THE EXAMINED LIFE IS THE MORE CHALLENGING LIFE.

Existential Depression in Gifted Children.

Existential depression is a depression that arises when an individual confronts certain basic issues of existence. Yalom (1980) describes four such issues (or “ultimate concerns”)–death, freedom, isolation and meaninglessness. Death is an inevitable occurrence. Freedom, in an existential sense, refers to the absence of external structure. That is, humans do not enter a world which is inherently structured. We must give the world a structure which we ourselves create. Isolation recognizes that no matter how close we become to another person, a gap always remains, and we are nonetheless alone. Meaninglessness stems from the first three. If we must die, if we construct our own world, and if each of us is ultimately alone, then what meaning does life have?

It's what you do along the way. And the absence of external structure implies the freedom to not associate with people who are a drain on your spirit or your time.  The challenge, though, is in interacting with people who don't get it, who won't get it, or (channelling Veblen) whose sense of self requires them not to get it.

Why should such existential concerns occur disproportionately among gifted persons? Partially, it is because substantial thought and reflection must occur to even consider such notions, rather than simply focusing on superficial day-to-day aspects of life. Other more specific characteristics of gifted children are important predisposers as well.

Because gifted children are able to consider the possibilities of how things might be, they tend to be idealists. However, they are simultaneously able to see that the world is falling short of how it might be. Because they are intense, gifted children feel keenly the disappointment and frustration which occurs when ideals are not reached. Similarly, these youngsters quickly spot the inconsistencies, arbitrariness and absurdities in society and in the behaviors of those around them. Traditions are questioned or challenged. For example, why do we put such tight sex-role or age-role restrictions on people? Why do people engage in hypocritical behaviors in which they say one thing and then do another? Why do people say things they really do not mean at all? Why are so many people so unthinking and uncaring in their dealings with others? How much difference in the world can one person’s life make?

Sometimes, hell is other people. Sometimes, evolved conventions provide a modicum of structure.  But "evolutionarily stable strategy" is a hard concept to explain to a bright ten-year-old, no matter how musically or mathematically virtuosoistic he is.

When gifted children try to share these concerns with others, they are usually met with reactions ranging from puzzlement to hostility. They discover that others, particularly of their age, clearly do not share these concerns, but instead are focused on more concrete issues and on fitting in with others’ expectations. Often by even first grade, these youngsters, particularly the more highly gifted ones, feel isolated from their peers and perhaps from their families as they find that others are not prepared to discuss such weighty concerns.

When their intensity is combined with multi-potentiality, these youngsters become particularly frustrated with the existential limitations of space and time. There simply aren’t enough hours in the day to develop all of the talents that many of these children have. Making choices among the possibilities is indeed arbitrary; there is no “ultimately right” choice. Even choosing a vocation can be difficult if one is trying to make a career decision between essentially equal passion, talents and potential in violin, neurology, theoretical mathematics and international relations.

That's not a bad problem to have. In part, pay packets differ because of the decisions individuals acting on their passions made.  Talent properly nourished is likely to serve the less-talented (by inclination or by choice) better than talent stifled, hampered, or exposed on a regular basis to resentment against achievement.

LET FACTS BE SUBMITTED TO A CANDID WORLD.

The faculty are stewards of the university.  Presidents, provosts, deans, and retention counselors serve at the pleasure of the faculty.  I've deliberately borrowed wording from The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America to introduce a CSU Faculty Voice recitation of the ways in which current president Wayne Watson has failed the faculty, the students, and the taxpayers.

To those of you who support Wayne Watson, I assume you are not willing to accept a miserable administrative performance, do not condone academic fraud and basic dishonesty, do not favor attacks on free expression, do not stand for cronyism, do not support cowardly retaliation as a management tool and do not wish to see the university destroyed. Do you really think the faculty is to blame? If there are achievements by this administration that offset the multiple failures listed above, I have missed them. I would be delighted to know what they are.

Go. Read and understand.

COLLEGE TEACHING IS MOSTLY ACTING.

It's probably more accurate to think of a classroom performance as improvisation.  Yes, dear reader, you must have a script, but yes, dear reader, you must have the good judgement to deviate from the script when a useful question comes up, or when an ad-lib might help make the point.

A good actor, however, does not read his script aloud while the audience reads it silently.

Digital slideshows are the scourge of education.

Indeed.

I get dissatisfied course evaluations, mostly for offering open-ended questions on assignments and examinations, or for grading harshly.

I do not recall an evaluation suggesting that I convert everything to a slide show and make the slides available on line.

Go to slide 4, read and understand.

The most important part of a presentation is ...

what is not committed to pixels.

FASCHING IST.

DIVISION OF LABOR STILL MATTERS.

In a recent post, I suggested that climate simulation models were only as good as the boundary conditions and the equations of motion.  I didn't know the half of it.

[C]limate scientists tend to show averages of many simulations, which smooths out any temporary changes in trend. Here is a figure that shows some individual simulations and how each one can have slowdowns at different times:

Figure 1a from Hawkins, et. al. (2014) Nature Climate Change, 

retrieved from Edwards, "Pause for Thought".

The gray band is the average of a number of temperature forecasts, a few of which are plotted.  The colored lines are observations.

We believe the complexity of the science and the public interest in the pause are not ‘difficulties’ to be avoided or glossed over but instead provide a fantastic opportunity to dig into the details of the science.

Wherein simulation scientists and policy advocates each have roles to play, and each role is different.

At the heart of this miscommunication lies a desire by scientists to simplify a complicated phenomenon. But whether this is done out of a desire to make a better case for policymakers to push through green schemes, or just to spread knowledge to the layman, the dumbing down of climate science has come at the expense of the facts.

Greens, in their quest to paint the darkest possible picture of our future, have been all too keen to seize on such oversimplifications, but in doing so they have given fodder to their dreaded enemies, the climate deniers. The greenhouse effect is fairly easy to understand, but the fiddly bits are decidedly less so. Ignoring them in favor of a cleaner narrative does the green movement more harm than good.

I'm extracting what appear to be the salient parts of both essays; both, and their comment sections, will reward careful study.

BULLYING INEPTITUDE.

Peggy Noonan.

We are suffering in great part from the politicization of everything and the spread of government not in a useful way but a destructive one. Everyone wants to help the poor, the old and the sick; the safety net exists because we want it. But voters and taxpayers feel bullied, burdened and jerked around, which again is not new but feels more intense every day. Common sense and native wit tell them America is losing the most vital part of itself in the continuing shift of power from private to public. Rules, regulations, many of them stupid, from all the agencies—local, state, federal—on the building of a house, or the starting of a business.

And yet: "Offer public affairs programming that takes seriously the idea that Government is Big because Government Generates Rents and Rent-Seeking Creates Gridlock and the whole Pundit Industry will collapse."

A CALL FOR REALISM.

The governing hallucination strategic plan for Northern Illinois University, yet another Vision 2020, proposed an enrollment of 30,000 students.  At the rollout of the plan, I was skeptical.

The projection (a visual in the speech, not provided in the transcript, possibly available in the webcast, and as far as I know not adjusted for the effect of the Ryan, Blagojevich, and Quinn administrations' policies driving people out of the state) provides for more graduates than were present in the early 1990s, and about the same number as were present in the middle 1990s. A special task force on right-sizing (Nineties-speak for strategic planning) determined that our enrollment target was around 19,000 students. (When I started in 1986, our enrollments were around 24,000, and there were 23 tenure-track faculty in economics. That task force determined our faculty size to be 15 for that 19,000. We are currently nine for the 25,400.)

And yes, I repeated myself.  And again.  To no effect.  So I tendered my resignation.

Perhaps headquarters will pay attention to the students, specifically, to the editorial board at the Northern Star.

Vision 2020, which calls for enrollment of 30,000 students by 2020, has always seemed unattainable to the Editorial Board.

In September 2010, just days after the plan was announced, the Editorial Board wrote, “But nothing good will come from everyone drinking the same Kool-Aid; NIU needs to adapt if it turns out that a particular goal is either immeasurable or impossible.”

That advice hasn’t been taken and Vision 2020’s goals have not been reevaluated, even though enrollment continues to plummet — including a 3.3 percent drop to 21,138 from fall 2012 to fall 2013.

Their advice:

NIU must focus on retention and bringing in transfers, since fewer freshmen are going to universities across the state.

NIU should have an enrollment of 25,000 by 2020 — that reflects statewide falling enrollment while giving us something to work for.

How will we reach that goal? The university should provide more scholarships to upperclassmen, transfers and non-traditional students, make it easier for credits to transfer over and introduce transfers to NIU in the same way we do freshmen instead of treating them like seasoned Huskies.

Again we’ll warn: NIU must stop sipping the Vision 2020 Kool-Aid and create a plan with realistic goals and detailed steps for hitting those marks.

I'll gripe about the retention follies another day. It occurs to me, though, that having the departments properly staffed so that students are able to complete their schedules without having to deal with irregular offerings either of foundational courses or key electives, might pay off in retention and completion to orders of magnitude greater than more money in student affairs.

VLADIMIR PUTIN CHANNELS TSAR ALEXANDER III.

The musical selections for the opening and closing ceremonies at the Sucky, er, Sochi Olympics, provide a better look into his soul than President Bush gazing into his eyes.

Consider the way in which the opening ceremony depicts Peter the Great creating St. Petersburg.  For the music, the Petersburger March.

Written by a Finnish subject of Alexander I, who dedicated it to his brother-in-law Friedrich Wilhelm III, King of Prussia.  At the Olympic opening, the mime troupe introduced the march with a very Prussian Lockpfeife fanfare, then presented a very Prussian Stechschritt during the march.  No Euler and his infinite series, no Mendeleyev and his elements, no John Paul Jones turning muzhikii into seamen.

At the closing, the athletes brought in the Russian tricolor to Tchaikovsky's Festival Coronation March.

MARCH IS (LEFTIST) WOMEN'S (SELECTIVE) HISTORY MONTH.

There's no money for staffing the academic departments or for replacing the dry-erase markers in classrooms.  Posters for the latest Identity Politics Flavor of the Month, yes.

At Northern Illinois University, the event begins with a promotional campaign.  Tuesday will be "This is what a feminist looks like" sticker day.  "We hope to break harmful stereotypes that cast all feminists as white, female, middle-class, or politically radical, and to open up the definitions of 'feminist' to more complicated meanings." Mostly, the Uncle Tims peacock that day.  The theme for the month, though, is the fiftieth anniversary of the Civil Rights Act.  Complete with all the usual suspects, and the usual abuse of the English language.  There's a special circle in Hell for marketing types that salt compound words with capital letters where they don't belong, e.g. TrucTrain, PowerPoint, or PeopleSoft, and for academic types that attempt to redefine words by inserting parentheticals, e.g. Terr(or)toriality or, from this year's collection of politically radical events -- note the inclusive or above --, "Shifting Fault(lines)."

The poster itself?  The portraits from the poster border are at the header of the event announcement.  No rebuttal to Undeniable Truth 24 here.

CRISIS MANAGEMENT IS NOT EQUIVALENT TO GOVERNMENT ACTION.

Last Week, Face the Nation moderator Bob Schieffer complained about the continued dysfunction in Washington, D. C.

The thing about the news is you can never know where it's going. But lately, it's falling into an all too familiar pattern.

How many Sundays have we started this broadcast the way we did today, with some terrible story from overseas, while back home, there's an equally important story competing for attention?

The overseas stories change, but here is the worrisome part. The story here is always just more of the same old same old, yet another variation of how Washington doesn't work.

"The New York Times" columnist, Tom Friedman, remarked the other day that Silicon Valley is the place where ideas come to be launched. Washington is the place they come to die.

But it is worse than that. As we saw last week, Washington has now given up on even trying to make the old ideas work. It is only February, but the way I read it, the president's retreat from entitlement reform, coupled with the Republican retreat on immigration reform, all but makes it official -- Washington is done for the year. Expect nothing else of consequence to happen here.

As a rule, not much gets done anyway in an election year, but Washington is off to its earliest start ever.

Perhaps that's because it's a mistake to look first to Washington.

Where government power is unchecked, where political opposition is demonized, marginalized, and suppressed, where people are molested by agents and offices of the state, the fact that a government can point to a “democratic” victory to defend its actions will never preclude popular protests. And a change in government, as we saw in Egypt and elsewhere, is no guarantee that popular discontent is alleviated. Although it is grievances about specific governments, specific policies, and specific abuses of power that animate any particular protest, it is the ability of government to wield as much power as people have allowed it to that give life to protest in the first place.

Fortunately, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have been able to secure a monopoly on demonization, marginalization, or suppression, and the fanatical moochers in the Democrat base and the fanatical believers in the Republican base counteract each other in numbers sufficient to secure gridlock, which is preferable to the tyranny either of Kenyan socialism or potted theocracy.

STOP ENABLING SUB-LITERACY.

Today's lesson in faulty thinking comes from the fever swamps of the Perpetually Aggrieved.

You can rationalize away all disparate impacts of institutional racism and sexism if you shape your theories, models and measurements just so.

I have argued vehemently, albeit academically, that higher education research is one of the whitest fields of research out there these days. Somehow econometrics brought the rational choice penchant for ignoring statistical discrimination from econ and wedded it to the efficiency logics of market enthusiasm to create a perfect storm of obfuscation and rationalized oppression.

Translation: the author has no clue how econometrics works, or what statistical discrimination arguments ignore.  Here's Bryan Caplan on the possibility that statistical discrimination is an informed prior.

Judging everyone as an individual is expensive, and relying on statistical generalizations is a cheap and effective alternative.  You don't clutch your purse when you see a bunch of little old ladies approaching on a deserted street.  You don't offer a policeman a joint.  You don't hire a guy with a mohawk as a receptionist at a law firm - even if he promises to get a hair cut.  Why not?  Because on average, little old ladies don't commit violent crimes, policemen arrest people for possession of marijuana, and guys with mohawks have trouble with authority.

If you question its usefulness, as a concept, there's more at Orgtheory.

In the fever swamps, though, the author goes from possibly useless criticism of economics to a howling non sequitur.

A college readiness test would come with no State obligation. The ridiculous notion that excluding poor students who aren’t college ready from Pell would magically incentivize public education to get on the ball with preparing all students is the kind fairy dust that gives us trickle down economics.

I agree, such a rule would not by itself stop the common schools from enabling failure. But the common schools enable failure by relaxing discipline and calling it sensitivity, and by lowering standards and calling it inclusion. If you seek fairy dust, start there.  You can't have bourgeois prosperity or bourgeois civilization without the right life management skills.  Our President is beginning to catch on.

"So often, the issues facing boys and young men of color get caught up in long-running ideological arguments — about race and class and crime and poverty, the role of government, partisan politics," the president said in a packed White House East Room. "But the urgency of the situation requires us to move past some of those old arguments and focus on getting something done and focusing on what works. Doesn't mean the arguments are unimportant; it just means that they can't paralyze us."

The initiative was shaped in part by two meetings Obama had with a chapter of the Chicago-based group Becoming a Man, which left a deep impression on the president and the group's young African American men. The last time they saw the president, they presented him with a Father's Day card in the Oval Office, leaving him speechless.

Obama was introduced by Christian Champagne, an 18-year-old junior at Hyde Park Academy High School, who said he was coasting along with B's and C's when he listened to the president talk about his own struggles growing up without a father at home. Now Champagne said he earns A's and B's and plans to go to college.

Keeping the common schools' shortcomings in mind, let's pick up a debate Joanne Jacobs fount that gets to the heart of the matter.  First, Deborah Meier puts in the case for the enablers.

And I thought, yes, Robert [Pondiscio], if we can't create schools that, in your words, kids "want to attend every day, schools they are proud to associate with, and where they feel valued," then, as you argue, "something is missing."  Those are words I can join you in saying—over and over.   When have schools ever been that for low-income and black or brown Americans, I ask myself?  Even middle- and upper-class white kids have probably mostly been eager to go to school because that's where their friends were.  And perhaps that's what, in the end, drives poor black kids to do it, too, even though it's generally a place of disrespect and failure, except for the five minutes between classes, the lunchroom, recess, and maybe sports.

In part, of course, this has been the fault of teachers.  They, too, are citizens of America and carry with them the longstanding prejudices that we haven't easily ever shaken off.  We whites of European descent have hundreds of years of disrespect for the poor and for people of darker skins embedded in our literature, culture, language, and everyday experience.   Standardized testing has even been a means, a tool, for justifying racism and class prejudice.

Yes, and standardized testing is also a means to overcome racism or class prejudice by permitting less arbitrary comparisons of peoples' abilities. It became more difficult for the Ivies to defend quotas limiting Jewish enrollment, for example, with more high test scores on applications with Jewish-sounding names.

Robert Pondiscio presents the rebuttal.

There is an idea at loose in overheated corners of the edusphere, which I pray you do not share, which sees a manufactured "shock doctrine" conspiracy to drive American education onto the rocks in order to seize control and make a buck.  It's a lovely, comforting illusion, isn't it?  We are capable, wise, and all would be well if the malefactors of great wealth were not aligned against us.  That is far easier to accept than our own shortcomings, low expectations, failed notions about schooling, and stubborn refusal to adapt.  Perhaps we were as complacent about our schools as Detroit's auto execs were about their factories.

Can I be persuaded that test scores are "not a definitive measure of 'intellectual prowess?'" I'm already persuaded, but what of it? I resist the facile temptation to conflate testing with all that is wrong with American education. Testing did not destroy schooling. It revealed the rot and complacency within too many schools, especially those serving our poorest children, like Detroit's.

We adapt, we grow, or else we stagnate and decay. The factories that employed generations in Detroit stand empty.  One hundred years ago, they didn't stand at all. A generation hence, maybe two, something else will stand in their place.  But not if we pretend nothing's wrong, Deb.  Not if we choose not to run the race.

Or if we atone for years of oppression by fobbing off a simulacrum of education on the descendants of the oppressed.  Without the proper life management skills, the poor stay poor.

JUST HONOR THE WORK.

Bernie Reeves of Phi Beta Cons puts in the case for the Core Curriculum.

How can society function as more and more college graduates, as Randy Newman put it in his classic song Rednecks, “go into LSU dumb and they come out of LSU dumb too”? The answer is by re-instituting what was often called the General College, two years of required courses for freshmen and sophomores. Whether or not the curriculum matched a student’s major or his career, it assured parents, the public, and the students that they were literate, numerate, and possessed a sense of the sweep of history and knowledge of the calculus of politics and government. That they could hold their own in a London drinks party.

Yes, the Canon and the Core matter. Present or not, it also matters that students own their education, whatever preparation they might have brought.  Case in point: today's senior capstone paper consultations.  Genetic testing, adverse selection, and medical expenses leading to bankruptcy.  Agglomeration economies, Marshallian industrial districts, and outmigration from Peoria.  The potential for algorithmic money to keep the good features of commodity and fiat money with fewer of the bad features.  Rent-seeking, campaign contributions, and import tariff rates.  I can't let up with people taking on that mix of challenges.

GET TO THE ROOT CAUSE.

Caitlin Flanagan has a long essay, "The Dark Power of Fraternities," up at The Atlantic.

Spend a few minutes noodling around the internet, you'll find plenty on the pervasiveness of fraternity culture on Wall Street or in government or in the local Rotary Club.  Buried in the longish article, though, is recognition that the Greek-letter organizations are part of the lowering of higher education.

It could never attract hundreds of thousands of them each year—many of them woefully unprepared for the experience, a staggering number (some 40 percent) destined never to get a degree, more than 60 percent of them saddled with student loans that they very well may carry with them to their deathbeds—if the experience were not accurately marketed as a blast. They show up on campus lugging enormous Bed Bath & Beyond bags crammed with “essentials,” and with new laptop computers, on which they will surf Facebook and Tumblr while some coot down at the lectern bangs on about Maslow’s hierarchy and tries to make his PowerPoint slides appear right side up. Many of these consumer goods have been purchased with money from the very student loans that will haunt them for so long, but no matter: it’s college; any cost can be justified. The kids arrive eager to hurl themselves upon the pasta bars and the climbing walls, to splash into the 12-person Jacuzzis and lounge around the outdoor fire pits, all of which have been constructed in a blatant effort to woo them away from competitors.

For years, I have been of the view that the way for higher education to cope with austerity and downsizing is to raise standards and enroll fewer students.  The Greek-letter organizations are complicit in the sub-priming of higher education.

Furthermore, fraternities provide colleges with unlimited social programming of a kind that is highly attractive to legions of potential students, most of whom are not applying to ivy-covered rejection factories, but rather to vast public institutions and obscure private colleges that are desperate for students. When Mom is trying—against all better judgment—to persuade lackluster Joe Jr. to go to college, she gets a huge assist when she drives him over to State and he gets an eyeful of frat row. Joe Jr. may be slow to grasp even the most elemental concepts of math and English (his first two years of expensive college study will largely be spent in remediation of the subjects he should have learned, for free, in high school), but one look at the Fiji house and he gets the message: kids are getting laid here; kids are having fun. Maybe he ought to snuff out the joint and take a second look at that application Mom keeps pushing across the kitchen table.

Tighter standards: fewer frats, less work for student life or remediation or the disciplinary boards that remain, although the damage of the late Sixties is entrenched even there.

If something as fundamentally reactionary as fraternity membership was going to replace something as fundamentally radical as student unrest, it would need to align itself with someone whose bona fides among young, white, middle-class males were unassailable. In this newly forming culture, the drugs and personal liberation of the ’60s would be paired with the self-serving materialism of the ’80s, all of which made partying for its own sake—and not as a philosophical adjunct to solving some complicated problem in Southeast Asia—a righteous activity for the pampered young collegian. Fraternity life was reborn with a vengeance.

It was an entirely new kind of student who arrived at the doors of those great and crumbling mansions: at once deeply attracted to the ceremony and formality of fraternity life and yet utterly transformed by the social revolutions of the past decades. These new members and their countless guests brought with them hard drugs, new and ever-developing sexual attitudes, and a stunningly high tolerance for squalor (never had middle- and upper-middle-class American young people lived in such filth as did ’60s and ’70s college kids who were intent on rejecting their parents’ bourgeois ways).

What was I saying about the folly of using "bourgeois" as a pejorative?

IT TAKES A THEORY TO BEAT A THEORY.

The Old Farmers Almanac missed the DeKalb winter.

Winter will be slightly milder than normal, with near-normal precipitation and below-normal snowfall in most of the region. The coldest periods will be in mid- to late December, early and mid-January, and in early to mid-February. The snowiest periods will be in mid- and late December and in late January.

No.

The Climate Prediction Center missed it too.

“Not one of our better forecasts,” admits Mike Halpert, the Climate Prediction Center’s acting director. The center grades itself on what it calls the Heidke skill score, which ranges from 100 (perfection) to -50 (monkeys throwing darts would have done better). October’s forecast for the three-month period of November through January came in at -22. Truth be told, the September prediction for October-December was slightly worse, at -23. The main cause in both cases was the same: Underestimating the mammoth December cold wave, which brought snow to Dallas and chilled partiers in Times Square on New Year’s Eve.

The problem: three months is too long an interval for a weather forecast, but too short an interval for a climate forecast.

The limit on useful weather forecasts seems to be about one week. There are inaccuracies and missing information in the inputs, and the models are only approximations of the real physical processes. Hence, the whole process is error prone. At first these errors tend to be localized, which means the forecast for the short term (a few days) might be wrong in places, but is good enough in most of the region we’re interested in to be useful. But the longer we run the simulation for, the more these errors multiply, until they dominate the computation. At this point, running the simulation for longer is useless. 1-day forecasts are much more accurate than 3-day forecasts, which are better than 5-day forecasts, and beyond that it’s not much better than guessing.

Put simply:

w_t = f(w_t-1) + e,

where w_t is the weather at observation t, f is the forecasting function, and e is the error, which may suffer from all the statistical contaminants.

Climate forecasts, on the other hand, are all about calibration of the model.

Climate science has the opposite problem. Using pretty much the same model as for numerical weather prediction, climate scientists will run the model for years, decades or even centuries of simulation time. After the first few days of simulation, the similarity to any actual weather conditions disappears. But over the long term, day-to-day and season-to-season variability in the weather is constrained by the overall climate. We sometimes describe climate as “average weather over a long period”, but in reality it is the other way round – the climate constrains what kinds of weather we get.

For understanding climate, we no longer need to worry about the initial values, we have to worry about the boundary values. These are the conditions that constraint the climate over the long term: the amount of energy received from the sun, the amount of energy radiated back into space from the earth, the amount of energy absorbed or emitted from oceans and land surfaces, and so on. If we get these boundary conditions right, we can simulate the earth’s climate for centuries, no matter what the initial conditions are. The weather itself is a chaotic system, but it operates within boundaries that keep the long term averages stable. Of course, a particularly weird choice of initial conditions will make the model behave strangely for a while, at the start of a simulation. But if the boundary conditions are right, eventually the simulation will settle down into a stable climate.

The researchers have ample opportunities to design boundary conditions and stability ranges consistent with their priors.

To handle this potential for initial instability, climate modellers create “spin-up” runs: pick some starting state, run the model for say 30 years of simulation, until it has settled down to a stable climate, and then use the state at the end of the spin-up run as the starting point for science experiments. In other words, the starting state for a climate model doesn’t have to match real weather conditions at all; it just has to be a plausible state within the bounds of the particular climate conditions we’re simulating.

To explore the role of these boundary values on climate, we need to know whether a particular combination of boundary conditions keep the climate stable, or tend to change it. Conditions that tend to change it are known as forcings. But the impact of these forcings can be complicated to assess because of feedbacks. Feedbacks are responses to the forcings that then tend to amplify or diminish the change. For example, increasing the input of solar energy to the earth would be a forcing. If this then led to more evaporation from the oceans, causing increased cloud cover, this could be a feedback, because clouds have a number of effects: they reflect more sunlight back into space (because they are whiter than the land and ocean surfaces they cover) and they trap more of the surface heat (because water vapour is a strong greenhouse gas). The first of these is a negative feedback (it reduces the surface warming from increased solar input) and the second is a positive feedback (it increases the surface warming by trapping heat). To determine the overall effect, we need to set the boundary conditions to match what we know from observational data (e.g. from detailed measurements of solar input, measurements of greenhouse gases, etc). Then we run the model and see what happens.

Observational data is again important, but this time for making sure we get the boundary values right, rather than the initial values. Which means we need different kinds of data too – in particular, longer term trends rather than instantaneous snapshots. But this time, errors in the data are dwarfed by errors in the model. If the algorithms are off even by a tiny amount, the simulation will drift over a long climate run, and it stops resembling the earth’s actual climate. For example, a tiny error in calculating where the mass of air leaving one grid square goes could mean we lose a tiny bit of mass on each time step.

There's still room, though, for further research.

The models also fail to get details of the past climate right. For example, most of the observed warming over land in the past century occurred at night. The same models used to predict future warming models showed day and night warming over the last century at nearly the same rates.

Past models also missed the dramatic recent warming found in observations in the Arctic. With this information as hindsight, the latest, adjusted set of climate models did manage to show more warming in the Arctic. But the tweaking resulted in too-warm predictions—disproved by real-world evidence—for the rest of the planet compared with earlier models.

Shouldn't modelers be more humble and open to saying that perhaps the Arctic warming is due to something we don't understand?

And, perhaps, these commenters suggest, to understand the value of specialization and division of labor.

The climate-change consensus is not endangering lives, but the way it imperils economic growth and warps government policy making has made the future considerably bleaker. The recent Obama administration announcement that it would not provide aid for fossil-fuel energy in developing countries, thereby consigning millions of people to energy poverty, is all too reminiscent of the Sick and Health Board denying fresh fruit to dying British sailors.

We should not have a climate-science research program that searches only for ways to confirm prevailing theories, and we should not honor government leaders, such as Secretary Kerry, who attack others for their inconvenient, fact-based views.

Indeed. Economists recognize, every day, the risk of engaging in mathematical politics, to endorse or to undermine established ways of doing things. Policy scientists in other disciplines require the same consciousness of those risks.

ALLOCATING RESOURCES EFFICIENTLY.

A dissident professor at Chicago State University notes what goes wrong at a dropout factory, and what ought be done about it.

Now the administration is cutting budgets on the academic side, which is leading to a spiraling downward in enrollments. Students can't get into the courses they need. They simply go somewhere else or drop out altogether. Meanwhile the giant administrative staffs are untouched.

No doubt, the faculty attempt to add students to closed classes, or suggest that the students gripe to the deans about the lack of classes, and the deans suggest that the students or their parents gripe to the legislature about the lack of state funding.  True enough, the students often get trapped in the pissing contest between university and legislature over funding.  Sometimes, though, you simply have to provide the capacity, or the university melts down.

If we faculty were to be honest with ourselves, we would admit that part of the problem is poor teaching. We have a few professors who:
- Administer multiple choice and true-false tests that are rigged so students can pass them without really learning anything.
- Never bother to learn their students' names. Treat students with contempt and disrespect.
- Don't bother to stay current in their fields.
Use Power Points that are half a decade old or are downloaded from the "instructors materials" from the textbook publisher (I've been guilty of this myself).

False productivity measures. And yes, at least make the effort to recall students' names. If you can recall it on a chance encounter a few years later, it makes some of the sting of the C minus the student earned go away.

Worst of all, the administration doesn't seem to give a damn whether teaching is any good or not. Sometimes poor teachers are rewarded with administrative positions where they are supposed to "evaluate" the rest of us. The faculty get evaluated to death, but it is mostly bean counting. And now that there is so much antagonism between faculty and administration, the lousy teachers aren't going to listen to the administration anyway. President Watson was reported to have criticized the faculty before he arrived on campus, but it was about how lazy we are and how we don't teach enough classes. He hasn't been in front of a classroom in years and has never to my knowledge taught a course at CSU, which I find unconscionable.

It's up to the Chicago State faculty to take back decision-making authority over curriculum, admissions, and teaching conditions.  That's the salutary message of the Illinois - Chicago informational strike.

Many of our problems are similar to those facing higher education as a whole, especially in our sector, which educates first generation college students. These students are being lured away by the for-profit online schools that promise an easy degree without leaving the comfort of your home.

That college-in-your-pajamas snare will consign more poor people to a life of poverty, deprivation, servitude and ignorance than the brick-and-mortar retention ponds have.  The task for faculty, whether at Chicago State, Illinois - Chicago, Northern Illinois, Illinois - Urbana, or Northwestern is to first stop enabling the high schools' continued production of Distressed Material that has to be remediated, and to second offer intellectual challenges to matriculants, whether they arrive with the life challenges of the projects, or the life challenges of Winnetka, or anywhere else.

A PROPER CIRCUS HAS PACHYDERMS AND A TRAIN.

Circus Spectacular had planned to bring its pachyderms to the Northern Illinois Convocation Center on March 4.   The presence of animal acts in circuses does not appeal to everybody, and some of the university, now including the Student Association, went on record as objecting to the circus's presence on campus.  Circus Spectacular have now cancelled the stand, citing "inclement weather and travel conditions."  I recognize that it is still winter in the Midwest, and winter gives no sign of wanting to go away.  The show, however, is making a jump from either Cincinnati or Green Bay to Milwaukee for weekend appearances, with the one-night stand in DeKalb.  The trainmaster of a traditional thirty-car show would be unimpressed with so many idle days between showings.

DOING MORE WITH LESS.

In higher education, rubrics are one of the many dumb ideas the colleges of deaducation seek to impose on professors.  (Have the deaducationists committed a venial sin by misappropriating a liturgical term?)  Fortunately, a student columnist nails an accurate thesis to the Northern Star's door.

Detailed rubrics take away from student creativity.

Indeed.

Perhaps, one element of becoming "the premier student-centered, research-focused public university in the Midwest" is to stop killing student creativity.

College is a time for students to learn while expressing themselves as individuals, but many professors are putting a stop to that, one exhaustive rubric at a time.

It’s difficult for students to complete a writing assignment without any guidance. A rubric is a way for a student to know what the professor expects of him or her, but they can become a burden for the same reason.

Many students approach a writing assignment and just look to fulfill each requirement before they turn it in; the fixation on those details prohibits the student from developing a personal style, making writing more of a chore. Providing simple guidelines allows students to relax on the requirements and focus on the purpose of the assignment.

Courtney Gallaher, assistant professor in geography and women’s studies, avoids providing rubrics in order to promote critical thinking.

Colleagues: consider giving up rubrics. For Lent to start, then for good.

WHAT MEANS THIS STRIKE?

The tenured and tenure-track faculty at the University of Illinois at Chicago have gone on a two day strike.  Because the strike does not deprive the management or the share-holders of income, even some potential beneficiaries of the strike on the faculty are skeptical.

Anthony Pagano, an associate professor of management who is not in the faculty union, said he agrees with its overarching goals — but not with the chosen means for achieving them.

Pagano said strikes in industry can be effective bargaining tools because they affect the company directly. In university settings, however, strikes don't really affect administrators — they affect students, he said.

"Who suffers from this (strike)? Not the university," he said. "The answer is students. And the students have zero say-so in this."

A statement by two Illinois-Chicago professors of English raise the possibility of short-term pain to current students, so as to avoid greater long-term pain to current and future students.

To understand why we’re striking, it’s useful to know a bit about UIC. It is, indeed, a major research university, but “large, struggling under-funded research university” would be more accurate. We’re more like Wayne State, Temple, or Brooklyn College, say, than Berkeley or Michigan, or even the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

But mainly, we like it that way. Unlike the flagships of state universities around the country (never mind selective private colleges), we don’t think our job is mainly to educate the children of the upper middle class.

If you look at college enrollments, almost all the top public schools enroll a large proportion of students from well-off families.

Yes, and you are in the same business as Berkeley and Michigan and Urbana, and your students deserve the same intellectual challenges as their future competitors for jobs are getting.  (Otherwise, your students will simply be managed by graduates of the flagships and the Ivies.)  Fortunately, the strike organizers get it.

Only about a third of our students come from families making over $60,000, and many of our students are from immigrant families, live at home, hold full- or part-time jobs, and even have children of their own.

What this means is that we characteristically enroll students whose preparation, as reflected in their ACT scores, isn’t as good as the students at places like Urbana-Champaign. (Family income is a very good predictor of ACT scores.) And we have some real problems with retention (family income is a good predictor of retention, as well).

But the UIC faculty and the UIC administration are completely united on the fact that we don’t think that the way to solve these problems is by getting “stronger” (which is to say, richer) students. In fact, when we put together a “Strategic Thinking Report” back in 2005, we explicitly said we’re not looking to recruit “better” students; we want to do a better job of educating the students we have.

In other words, no dropout factory, no watered-down degrees just to make the completion statistics look better.  But to do a better job of educating the students who show up requires proper resources.

The UIC faculty is committed to that mission. And the whole point of the strike is to help us fulfill it.

Start with the retention problem. The biggest falling off is between the first and second years of college, so our administration is (rightly) concerned with the first year experience. What courses do first year students take? Who teaches those courses?

Every entering UIC student takes at least one writing course; most take two. Not surprisingly, our writing courses are overwhelmingly taught by lecturers (i.e. non-tenure track faculty), on year-to-year contracts and paid a standard salary of $30,000. Furthermore, although the administration carries on endlessly about the importance of merit, they’re unwilling to mandate a promotion track for non-tenure track faculty, the whole point of which would be to reward merit.

So what exactly does it mean to insist on the importance of the first year experience and then pay the people most responsible for that experience a wage that virtually requires them to work a second job? What does it mean to claim you want to reward the best and the hardest working when you not only won’t promote them, but you won’t even provide a position they could in theory be promoted to? You’re short-changing both the faculty and the students.

I repeat myself. But repeat myself I must.

How many students are taking classes from temps who have no office hours because they have no office? And what authority does such a surrogate professor have? (To repeat some pet themes of mine, one reason the military is more effective at developing troops is that the boot's introduction to the service is a senior noncom. The cub dispatcher who has tied up the railroad for the third time in a week has a conversation with a crusty general superintendent of transportation along the lines of "let's discuss a different career.")

There's a potential bargain to be struck between the administration and the union here: put the senior faculty in the same position vis-a-vis the new students that the senior noncom or the crusty general superintendent holds.

There are, however, fewer senior faculty to sit in the superintendent's chair.

On the contrary, with fewer tenure track appointments getting made, the tenure track faculty skews older; therefore, we have salary compression — the effect of years of no raises combined with the effects of inflation and no cost-of-living increases. But the Board of Trustees has been as reluctant to deal seriously with this issue as it has been with those $30,000 a year non-tenure track minimums.

Then, strip away the radical pose and note in the manifesto a call for methods of university governance that works.

These are bread and butter issues. They don’t even speak to the loss of autonomy and control that faculty are experiencing in neoliberalized workforces, to questions like what academic freedom means to people on one-year contracts or to the politics of reducing universities to nothing but supposed instruments of economic development.

Historically, the administration of the university was a function of faculty who were chosen to manage the running of departments.  The Dean was Dean of Faculty — chosen by and beholden to the people who actually teach students. But with the bureaucratization of the university and the growth of the university as corporation, deans, provosts, and their myriad vice-provosts have become management. This now-bloated segment of the university makes decisions about the welfare of faculty and students.  A recent study shows that non-faculty jobs have grown by 27 percent while faculty lines remain flat or decreasing.

The term “shared governance” is invoked to disguise this evisceration of power but what it mainly means is that faculty senates can “advise” the administration and the administration can then do whatever it wants. To call shared governance real governance is like saying your dog has an equal say in how your household is run because sometimes when he whines he gets fed.

One of our issues in this strike is to take back decision-making power over the issues that matter to us — curriculum, teaching conditions, the distribution of monies, and the like.  The administration is fighting ferociously to retain that power — since giving it up would in effect be returning it from management to workers.

Notice: take back. Not restoration.  Not "turning back the clock."  The language of thermodynamics (only entropy increases) or of cosmology (uni-directional time) is not applicable to human actions that are historically contingent, subject to review, and reversible.  And whether we're speaking of an administrative power-grab, or of a sub-priming of institutions of higher education to the demoralization of faculty and to the dis-service of striving and determined students, reviewing the consequences and reversing the mistakes is a consummation devoutly to be wished, never mind the politics of the statement.  Without students, no university.  The faculty are permanent.  Administrators come and go, and they job-hop and punch their tickets and go on to wreak havoc elsewhere.

At Chicago Circle, the havoc has been sufficient to drive the faculty to unionize, and to strike.

CAPITAL - LABOR COMPLEMENTARITY.

For years, I've enjoyed chamber music, and for years I've puzzled over how a top-notch violinist finances the acquisition of a high performance violin on a musician's salary.  Short answer: they don't.  Collectors of objets-d'art enter into trust agreements with performers (no doubt the lawyers and tax accountants get a piece of the action) to the mutual benefit of everyone, particularly because musical instruments deteriorate if they're not played.  Although some performers own instruments that provide a capital gain at retirement (much like a taxi medallion) the trust agreement is common with some of the rarest instruments, such as the Lipinski Stradivarius, recently stolen from Milwaukee Symphony concertmaster Frank Almond by low-lives with ties to Milwaukee-area Democrat politicians, fortunately recovered in playable condition after good police work by Milwaukee's police department and the FBI.  Mr Almond and the violin appeared in a recent Milwaukee Symphony Pops concert, with several members of the Milwaukee police present as the orchestra's guests.

THEORIZING CRAP.

To philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, "civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them."

To culture-studies types, thinking about routine is all.

Behind me was the hum and chatter of an art opening—this was at a now sadly departed radical Chicago cultural center called Mess Hall. On a table nearby were offerings of hummus and home-made brownies. Nearly everyone else was chatting and oblivious to my plight, but I could sense at least one other person impatiently waiting behind me. Then I went in, and, inside, next to a perfectly serviceable modern flush toilet seat, was a five-gallon bucket of shit. As far as I could tell—I’ll admit I kept my eyes averted—there was a layer of sandy material on the very top of the bucket, along with a note about how to use it. It was like a giant human litter box.

I was happy that they at least gave us a choice, between the loo and the litter.

Follow your shit, we were admonished in this project, and see how it’s all wrapped up in capitalism and the environment. The point was to get us to actually think of what happened to our shit once it left our body, and the ways in which we allow our shit to leave and mingle with the great waters of seas and rivers. The shit compost bucket was a way to make its materiality even clearer, in case we had forgotten.

And we have, by and large, been allowed to forget about shit. We believe that the problem of excrement is solved. In some senses it is, and a society with working waste removal is a healthy society.

Precisely, although there's a culture-studies essay of prodigious length about why that proposition is wrong.

The very idea that one should be concerned about privacy or dignity while shitting is one that hippy-radicals and academics mock. Historians of shit like to describe this urge to privacy as a bad departure for the culture. Some describe, with a smugness that sometimes floats to the surface, the fact that the ritual of going to the toilet was once upon a time a communal experience, with people laughing and chatting away and catching up on gossip as they went about their business.

Dominique Laporte’s 1978 History of Shit, for instance, interrogated shit as a reservoir of cultural anxieties and asserted that the development of modern toilets was symbolic of a larger bourgeoisification of culture.

Retired or not, I shall not rest as long as there are people who should know better using "bourgeois" and its variations as a pejorative.

Civilization, we are told, produces too much shit, and we cannot actually shit less. But there is more human and animal excrement than we can handle. Animal shit particularly has increased exponentially in countries like the U.S., where farming now means animals are herded in the millions as part of massive agribusiness corporations—and the nature of animal shit has changed as animal feed has changed.

So the composters come forth. They believe that to compost shit, to return it to the earth so that it might regenerate the world, addresses our environmental and ecological crisis.

Never mind the composters. I give you the sewer socialists of Milwaukee, who, years ago, saw the potential in selling dried activated sewage sludge as a fertilizer.  With a foot of snow (or is it the beginnings of the next glacier?) on the ground, and a layer of Milorganite under it, the potential for a lush lawn in May, if the ice cap melts, is great.

Fortunately, even culture-studies types have to recognize reality.

To reduce water and paper waste requires people to adhere to ways of life that take us backwards in time. It compels people to return to patterns of labor and leisure (or the lack thereof) which are often sexist and in fact can actually aid in the greater spread of disease.

Quite. In Whitehead's words, "The art of free society consists first in the maintenance of the symbolic code; and secondly in fearlessness of revision, to secure that the code serves those purposes which satisfy an enlightened reason. Those societies which cannot combine reverence to their symbols with freedom of revision, must ultimately decay either from anarchy, or from the slow atrophy of a life stifled by useless shadows."  Whether the culture-studies types are the anarchy or the useless shadows is left to the reader.