than putting scare quotes on terrorists.

EDUCATION OPPORTUNITY. No Notre Dame, no Brigham Young, no Yeshiva, no Maranatha.

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH, at least at Kansas State.

CURIOUS INTERNET TRICKS. No. 2 Pencil has been up and posting for the past week. The new posts finally got onto my machine today. Neither Internet Explorer nor Netscape updated the content from just before Thanksgiving. Explanations or suggestions welcome.

DECK US ALL WITH BOSTON CHARLIE. Robert Musil has the rest, and copious links to erroneous variations thereof.

LOWERING THE BAR is, well, lowering the bar, reports Gene Expression.

CLOSED-MINDED HUBRIS. Yup, some professors have thin skins when it comes to having their prejudices questioned. Today it's Tightly Wound's catch, snared in an English department not far from here.

FISHING OFF THE COMPANY PIER. Former Dean Dwyer (California, Berkeley, Law) is the compleat angler.

THE DIVERSITY BOONDOGGLE covered at length by Joanne Jacobs, with lots of links.

SHAKING YOUR FAMILY TREE. Those of you visiting me because of hits on William Brewster or Stephen Hopkins might want to look at Cal Pundit's list of family history resources online. Many of you know of these already. For those who do not, take the time to read them and understand them. Also, understand this fundamental rule of research: start where you are and work backwards. It does no good to start with someone legend gives as your ancestor, you might waste lots of time pursuing a line that isn't there. Although it is true that everyone is a descendant of Mohammed, or of Charlemagne, or possibly of Silas Slytherin, your challenge is to demonstrate how.

EXAM WEEK. Postings are likely to be light.

ALMOST AS GOOD AS A POMO-GENERATOR. Where Worlds Collide provides a link to
Rob's Amazing Poem Generator. It takes your weblog text and creates a poem. Or something, namely

"Cold Spring Shops Observations on education,
Expanding access to passengers,
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5:track here
he notes Asymmetrical Information. that
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channel being sued by Stephen
Karlson at 2:and liberal. THANKSGIVING, In an
ISO 15001 standard for those new Carrollton,
Maryland connection to your assistance
to resolve. Behind the possibility
that point,
posted by effectively announcing that means
3 All HAVE a copy of
professors being
sued by Stephen
Karlson at 4:48 PM
HANGED FOR the suit are
consistent basis parking The march
in Weaning U.N."

DIMINISHING RETURNS. Daniel Drezner has some comments, germane to the tenure tradeoffs noted in the preceding post, about Paul Krugman's ventures into commentary on policy. Put another way: Good, Fast, Cheap. Which two do you want?

TENURE TRADEOFFS. Would John Rawls have gotten tenure today? Kieran Healy suggests not: "Rawls published three papers in his first 10 years out of graduate school. In the current academic climate, he'd have been out on his ear after his sixth year, denied tenure and looking for a job in the toughest spot in the academic job market." That's a classic debate in the academy: what is the optimal production rate of quality? Given the proliferation of journals, and not much in the way of a market test for academic research, the incentives that exist are on the side of chunking out a lot of workmanlike stuff, never mind the profundity. The publication lags David Levine identifies certainly encourage erring on the side of workmanlike rather than profound publishing. Then, once one has tenure, the committee assignments will ensnare you if you're not careful (and if you are careful, the dumb decisions the committees make will get you anyway), and late bloomers like Rawls, or Kant, or Brahms simply vanish.

WHAT WILL THE MULTI-CULTIS SAY? "Etiquette for nerds," teases Joanne Jacobs, linking to a business etiquette course offered by the University of Cincinnati. I suppose that's progress, attempting to undo some of the transgressiveness "celebrated" elsewhere around that university.

PEOPLE RESPOND TO INCENTIVES. Cal Pundit is not impressed with the 12,000 pages or so of documents that Iraq has submitted, and relates tales of businesses involved in lawsuits providing much more mass. That's where the scanning equipment comes in handy. It helps to have the right kind of metal detector if you know there's a needle in a haystack.

CARDIAC PACK. The cold-weather winning streak on the Frozen Tundra continues. Despite a valiant effort by the Vikings and numerous first-half mistakes, Packers 26, Vikings 22.

PARK AND RIDE. Transport Blog uses my paid parking post as a springboard to a new topic: suburban stations for through trains. It's a new topic, as the Bay Area Rapid Transit (motto: we're not as long as the Union Pacific, but we're wider) and Chicago's Metra are suburban operations with commuters who drive to the station and ride the train to the city. (Given daily parking charges in Chicago, and the permanent congestion on the expressways, Metra is cheaper and often no slower than driving.)

Turning to the "parkway" stations ... Transport Blog asks, "If you have both a parkway station and a town/city centre station that means making two stops rather than the normal one. Hey, if you have a second parkway station on the other side of town that means 3 stops." In the Northeast Corridor, that doesn't pose any problems. Through trains from Richmond, Virginia, to Boston, Massachusetts often make Alexandria, Virginia (connection to the Washington D.C. Metro L line), Washington, D.C. (also a connection, walking distance to Capitol Hill), and New Carrollton, Maryland (connection to the same Metro line that serves Union Station); further north they make Metro Park, New Jersey (imagine a parkway station with a multi-level parking deck and a ramp to the nearby turnpike), Newark, New York Penn Station, and Rye, New York. Some trains also make Route 128 (this would be like naming Didcot Parkway for the nearest motorway) outside Boston. The Wisconsin service would make more sense if the trains originated in Oconomowoc or Brookfield and made a stop near General Mitchell Airport as well as in downtown Milwaukee. The point of providing stops is to serve passengers, schedule keeping is simply a matter of providing the power for the job. The folks who brought us the Acela Express are now demonstrating a 150 mph capable turbine-electric locomotive that resembles an Acela power car. I have my own ideas what a 150 mph power car ought to look like, but that's for another day.

PEOPLE RESPOND TO INCENTIVES. Commuters frequently drive to the train station, park all day, and ride the train. San Francisco's Bay Area Rapid Transit (motto: we're not as long as the Union Pacific, but we're wider) recently provided some reserved, by-permit-only, paid on a long-term basis parking spaces at stations. Shark Blog is not impressed with the results. "The highways in the Bay Area are overcrowded, and BART has excess capacity that could be used. But people will only opt for BART if it is convenient and time-efficient. The sanest solution would simply be to build more parking spots, and charge by the hour for all of them. But transit agencies tend to be run by a combination of people who hate cars altogether ('let them take the bus or ride a bike to the BART station!'), redistributionists ('BART should be free!') and the economically illiterate. So the half-assed solution of reserving a portion of the parking spots means that a few people will pay for reserved spots but probably won't use their spot all the time, meaning there will always be some unused parking capacity. At the same time, more of the occasional riders will fail to find parking, and will probably avoid BART altogether, and just drive all the way to their destination. Where they may have to pay for parking anyway."

His post does not spell out whether the remaining parking spots are free, which only aggravates the problem of people claiming all the free spots, compelling the later riders either to leave earlier themselves and complain, or leave later, complain, and then drive into town. And if the remaining spots are free, there is little incentive for the extremely regular early rider to buy a permit space, as he's only got to beat the rest of the traffic for the first few trains.

Chicago's Metra lots use a combination of permit and paid parking. The availability of pay-by-the-day spaces is a benefit for the occasional rider, provided a space is available (DeKalb readers: Elgin Big Timber is a bit longer drive, but less of a lottery than Geneva or Aurora. The railroading is more impressive than the Union Pacific although less so than the Burlington.) As an aside, I wonder if Metra overbooks? If on any day some percentage of the permit holders don't ride the train, there exists a number of permits in excess of the spaces at which the permit part of the lot is full every day.

I suppose that if the wider-than-the-Union Pacific BART went the Metra route, Acura-driving egalitarians would have even more to whine about.

HEGEMONIC BIASES? Regions of Mind discovers rednecks and whiggers. Critique of Pure Tolerance, anyone?

DIE FAHNE HOCH, die Reihe marschiert nach San Francisco. Oder vielleicht nicht?

REVERSING THE NIGERIAN SCAM. I have been reading a Yahoo newsgroup that reports unusual train movements in the Southwest of England. A poster provided the following material. "Yesterday in 'The Guardian' an article - Nigeria's big ideal for the trains: Call in Virgin." Must have been the Guardian On Dead Tree, otherwise I'd provide a link. But the story has a great deal of potential.

"Dear sir,
Please I am Ms DAISY STANIER, the only daughter of late chief mechanical engineer WIILIAM STANIER from Crewe. My sources of your contact gave me the courage and confidence to rely on you. I am writing you in absolute confidence primarily to seek your assistance to transfer our stash of twenty Voyager Trains now in the custody of a RIP TRACK here in Crewe to your railways pending our arrival to your country.
SOURCE OF THE TRAINS
My late father, chief mechanical engineer SIR WILLIAM STANIER, a native of Swindon district in the southern counties of England, died under Lord Beeching's axe ..."

PEOPLE RESPOND TO INCENTIVES. Lowering the bar produces hoppers rather than jumpers, notes Asymmetrical Information.

THOSE WHO PREACH RESPECT FOR DIFFERING POINTS OF VIEW frequently surprised to discover one. Discriminations is the latest to discover this truth.

PROTEST COMMITTEE. Amidst talk of war, and continued administrative follies on campus, and the continuing early winter, the Louis Vuitton Cup competition continues, to determine this year's challenger for the America's Cup, which remained in New Zealand after the 2000 match. Unfortunately, most of the action is in the courtroom. One World Challenge, a Seattle syndicate, is being sued by Team Dennis Conner and Prada, the Italian challenger, for espionage and possession of weapons of mass destruction. One World is supposed to race against Prada beginning December 9, pending the outcome of the hearings to be held December 7 and 8. There are good reasons to sail a Laser. The scantlings and foils are in plain sight, the latter particularly on windy days.

DIVERSITY TRAINING=OPPRESSION notes Highered Intelligence. No big surprise, just read the Critique of Pure Tolerance. Perhaps that screed ultimately will be recognized as the diversity boondoggle's version of Mein Kampf.

DISSERTATION TOPICS. Thank you, Professor DeLong.

INFORMATION SPILLOVERS. Virginia Postrel (!) notes, "The argument that tax dollars shouldn't undercut market efforts is reasonable, but in this case most of the articles come out of tax-funded research to begin with. That research is funded because of the belief that the knowledge it generates makes everyone better off, a claim that's more likely to be true if the knowledge is widely shared." It's her 5 December entry, with multiple links to other sources.

NO TRADEOFF HERE. Transport Blog looks at on-time performance on the UK railways and observes that, to passengers, "Isn't it interesting that passengers always say that punctuality is the issue but when it comes to the things that really matter ie their money actually the big issue is frequency." But there's no tradeoff, any Long Island Rail Road employee or Milwaukee Road veteran can tell you how to do both.

FILTHY LURES FROM THE WEST. Daniel Drezner notes that the al Qaeda attacks on the Bali and Kenya resorts (and the 'splodeydopes blowing up a Sbarro, and the food poisoning on cruise ships?) are consistent with an anti-pleasure worldview. He suggests that people show their defiance by taking ostentatious holidays. Once the grades are in ... and I will be armed with blowtorches, soldering irons, and other dangerous weapons if anyone objects.

SAND ON A CONICAL PILE? I received a hit from a Yahoo search on "calculus examples related rates of change conical sand." I made fun of such problems here, which probably didn't give the reader much help, but the Yahoo search does turn up sites that provide hints for such problems.

KICK ASS AND TAKE NAMES. The fallout from the St. Cloud State University anti-Semitism case continues. The SCSU Scholars describe the situation. First, the University (as is the case with many regional-based state universities) has an image problem and REMFs galore: "Over the past dozen years, past administrators at SCSU have stood by and allowed our university to be characterized in the press as an enclave for drunkenness, sexism, homophobia, racism, and anti-Semitism."

Second, there's no consensus on the mission of the University: "Yes, I understand that if you took the job of President of SCSU, you would find it a thankless one. On the one hand you would have to stand up to the minions at MnSCU who continue to try to “dumb down” your university to the level occupied by Cass County Community College. And those folks in St. Paul are backed by an Attorney General’s office that is headed by an individual with higher political aspirations and a vested interest in settling every suit. At the same time you would have to deal with the micromanagers of the Faculty Senate who seem all too eager to second-guess your every move."

Meanwhile, rather than admit selectively, charge accordingly, and steer resources to the academic programs (which would give the faculty incentives to skip the Faculty Senate meetings), the administration has been feathering its own nest.

Unfortunately, anyone who would apply for a university presidency and give as objectives (1) serious admission standards (2) applied on a consistent basis among populations (3) enforced by a faculty (4) on the tenure-track (5) with time for research and manageable class sizes (6) and limited assessment and committee duties (7) in order that tuitions reflect the benefits students receive yet (8) do not subsidize bureaucracies charged with special education, diversity boondoggles, big-time sports and lying to the alumni would likely not make the short list of candidates.

SND THM 2 DS SCHL. Quare compares her wordcount to that on some widely read weblogs.

KILLING THE MESSENGER. Showing up might be 50 percent of life, but pointing out that the other 50 percent takes some work is a way to get yourself in trouble, at least for Pasadena schoolteachers.

APPRENTICESHIPS. There's a weblog for aspiring Ph.D.s. (Via Joanne Jacobs.)

HE'S GOT THE WHOLE WORLD IN HIS HANDS. Or something like that.

CLASSIC OLIGOPOLY. Thus does Glenn Reynolds describe the three-network era. "Those who didn't like it could shout back at the television, but that was their only outlet. This suited politicians like Gore - whose mainstream Democratic liberalism fits well with the traditional network-news mindset - well enough, but left a lot of viewers unsatisfied.

"But technology changed all that, as broadcast networks were augmented by cable and satellite. Now viewers have a choice, and Fox's share is growing while its competitors' shares are shrinking. The same is true in other areas: talk radio, where liberal hosts have failed to get the kind of audiences enjoyed by conservative and libertarian hosts, and the Internet, where conservative/libertarian voices predominate to the great frustration of, well, guys like Al Gore. In fact, it seems that the greater the competition in a medium, the more that medium leans away from traditional establishment liberalism."

Do I hear an echo?

Joanne Jacobs recommends a Michael Wolff column pointing out a further failing of liberal commentators: they're boring. Put more precisely, many confuse earnestness (anybody remember gravitas?) with seriousness. Same failing the assessors of the obvious and the teddy-bear pushers have: they dread the possibility that someone, somewhere, might be laughing at them. Add to that their failure to recognize that important doesn't have to be boring, and visualize the channel being changed. Or visualize the television being turned off, and the model railroad being worked on.

Professor Reynolds concludes with "Gore, on the other hand, seems to have moved to the left, introducing new policy proposals like national health insurance that seem tailor-made for old-style establishment-liberal media. It remains to be seen whether his views will be rewarded by the political market." He has a better chance of succeeding in his own party with that strategy, than with the public. It's the median voter theorem, again. If the Democrats seek to attract voters to the "left" (although there's more than one dimension to left) and Republicans to the "right" (same caveat) the successful strategy for winning the Democratic nomination is to run to the left (what Vice President Gore is doing) and then position yourself more as a centrist for the general election. Mr. Gore learned the first part of this lesson the hard way in 1988, positioning himself for the primary between Governor Dukakis and Vice President Bush. All he achieved by that was to provide Republicans with a Willie Horton stick to beat Democrats with. We will see if he learned the second part of the lesson in 2000, when he offered continuity with the Clinton administration in the primaries, then sounded like Walter Mondale with personality from his acceptance speech until the election.

SELF LOATHING: "Some so-called progressives, it seems, would rather whitewash theocratic fascism than acknowledge that the West holds the moral high ground in any conflict. Ironically, this repugnant attitude only helps those conservatives who would demonize all dissent on war-related issues. It certainly makes their job easier." And much more, from Cathy Young.

MULTICULTURALISM IS PATRONIZING. (Via InstaPundit.) The writer may substitute Ian Buruma for Spoons Experience in this independent study problem.

THEORY AND PRACTICE. Daniel Drezner on John DiIulio's difficulties, and Condoleezza Rice's successes, with links to several other commentaries. Sometimes I suspect that President Bush's changing statements vis-a-vis Iraq are something he learned as Governor, dealing with university administrators, who are prone to ask "how deeply" when the State House says "bend over." Perhaps he is seeking to elicit similar, chicken-with-its-head-cut-off reactions from Saddam Hussein, who will then issue his military orders, followed by counter-orders, followed by disorder, perhaps followed by the generals showing a little more spine than university administrators ...

COVENTRY REDUX UPDATE. Midwest Conservative Journal also notes, via an Australian (!) source, that Israel's Mossad has been given leave to open cans of whup-ass as necessary.

MUSCULAR CHRISTIANITY. Midwest Conservative Journal discovers that it's evangelical Christianity, not evangelical Islam, on the march in the developing countries. Somewhere in the clutter in the Superintendent's office is an Atlantic issue with an article on that point, and hard by the computer is a copy of Economics Nobel laureate Robert Fogel's The Fourth Great Awakening & the Future of Egalitarianism. Although Professor Fogel focuses on the United States, he notes the growing influence of evangelical Protestantism in Latin America and elsewhere.

INVINCIBLE. The Boston and Maine Railroad had a locomotive so named. In the late 1930s the Railroad sponsored a contest among New England schoolchildren to name locomotives. Among the winning names were East Wind, Ye Salem Witch, Little John, and Invincible. Today, the running gear for a kit arrived from Locomotive Workshop. This one I'm going to name Invincible. It will look something like Little John.

With exams soon to be upon us, and winter weather moving in, web logging is likely to give way to locomotive building.

BLOGGER PUBLICATION PROBLEMS noted at 6:30 PM, God's time. More postings later.

KRUGMAN TRUTH SQUAD. That's a regular feature at Random Jottings.

NO GOOD DEED GOES UNPUNISHED. "Former NIU student sues for alleged harassment, discrimination," reports the Northern Star. "In the civil suit, Carl Qualls, an African American, states that NIU 'permitted a racially hostile educational environment that existed throughout Plaintiff’s matriculation at NIU'." Litigation is pending, with a status hearing scheduled for December 18 in Rockford. Among the university officials named in the suit are President John G. Peters, whose interview visit to the Faculty Senate included mention of the diverse student population at the University as an advantage for workforce participation, Provost J. Ivan Legg, who still brags on the progressiveness shown by his Oberlin College senior class in electing an integrated slate of class officers, sometime before I was born, Associate Vice Provost for Academic Support Services Admasu Zike, acronymer extrordinaire, with extensive experience in area studies, Associate Vice President for Administration and Human Resources and Director of Affirmative Action Steve Cunningham (res ipsa loquitur.)

Update to be provided after December 18.

TEETHING TROUBLES. More on the difficulties with the Virgin Voyager trains at Where Worlds Collide. I liked this: "The trains (basically sprinters with pointy noses) just aren't designed for the long-distance market; the lack of luggage space and inadequate catering are example of this. As for the serious overcrowding problems, this is a consequence of attempting an all-day regular-interval service with short trains when the demand varies considerably by time of day. While Virgin claim there are as many seats available over the course of the day, I'm sure there are far fewer at busy times." There's nothing wrong with putting a shovel nose on a railcar (note to my readers: 'doodlebug' has a very different meaning on US rails than it does in England, where it refers to a German cruise missile) but the Boston and Maine provided full-size trains at busy hours.

This train will show up the Acela Express.

Here's something ironic from the Flying Yankee history page: "The train was designed as a sprinter, covering intermediate distances quickly."

VEIL OF IGNORANCE. Cal Pundit suggests extending experimental economics into philosophy. For example:

"What I'm thinking of is a combination of philosophy and experimental economics. Test subjects are presented with three different "worlds," each with 10 people and $100:

World 1: 9 people get $1, one person gets $91.
World 2: 5 people get $3, 3 people get $10, 1 person gets $20, and one person gets $35.
World 3: All ten people get $10.

Each contestant gets to pick a world, the dice are thrown, and the money is doled out. Since your 'position' in the world is randomly chosen, it's a reasonable approximation to the "veil of ignorance" that Rawls proposes as a precondition for the people choosing how society will be ordered.

Has anyone ever tried this? It seems like an interesting little experiment to me.

UPDATE: Actually, how about a little addition to make this fit Rawls's notion a little better: the test subjects are separated into groups of ten and put in a room where they have to decide (any way they choose) which of the three worlds they want. Once they've decided, all ten draw a ticket from a hat and get the amount of money on the ticket. It would be pretty interesting to listen in on the conversations, too!"

I don't know of anyone who has run such an experiment, but Steven Landsburg has some thoughts that I've borrowed from to propose a slightly different experiment. Rather than divide $100, try something like this. Keep Worlds 2 and 3. Replace World 1 with this: 3 people get $15, 7 people get $22. There is more to economic justice than slicing the pie: our actions also determine the pie.

Landsburg gets more provocative, asking, anent Rawls, whether an individual behind the veil of ignorance was ignorant of his or her role: would all be humans, or would some be assigned the role of a baby seal, or of an aborted fetus (Armchair Economist, p. 58).

ILLINOIS WEBLOG UPDATES. Just discovered University Blog, looks like a prolific linker. Current coverage focuses on the Supreme Court-bound Michigan Law affirmative action case, also being watched carefully by Discriminations.

FISHING OFF THE COMPANY PIER "University officials have confirmed that there have been, and continues to be, relationships between faculty and students on campus. NIU policy does not prohibit these relationships, but “strongly discourages” them," reports the Northern Star. The story ran last week Monday. Later that week, Dean John Dwyer of Boalt Hall (otherwise known as the University of California at Berkeley's Law School, how pretentious can you get) stepped down for reasons that may involve fishing without a license. Critical Mass has been covering the story. Cal Pundit suggests, not closely enough.

CLUELESS? Harley Sorensen doesn't get out much, does he?

MAKING IT UP ON VOLUME. Several informative posts at Jane Galt (now trading in asymmetrical information) on the economics of music recording (high startup costs, negligible marginal costs once the master has been made.) Just keep scrolling.

ECONOMIC FORECAST? Best of the Web finds this interesting forecast from Ted Rall.

Best of the Web comments: "Now, there's probably a grain of truth to this, at least inasmuch as a successful liberation of Iraq would allow the lifting of U.N. sanctions and increase Iraqi oil production, bringing prices down. The weird thing is that Rall is supposed to be antiwar and here he is drawing a cartoon emphasizing--indeed, probably overstating--the potential benefits of war."

That is, if you view it as a benefit. Midwest Conservative Journal has found and responded to this Robert Redford statement asserting "The Highest Patriotism Lies in Weaning U.S. From Fossil Fuels ."

Perhaps, but wouldn't cheaper oil, refined in Western refineries, induce a great deal of inter-fuel substitution in developing countries, and reduce or eliminate the Asian Brown Cloud?

DIE FAHNE HOCH. Midwest Conservative Journal and Little Green Footballs report some European countries banning Kosher food production, ostensibly out of concern for animals. I suppose there will be an ISO 15001 standard for slaughtering at some point.

COVENTRY REDUX? Perhaps it's my turn to be fitted for a tinfoil hat, but here's my turn to be speculative. Wasn't there news of the usual "chatter" from the usual terrorist sources in the last few weeks? Wasn't there speculation about the recently discovered Bin Laden tape being a signal to do something? Then al-Qaeda stages an away match in Kenya, and afterwards (1) there's news that the Australians had some intelligence about Kenya and (2) Swiss intelligence calls the Bin Laden tape a fake? Might the Kenya attacks have happened in order to keep some sources secret? Not the first time that's happened in a war.

BIOTERRORISM? The thought that all those cruise passengers were getting sick was not an accident occurred to me. Greatest Jeneration published her fears. It could be kitchens that are not shipshape, but on several different ships?

OUR RECRUITING DIFFICULTIES. "Load: anything above five quarters or four semesters a year is heavy, below that is light." That's in David Levine's Cheap Advice. As if we don't have enough difficulties when we start a search and then have to abort it.

ACADEMIC SUCCESS. The plus one at Newmark's Door is a link to David Levine's Cheap Advice for beginning academicians. Well worth a look, even for those with some experience.

As an aside, the last post to Blogger took, for whatever information that provides.

UNUSUAL OCCURRENCE REPORT. Joanne Jacobs reports No. 2 Pencil's difficulties with Homestead and Blogger. Newmark's Door has the traditional four posts plus one for December 3 up, Highered Intelligence's posts for late on December 2 are visible, but Atlantic Blog checks in for December 2 but not December 3.

FAKERY AND FUMBLERY. Despite a Bear touchdown on a fake field goal, and an interception on the last play of the first half that led to a fumble that led to another fumble that led to a touchdown-saving tackle, and interference in the end-zone, and a Bear touchdown at the end of the game, Packers 30, Bears 20.

RULE 251-D. The January 2003 issue of Trains features the end of double track operation on the Santa Fe lines in Arizona and New Mexico. Those lines were distinctive in North America as trains operated left-handed (so as to take advantage of favorable gradients further west), requiring gantry signals in order for the engineer to be able to see the signal without a steam locomotive boiler getting in the way. "Probably no other railroad, save the Chicago & North Western, had as many route miles operating left-handed." That would be in North America: Santa Fe's left-hand running is about 453 miles of track, whilst Paddington to Penzance is 305 miles of double track operation, excluding the Royal Albert Bridge.

The Arizona and New Mexico lines are now dispatched by Centralized Traffic Control, and the discipline of taking siding to clear an overtaking superior train's schedule has passed (as have the cabooses that made lining the track easier.) There is a sidebar in the Trains article on how it worked: entirely by use of outside sidings and exit signals circuited to the third block in the rear. No reason to have a block operator awaiting 1-5-5 from the signalman in rear. It gets rather chilly on the Colorado Plateau.

FIFTIES NOSTALGIA. Regional scientist turned columnist Paul Krugman misses the old days of three major networks and the Fairness Doctrine. He has already drawn fire from Misha and Eleven Day Empire and Atlantic Blog.

I too, wish to disagree with the Professor. I wish to remind him that the Fairness Doctrine is a consequence of decisions taken years ago. "It was the intention of Congress that the [broadcast] industry should be competitive and that every region in the country should be served. But these objectives were in conflict. If the power permitted were low, the number of stations could be large, but listeners in remote and sparsely settled regions would not be reached by broadcasts. If the power were high, every region could be reached, but the number of stations would be small. Broadcasting, moreover, would tend to be concentrated in a few large cities." So wrote Clair Wilcox in 1971 (Public Policies toward Business, 4th edition, Irwin (1971): 442.) The compromise Congress reached set up some clear-channel radio stations, in such a way that only three major networks emerged. Congress compounded the error by allocating twelve VHF television channels, again in such a way that only three major networks would emerge. (The 1964 legislation requiring installation of UHF capability on all televisions was one attempt to fix that problem.) The Fairness Doctrine arose as a way of coping with the resulting triopoly. Was the programming back then all that great? Federal Communications Commission Chairman Newton Minow didn't think so. Nor is it easy to envision an easy market solution to triopoly, Professor Krugman is no doubt familiar with Avner Shaked, "Non-Existence of Equilibrium for the Two-Dimensional Three Firms Location Problem," Review of Economic Studies 42, 1 (January 1957): 51-56. (It's not just physics where three-body problems get messy). Deregulation of cable allows the introduction of new information providers, and the value of a radio station is now determined in something resembling a market, rather than allocated, notionally in the public interest (let us all honor that broadcast pioneer, Lady Bird Johnson). And that market allocation offers a way around the bias Professor Krugman claims to see. Thom Hartmann offers some suggestions along those lines.

PRAVOSLAVIE. Results from the SelectSmart Religion Survey

1. Eastern Orthodox 100%
2. Roman Catholic 100%
3. Hinduism 93%
4. Mainline to Conservative Protestant 88%
5. Orthodox Judaism 74%

Am I suffering from Post-Puritan Stress Disorder?

GRADE INFLATION UPDATE: Alfie Kohn's Dangerous Myth of Grade Inflation, fisked by Tightly Wound as noted here, has now attracted the ire of The Irascible Professor.

Not much for me to add, except this. Where the Irascible Professor asks, "Come on Alfie, wouldn't you be at least a little concerned if you were driving across a bridge designed by an engineer who got the 'lowest A' in a class where only A's were awarded." If memory serves, the Romans had their trivium and quadrivium, but no colleges of engineering. Rather, the designer had to stand under the bridge as the falsework was removed. If the arch gave way ...