The use of "diversity" to excuse the admission of underqualified basketball players was, of course, the height of cynicism. But in the contemporary college environment, the Athletic Department's strategy is understandable. A basic premise of the "diversity" movement in higher education is that academic qualifications need to take a back seat to the prospective student's "diversity" qualifications. In this respect, the Binghamton story simply took the "diversity" argument to its logical, if absurd, extreme.For tonight's exercise, substitute students wherever you see basketball players.
The databases are fed, in part, by arrest reports; officers are instructed to take detailed notes and enter them into a computer program that moves the information to a large server.You can't see it if you don't look for it.
It is, I hope, widely understood that the carbon footprint of flying is very high. What might not be as widely understood is that the shorter routes tend to be the least efficient routes. On a short flight, the extra fuel-consumption of take-off and landing is shared out among fewer route miles.The environmental considerations are a plus for the trains. The relative inefficiency of those puddle-jumper planes sounds about right.
And further, aircraft are less efficient flying through the denser air closer to the surface, and more efficient when they reach "cruising altitude". And of course, when flying from, say, Atlanta to Charlotte NC, or Columbus OH to Chicago, you spend the bulk of the flight either climbing to cruising altitude or descending from it.
And under present conditions, HSR [high-speed rail] demand focuses on trips of one to three hours, which are all short-haul flights in terms of flying. So not only can HSR be powered by sustainably generated electricity (either from the outset for 220mph Express HSR, or as part of ongoing upgrades, for 110mph Emerging HSR) ... but the flights they will replace are those that have a higher carbon footprint per route mile than the average for flying.
The commuter airline business model is unsustainable. And in the time it takes a passenger to make the schlep from security to one of the distant terminals, a passenger train leaving from a suburban Atlanta station could be as far as Columbia, S.C. enroute Raleigh or Birmingham enroute New Orleans.Airlines have a boarding process, through one door. (I'm having flashbacks to those pigs toiling up the ramp in The Jungle.) Railroads have uniformed train crew at several doors, and All Abooooard!
Mitchell has emerged as one of the country's fastest-growing airports by becoming a flashpoint for discount competition. It reported record passenger numbers in each of the last three months of 2009, a year when many other big U.S. airports saw steep declines.And six or seven times a day a Hiawatha calls at the airport. Seventy-eight miles and 74 minutes away from Chicago, 60 miles and 52 minutes away from Glenview. Sometime in the near future, 46 miles and 31 minutes away from Watertown. (Don't get me started on that "emerging" HSR. Give me 15A and 15B and a rake of nine coaches, a Super Dome, a cafe car, a parlor, and a Skytop Lounge -- or anything you see in these pictures -- and I'll get those Air Tran transfers to Glenview in 40 minutes.)
Helping drive Mitchell's popularity is AirTran Airways, which believes the airport can be bigger still. The discount airline says it can help turn Mitchell into a long-sought third Chicago airport, joining O'Hare and Midway.
Sound crazy?
Not so, says AirTran, which has steadily expanded its Milwaukee hub the last five years.
"Part of our strategy is to reach down into that northern Illinois area," AirTran CEO Bob Fornaro says. "Within 60 miles of Milwaukee, there are about 3½ million people. Part of the market certainly extends into northern Chicago. So we think there's a lot of potential from north Chicago."
Mitchell Airport director Barry Bateman estimates that nearly a million of Milwaukee's 8 million passengers come from Illinois.
AirTran isn't the only carrier operating out of Milwaukee that has its eye on travelers from Chicago's north suburbs and has thoughts of making the airport one they'd embrace. Midwest Airlines, which also operates a hub at Milwaukee, does, too.
The [La Crosse] route follows Amtrak's Empire Builder route from Madison through Tomah. It runs into La Crosse and across the Mississippi River. The route heads north through Winona, Red Wing, and into St. Paul. It's known as the river route.Strictly speaking, the La Crosse route picks up the current Empire Builder route at Portage. But you have to like the name of the coalition's coordinator. The Mississippi River routing poses challenges to going fast, however.
Supporters say it only makes sense that La Crosse be the choice since it already has the Amtrak service.
"It is the most successful long distance train service in the whole Amtrak system," says Jim Hill, coordinator of the Empire Builder High Speed Rail Coalition. "So you're building on success. All solid business models start with building on success."
High speed rail would require upgrades to existing tracks. They are currently designed to handle speeds of 80 miles an hour. A high speed line requires the capability to handle 110 miles an hour. Some analysts believe it may cost anywhere from $2-4 million per mile to replace the tracks.There are a lot of curves on the River Division west of La Crosse, and the best a steam-powered Hiawatha could do there was short sprints in the low 80s with checks for the curves and the towns. East of La Crosse, the tracks were once capable of 110, although to provide more miles of that speed requires extensive earth moving through the ridge between Sparta and Tomah, and some line relocations near the Wisconsin Dells.
Fairly high speed is an understatement. The problem policymakers face is that one route cannot serve both cities, and a network of lines connecting in the Camp Douglas area would drive the highway lobby and their shills nuts, that despite Interstates 90 and 94 dividing not far from there."We see the bottlenecks on I-94 crossing the St. Croix River at Hudson, so we know the demand is there," says [high-speed rail advocate] Scott Rogers.
If the interstate is being over-used, Rogers says the current track is definitely underutilized. A hand full of freight trains come through Eau Claire on any given day. A high speed passenger rail line would mean 6-8 round trips daily.
Many years ago, a fairly high speed passenger and freight line ran through the area according to Rogers.
The artwork, and the specifications, suggest souped-up Electroliners.By the end of 2010, high-speed Allegro trains produced by Alstom will start running between St Petersburg and Helsinki. This service will reduce the journey time between the two cities from 6 to 3.5 hours.
The high-speed Allegro trains will replace the Sibelius and Repin trains currently operating between Helsinki and Moscow. The launch of the Allegro service will allow the number of journeys between Russia and Finland to be gradually increased.
Each Allegro train has seven carriages, and total capacity of 344 passengers. The Allegro can reach a speed of 220 km/h, but thanks to the body tilt of up to 8 degrees, the effect of the centrifugal force will be minimized when rounding curves, ensuring maximum comfort for passengers. The train will also include seats for physically impaired passengers, a children’s play area, and places for passengers with pets. The entire train will be non-smoking.Highballski!
Questions never asked when it comes to the operating costs of highways - -including repairs, patrolling, plowing - - and then the inevitable replacement or expansion.What he said.
Specifically, the Zippin Pippin, on the National Register as the last public place Elvis Presley was seen alive. I've ridden it, it's a good mid-sized 'coaster, currently dormant in Memphis.Bay Beach Amusement Park not only pays its own way but pours hundreds of thousands of dollars into the city coffers each year, making it one of the city's biggest money makers, city officials say.
A roller coaster would only help that, they say.
Eight years of graduate school. Seven years getting tenure. Then told to go away and don't come back. In a crappy job market. By people with less credentials than you. Oh, I can see how that could push a borderline personality over the edge.A high school classmate is now a supervisor with the Postal Service in Milwaukee, one of the sorting facilities in which a fatal shooting took place. For his sake, and for the sake of the responsible postal workers, consider a different expression.
I concur with the second paragraph and dissent from the first. Up or out is also a feature of the military. The lieutenant who takes a long time to screen for captain is unlikely to screen for admiral. Is it no accident that higher education started to lose its edge about the same time reformers (of various persuasion) began to undo (whether in the name of access or in the name of parsimony) the norm of tenure track appointments?Regular readers know that I consider the tenure system unethical, and that I've specifically taken it to task for the "up or out" moment of decision. That position isn't terribly popular in higher ed, but there it is.
But to use this case to argue against the tenure system strikes me as way out of bounds. This isn't about a typical, predictable consequence of the tenure system. It's about someone who has killed before, killing again.
When I started teaching I thought that I was an educator who, if things went well, would at least occasionally entertain. Today I think I'm an entertainer who, if things go well, at least occasionally educates. I think the switch has made me more effective, and I'm pretty sure it's made me happier.Indeed.
On behalf of the NIU community, our students, faculty and staff, we offer our heartfelt sympathy and condolences to President Williams and the University of Alabama in Huntsville family. We share your pain and your loss, having personally experienced the profound grief you are encountering on this tragic day.
President Peters has spoken with President Williams and has offered prayers and support from our NIU family during this difficult time.
"Who are you kidding?" I wanted to get up and ask the English professor who was giving a talk at the South Atlantic Modern Language Association convention in November. He was analyzing a graphic novel, the spaces between panels, the line widths of the panels, the lettering inside the "speech bubbles."Perhaps, though, the traditional forms survive away from the workshops and the refereed journals. But the practitioners don't realize that they're using the traditional forms, if the title of tonight's Book Review No. 5, Secrets of The Lost Symbol: The Unauthorized Guide to the Mysteries Behind The Da Vinci Code Sequel. It's a cumbersome title, and literary criticism, particularly if it's applied to the works of dead authors, is by definition unauthorized. (I'd conjecture that only a very poor author would leave program notes, as it were, behind in a notebook for some future researcher to discover and quote from.)Maybe he was trying to keep his job in a field that by job postings indicates increasing irrelevance. Students are leaving English departments in droves. "This is a profession that is losing its will to live," proclaimed William Deresiewicz, former English professor himself, in 2008 in the pages of the Nation, no less.
It's been a death by slow suicide. The reference to "spaces" coming from the podium was the same kind of self-abusive parsing, I had seen applied by deconstructionists in the 1990s when I was a graduate student. The depressed patient, failing to see any worth in his work, had leveled the greatest works to "texts." Reading between the lines of "text" has evolved into reading the gaps between panels: "Lots of stuff happens in that silent space," said the professor.
The other English professors and graduate students in the audience nodded in complicit agreement, knowing that to acknowledge his intellectual nakedness would reveal their own. Or maybe they've really convinced themselves they're clothed in real scholarship.
The article does not report whether Mr Walker objected to receiving Highway Trust Fund monies, which pay for some upgrades of arterial highways, which in turn encourage suburban development that calls for property taxes to provide and maintain the local roads. (Take a very long view: the Highway Trust Fund paid for Interstates 90 and 94, which diverted sufficient traffic from the 400s and Hiawathas that the railroad companies removed the signalling that permitted the 100 mph running, which made the trains less time-competitive with the Interstates, and that culminated in a spiral that led to the end of all the trains except the ones Amtrak ended up underwriting. The service that remains west of Milwaukee is what happens when the government preserves a day train across the Northern Tier with a service base in Chicago.)The county executive, a Republican candidate for governor, said he might back the high-speed rail idea if "there was a model that could be shown where it was self-sufficient, where the operating costs were covered by the users." He acknowledged that also was unlikely.
Walker warned against hidden costs linked to the line, which he said ultimately could lead to cannibalizing other state transportation projects or prompt some new tax or fee. "There's no appetite for a tax increase," Walker said.
Walker said he was concerned the operating costs for the rail line would take away money intended for road and bridge projects. The state's application for the federal railroad aid estimated operating subsidy costs at $7.5 million a year for the Milwaukee to Madison link and $8.1 million for upgraded service on the existing Hiawatha line between Milwaukee and Chicago, according to the state's application for federal high-speed rail money. The annual subsidy would grow to $28 million for both links by 2022.So make the Interstates toll roads. In particular, bill the trucks for the full incremental cost of congestion and more rapid depreciation they cause, then work with CPR to share the cost of two tracks all the way to LaCrosse with additional recessing sidings at strategic locations. (There's room near Caledonia at a location I remember as A-68, and room near New Lisbon for lots of infrastructure.)
[Walker] also questioned the basic premise of the line, saying the ticket cost likely would be too high to attract enough riders. [He] said the fast trains wouldn't be as swift as driving a car, when factoring in time needed to get to the Amtrak station in Milwaukee and time to get from a proposed rail station at the Madison airport to the state Capitol or other Madison destinations.For people in Milwaukee or Brookfield with business at the Capitol or the University that's true. The value of the line, however, is in getting Madisonians to Mitchell Field or Glenview for O'Hare or for getting Racine and Kenosha area collegians (or Badger fans) to Yahara Station, and I hope Somebody In Authority is considering a station in Gurnee or perhaps Wadsworth for easy connectivity to Great America and the outlet malls on both sides of the State Line.
Weather, the article notes, is not the same thing as climate. All the same, there is glaciation on the landscape as far south as Cincinnati. Enthusiasts were looking at the peaks of Hawai'i's volcanoes in hopes of making it 50 of 50.Forget red and blue — color America white. There was snow on the ground in 49 states Friday. Hawaii was the holdout.
It was the United States of Snow, thanks to an unusual combination of weather patterns that dusted the U.S., including the skyscrapers of Dallas, the peach trees of Atlanta and the Florida Panhandle, where hurricanes are more common than snowflakes.
More than two-thirds of the nation's land mass had snow on the ground when the day dawned, and then it snowed ever so slightly in Florida to make it 49 states out of 50.
If the DeKalb - Milwaukee Madison series continues, with alternating home games, the 2009-2010 game will be in DeKalb. Maybe an opportunity to fill the Convocation Center?Not that game, however. It was at the high school, with plenty of seats in the gym. Madison scored a three point basket for an early lead, it was all DeKalb after that.
At The Sports Economist, Professor Miller lays out the tradeoffs.The play-in game is like the appendix of the tournament. You can live with it but don’t need it. And you wouldn’t want 32 appendices, which is the way it would work with a 96-team bracket. The top 32 teams — the only ones with a prayer of winning the tournament — would get a bye and the other 64 would square off in two days of televised tedium before the bracket is reduced to something that can comfortably fit on a sheet of 8½-by-11 paper.
What this is about, of course, is television dollars. The NCAA can opt out of its current 11-year, $6 billion deal with CBS and secure an even more lucrative contract, probably with ESPN. The tournament becomes a bigger cash cow if there is more of it to love.
The biggest proponents of expansion are coaches, who have a vested interest in keeping their own jobs and seeing the lousy coaches they can dominate keep their jobs, too. They complain that only 19 percent of the 347 teams in Division I make the tournament, which means the coaches of the other 81 percent risk losing their jobs.
To which, I would reply, Bill Self wouldn’t save his job if he regularly squeaked into a 96-team tournament as a No. 24 seed. But if it makes you feel better, you’re all winners. You all get a ribbon. Except you, Alcorn State, with your 0-24 record. You’ve really let yourself go.
Only a few teams each year have legitimate gripes about missing the tournament. They are usually midmajor schools that win their regular-season conference title and get upset in their conference tournament. But they had a chance to win their conference tournament. Schools in every conference except the Ivy League — whose regular-season champion gets an automatic bid — have a fighting chance to win their way in to the NCAA Tournament regardless of how crappy they’ve played the previous four months.
One of the tradeoffs the NCAA needs to consider is the simultaneous increase and decrease in interest this would cause. The expanded tournament would redistribute the bubble, putting some teams on it and taking others off it. Is the net marginal effect on fan interest positive?More to the point, where would the advertising revenue boost come from, if the play-in games had fewer viewers than the public access channel, and if the round of 32 had on average more mismatches?
In addition, this proposal would lead to a basketball version of grade inflation. While getting an A is great for the individual student, it's not necessarily true if everyone gets A's (the fallacy of composition). A given grade no-longer reflects the willingness and ability of a student to do quality work.That's a longer way of stating my "But does 'made the seventh game' [the play-in round] say anything about a coach that 'finished in the middle of the conference' doesn't?"
Similarly, the more teams that get into playoffs, the less interesting the playoffs become. This also has to be accounted for when thinking about the net marginal effect on overall fan interest.That's the probable lower ratings for the play-in and round of 32 at work. There's a further substitution effect at work, one that is hard to tease out. But sports fans have budget constraints. More tournament games on offer has the potential of reducing attendance at regular season games. And the players have to work harder for no more pay.
There is room for movement in this direction, particularly as the costs of beer-'n-circus and the waste of access-assessment-remediation-retention clash with un-bubbled endowments and falling tax revenues.On the other hand, working for pay may contribute to the academic seriousness of the college culture rather than detracting from it if student reports are to be believed. I am referring not only to students in work-study programs whose work consists of helping a professor with his research. Students who take menial jobs in the college dining hall of or the building maintenance operation often say that having the discipline of a job helps them to organize their time more efficiently, including time for studying. If students working for pay would not take their academic responsibilities more seriously if they had no job, their employment is not an impediment to higher education. Paradoxically it may even help by getting them out of places where they would otherwise goof off. I do not know of empirical studies that could throw light on this issue.
By dint of numbers, the goof-off students may have more impact on the cultural atmosphere of most college campuses than serious students who are trying to learn as much as possible. Perhaps public policy can change this, at least marginally, by providing more incentives for serious students and fewer incentives for goof-off students.
[Dr. Crazy, who I have reason to believe is at a not-quite mid-major, extending an argument by Wesleyan's Tenured Radical] notes in passing the different understandings of 'productivity' that underlie the work speedup. More students per class increases the tuition generated per professor, at least in the short run; that's one version of 'productivity.' More students per class decreases the amount of individual attention the professor can really give, which leads to a decline in the quality of feedback; that's another version of 'productivity.' Both versions are internally valid, but they don't necessarily mesh with each other. And that's where the real problem is.I think I've sung that song before.
Once again, higher education emulates the railroads. Whether the fault lies with the legislators or with their willing accomplices in university administration, the obsession of whoever is calling the shots with cost per degree or student credit hours per professor is emulating the Chicago Great Western's emphasis on gross ton miles per train hour.(I've since changed the template, the extended argument, with pictures, is here.) The deeper problem in higher education, however, is precisely that there is excess capacity in access-assessment-remediation-retention. The following is not a quote from me.
Worse, some students actually prefer classes that don't ask very much of them. (If you doubt the truth of this, spend a day at in-person registration, just listening.) The mutual non-aggression pact between an instructor who doesn't ask very much and students who'd rather not be bothered is one of the open secrets of American higher ed, and it fits short-term institutional needs disturbingly well. There's a reason that Rocks for Jocks and Physics for Poets still exist.You produce more student credit hours to divide by whatever base you're using by not challenging the students; your retention rate is higher if fewer students get reality checks. Never mind that those metrics simply keep the positional arms race going and help U.S. News sell more of those annual guides. Never mind that your job fairs only fill up when the economy is vibrant.
The endemic conflict is that beyond a minimal level, and outside of the elites, there's no economic incentive for the institution to do better than okay in the classroom. Once you understand that, the rest follows. (There's a moral imperative, but that's a different issue.) For a college that's struggling to stay afloat financially, the short-term cost of stuffing a few extra seats into each class is dwarfed by the tangible and immediate tuition gain (or labor saving). You can blame pinheaded administrators for that if you want to, but you'd be missing the point; the math is what the math is. When the college is flush, it's possible to make a choice to have your cake and eat it too; when the college is strapped, though, the contradiction is unavoidable.That assumes away the market test for the college. One of these days a state board of higher education is going to look at the graduation rates and job placement records of its universities, colleges, and community colleges, and ask if all of them are necessary. I won't rule out that happening in Illinois first.
A friend in Geneva did hear it, and thought it sounded like a plane crash. All I had was some extra traffic on my sitemeter, mostly people researching the Sandwich Fault. My conscience was clear that morning too.Earthquakes, generally speaking, are caused by a shifting of rocks, Stoddard said. In the Midwest, it's most likely due to what is called glacial rebound.
"We used to have huge glaciers sitting over Great Lakes region and into Canada," he said. "When they melted, that releases a lot of weight from that part of the world. The surface of the Earth rebounds upward. Imagine taking a bowling bowl off a mattress, only with the earth it happens a lot more slowly. As the surface rises up, small adjustments in the rock happen occasionally. And we felt one this morning."
The surprise in the region is the $810 million grant to develop a new corridor between Milwaukee and Wisconsin’s capital, Madison. The last passenger train ran from Chicago to Madison in 1971, and it bypassed Milwaukee, running on the historic C&NW route through Beloit and Janesville. Former Republican Governor and Amtrak Chair Tommy Thompson talked about Madison service during his tenure in office, but it appears that the current Democratic administration in Washington plans to deliver the service that the Republicans failed to provide. The present governor, Jim Doyle, and Transportation Secretary Frank Busalacci support expansion of passenger rail in their state.What good are passenger train advocates who don't read Passenger Train Journal? The last passenger train to Chicago indeed quit running on 30 April 1971, but it ran on the historic Milwaukee Road route through Janesville and Zenda. (The less we say about Amtrak's Zenda Zephyr, the better.) The Madison project is the first (and second, when 75 minute trains return to the C&M) stages of a speeded up service connecting Chicago with the Twin Cities. There's an extensive history of the Madison corridor in Issue 241, as well as a condensed version of several Cold Spring Shops posts describing Wisconsin's project.
The other new service planned under the program will be the 3-C (Cleveland-Columbus-Cincinnati) corridor in Ohio, which is slated to receive $400 million. The line last saw a passenger train in the late 1960s, and the only city pair within Ohio that is connected by rail today (Cleveland-Toledo), has service only in the middle of the night. Clevelanders can go to Chicago, New York or Washington, D.C. at inconvenient hours, but have no conveniently-scheduled trains. Governor Ted Strickland, a Democrat, supports the 3-C initiative, while his Republican predecessors opposed it. Strickland faces a hard challenge in his bid for re-election, and a rail line that will take people from one place in Ohio to another is a “deliverable” for which he can claim credit. Ohio is also a “battleground” state, which was crucial in 2004. If Democrat John Kerry had won the state, he would have ousted George Bush from office.Let's leave the politics aside, 'kay? The Amtrak network that emerged in 1971 for the most part preserved the best of the passenger train service that existed in late 1970. (But the Chicago and North Western, which repeatedly trimmed its schedules by telling the regulatory commissions the Milwaukee Road's parallel service was an adequate replacement, managed to drop all its trains, including the Green Bay service, and that kept the Overland Route free of passenger trains, despite its potential as a high speed line.) Here's how longtime train speed analyst Donald M. Steffee characterized that Ohio service.
A lone Beeliner [Budd RDC] round trip which connects with nothing at either end is the remnant of the once-fine service between Cleveland and Cincinnati. This run, with cities such as Columbus, Dayton, and Springfield as intermediate points, would rate Trans Europe Express service if it were operating in Europe.Trains 28, 8 (June 1968): 26. Cleveland to Columbus and Cincinnati on the Interstate Highways is not a toll road. Whether the passengers deserted New York Central or New York Central discouraged passengers, there was no base for the service in the late 1960s, and little interest in writing it into the Amtrak legislation.
Starbucks has always been most vital, most interesting, most revolutionary when at its most commercial.I'm not sure there is such a thing as a tasteful airport lounge. The mind boggles. But then, I miss the upstairs bar on the Peninsula 400.
Granted, not everyone thinks of the chain as radical. Take Bryant Simon, a historian at Temple University. In his 2009 meditation on Starbucks, Everything But the Coffee, he offers the usual critiques of the company. It says it sells coffee, but it doesn’t. It says it’s a venue for conversation and civic discourse, but it isn’t. It sells overpriced coffee-like beverages and a safe, predictable, environment. It preys on needy, status-seeking consumers by offering them clean bathrooms, innovative products, and a soothing ambiance in myriad convenient locations. For Simon, Starbucks was designed to be an exclusive, elitist institution: When CEO Howard Schultz began adding locations in the late 1980s, he “made sure to put his stores in the direct path of lawyers and doctors, artists on trust funds and writers with day jobs as junk bond traders.”
If you’re thinking to yourself, damn, that’s totally unfair to writers with day jobs as unemployed writers, well, yes, that was Schultz’s evil scheme! He wanted to introduce fancy coffee to people who weren’t already drinking fancy coffee. So, Simon reports, “unlike an owner of one of the beat coffee shops in the 1950s, he didn’t set up in transitional neighborhoods or fringe places like, for instance, Chicago’s neobohemian Wicker Park.”
In the late 1980s, of course, there weren’t many cafés serving high-quality coffee anywhere. Coffee consumption per capita was at its lowest point since 1962, soft drinks had recently surpassed hot caffeine as the nation’s favorite beverage, and Coke was in the midst of a campaign advertising its utility as a breakfast drink. The few cafés that were selling espressos and capuccinos, however, were located precisely in places like Wicker Park.
In choosing to locate his outlets in busy downtown locations, Schultz was expanding the world of high-end coffee—diversifying it, in fact, by taking it beyond its insular, self-conscious subculture. The décor of his stores amplified this process. They had the clean and slick streamlining of a fast food restaurant but were more comfortably appointed. Instead of walls lined with old books, there were gleaming espresso machines for sale, packages of whole beans, ceramic cups. They felt a little like a Williams-Sonoma store crossed with an unusually tasteful airport lounge. They were cafés for people who would never set foot in a bohemian coffeehouse, people traditional coffeehouse entrepreneurs had completely ignored.
For less than the price of a Whopper, you could hang out in a sophisticated middlebrow lounge/office for hours on end. And they were popping up everywhere. Exclusive, elitist? Starbucks was exactly the opposite, introducing millions of people who didn’t know their arabica from their robusto to the pleasures of double espressos. Finally, good coffee had been liberated from the proprietary clutches of hipsters, campus intellectuals, and proto-foodies and shared with bank managers and real estate agents. In offices across America, it suddenly smelled like ’ffeine spirit.
The alternative might be an assessment for street repairs, probably more than $40 per house and $115 per hotel. Make that an additional assessment, as 40% of the department's spending relies on other than fuel tax revenues.Toll roads in Wisconsin are unavoidable, given the need for billions of dollars to pay for road and transportation improvements in the state, a former state transportation secretary said Thursday.
Tom Carlsen, who led the Transportation Department under former Gov. Scott McCallum, broached that long-avoided proposal during his introductory remarks to a discussion of transportation in southeastern Wisconsin held at the Medical College of Wisconsin.
Similar proposals and predictions on regional transit and gas tax increases were among the items debated.
"Automatic tolling will come some day," and not soon enough, Carlsen said, noting that gas taxes alone won't generate enough money to rebuild the aging freeway system and support the transit needs in the southeast part of the state. Improvements in fuel efficiency and the increasing use of alternative fuels will decrease the money generated through the motor fuels tax, which provides nearly 60% of the Department of Transportation's annual spending.
Carlsen also said the state needed to raise the gas tax to provide more money for building and maintaining highways, including the outdated Zoo Interchange.
I'm not sure when National Signing Day became National Signing Day, but raise your hand if you have qualms about a "tradition" in which elite footballers from high schools across the country hold press conferences to announce which university they'll be attending.And chin-pullers wonder why there's not much learning going on in the high schools or the colleges.
Indeed.Can you imagine being 18 years old and announcing your choice of college on national sports TV?
You want to talk about sick? Check out this report from the ABC affiliate in Knoxville, Tenn.: "National Signing Day is an unofficial holiday for die-hard college football fans, and some are even opting to skip work so they won't miss a moment."
The report quotes a sports bar owner: "There will be a huge crowd, almost like March Madness or some other holiday."
Right. Like Super Bowl Sunday. Or, you know, Easter.
Can we just pay these athletes and acknowledge what everyone knows to be true -- that major college football is minor league pro football? How is it that universities and coaches continue to make millions of dollars off the efforts of "amateur" athletes who could get suspended or kicked out of school for accepting a suit of clothes or a few bucks on the side?
The hypocrisy is breathtaking.
Stan persuades all the citizens of South Park to buy hybrid cars. A disaster of epic proportions threatens the town and Stan is to blame -- just as everyone starts to feel really good about what they're doing to help save the earth ...Oh, wait.
Nice to have a train to be able to demonstrate your Concern.Tim Ahern, a spokesman for the environmental group the Trust for the Public Land, said he had bought a Prius for his commute from Sacramento — about 80 miles east of [San Francisco] — for the same reason cited by many buyers: Mother Earth.
“I was driving,” Mr. Ahern said. “But I was also doing something good for the environment.”
But on Wednesday, he said he was stunned that the Prius might have problems and had called his Toyota dealer for more information. Unfortunately, he said, there was little information to be had.
“So,” he said, “looks like I’m riding the train for a while.”
This Family is not the same as the Five Families, or the First Families of Virginia, nor does the article suggest there is a conspiracy so vast ...For more than 50 years, the National Prayer Breakfast has served as a prime networking event in Washington, bringing together the president, members of Congress, foreign diplomats and thousands of religious, business and military leaders for scrambled eggs and supplication.
Usually, the annual event passes with little notice. But this year, an ethics group in Washington has asked President Obama and Congressional leaders to stay away from the breakfast, on Thursday. Religious and gay rights groups have organized competing prayer events in 17 cities, and protesters are picketing in Washington and Boston.
The objections are focused on the sponsor of the breakfast, a secretive evangelical Christian network called The Fellowship, also known as The Family, and accusations that it has ties to legislation in Uganda that calls for the imprisonment and execution of homosexuals.
The Family has always stayed intentionally in the background, according to those who have written about it. In the last year, however, it was identified as the sponsor of a residence on Capitol Hill that has served as a dormitory and meeting place for a cluster of politicians who ran into ethics problems, including Senator John Ensign, Republican of Nevada, and Gov. Mark Sanford, Republican of South Carolina, both of whom have admitted to adultery.
More recently, it became public that the Family also has close ties to the Ugandan politician who has sponsored the proposed anti-gay legislation.
Ridership in [European] markets has been bolstered by high gasoline prices and one-way highway tolls of $40 and $100, respectively. These and other foreign routes have attracted much of their ridership from a strong core of rail passengers that does not exist in the U.S.When I want to be provocative, I provide the following formula for jump-starting high speed rail in the United States: a carbon and infrastructure tax of about $5 per gallon of gasoline, and time-of-day tolls on all Interstate highways. That strong core Mr Cox hints at is a response to incentives. My formula is deliberately provocative.
High-speed rail does little to unsnarl traffic jams because most highway congestion is within urban areas, not between them. It also has negligible impact on airport congestion. The world's strongest high-speed rail market, Tokyo to Osaka, is also one of the world's largest airline markets. Even with high-speed rail, there is still frequent air-shuttle service between Paris and Marseille.The air shuttle doesn't do passengers in Avignon or Montpellier or Aix-en-Provence much good, but the TGV can serve those communities with a fast service that can load and unload through more than one door and be underway again in two minutes or so. To address highway congestion, the intercity train operators must coordinate their schedules with the regional train operators. Without any special efforts, Metra weekend suburban trains, which when I moved to DeKalb tended to be lightly-loaded three-car rakes, have turned into nine-car rakes frequently delayed by heavy passenger loadings. All Illinois does to discourage more driving is not build more roads. Better connectivity between Metra and the expanded Amtrak service is desirable.
The administration is planning on giving Florida $1.25 billion to build a Tampa to Orlando high-speed rail line. The train on that route is expected to hit speeds of 160 mph and to make a trip between the two cities in about 45 minutes.I'm not sure that argument generalizes to other corridors, such as the Chicago network or California, where a lot of the air travelers pick up rental cars at airports and where the passenger services, even at 1938 Hiawatha speeds, are time-competitive with the puddle-jumper aircraft.
This will be helpful if you happen to live in the Orlando Station and have business in the Tampa Station. But most travelers will be better off driving.It's about 90 minutes by car, though it can be less depending on your home and destination. Once you factor in the time it would take to travel to the station, park, walk to the platform, and wait for the train to depart and also pick up a rental car on the other end, driving would probably be faster.
I am reading senior papers this term (one reason my blogging tends to be a little spotty lately.) I would like to spend my time working on developing how their education here allows them to see economic theory work on their topic. I would like to play with the results of their statistical work, refine it, be sure we used the right technique and had the right data. But I spend an enormous amount of time having them write and re-write their papers. And at this point I should not have to keep finding each mistake they make -- they should be able to find some. If they don't and I find it on re-write, they wonder why I didn't find it for them the first time. And it's all I can do sometimes not to say, "I'm not the one who let you down."That's also my complaint, when I'm doing my hitch on the capstone class, or when I have a 400 level class with a term paper requirement.
Other causes, less tangible, contribute to students’ poor record and performance in college (especially that 20 percent or so who demand extra time and energy from the professor), and here I venture on more speculative ground. Some are not sure what is done in the classroom—how to behave. They don’t know when or how to take notes. They perennially miss due dates, drift in late, drift out during the break not to return. They sabotage themselves and then seem to expect forgiveness and accommodation from their professors. Someone showing up one day after having been missing for five or six weeks, only vaguely recognized by the professor, will assume that a way can and will be found to bring him up to speed and on track with the rest of the class. Is all this the result of repeatedly being forgiven in the past? I think so.People respond to incentives. The high schools, however, are providing the wrong incentives.
(Via Phi Beta Cons.)A study done for The Concord Review Institute some years ago found that the majority of U.S. public high school teachers no longer assign serious research papers, because teachers do not have the time (or perhaps the knowledge) to guide students through them and to assess them when they are handed in.
It is clear that working with students on term papers would be less time-consuming than layup drills for basketball, tackling drills for football and batting practice for baseball, to which countless hours of students and coaches are devoted every year on a regular basis.
Twitter, Facebook, and to some extent even text messaging have fulfilled the need to express oneself in a way that starts to make blogging obsolete. Don't believe it? All you have to do is to check out the blogs now provided by the professionals, like Progressive Railroading. Even with the extensive website promotion, the professional graphics, and the printed word, these professionally published blogs have become the haven of certain opinionated types who live to stir up the few readers who dare to respond. Meaningful dialog is, how do they say, flamed.The only thing worse than no traffic is too much of the wrong kind of traffic ...
That project is one from a Cold Spring Shops wish list. (View a Cold Spring Shops Downeaster report from the Quebec Riviera.) The Bar Harbor and the old Down Easter, complete with through sleepers from Philadelphia and New York to Rockland? Not yet.Thanks to the announced $35 million grant, the Downeaster route will extend an additional 30 miles north of Portland to Brunswick, Maine, stopping along the way at the town of Freeport (site of a 24-hour LL Bean outlet store).
The grant will upgrade Pan Am's freight line between Portland and Brunswick (now a 30- to 40-mph line used by 6 trains a day between Portland and Yarmouth, and two trains a week on the 16-mile Brunswick Branch. The funds will go to installing welded rail and new ties over the route and improve 36 grade crossings.
Once the upgrades are done, travel time on the extension should take about 50 minutes. Bonus: At Brunswick, riders will have the chance to transfer to summer excursion trains to Rockport, Maine, run by the Maine Eastern.
It's also doable with the current infrastructure, and a train service that included a few additional stops (Gurnee for Great America, Rondout for transfers to the suburban trains) would not be able to exploit 150 or 200 mph capabilities anyway. A 62 minute timing [Milwaukee downtown to Chicago Union Station] with stops at Airport, Sturtevant, Gurnee, Rondout and Glenview and 110 mph maximum speeds is feasible, at least on my computer.If the service that our tax dollars pays for does not involve better connectivity in Chicago, however, I will not be pleased. And I must remind readers that The Milwaukee Road was toying with 60 minute non-stop timings on the Hiawathas and selected Milwaukee-Chicago trains in 1938-1939.
