TIME FOR A NEW METAPHOR?

A human-interest story about an excursion train says it will "chug" through town.

The train of nine historical passenger cars from the 1940s and ’50s is being operated as part of the organization’s annual convention, the first to be held in Iowa, according to a news release from the society.

The train went on the route Sunday and is set to travel the route again Monday. These trains will operate along the historical Chicago & North Western line, once the route of the famous Union Pacific Streamliners.

The train will pass through Illinois towns including DeKalb, Dixon, Rochelle and Sterling. The train should go through the DeKalb area between noon and 1 p.m. Monday.

The National Railway Historical Society invites everyone to view the train as it passes, but it request they stay off railroad property and tracks.

General Electric's diesels might be said to chug when they're turning over at low speeds, but steam-era images are not necessarily the best publicity for today's railroads, whether of the industrial-strength raw material and intermodal variety or of the gliding-fast passenger variety.

Recommended watching location: the Rochelle Railroad Park.  The Moudy Park gazebo in downtown DeKalb might also work.

OPPORTUNITY COSTS.

Securing the state football title games doesn't come for free.

Northern Illinois University administrators: Please skip the next paragraph because I love my NIU job and want to keep it.

NIU showers excessive attention and resources on athletics for questionable return and at the expense of many other worthwhile pursuits. Walk through downtrodden Reavis Hall, read the salaries of coaches, and teach student-athletes who often are unprepared for (and uncaring about) college-level academic work, and you might feel similarly.

To be fair, NIU is not alone. Many universities put way too much stock in their teams.

The reference the author makes to Reavis Hall could apply to any of the buildings in the Watson-Reavis-DuSable complex, particularly their bathrooms.

Those additional football weekends in DeKalb might bring in tourists with disposable income, but, note, only for one weekend.

John Crompton, a highly respected researcher who studies marketing and financing of public leisure and tourism at Texas A&M University (an institution no stranger to athletic boosterism), notes: “Economic impact analyses have an obvious political mission. They invariably are commissioned by tourism entities and usually are driven by a desire to demonstrate their sponsors’ positive contribution to the economic prosperity of the jurisdiction that subsidizes their programs or projects. The intent of a study is to position tourism in the minds of elected officials and taxpayers as being a key element in the community’s economy.”

Some ways in which economic analyses are flawed include erroneous aggregation, abuse of multipliers, ignoring community-incurred costs, and exaggerating the number of visitors, according to Crompton.

Come fall, our senior economics majors will be picking capstone paper topics, and more than a few might involve stadium subsidies.  Consider the above as a head start on a literature review.

READY FOR FALLING SKIES?

The next advance in miniaturization: mechanical mosquitoes.

Image via Dirty Dazz.

London's Daily Mail covers the story, including an intriguing possibility.

The insect manoeuvrability which allows flies the ability to land precisely and fly off again at speed may one day prove a crucial tactical advantage in wars and could even save lives in disasters.

The military would like to develop tiny robots that can fly inside caves and barricaded rooms to send back real-time intelligence about the people and weapons inside.

[Oxford zoologist Richard] Bomphrey said: 'Scary spider robots were featured in Michael Crichton's 1980s film Runaway - but our robots will be much more scaled down and look more like the quidditch ball in the Harry Potter films, because of its ability to hover and flutter.

'The problem for scientists at the moment is that aircrafts can't hover and helicopters can't go fast. And it is impossible to make them very small.

And here I thought Falling Skies was ripping off The Wrath of Khan's slug-in-the-ear trick. Now if some of our micro-drones turn up to battle the invaders' micro drones, or if praying mantises develop an appetite for mechanical drones ...

EINS, ZWEI, G'SUFFE!

The Milwaukee County Park Commission brings back an obvious revenue-enhancer: ein Biergarten.  The first one is in a park adjacent to several tony North Shore suburbs.  We await announcement of one in Koscziuszko Park, so that miscreants can be assigned their community service gathering empty piva cans.

AN INCONSISTENT FORM OF FLATTERY.

Laurie King and Leslie Klinger invite a number of writers to compose a Sherlock Holmes story.  The results, which include some attempts at lost Holmes adventures, and some stories using Holmesian techniques, make up A Study in Sherlock: Stories Inspired by the Holmes Canon.  Short Book Review N^o. 18 follows.  The volume will probably stay in the library.  The content is uneven.  That might be because the editors invited individuals not necessarily known for their work in mysteries, or Victoriana, or medical thrillers, to participate in the project.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

LAW SCHOOL WILL STILL BE THERE IN A YEAR.

A dozen recent college graduates hire out to drive the six Wienermobiles.

More than 1,000 college seniors from across the country apply for 12 spots each year, according to Ed Roland, a marketing manager with Kraft Foods, the parent company of Madison-based Oscar Mayer. He wouldn't own up to the salary but said it's a competitive starting wage.

One successful applicant passed up a slot in law school to be an Oscar Mayer Wiener.  College bubble, indeed?

ESCALATE THE POSITIONAL ARMS RACE.

Northern Illinois University gets to host the state high school football title games in odd-numbered years. That becomes occasion for the retired sports information director to argue that the existing press facilities and skyboxes are inadequate.

What we all hope, even with the current dire economic times, is that the IHSA football state finals provide the impetus for the next wave of Huskie Stadium renovations. The next capital campaign maybe? Even with the generous Bud and Joyce Nangle press box gift (estimated between high six figures and low seven figures in 2008), the project needs more external support. With Illinois State planning a $25 million renovation for its Hancock Stadium and rumored to be contemplating going from FCS to FBS in the near future, the football competition in-state at every level will only get more difficult. Get my drift?

We noted, a year or so ago, Illinois State's ambitions to become the next Northern Illinois in football.  It will take a bit of research to discover whether Illinois State have string quartet envy or steel band envy, or if there is circus envy somewhere in Northern Illinois.

MORE HELP ON THE WEATHER RAIL.

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel sends a reporter to cover scow racing on Okauchee Lake (sail letter E, for those of you not versed in Inland Lake Yachting Association racing.)  Because it's a windy day, the reporter gets on board "Doc" Henschel's C Scow.

DIAGNOSING THE COLLEGE BUBBLE.

Berry College's Peter Lawler channels Cold Spring Shops.

To defend some administrative expansion for a moment:  Fund raising, admissions, and "retention" have become much more complicated.  Colleges seem stuck with treating students much more like consumers, and so with indulging student whims and whines.  That's led, for example, to a kind of amenities arms race--resort-style health facilities, gourmet food, and so forth.

Colleges used to worry about the character and moral fiber of their students, and so they had a lot of in loco parentis social regulations and demerits and so forth.  Now they worry that students aren't happy or too stressed or lonely or short on self-esteem.  Colleges are paranoid about retention--that if the consumers aren't happy they'll just choose another brand of college. They also spent a significant amount of time and resources being concerned with the health of students, as if the main variable associated with being healthy isn't being young.

Let's say there's something to each of these charges of self-indulgence, although in each case the charge is exaggerated. (And I presented each charge with plenty of irony.)

Exaggerated, perhaps, but worth putting in front of Big Think readers all the same.  As is his diagnosis of what's gone wrong.

The administrators themselves, full of models of excellence derived from business (encouraged by government when the Republicans are in power), schools of teacher education (which should be abolished or keep to themselves), and political correctness (encouraged by government when the Democrats are in power), demand quantitative, measurable, assessable solutions to tricky and often "goes with the territory" problems.   A problem with techno-democracy is that it tends to harness everything to the imperatives of technology or "the measurable."  There's more than some irony in addressing techno-democratic excesses with techno-democratic methods.

That's why there are market tests.

PRIVATE RETIREMENT ACCOUNTS WIN BY DEFAULT?

That appears to be the argument of an advocate for ending public pensions for new state employees.

Second, when you utilize a 401K matching program, there is no such thing as “under-funding”.  The retirement money is actually paid out immediately, with each paycheck.  This allows the government to pay its bills now, rather than pass them along to future generations.  Third, a 401K match has many benefits to the employee that pensions do not offer.

For example, in a 401K, the money is 100% yours.  If you decide to leave your job after 10 years, you don’t forfeit any of the government’s contribution.  You can take it with you to the private sector or to another public agency.  Under traditional public retirement programs, employees are trapped.  If they are unhappy after 10 years with an agency, they are forced to grind it out for another 10, 15, or 20 years in order to be able to collect their pension. Conversely, in a 401K program you can resign at any time without leaving any cash on the table.

Another benefit is that the retirement money does not stop paying out when you and your spouse pass away.  Whatever is left is part of your estate and can be willed to loved ones.  Furthermore, 401K funds can be self-lent in cases of need, and are paid back with interest.

In light of the propensity of corporate pension plan managers, and state legislators, and Congress, to use plan assets -- yes, including Social Security -- as a piggy bank, the alternative looks pretty good. The danger, though, is that private acount holders also can use the assets as a piggy bank, which is what self-lending refers to.

CORPORATE WELFARE FOR ROADHOGS.

That's a Cold Spring Shops category intended to bring readers' attention to the use of public money to allow truckers to endanger motorists whilst stealing business from investor-owned railroads.  It's also a valid description of a lot of infrastructure spending.

The Interstate Highway System is justly lauded as one of the greatest engineering and political achievements of the 20th century. President Obama regularly invokes the nearly three-decade initiative when talking about public works projects that could get the economy back on track. Unfortunately, the simplified story about the Highway System misses the fact that billions of dollars were likely wasted because we built a system too large to serve its core purposes, and we failed to ensure the investments were in the right place at the right time.

As it is, the Interstate Highway System was wildly over budget. The U.S. Department of Transportation reports that initial estimates put total construction costs at about $27 billion. By the time the system was completed in the 1980s, the federal government had spent more than $114 billion and the total cost accumulated to $129 billion.

On balance, the spending might have been worth it, but aggregation overlooks uneconomic allocations of resources at the margin.

No incentives existed to prevent overbuilding. This overbuilding may have resulted in tens of billions of dollars in excess federal and state government spending even though many economists suggest that the economic benefits of the system outweighed the costs of its construction. After all, the result of the project was a 46,876 mile long system that knitted together all major U.S. metropolitan areas, and economists have shown that the interstate system was a boon to business as intercity trucking became more efficient and less costly and urban congestion fell dramatically.

The cities became less congested because the interstate highways, which originally were not to be run into cities, made migration outward, and congestion there, more likely.

Nevertheless, billions of dollars were likely wasted because the users - commercial truckers as well as passenger cars - were never required to directly consider the costs and benefits of using these roads with a true user fee such as a toll. In the 1950s, Congress decided to eschew tolls altogether, opting instead for the politically expedient and administratively efficient (at the time) gas tax. The end result was a system where many roads were built to nowhere, or at the wrong time, and transportation subsidies became endemic. A price sensitive private sector, in contrast, might have otherwise built roads elsewhere and for even more productive purposes.

It is this reality of overbuilding that should sober ideas about infrastructure spending "paying for itself" or "filling a need," particularly in an advanced and mature economy such as the one within th United States. Certain parts of the Highway System certainly showed positive economic gains, but many other segments were unnecessary - or at least not necessary at the time the government built them. While spending federal dollars on road development is not the only arrow in the quiver of the pro-stimulus argument, a more sophisticated look at our experience with the Interstate Highway System at least suggests that Washington should be careful about simply dropping billions more dollars on the economy without considering the potential inefficiencies they create.

Perhaps so, although an advocate of Keynesian stimulus in an era of cheap capital is likely to tell the authors, "Look, I don't want to have to explain to my grandchildren that the socialist revolution came while The Best and The Brightest quibbled over allocating the stimulus money in a first-best-efficient way."

PRICE DISCOVERY?

The value of a steer depends on what consumers are willing to pay for a steak.  There's probably a research project waiting to be written on the effects of backward integration by meat-packers.

Retail giants like Walmart grab an increasing share of any profits. The price a rancher gets for beef, adjusted for inflation, dropped from $1.97 to 93 cents per pound between 1980 and 2009.

Today, though, the ranchers are focused on a different villain, and one after another, they pull me aside to tell different versions of the same tale. They talk about the meatpackers’ power — how it’s become nearly impossible to make a living as a small operator, because the meatpackers no longer buy much from small operators. It’s harder and harder to get a fair price for cattle, they say, and the meatpackers that slaughter and process the beef conspire to make it so.

Bill Bullard, president of the Montana-based Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund (R-CALF), mounts the podium like a preacher and rallies the crowd. “Our cattle industry is shrinking,” Bullard booms. “Folks, these are signs of an unhealthy industry. An industry in severe crisis.” He’s one of many who raise the specter of the nation’s chicken and hog industries, in which once-independent farmers are now treated more like meatpackers’ employees.

Derived demand is derived demand, whether you call yourself an independent vendor or a sub-contractor. There's a long history in meat-packing of the packing-houses behaving like an oligopsony. Thus model-building is going to be challenging.

The rise of the meatpackers began in the 1880s — an era, in the words of the Federal Trade Commission, “when the modern American meat industry was in its infancy.” Back then, John Rockefeller was building the Standard Oil empire as other powerful men became railroad and steel barons. The “Big Five” meatpacking companies controlled 45 percent of the domestic cattle market by the early 1890s. Every Tuesday at 2 p.m., their representatives met in downtown Chicago to decide how many cattle each would bring to the marketplace. This illegal act of collusion — which kept meat prices high by limiting supply — was known as the Veeder Pool, because the meatpackers’ attorney, Henry Veeder, kept records for the meetings and later testified about them in Congress. The Veeder Pool and similar dodgy arrangements put the squeeze on ranchers, whose cattle decreased in quality and value as the packers held them back from the market.

Doesn't such a strategy have to depress the value of the cut meat to restarateurs and home-makers?  The U.S. Department of Agriculture and Urbana's Richard Arnould have looked more systematically at changing concentration in meat-packing.

While there have been fluctuations — meatpacker concentration hit a low point in 1977 — mergers in the ’80s began a tidal wave of consolidation that leaves meatpackers with nearly double the power they wielded 120 years ago. Four giant companies — Tyson, Cargill, Brazil-based JBS, and National Beef — now control about 80 percent of the U.S. beef market.

And the oligopsony is back to squeezing suppliers. (There's probably another paper on the effects of Wal-Mart squeezing the meat-packers ... again, all ability to squeeze or to raise margins depends on the willingness of that shopper to purchase a steak.)

With fewer buyers to sell to, more and more feedlot owners are accepting packer-offered advance marketing agreements, which guarantee they can sell their cattle. It seems much safer than waiting for a buyer to come around — or not — and watching cattle get overfat and decrease in value.

The big meatpackers already have a lot of cattle locked up through these advance contracts; the cash market now makes up less than 40 percent of the total market. And the meatpackers are paying less than they used to for cows on the cash market, because they don’t need those cattle as much anymore, [Auburn agricultural economist Robert] Taylor says. Because the price of the contracted cattle, or “captive supply,” is based on the price of the cash market, the packers benefit twice. “If they depress the price on the cash market, not only do they get those cattle cheaper, but they also get all of the captive supply cheaper,” Taylor says. “So that means there is a multiplier incentive for them to manipulate the market.”

But a paper by Professor Taylor shows a secular decline in the real price of food products.  Working hypotheses: there are efficiency gains in vertical integration, or perhaps the meat-packers had been restricting output to an unprofitably small volume prior to the writing of contracts.

Rich Sexton, an agricultural economist at the University of California-Davis, says the meatpackers’ marketing contracts increase efficiency by minimizing the transaction costs embedded in the old system, in which many cattle buyers roamed across rural landscapes bidding on small lots of cattle. Contracts also guarantee meatpackers a steady supply so their large processing facilities can operate at maximum efficiency, allowing for greater quality control than the cash market does.

But where farmers make relationship-specific investments to work with meat-packers, there is a potential for a hold-up.  And no lack of work for legislators and regulators.

A CLARIFICATION FROM THE VATICAN.

Britain's Railway is the longest-published ferroequinology magazine in the world.  They've recently released a number of single-theme short books (bookazine is the latest barbarism perpetuated as a neologism) on a number of subjects, including a Flying Scotsman Travelogue.  That work made reference to s previous offering, World's Fastest Steam Railway:  London King's Cross to Edinburgh Waverley.

Yes, a number of fast steam locomotive trials took place on the East Coast Main Line, but turn to page 79 for an intriguing passage from the Defenders of the Faith.

On July 20, 1934, Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad 4-6-4 No. 6402 was tested in order to show that a high-speed service was feasible.  Heading a regular service train from Chicago, to Milwaukee, it hauled the 380-ton train over the 85 minutes [c.q. -- 85.5 miles from Union Station to the Everett Street Depot] in 67 minutes and 37 seconds.  A maximum speed of 103mph was reached.

It also averaged 89.92mph for a 68.9 mile length.  British author Bryan Benn believes it is the first claim of more than 100 mph (in which the surviving documentation strongly indicates its accuracy), and therefore it may be deemed by some to have beaten Flying Scotsman by a few months.  The success of the test run led to the railroad launching its 'Hiawatha' express in 1935.

Count Cold Spring Shops among the "some".  For partisans of British steam performance, however, the next paragraphs are instructive.

At the time, the 'Hiawatha' was the fastest scheduled express train in the world.

A recorded run with a dynamometer car behind locomotive No. 2 on May 15, 1935, from Milwaukee and Wisconsin [Milwaukee to New Lisbon, actually -- there is still a wye to turn a steam train at New Lisbon] saw 112.5mph recorded over a 14 mile stretch [this figure out of deference to the claimed speed record of New York Central 999, which Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry still unaccountably credits with that speed].  As such, it would have been the first steam locomotive to  officially exceed 110 mph.

They were followed in service by the six F7 streamlined 4-6-4s which were introduced in 1939 and ran at speeds in excess of 100mph on a daily basis.  One was recorded at 125mph on a run between Chicago and Milwaukee after managing an average of 120mph for 4 1/2 miles, a whisker short of Mallard's record.  The F7s were also recorded as running to the fastest scheduled speed between stations; the 'Twin Cities Hiawatha' [Morning Hiawatha] had to cover the 78 miles from Portage to Sparta [other way] in 58 minutes at an average of 81mph.

All as we have informed readers for years.  We await the opportunity to declare a new North American steam speed record.

That noted, the Flying Scotsman Travelogue clearly describes a more colourful railroad than the Route of the Hiawathas.  Dauntless dive-bombers flying out of Glenview or off lake steamers converted to practice aircraft carriers and on occasion crashing in Lake Michigan aren't quite as exotic as Zeppelins brought down by rifle fire, and Abraham Lincoln's stolen horse in Portage not as wild a political story as Cromwell or Mary Queen of Scots.  It's also hard to conceive of a camp train headed for a college of wizardry and witchcraft loading from any odd-numbered track in Chicago's Union Station.

GOING FOR THE SPORTS TOURISTS.

Huskie Stadium will be the location of the state high school football title games, in odd-numbered years.  That will be one good weekend for the hospitality industry.  There are 103 additional weekends, though, for which any hoped-for investments in new hotels and eateries must find sources of revenue.  And the propensity -- nay, avarice -- of the Mid-American Conference to schedule home games on weekdays (despite objections from knowledgeable people) further depresses the animal spirits.

HUMORLESS HARPIES.

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker attempts to build bipartisan cooperation by inviting legislators from both parties to a Brat Summit.  The heirs to the campaign for equal voting rights complained.

Woman’s Christian Temperance Union president Rita Wert said Tuesday that serving beer at the so-called brat summit sets a bad example. She says the problems facing Wisconsin are serious and the judgments of policy makers should not be clouded by alcohol.

The current president is named Wert and a predecessor was named Tooze. There are still 5,000 members in the organization, which was at one time powerful enough to have gotten Prohibition enacted, according to the article.

TAKE BACK YOUR SUMMER.

Cold Spring Shops has long been skeptical of the proposition that longer hours equate to greater productivity.  Validation of a more systematic nature comes from Psychology Today (via InstaPundit).

The problem is, the little time we now allot ourselves for vacations can't do what vacations are supposed to do. "You need more time to fix burnout," explains Joe Robinson, author of Work To Live: The Guide to Getting a Life. You have to be cut off from a stressor for a sufficient amount of time to give your mind and body a break. And you have to allow two weeks for your body to rebound.

But trying to get more than one week at a time is difficult, especially in today's climate. People have to beg their employers for any time in the first place. The upshot is they wind up feeling guilty for taking time off. And vacations feel illegitimate.

Robinson points out that Americans are going through a cycle of overwork that began with the recession of the early '80s then shifted into high gear in the late '80s with a series of technological advances—fax machines, desktop computers, cell phones. We have lots of tools that bestow on us a false sense of urgency.

Add to that the fact that labor has been cut to the bone. Everyone left is doing multiple jobs and working extra hours. We're living in "a world of no boundaries" between work and life, says Robinson.

The good news is that the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority have a commercial making fun of the work obsession.

Sometimes the first stirrings of a social change are commercials making fun of that which is previously sacred.

BURSTING BUBBLES?

What lesson might the operators of name universities in the United States learn from a Benet Academy graduate discovering that Cambridge is cheaper.

In vetting colleges where she had been accepted, [Nicoletta] Knoble noticed it cost more than $50,000 a year to attend the University of California, Berkeley, and about $62,000 to attend the University of Chicago. She said generous scholarships from New York University almost tipped the balance. Syracuse University and Washington University also were among the domestic schools that accepted her.

The cost to attend Cambridge University totals £26,000 a year, which Knoble expects will translate to about $40,000 a year. Another reason it costs less to attend the University of Cambridge is the three-year undergraduate degree program, as opposed to the traditional four-year degree programs at universities in the United States.

Cost and location ultimately steered her decision to study archaeology and anthropology overseas.

“That’s partially why I started looking abroad,” Knoble said.

Not only is college in Europe cheaper for U.S. students to attend, it’s only a couple hundred dollars – as opposed to thousands of dollars – for Europeans to attend them.

Without generous financial assistance to graduate students, the article notes, Northern Illinois University might not be running a current-account surplus with the rest of the world.

FRAMING, AGAIN?

George Lakoff uses his stature as a highly-decorated professor at a well-regarded university to collaborate with a political strategist to offer self-styled progressives false choices.

Progressive morality fits a nurturant family: parents are equal, the values are empathy, responsibility for oneself and others, and cooperation. That is taught to children. Parents protect and empower their children, and listen to them. Authority comes through an ethic of excellence and living by what you say, rather than by enforcing rules.

He's been beating this drum for probably longer than I've been posting.  It's intriguing how much flak the essay has been taking, from the self-styled progressives on one of their main bulletin boards.  (Scroll through the comments and instruct yourself.)

The false choice comes in equating progressive morality and social cooperation.

Correspondingly in politics, democracy begins with citizens caring about one another and acting responsibly both for oneself and others. The mechanism by which this is achieved is The Public, through which the government provides resources that make private life and private enterprise possible: roads, bridges and sewers, public education, a justice system, clean water and air, pure food, systems for information, energy and transportation, and protection both for and from the corporate world.  No one makes it on his or her own. Private life and private enterprise are not possible without The Public. Freedom does not exist without The Public.

Division of labor is also an emergent phenomenon. Sometimes The Public set up institutions that assist The Invisible Hand.  Sometimes those institutions arm-wrestle The Invisible Hand.  Keep that in mind, now work through the passage that follows.

In conservative politics, democracy is seen as providing the maximal liberty to seek one’s self-interest without being responsible for the interests of others. The best people are those who are disciplined enough to be successful. Lack of success implies lack of discipline and character, which means you deserve your poverty. From this perspective, The Public is immoral, taking away incentives for greater discipline and personal success, and even standing in the way of maximizing private success. The truth that The Private depends upon The Public is hidden from this perspective. The Public is to be minimized or eliminated. To conservatives, it’s a moral issue.

No, the self-discipline to be successful is the self-discipline to prosper by respecting the wishes of others.  The Public stands in the way of maximizing private success by agreeing to rules of ownership, contract, and fraud only for grifters and fraudsters.  The moral issue may be the attempt to sharply define boundaries between The Private and The Public, something that observers from diverse political perspectives might agree is not possible.

YOU DID THIS TO YOURSELF.

The fruits of access and retention.

College is about learning how to learn, how to approach and synthesize new information, and how to meet multiple expectations and deadlines. For students like you, Gregory, it is a four-year, dog and pony show. You party with your friends, come to my class reeking of booze, and never complete the most basic of tasks. You will get the College Diploma, because you managed to scrape the bottom of the barrel of your intellect to meet the bare minimum requirements.

You are not educated. You have a piece of paper. Congratulations.

It's at the anonymous faculty gripe site, but sometimes you can learn more from the people on the front lines than you can from the public relations types.

IN CASE YOU REQUIRE CHEERING UP.

The NIU Steelband performs In She Rainorama to conclude the spring steel band concert.

The University has requested that You Tube not share the embedding code.  Open the link in a new window and enjoy it all the same.

THE WESTERN CAMPAIGN GETS ITS DUE.

It has long been the position at Cold Spring Shops that the progress of Grant and Sherman from Kentucky into Tennessee and Mississippi, and thence to Atlanta and onward to the coast, secured the Union, and likely would have done so no matter how the contest between Lee and any commander of the Army of the Potomac prior to Grant coming east had turned out.  Jeff Shaara's A Blaze of Glory: A Novel of the Battle of Shiloh has a note to the reader beginning "This is the first of a trilogy that explores the mostly overlooked stories of the Civil War that take place west of the Appalachian Mountains."  If these works turn out as well as his European Theater trilogy did, Book Review N^o. 17 will be followed by additional favorable reviews of the promised works on the siege of Vicksburg and Sherman vs. Johnson in the Carolinas, a part of the war that is most obscure yet possibly more significant than the better-known culmination of Grant and Meade vs. Lee culminating at Appomattox.  Mr Shaara follows his usual practice of following the actions of individuals on both sides, both well-known (Forrest, Sherman) and less well-known, including one private in the Sixteenth Wisconsin Reg^t, a unit mustered at Camp Randall, thence with Sherman into the Carolinas.  Any further discussion of the Reg^ts role in Blaze of Glory would risk spoiling the tale: let us note that Mr Shaara's research is evident.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

SUPERFLUOUS SUPERVISORS.

Josh Barro, an economist, suggests that increased spending by universities does not equate to increased performance.

For example, over the last few decades, the typical public four-year college has seen a sharp expansion of its support and managerial staff — from 5.5 per 100 students in 1987 to 7.5 per 100 in 2007. Colleges have also been reducing student-to-faculty ratios, and increasing spending on fringe offerings like gyms and student centers. As a result, expenditures per student by public institutions of higher education rose 48 percent from 1985 to 2009, after adjusting for inflation. Can we really say that higher education has gotten anywhere close to 48 percent better over that period?

With apologies to Bill Clinton, that depends on what one means by better. Better amenities? Check. More support staff for unmotivated or unprepared students? You betcha.  Assistance for faculty who want to put more of their course material online?  Indeed.  Note here that I'm skeptical of Mr Barro's confidence in video and distance education, which you'll see endorsed in his column.

In California, where there used to be two girls for every boy at Surf City, there is now one administrator for each professor.  Details at Marginal Revolution.  Do we have any evidence that those increases in administrators, and their impositions on faculty, have produced any efficiencies?

THERE HAS TO BE A BETTER WAY.

When a pedestrian commits a fatal act of railway trespass, passengers are trespassed against.

Saturday morning, the radio traffic reports indicated that the last two Metra Geneva Sub trains never made it to Elburn late Friday or early Saturday.  A trespasser had a close encounter with a freight train near the Geneva Depot.  The article does not report on bus service in substitution.  The last runs from Chicago are sparsely ridden west of Wheaton and nearly empty west of Geneva.  Perhaps the taxi operators got some business.

Earlier that Friday, a Wauwatosa woman trespassed in front of a Hiawatha in Caledonia.

None of the 145 passengers and crew members aboard the train was injured and passengers were taken to their destinations on buses after a delay of almost three hours, [Amtrak source Vernae] Graham said.

Buses also were dispatched to pick up passengers booked on two subsequent trains from Milwaukee.

Three hours seems to be the norm for investigations by the police and the coroner in fatal occurrences of railway trespass.  I'm sure the authorities have good excuses reasons for delaying passengers and train crews to this extent, never mind the missed connections passengers might suffer because of officialdom's wishes.

OCCASION TO HOIST A SPRECHER.

Yes, the Harvey's Wallbangers began their World Series run thirty years ago this week.

Those Brewers were just above .500 and 5 1/2 games out.  This year's edition has more modest accomplishments and a lot of injuries.  All the same, beating the Cubs is beating the Cubs.  Maybe a sake chaser for the beer?

PLAYER WITH RAILROADS.

Visitors from New York and Boston offer photographic impressions of the 'L'.

Cold Spring Shops regulars know where those prize photo locations are.

SEPARATING EQUILIBRIUM?

Kay Hymowitz of City Journal considers what happens when people who ought to know better decide not to bother with the consequences of bad life-management skills.

At the top of the social order is a positive feedback loop, with kids raised in stable, high-investment, and relatively affluent homes going to college, finding similar mates, and raising their own children in stable, high-investment, and relatively affluent homes. At the bottom is a negative feedback loop, with kids raised by single mothers in unstable, low-investment homes finding themselves unable to adapt to today’s economy and going on to create more unstable, single-mother homes.

Not only do we have more poverty, inequality, and immobility; we have the makings of a caste society, with an inherited elite and an entrenched proletariat. That’s not an America that anyone finds very attractive.

That despite all the best efforts of the diversity establishment to celebrate differences, let alone to mau-mau anyone who points out those deficient life management skills as victim-blamers.

SHORTER COLD SPRING SHOPS.

According to Barbara Kay at Canada's National Post, Higher education needs a rethink.

An entire library could be filled with books lamenting the present state of higher education in the arts and humanities — the lack of intellectual diversity, the dumbing down of courses to accommodate the unmotivated lowest denominator who must not be failed on principle, and other well-publicized grievances. So while knowledgeable observers agree that a university degree is a sine qua non for the job market, they also agree that while it is serving more numerous clients, higher ed is delivering less than it did as an elite institution. Many undergrad degrees conferred today are largely pro forma, as universities are not producing a plethora of critical thinkers or even proficient writers.

Welcome to the fight.

Richard Vedder concurs, with a useful bit of allowing for risk and uncertainty.

The “college-for-all” crowd, personified by President Obama and the Lumina Foundation, argues, correctly, that the average college graduate earns more than the average high-school one. But that calculation fails to use a more appropriate measure (more of a Bayesian approach to the statistical cognoscenti) to analyze the returns to college. Specifically, if 45 percent or so of students fail to graduate in six years, earnings comparisons unadjusted for the high risk of dropping out are totally inappropriate.

The human-capital and job-market-signalling folks can have all sorts of fun now.

PROFSCAM: THE SEQUEL.

From time to time, an author makes some money writing about Radical Occupation of the University, or Lazy Professors at the University, or Administrative Bloat at the University, or Sports Corrupts the University.  It's possible that a papyrus burned by Napoleon or by the Romans at Alexandria might have made similar complaints about Pharaoh's Intellectuals.

Charles Sykes's ProfScam might be the prototype for the current series of such books.  It happened to come out about the same time that Identity Politics captured some disciplines, and Quantity-Dominates-Quality became the model for research visibility among weaker departments, and Falling Test Scores became a public issue.  The country's sports mania did not yet have Michael Jordan or the 'Niners or a strong Wisconsin football team as further evidence of misplaced priorities, although a lady called Camilla Parker Bowles occasionally appeared in tabloids in association with the Prince of Wales.

Naomi Schafer Riley recently offered an entry in the series titled The Faculty Lounges.  The most telling observation I can make in Book Review N^o. 16 is that my copy has no marginal notes, and no page numbers noted on the flyleaf, both common Cold Spring Shops practices as the books pile up in advance of the reviews being posted.  (I learned some years ago that "where did I see that passage" was becoming an inefficient random-access algorithm.)  An observation at University Diaries is spot on with why that is the case.

There is one lesson Ms Riley might have learned subsequently about the value of academic tenure, one of the Abuses and Ufurpations of the Profefsoriate that she would like to end.  About a month ago, she said some unkind things about Area Studies on a Chronicle of Higher Education site, and the Chronicle of Higher Education ... let her go!

One learns, in the course of earning academic tenure, not to take criticisms of one's necessary and sufficient conditions as personal attacks, and how to couch criticisms of other peoples' necessary and sufficient conditions as Improvements in the State of The Art.  Then, upon earning tenure, one is able to be a bit more aggressive in the criticisms of other peoples' analyses.  The lesson is left to Ms Riley as an exercise.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

LET US SPEAK FREELY

A self-described Obama Democrat explains why he is a board member of the National Association of Scholars despite the perception, in some circles, that the organization represents conservative voices.

In a word, because since I first heard about the NAS from the horse’s mouth some twenty years ago—Steve Balch’s son and my son were childhood playmates, I’ve long been an NAS member, and Steve and I have long been personal friends—I have believed passionately, and have told Steve (and more recently Peter Wood) often, that in my view he, they, and the NAS generally are doing vitally important work in seeking to preserve, and often (lamentably) to restore, the quality of higher education in America.

Moreover, because I believe equally strongly—as do Steve, Peter, and (I gather) NAS members generally—that unless higher education is rescued from the doctrinaire, ideologically skewed, politically correct mindset that has taken hold of academe since I was in graduate school in the early 1970s, not only the quality of higher education in America but, without exaggeration, the survival of Western civilization as we know it will be at grave risk.

Perhaps so, but perhaps the risk to higher education is in the circumlocutions with which he continues.

I believe there is no question that American society still has a long way to go before issues related to race, gender, and class cease to impose arbitrary and unfair limits on economic, social, and other opportunities and progress.

That "issues related to" or the similar "issues of" language looks less threatening than "American society still has a long way to go before endemic racismsexismhomophobia not to mention elitism and classism cease to impose arbitrary and unfair limits ..."  Never mind that institutions of higher learning achieve at least some of their status from determining who does or does not get in or who does or does not graduate or how well the football program fares in bowls.  All the same, that "issues ..." formulation is a dog-whistle for the more radical phrasing I proposed.   Test this hypothesis: suggest to your campus diversity enablers that primitive belief systems or erratic or non-existent life-management skills or just plain wishful thinking contribute to those arbitrary or unfair limits and see what reaction you get.

But there is hope.

I just don’t believe that shoehorning race, gender, class, social justice, sustainability, and/or any other social or political issue into every classroom discussion and aspect of college life is either the way to achieve meaningful progress on those issues or to fulfill the educational mission for which our colleges and universities were created.

Well, we economists have long understood that Marx is at best a minor post-Ricardian and that engaging in discriminations not based on productivity differences is unprofitable.  Perhaps, though, Professor Winnick has discovered, through his own efforts, that his discipline, too, is subject to market tests.

The lowering of academic standards and the dumbing-down of the curriculum—both while the cost of a college education continues to skyrocket—are equally disturbing long-term trends.

To insist that all that really matters in the study of literature are issues related to race, gender, and class is not to centralize, but to marginalize, literature as a subject worthy of serious thought and a source of meaningful knowledge about and understanding of the human experience—including but not limited to what it means to be black, female, gay, and/or poor.  It can only result, over time, in the abandonment of any study of literature at all.

The Theory meat-grinder makes the English electives less attractive, and with fewer students signing up for formulaic and tendentious literature courses, the Ph.D. in literature looks even less attractive, and there are fewer graduate students to supervise.

To make it optional for an English major to study Shakespeare, or for a history major to gain a broad knowledge and understanding of the major events and trends of human history, or for a humanities major to know something about science, or for a science major to know something about the humanities, or for anyone to know any foreign language, is to institutionalize ignorance, and to put at risk the breadth and depth of knowledge on which not just the value of higher education but the viability of our political system, society, and civilization depend.

Some of this sounds very much like an essay I wrote over twenty years ago, that opened thusly.

Universities are failing to carry out their mission. Contributing to this failure is a collection of ideas we call "politically correct." The intellectual foundation of these ideas is an extreme relativism that questions the possibility of objective knowledge and seeks to dispel "coherent beliefs of any kind." A university built on such a foundation cannot stand.

Welcome to the fight, Professor Winnick.

Releasing higher education, and educators, from the political and ideological bondage by which it and they have been confined in recent decades is something in which all of us, professional educators and “civilians” alike, have an enormous stake—and which all of us, regardless of what lever we pull in the voting booth, should be working together to achieve.

Whether we define ourselves as Democrats or Republicans, liberals or conservatives, independents or moderates, we should all be able to agree that colleges and universities have a duty to produce graduates who know how to think critically, evaluate complex evidence, ask difficult questions, and seek answers from books or other credible sources and not just blogs.

We should all be able to agree that every college graduate, regardless of major, should emerge from his or her undergraduate years not just with theoretical job skills and actual debt but with a greater understanding of and (we may hope) appreciation for our political system (both its genius and its imperfections), history (both proud and sometimes shameful), and cultural legacy (including the great books, music, and art our civilization has produced).

We should be able to agree that even in a stronger economy than prevails today, an education which fails to produce those results—be the student’s major English, History, Business Administration, or Physics—is not worth its cost.

We should be able to agree that the imposition of any political, social, economic, environmental, or other agenda on any student or faculty member as a condition of matriculation, academic success, employment, or tenure is unacceptable—and should be prohibited or purged from every institution of higher education worthy of the name.

Although there are no doubt many educators at every college and university who hold these truths to be self-evident, it must be recognized that in most such institutions they are badly outnumbered, under constant attack, or forced to keep their views and concerns on these issues to themselves.

The absence of an agenda is an agenda (sorry for the nit-pick), but the sentiments are proper.  It might be better to propose an agenda in which students learn that there are controversies, often with more than two sides, and that there might be compelling cases for each of the contending sides.  And the absence of that agenda might be holding back that stronger economy Professor Winnick hopes for.

Rising incomes may be rewards to people who learned careful reasoning, mathematics, and science, and who sold their skills to employers who valued them. That others are losing ground may be evidence of diminished skills of more recent graduates of high schools and universities. Economists are sorting out these hypotheses.

I'm closer to calling it a career now than I was in 2005, when that post went up, or in 1991, when I wrote the essay. It's taken more than one summer, but I continue to fight it out on this line.

THE CASE FOR LIMITING GOVERNMENT.

Joseph Stiglitz thinks he's writing about income inequality and plutocracy, but there's a deeper meaning to this passage.

Rent-seeking distorts the economy. Market forces, of course, play a role, too, but markets are shaped by politics; and, in America, with its quasi-corrupt system of campaign finance and its revolving doors between government and industry, politics is shaped by money.

For example, a bankruptcy law that privileges derivatives over all else, but does not allow the discharge of student debt, no matter how inadequate the education provided, enriches bankers and impoverishes many at the bottom. In a country where money trumps democracy, such legislation has become predictably frequent.

The strongest case for enumerating and limiting the powers of government, and changing those numbers and those limits only after careful and lengthy deliberation, might be that in the absence of such restraints,   the temptation to spend money to influence those changes, or, as appears to be the case, with Wisconsin's recall elections, to suggest that money alone influences policy.  Walter Russell Mead suggests it is not yet time to give up on logic and content.

[M]oney does matter in politics, but money alone is rarely enough, especially on an issue which voters care deeply about. When the left — or the right — can summon popular passion and energy to its side, it can not only put up a noble fight. It can win. This actually happens quite a lot in American politics: poorly funded campaigns with charismatic candidates tap into some deep reservoir of popular sentiment and they deal out bitter defeats to the pallid, colorless but well-moneyed Establishment candidates. This has been happening relatively frequently in Republican politics of late. There have been times in American history when it happened also on the left. Milwaukee, Wisconsin has had Socialist mayors.

The left’s problem in Wisconsin wasn’t that the right had too much money. The left’s problem is that the left’s agenda didn’t have enough support from the public. Poll after poll after poll showed that the public didn’t share the left’s estimation of the Walker reforms. Many thought they were a pretty good idea; many others didn’t much like the reforms but didn’t think they were bad enough or important enough to justify a year of turmoil and a recall election.

The left lost this election because it failed to persuade the people that its analysis was correct. The people weren’t a herd of sheep dazzled by big money campaign ads on TV; the Wisconsin electorate chewed over the issues at leisure, debated them extensively, considered both points of view — and then handed the left a humiliating, stinging and strategic defeat.

And perhaps we can return to one dimension of normalcy. It is unusual for electoral events in Wisconsin to make Illinois politics look good, but the past eighteen months have surely had that effect.

THE ZOO LINE.

The Riverside and Great Northern Railway, at the workshop that built a number of miniature railroads for amusement parks and zoos, is open for business.

There was space to build tracks because The Milwaukee Road relocated its line west of Wisconsin Dells.

The [Sandleys, father and son] moved their operation to the Dells off Stand Rock Road, obtaining an abandoned La Crosse and Milwaukee Railroad right of way that they were able to use as a demonstration and test track for their engines and cars.

The LC&M track was moved about 50 feet uphill and is still in use today. (When this writer visited the R&GN, an Amtrak train caused a stir when it rolled by with the Milwaukee Road's restored "Cedar Rapids" multi-windowed Skytop lounge in tow.)

On occasion that car brings up the rear of a 261 steam excursion, and perhaps visitors to the Dells will have an opportunity to witness 261's passage again, or perhaps a passage by the Coalition for Sustainable Rail's test engine.

YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK.

Several impressive time-lapse movies of the Transit of Venus, from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory.

WE SHALL FIGHT THEM FROM THE BEACHES.

London's Daily Mail offers a colour gallery of England as it was in 1952.

B. Anthony Stewart photo via National Geographic Society.

A HISTORIC FIFTH OF JUNE.

Britain celebrates a Diamond Jubilee.  Two noteworthy observations from this morning's events: the National Emblem march rendered in that British march tempo, and the lead plane in the fly-past sporting D-Day stripes on the wings.

Her Majesty requested the band to play The Star Spangled Banner at the 12 September 2001 Changing of the Guard.

The last Queen to view a Diamond Jubilee was Victoria, and the Transit of Venus occurred during her reign.    John Phillip Sousa wrote a march for that occasion.  Another Transit of Venus coincides with today's Jubilee, although it will not be visible from Britain (and not because of the clouds).

On this day, the Boston and Lowell Railroad was chartered in 1830.  That's the first component of what became the Boston and Maine.

PRODUCTIVITY FOLLIES.

A Counterpunch essay takes on the myths of academic accountability.

Why aren’t professors requiring more of students? Is it because, as some have argued, universities care more about research than about teaching? Or because professors are just lazy and hence don’t want to exert themselves grading lots of assignments? The latter position has lots of proponents. Tenure makes it nearly impossible to fire a professor, so what incentive does he or she have to do any real work?

The point, as Michael Munger frames it, is that tenure is a hire.  It's difficult to fake being assiduous for six or seven years so as to be able to goof off for the next thirty.  There's no shortage of interesting questions to research.  The problem is that counterproductive administrivia and false economies get in the way.

Leaving aside the issue of whether people are more effectively motivated by the carrot or the stick, there’s one huge reason for the decline in the expectations placed on students in higher education that has yet to be given sufficient attention–the increasing amount of university-level instruction that is being done by what academics refer to as “contingent faculty.” Contingent faculty–primarily adjuncts who are hired by the course–are paid so badly that they are forced to teach more courses per term than can be handled well.

Sometimes, doing more with less is a false economy, and the use of cheap and contingent academic labor is destructive in multiple ways, as the essay notes.

I spend almost all my time during the terms when I’m teaching grading quizzes and essays and meeting with students to discuss them. I don’t mind doing the work because I know it’s important. I do mind having almost no free time, but there are breaks between terms and then the summer when I can do some real research. I can’t do much research while I’m teaching. There just isn’t time.

Here’s the kicker though. I’m tenured. I’m one of an increasingly tiny elite of tenured professors who have reasonable teaching loads and rock-solid job security. I teach two courses per term. Sounds pretty cushy, doesn’t it? It’s all I can handle though, if I want to do a good job.

I complained once to another critical reasoning instructor about the amount of time it took to grade essays.

“I don’t give essays,” he said, “I can’t, I’m teaching four other courses.”

He was an adjunct.

Note: no shortage of interesting questions, and "summers off" mean some uninterrupted thinking time to work on them.  Read on.  You can't offer Marshall Field service with a Wal-Mart business model.

I’m fortunate because my job is secure. I have time to give my students substantial reading and writing assignments and I don’t have to worry that they will trash me in their evaluations if I give them a lot of work, or if I’m hard on their papers. I trust them to be fair with me if I am fair with them, and they usually are. Tell an adjunct that, though. They’re hired by the course. If their evaluations aren’t good, they know that they can be easily replaced with some other recent Ph.D. who’ll be more accommodating.

There’s a lot of talk about how the consumer model of higher education is destroying it. I think if it were employed properly, it could save it. Students should be getting more for their money than most adjuncts, through no fault of their own, are able to give them. It’s not that adjuncts are less well qualified than tenured, or tenure-track professors. They’re occasionally better qualified.  The problem is that they’re overworked. Most aren’t able to give students the kind of attention, or assignments, or feedback on their assignments that a tenured or tenure-track professor could give them. If I were paying what students are paying nowadays to go to school, I’d want more for my money than I could get from and adjunct.

But you can't offer Marshall Field service to clients with a Wal-Mart mentality, either.

Most of my students don’t know the difference between an argument and a bunch of unsupported assertions strung together with a lot of non-argumentative rhetoric. Many of them have difficulty even remembering the topics of papers that are assigned in class. I’ll give them the topic and explain the structure the paper should have and still, many will turn in rambling, unstructured musings on unrelated topics. It’s not because they don’t care about doing well. They care very much, but their minds are so completely untrained that even teaching them the most rudimentary of practical skills requires enormous chunks of time, more time than most adjuncts have to give to their students.

People are blaming professors for the crisis in higher education. The decision to turn over increasing amounts of instruction to beleaguered adjuncts is not coming from professors, however, it’s coming from administrators who’ve migrated to academia from the world of business where cutting costs is pursued as if it were a holy grail.

Professors, even adjuncts, care about teaching, but faculties are being squeezed by bloated administrations that need to cut costs to justify their own existence and one of the ways they have chosen to cut costs is to replace tenured faculty with adjuncts. Students need feedback on their work. They need more than just a grade on an assignment if they have any hope of doing well and for many of them grades are crucial to their receiving the financial aid they need to be able to remain in school. Most adjuncts don’t have time to give much feedback though, or to meet with students one-on-one to discuss how they might improve their work. Imagine how frustrated, how desperately frustrated, a student could become who sees his or her grades slipping but can’t get enough feedback from an instructor to halt that downward trend.

Perhaps the reliance on cheap and contingent labor means bad work habits don't get corrected.

Lack of feedback isn’t the only problem associated with the increasing use of adjuncts. I’ve had students who have never been to a single class email me in week eight of a ten-week term with some sob story as to why they’ve never been to class and begging me to make up some special assignments for them so that they can “still pass.” Where, in God’s name, I’ve asked myself, are these kids getting the idea that any instructor would do such a thing? It took me a while to figure that one out. I’ll bet there are a few adjuncts out there who’ll do it. If the student is still officially enrolled in the course, he can still do an evaluation and the instructor may fear he’ll get a bad evaluation if he doesn’t find some way to help the student pass.

Students are being led to believe that they don’t have to do any real work in order to earn an advanced degree. So then, when they run into an instructor who actually requires something from them, they protest the instructor is being unfair. What isn’t fair, however, is blaming tenured and tenure-track faculty for the diminished expectations that are being placed on students when evidence suggests the problem stems from the gradual takeover of instruction by overworked adjuncts who don’t have the time or energy to require much of their students. What isn’t fair is taking money from people and claiming to be educating them when you’re not.

The failure of higher education to be higher cannot be laid off entirely on the cheap labor, overworked teacher business model.  Diminished expectations are also a consequence of admitting unprepared students and calling it "access", of questioning whether any modes of thinking ought be "privileged" over  others, of the pandering implicit in the "first-generation, non-traditional" means expecting less of such students.  That last is particularly relevant for a professor at Drexel, the commentator's workplace.

SMALL-SAMPLE PROPERTIES OF GRADING CURVES.

There's a line in my course outline that reads, "In a class of under 50 people, it is impossible to impose a curve."  An essay on possible grade inflation explains why.

Some professors caution that forced standards could backfire and punish high-achieving students. Others also argue that doling out fewer A’s and more B’s and C’s could result in harsher student evaluations, which factor into promotion and tenure decisions.

“I’ve taught the same course for almost 20 years,” said Joseph Konstan, a professor in [Minnesota's] Department of Computer Science and Engineering. “I’ve had times when 60 percent of the class earned an A, and I’ve had times when 20 percent of the class earned an A.”

What might tamp down grade inflation, he asked, “without disadvantaging the students who happen to come in with a good bunch?”

Or, to use the formulation I use when students ask me to clarify that line, do I want to commit myself to failing two or three or four people simply to get a Gauss-Procrustes distribution?

But the essay goes on to note that the fortunate 60 percent tends to cluster in some fields, not others.

At [Minnesota], grades vary greatly by department. Nearly 61 percent of students who took entry-level courses in the College of Education and Human Development nabbed A’s in fall 2011. In the College of Science and Engineering, 29.5 percent did. The College of Biological Sciences awarded the fewest A’s in those courses — 24.6 percent.

[Minnesota chemist Christopher] Cramer worries that inequality punishes the best students in the sciences when they compete for jobs against graduates from other colleges.

Posting relative performance rankings, showing the percentiles that accompany the grades in each class, will give employers some basis for making those comparisons, although it's likely that a Minnesota computer science or chemistry or biology graduate is competing with graduates held to similarly tough standards elsewhere.  Grade inflation variations by discipline correlate among universities and regions.  There may, all the same, be incentives to inflate.

Karen-Sue Taussig considers herself a rigorous grader but admits to being even tougher when she started at [Minnesota] in 2001. “Looking back,” the anthropology professor said, “I really think there are a lot of subtle pressures to conform to a norm.”

Taussig talked with her students about the rigor of her course, but still, at the end of the semester, students pushed back in course evaluations. “We live in a grade-inflated world,” one told her. Several called her grading unfair.

“I was really struck by that,” Taussig said.

She suspects that attitude is rooted in the growing cost of a degree and the declining public funding for universities. “They’re paying for it, and they worked really hard, and they put in time, and therefore they think they should get a good grade,” she said.

So the public, as much as the professors, must share expectations of what grades stand for, Taussig said.

Yes, it's unfair that there are students at Minnesota who were smart enough to get in and well-off enough to be able to pay for it and growing up in the early twenty-first century.  As P. J. O'Rourke puts it, "You better hope that life never becomes fair."

It's up to the professor to say no and uphold standards, and it's up to the public to encourage both.

CONSIDER THE TOTAL EFFECT.

Cold Spring Shops contemplated an hour waiting to legally recycle electronic equipment.

Math problem: is the carbon footprint of all those cars (including more than a few sport-utes, pickups, and vans) moving up in the queue a net environmental loss, compared to the materials recovered by the recycling company?

Maybe somebody is paying attention.  The county will be holding short collections, more frequently.

“When we do big one-day collections, people are sitting in traffic with their cars running and it didn’t make sense,” [DeKalb County solid waste coordinator Christel] Springmire said. “Doing these short, frequent collections makes more environmental sense.”

Now, if the computer manufacturers would put more durable capacitors in their motherboards ...

HOW OTHERS SEE US

An excessively enthusiastic Packer fan nearly upstages the Queen in London's Daily Mail.

A local news video shows how when the Green Bay Packers wide receiver tossed his cleat into the stands for a young boy to keep as a memento, it was ripped out of his grasp by an over-eager female fan.

The grown woman, identified as Robyn Ereth from Neshkoro, is seen physically trying to body block the young boy as he holds on tightly to his prize but she keeps fighting until she can thwart him.

The receiver intended for the boy to receive the cleats.

Now Mr Driver himself has stepped into the debate, posting to his own Facebook page and hoping for some grassroots help.

'Had a great time at my charity softball game, but I just saw a truly disturbing video of a grown woman snatching one of my cleats from the boy I threw it to in the stands,' he wrote.

'I want to get this boy the cleats he deserves! Can you guys help me find out who he is so I can get them to him??? Thank you Packer Nation!'

He asked and he received, as a Journal Sentinel reporter Tweeted at the star saying that he confirmed the boy's name is Stephen Wagner after speaking with the family.

Here's the video.  The Wagner family hears from Mr Driver, and gets some props for not getting in the gutter with the groupies.

Through this all, Stephen and his family have been class acts. Caught up them briefly after the incident and then again later. They're not spiteful. And, of course, it'll be a generous gesture by Driver once they are able to connect.

Keep calm and carry on.

RUNNING EXTRA.  Story picked up by the I4U traffic bureau.

RAILFANS GET NO RESPECT.

The Onion gets in on the act.

Thomas the Tank Engine told reporters Tuesday that while he's glad trains are a source of fascination and joy for so many children, he often feels uncomfortable with the attention he receives from the autistic fans that make up the majority of his fan base. "Don't get me wrong—I'm grateful that these kids enjoy me so much, but I think the way they're enjoying me is not really so healthy, and honestly not the way I would choose to be appreciated, personally," the anthropomorphic locomotive said between stops on his Mystery On The Rails tour, where he observed that children with autism "outnumber the normal kids by at least three to one."

THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME?

One of Santa Fe's seven-foot driver Super Baltics had a streamlined casing.

Image from Allen Dale at Steam Locomotive.

The Coalition for Sustainable Rail's research project at the University of Minnesota intends to give sister locomotive 3463 a streamlined cladding.

THIRTY YEARS AGO.

Milwaukee Brewers at .500, seven games out of first, Harvey Kuenn takes over as acting manager.

By September I was teasing Detroiters by ordering Harvey Wallbangers in bars.

VLADIMIR BADENOV?

Grand opera might be set in the Middle Ages, or in Nibelheim, or in antiquity, and yet it has contemporary resonance.

Last weekend, the latest production to allude to the opposition protests that have brought tens of thousands onto the streets of Moscow opened at the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg, Putin's hometown.

Gone are the tsarist-era costumes favoured by most who put on Boris Godunov, the 19th century opera by Modest Mussorgsky about a ruthless tsar who takes the throne after murdering the rightful heir.

In their stead, police walk the stage wearing their ominous black leather jackets. Camouflaged riot police bearing rubber truncheons hold back protesters begging the tsar for bread.

Fearless Leader will not be pleased. Stalin's Own Ballet has also gone contemporary with a classic.

In Moscow, the grand Bolshoi Theatre has put on its own production targeting Putin's stranglehold on power. Renowned director Kirill Serebrennikov has taken the Golden Cockerel, an early 20th century opera written by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov as the tsarist regime entered its final death throes, and infused it with references to the present-day regime. One of the tsar's sons carries an iPad – a clear reference to Putin's protege, Dmitry Medvedev. KGB-style bodyguards clear Kremlin halls for the tsar's arrival. A grand parade celebrating the tsar features a Topol-M missile, Putin's favourite addition to yearly Victory Day festivities.

The opera opens with dozens of dignitaries and military men arriving to greet the tsar, a paranoid man divorced from reality.

At a performance of the opera on the eve of Putin's return to power this month, whispers of "it's just like the inauguration" ran through the audience.

"You can take any epoch in Russia and bring it to modern times and it will be the same thing," Serebrennikov said. "That's what happens in Russia – it's the same thing, over and over again."

The Romanovs banned Boris and Cockerel, but the Communists celebrated both works, presumably because the directors were well-enough vetted as to resist the temptation to push the limits of glasnost or de-Stalinization.

THE LAWS OF PHYSICS ARE IMMUTABLE.

Transportation companies have to worry about farebox yield.

"The seat is a revenue generator," [seat manufacturer's vice president Jeff] Luedeke says. "Normally if you look at a 737 or A320 there are three seats on each side. If you wanted maximum comfort you could do two on each side -- and make the seats a lot wider. But with the reduced head count the operational costs don't work out."

Apparently air passengers are willing to pay for faster travelling speeds rather than passenger comfort, given their willingness to put up with passenger loading practices that violate livestock handling standards, and a preference for bargain fares never mind how narrow the seats are.

YOU KNOW IT'S TIME TO TAKE A DAY OFF WHEN ...

mathematics intrudes.

Via Voluntary Xchange, who got it from Applied Mathemagics, who got it from Illiterate Alliteration.

SYMPTOMS OF EURO-SCLEROSIS?

Again, unexpectedly.

Employers in the United States added only 69,000 jobs in May, the fewest in a year and not even close to what economists expected. For the first time since last June, the unemployment rate rose, to 8.2 percent from 8.1 percent.

That's against a smaller labor force than that just before the financial markets crashed. Overseas, ominous signs proliferate.

The Dow Jones industrial average fell 275 points, its worst day of the year, and for the first time was down for 2012. The Standard & Poor's 500 index is almost 10 percent below its 2012 high, the traditional definition of a market correction.

The political finger-pointing has intensified.  InstaPundit has a roundup from this morning, as does the Associated Press.  Daniel Mitchell gives the national government's stimulus efforts a poor evaluation.

But I suppose the good news is that the United States is not Europe. Government is even bigger on the other side of the Atlantic and many of those nations are in the middle of a fiscal crisis and the unemployment rate averages 11 percent.

Yes, but we have an executive branch bent on spending money and providing social services more like Europeans, and an Opposition offering only a rudimentary fiscal stimulus, in the form of not changing the tax rates.  And defenders of Our President suggest that he's been practicing fiscal restraint on a scale not seen since Herbert Hoover.  Jonah Goldberg questions the basis for that comparison. "Obama took what was supposed to be a one-time emergency expenditure and made it part of the new normal."  That's based on a different post from Daniel Mitchell, who also provides a lighter look at the fiscal policy, with links to the more substantive analysis.

You'd think that a large emergency spending bill that prevented wholesale liquidation of dubious assets followed by a large Democratic stimulus package would have, well, stimulated.  The stimulus spending as implemented, however, imposed so many constraints on projects as to dissipate much of the effect in process losses.  The uncertainty over the future course of federalized health care plus the changes, or not, in the tax code and in spending, have to dampen even the wildest of animal spirits.