Forty Questions

Finishing up book

2011-08-05T09:22:00.000-07:00

So this blog is on hiatus. Ocasional short stuff (mostly new lyrics, which is my version of doing sudoku during the week) can be found at http://fortyquestions.com .

Topaz Talks About Grade Inflation

2011-07-16T17:51:00.000-07:00

My modest attempt to go viral with the topic of grade inflation by merging it with a cute pet video. Enjoy!

New Article in Teachers College Record on College Grading

2011-07-13T13:05:00.000-07:00

You can download a copy from TCR (if you're a subscriber) here:

Here's the beginning of it. I'll put up the rest temporarily later. Pdf is available on request.

Where A Is Ordinary: The Evolution of American College and University Grading, 1940–2009

by Stuart Rojstaczer & Christopher Healy

Background/Context: College grades can influence a student’s graduation prospects, academic motivation, postgraduate job choice, professional and graduate school selection, and access to loans and scholarships. Despite the importance of grades, national trends in grading practices have not been examined in over a decade, and there has been a limited effort to examine the historical evolution of college grading.

Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: Here we look at the evolution of grading over time and space at American colleges and universities over the last 70 years. Our data provide a means to examine how instructors’ assessments of excellence, mediocrity, and failure have changed in higher education.

Data Collection and Analysis: We have collected historical and contemporary data on A–F letter grades awarded from over 200 four-year colleges and universities. Our contemporary data on grades come from 135 schools, with a total enrollment of 1.5 million students.

Research Design: Through the use of averages over time and space as well as regression models, we examine how grading has changed temporally and how grading is a function of school selectivity, school type, and geographic region.

Findings/Results: Contemporary data indicate that, on average across a wide range of schools, A’s represent 43% of all letter grades, an increase of 28 percentage points since 1960 and 12 percentage points since 1988. D’s and F’s total typically less than 10% of all letter grades. Private colleges and universities give, on average, significantly more A’s and B’s combined than public institutions with equal student selectivity. Southern schools grade more harshly than those in other regions, and science and engineering-focused schools grade more stringently than those emphasizing the liberal arts. At schools with modest selectivity, grading is as generous as it was in the mid-1980s at highly selective schools. These prestigious schools have, in turn, continued to ramp up their grades. It is likely that at many selective and highly selective schools, undergraduate GPAs are now so saturated at the high end that they have little use as a motivator of students and as an evaluation tool for graduate and professional schools and employers.

Conclusions/Recommendations: As a result of instructors gradually lowering their standards, A has become the most common grade on American college campuses. Without regulation, or at least strong grading guidelines, grades at American institutions of higher learning likely will continue to have less and less meaning.

****************

Unregulated and self-regulated organizations and professions commonly have problems maintaining standards and ensuring ethical behavior (DeMarzo, Fishman, & Hagerty, 2005; Frey, 2006). Without regulation, it is likely that many individuals will pursue local benefits even if their actions are detrimental to the global good. Grading of undergraduates at American colleges and universities incorporates a system of standards that is almost always unregulated. The A–F letter grade system of American higher education has been in wide use for roughly the last 100 years (e.g., Meyer, 1908) and gradually became the basis for the now ubiquitous 4.0 grade point average (GPA) scale. Implicit in the use of our grading system is the belief that it has value both as a motivator of students and as a tool for postgraduate schools and employers to identify the best and brightest. The assumption is that college instructors will individually regulate their grading practices out of a sense of personal integrity and because they realize that how they grade and teach influences the reputations of the institutions they represent.

Efforts at employing even soft external guidelines on grading practices are almost always rebuffed by both instructors and university leadership, and often equated with a lack of faith in the integrity of the faculty. A grade should reflect an instructor’s true view of student performance, but a college instructor may be at best ambivalent about the worth of grades (e.g., Battersby, 1973). Even if an instructor feels that grades have value and purpose, there are significant perceived incentives for that instructor to abandon any objective standard and award grades that are artificially high (e.g., Feldman, 1976; Johnson, 2003). In the absence of oversight, one might expect that grading standards at colleges and universities would degrade over time. A’s would become commonplace. Failing and substandard grades would become rare. The ability of grades to motivate or serve as an indicator of performance would be impaired.

Have universities and colleges managed to maintain academic standards in the absence of regulation? We have tried to answer that question by examining undergraduate grade distributions over the last 70 years using historical and contemporary data from over 200 American four-year schools (institutions are listed in the appendix). We measure changes in academic standards over time, examine the evolution of the divergence in grading practices between public and private schools, and look at the potential causes of those changes.

METHODOLOGY

We assembled our data on four-year school grades (grades given in terms of percent A–F for a given semester or academic year) from a variety of sources: books, research articles, random World Wide Web searching of college and university registrar and institutional research office Web sites, personal contacts with school administrators and leaders, and cold solicitations for data from 100 registrar and institutional research offices, selected randomly (20 of the institutions solicited agreed to provide contemporary data as long as the school’s grading practices would not be individually identified in our work).

The characteristics of the 135 institutions for which we have contemporary data are summarized in Table 1. In addition, we have historical data on grading practices from the 1930s onward for 173 institutions (93 of which also have contemporary data). Time series were constructed beginning in 1960 by averaging data from all institutions on an annual basis. For the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, data are sparse, so we averaged over 1936 to 1945 (data from 37 schools) and 1946 to 1955 (data from 13 schools) to estimate average grades in 1940 and 1950, respectively. For the early part of the 1960s, there are 11–13 schools represented by our annual averages. By the early part of the 1970s, the data become more plentiful, and 29–30 schools are averaged. Data quantity increases dramatically by the early 2000s with 82–83 schools included in our data set. Because our time series do not include the same schools every year, we smooth our annual estimates with a moving centered three-year average. It is worth noting that the same trends we detail here are also clearly visible in the unsmoothed data. They are also clearly visible if we reduce our database to the 14 schools for which we have mostly continuous data from the 1960s (or earlier) to the 2000s.

How Many People Should Go To College Anyway?

2011-06-29T06:00:00.000-07:00

There is a strong bias in this country to giving all high school graduates access to college. We have no real alternative plan for 18 to 22 year old high school graduates aside from the military. There are no decent jobs for them. We don't have vocational training programs for them to become plumbers, carpenters and whatnot. If you are a high school graduate, aren't destitute, and aren't going into the military, chances are that you'll at least try college for a semester or two. About two thirds of high school graduates do just that.

In order to accommodate this extraordinary level of participation, we've created colleges for every kind of student imaginable. There are schools for the very smart, schools for the average student, schools for the high school dunce, schools for the wealthy, and schools for the poor. There is some overlap between those distinctions I've just made, but the fact is America has a very stratified, caste-like system for higher education where the strata are highly organized by SAT score, high school GPA and family income level.

Come from a wealthy (180K annual income or better) family and chances are you won't go to a public school. If you're a 2100 or better SAT kind of kid, you'll end up at places like where I used to teach, Duke. If you're an 1800 of better SAT kind of kid, you'll end up at places like Syracuse or Kalamazoo. If you're kind of slow, but rich, there are places for you as well.

Similarly, if you come from a family of relatively modest income (80K or less), you aren't going to go to a private school unless it's a sketchy for-profit one like the University of Phoenix (for profit private schools typically make their money by fleecing the poor and lower-middle class). You might try to save some money and go to a community college first before you go to a four year state school. If you're smart and can afford it, you end up at the flagship state campus. If you're slow, you'll end up at an open-admissions public school, typically a campus where there are few dorms and many students live at home or work at least part time.

Given the great variety of schools available - thousands of four year schools - one would think that graduation rates would be reasonable for our nation's students. But they aren't. Despite a large menu of schools, graduation rates have stagnated at about 50 percent for decades. Much of that stagnation is due to the low-end schools, both private (usually for profit) and public. Graduation rates for these schools can be abysmal, in the 20 percent range. But even at flagship state schools, which get the best of the students from modest income families, graduation rates are typically less than 75 percent.

There are those that think this level of failure is acceptable. A little college is better than no college at all they say. But this blithe optimism ignores that the average GPA of those that do drop out is incredibly low relative to national averages, in the 2.0 to 2.3 range from what little data I can find. In this day and age, that kind of student has learned essentially zero over his or her year or two on campus. It is a waste of time and money for these people to attend college.

The low graduation rates indicate that there is a profound mismatch between the academic performance of incoming freshmen and what is expected of them. It’s not really a matter of brains. We’ve already stratified students so that they, by and large, are attending the kind of college they should attend based on their scholastic aptitude. It’s a matter of commitment and finances. Many students don’t really have the financial resources or time to do the 20 to 25 hours a week of work and attendance required. They may have to work full time. They may have families to raise. Others have the resources, but not the drive.

Over the last fifty years, we’ve tried to deal with our high college dropout rates by lowering academic standards. It hasn’t worked. Part of our failure to increase graduation rates relates to the increased cost of higher education. Part of it relates to our continuing to push for higher access. Part of it relates to the increasing failure of our high schools to prepare students for college (or to be fair, the inability of high schools to produce a higher percentage of college ready students out of the high school pool).

This dilution of what a college degree means, ultimately, that our best and brightest aren’t being challenged as much as they once were. Literacy rates are down for college graduates. Study hours are down for college students. Recently, for example, I took a tour of a flagship school’s intro physics labs. The class didn’t use calculus, but somehow met requirements for many students’ majors. The campus has, on paper, the best students in the state by far. Physics without calculus for students who are, supposedly, science majors? Roll over Isaac Newton and give Albert Einstein the news.

When it comes to college education we have been emphasizing quantity over quality for decades. Curiously, this watering down has occurred across the board, even in places where student quality is, at least on paper, quite high. There is no good reason why the schools that attract the best and brightest have decided to expect less of their students. But they have done so.

Despite the high number of students who fail to graduate, there are those who continue to push for even more access to college. The Obama administration certainly is pushing hard in this direction. Obama has called for a dramatic increase in the population of college graduates. He wants an astonishing 60% of all 25 to 34 year olds to have associate degrees or better within 10 years (up from 40% today) and has argued that the increase is necessary for this country to maintain its economic competitiveness.

The Obama team’s views on access have their origins in a recent book, The Race Between Education and Technology by Goldin and Katz. It’s a very good book. I highly recommend it. For those who believe that books no longer can influence society, the profound impact of this one book on DC thinking says you’re wrong. But I think the message of this book – or at least how people like Obama are interpreting the message of this book – is also wrong. I’ll continue this next time.

The Cost of Denying Our Mortality

2011-06-22T06:00:00.000-07:00

Recently, I took care of two health issues, one for me and one for my cat. What happened to me? I had a couple of suspicious-looking bumps on my forehead. I'm from Slavic stock. I have two skin colors, pasty white in winter and tomato red in summer. If anyone has the type of skin prone to cancer, it's me. I went to a local skin doctor to have the bumps looked at. He took a little slice from each bump, did some biopsies, and asked for a second opinion from people at Stanford. The grand total for this tiny procedure that took ten minutes of his time and another half hour of a tech's time preparing some slides? Eight hundred and ninety bucks, 540 from my doctor and 350 from Stanford to look at the slides. The verdict? One wart and one pre-cancer growth, both of which need to be removed.

I was furious about the bill for the second opinion. Stanford's fee for looking at the slides was 110 dollars more than my skin doctor charged for his entire biopsy. It cost me three hundred and fifty bucks for one Stanford doc (or tech) to look at a couple of slides probably for no more than two minutes each. I've been trying to avoid Stanford for all my medical work for a long time. They have a wonderful gleaming facility that looks like a high end hotel. In the end, you pay for all the spit and polish, more than anywhere else in the area.

Four years ago, I had a routine colonoscopy at Stanford and they charged 800 dollars more than a nearby hospital charged my wife for the same work. For the extra money, they did give me nice booties to wear so I wouldn't slip on the floor if I walked around while I was recovering (my wife didn't get booties at her hospital). Three years ago, I had Stanford look at a urine sample and the fee was 800 bucks, about three times more than I had ever been charged before. After that, I decided to foreswear Stanford Hospital and I dropped my Stanford primary care physician. This little extra Stanford bill for my biopsies reminded me just why I hate Stanford's medical facilities.

Enough about me and my kvetching about Stanford. A week after my biopsy, my cat was attacked by a raccoon. She's lucky to be alive. I took her to the veterinary emergency room late at night and waited while they sedated her and stitched her up. The total fee? A mere five hundred ninety seven bucks. The facility was kind of run down. Nothing gleamed. The vet certainly didn't give my cat little booties to wear. But she came out of the emergency room alive and well, adorned a silly Elizabethan collar to try and keep her from ripping out her stitches. The collar lasted less then 10 minutes, the length of the drive home. Somehow, she found a way to slip it off while still in her transporter. My cat is a feline Houdini.

Had I been attacked like my cat and gone to the emergency room at Stanford or El Camino hospitals, I know what the fee would have been for being sedated and patched up. Somewhere around 10 times more than the fee for my cat (and since my insurance deductible is 8K, I would have paid for all of that out of my own wallet). Thinking about the difference in cost made me think about the difference in care. The pet hospital was very basic. The hospitals on the other hand are both gleaming towers. Forty years ago, they weren't that way I know. Stanford and El Camino hospitals weren't as grungy as the pet hospital, but they were modest, no-frills things. It's not surprising that they both charged much less way back when.

I know I'm being glib here, but after taking my cat home I really did start to think to myself, "You know next time I have a medical problem that needs emergency treatment, I'm going to stop talking, start meowing, drive myself to the pet hospital, and try to convince those vets that I'm a cat. The care will probably be fine and I'll save myself several thousand dollars."

It's obvious that animal hospitals charge less than human hospitals chiefly because we value our pets' lives far less than our own. Had the animal hospital told me it would cost 6K to treat my cat's raccoon wounds, I would have balked, though I really do like my cat. Vets charge what the market bears. The quality of their facilities reflects their lower fees. No one gets outraged when we put a cat down and talks about death panels for Fluffy.

I'm going to say something outrageous here. We can learn something about our own health care from how we treat our pets when they are sick. We put limits on the care we provide them. We put a value on their lives.

Americans don't do this when it comes to human life. We believe that we should spend whatever it takes to keep the ones we love alive whether it be for a day or month longer. We've even embedded this idea into our insurance policies, which no longer are allowed to have monetary caps. We believe that hospitals should be symbols of life everlasting, possessing every piece of equipment known to keep us going for as long as possible. This effort at extending life no matter what, ignoring the definite inevitability of our mortality is slowly but surely bankrupting this country.

I have seen this denial of mortality in my own family. My parents and grandparents were all European. Both my father and grandparents came here as full adults and their attitude toward death was much more pragmatic and realistic than what I see is typical with Americans. For example, after a decade of dealing with Parkinson's disease, my father was more than willing to say good bye to this world. "Give me a pill," he said to me. "This is no way to live." I would have done just as he requested, but first I asked my mother for permission. She said no, she wanted him to go on for as long as he could. He did live for several more years, but I never saw the point in it, and neither did my father. Then again, despite all the hardship, I truly believe my mother was grateful to have my father for that extra time.

My mother's attitude toward death was far more aligned with American attitudes (of course I'm generalizing and assigning cultural trends to individual behavior). After living with a fatal cancer for more than a year, far longer than anyone thought was possible, she had major surgery to remove a tumor so that she could live a few more months. The cost was about 100K, almost all of it paid by Medicare and a Medicare supplement. I'm a mama's boy through and through, and was happy to have her live those extra months. But I knew that had we lived anywhere else, that surgery would have never happened.

My wife's family is a typical American one and not surprisingly in my view, there have been major surgeries involving my wife's family for people in their eighties that have totaled hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs. One of those surgeries left the patient unconscious for over a month. She was eventually electro-shocked back to consciousness, but now suffers from dementia. She is in a nursing home, bedridden, and the bills keep piling up. When all is said and done, the cost of her care will be over one half-million dollars.

As I write this another relative in his nineties - who has been blessed with health and a sharp mind for almost all those years - has spent a week in the hospital in and out of consciousness as doctors continue to keep him going. Only in America.

America is by its nature an optimistic, can-do country. I've never seen any other place quite like it. We believe that no hurdle is insurmountable. It's wonderful to see this optimism in action. But when it comes to dealing with sickness and inevitable death, that optimism has a limited place. Somehow we need to come to terms with the fact that it is neither desirable nor financially viable to extend the lives of our citizens no matter the cost and the quality of that life.

Our Ridiculous Expectation For Politicians

2011-06-17T06:00:00.000-07:00

Suppose you worked for a company, did your job well, and in your free time had an affair or went online and sexted with someone other than your wife or husband. Your boss found out about the dalliance and fired you on the spot or demanded that you resign. Unless you're in the morals and values business - you're a church pastor for example - your response should be, "I'll see you in court." Whether you are or aren't cheating on your spouse has nothing to do with your job. It's not a criminal offense. Can you imagine if it were? We'd have to outsource our prisoners, we'd have so many of them.

People cheat. Husbands. Wives. If they didn't, damn, we wouldn't have anything to write about in novels and show on TV series. It's common. I don't think it's a good idea to cheat because I personally believe it's a hurtful thing to do to the one you love. But I understand that monogamy isn't for everyone and that especially under the influence of alcohol, it can be a very tenuous concept.

I've known lots of people who have had affairs, one-night stands, and who knows what else. If I were to use monogamy as a guide for whom I can and cannot trust in matters outside of sex, I'd have to pretty much not trust a third of the people I know fairly well and like. How did I come up with that number, one third? It's a guess, based on the number of times I've seen people I know make that certain kind of sheepish to warm "we've slept together" hello with someone else. It's a tell that I think all people have, that certain kind of hello. I can't explain what it entails, but I can identify it instantly. My guess of one-third is not that much different than polls about adultery , which if I remember correctly suggest that 30 to 60 percent of all married people cheat.

I don't think it's valid to use monogamy as a guide for trust on other issues. Sex is different. We're wired for it. Our hearts are not universally steadfast and attached to one person and one person only. Just because someone is monogamous does not indicate to me that I can trust him or her on money matters. There are no data that I know of that show that those that are monogamous are better thinkers, more creative or are more conscientious workers. It's true that they do, on the whole, make better spouses.

When it comes to marriage, give me a monogamous partner, please. But in a work or business environment I don't care whether the person I'm working with is having an affair or frequents dirty book stores at night. That's his or her private business.

This country does seem to separate people's sexual appetites (at least heterosexual ones) from the workplace. It would be a ridiculous expectation to not do so. We'd have to fire a lot of key personnel in all companies if we considered monogamy to be part of someone's work description.

But when it comes to politicians, we do get ridiculous. We expect our elected officials to not do what so many others do frequently. Politicians can't have affairs. The argument is frequently made, "If you can't trust him to honor his marriage vows, how can you trust him to do anything else?" It's an absurd if and then argument. What do attitudes toward sex have to do with someone's ability to make good laws, work well with others, and honor promises concerning legislation? Nothing. Monogamy is desirable in marriage, certainly, and its absence can create hell in someone's personal life if they get caught cheating. Beyond the issue of marriage and family, however, it's of no importance.

I'll make one concession to the "those who cheat are bad through and through" argument. There are people who sexually harass others on the job routinely, whose efforts at sexual conquest overwhelm their lives to such a degree that they can do little else but wallow in sexual desire. No, I don't trust people like that, no more than I'd trust a heroin addict with my money or laptop computer.

Your garden variety cheaters, however, are just being human. They shouldn't have to wear scarlet As on their dresses or sport jackets. They can be outstanding workers and contributors to society. That's just as true of ordinary citizens as it is for politicians.

I don't like to make assessments based on small datasets, but let's, for example, look at our last three presidents. One, Clinton, has had countless affairs. The other two, Bush and Obama, seem to be (Who knows really?) loyal and true to their spouses. Was Bush any more trustworthy than Clinton? No. Is Obama any more trustworthy? Based on issues that are important to me that I've seen him waffle on, no. Bush is likely monogamous, but an idiot. Obama is likely monogamous, but has limited leadership ability (aside from speechwriting and oratory, two big exceptions) and has little skill relating to others one on one. Based on our small sample of three, I'd say not only is monogamy overrated as an indicator of presidential capability, but cheaters make the best presidents.

As I write this, a politician, Anthony Weiner, is preparing to resign from congress for sexting with a bunch of women. Yawn. I happen to think that Weiner isn't a very good congressman. He likes to get on TV and scream and shout. He doesn't seem to work effectively with others in DC. Basically, he's a loudmouth, do-nothing. That said, his district keeps re-electing him. They apparently think that all that bluster is valuable. Whether he sexts or not, whether he exchanges bodily fluids or not with someone who isn't his wife, shouldn't matter.

We've been through this before with I don't know how many politicians, both Democratic and Republican. We keep expecting and demanding that our politicians rein in their desires when, in fact, they have rock-star like access to sex. It's an expectation and demand that makes no sense, and one that isn't present in the culture of any other Western country.

We pretend that the sexual revolution never happened and our lives are like 50s television shows. We ignore the fact that in this day and age, there is no privacy and the internet can capture and send to the world every little stupid move we make. We watch with rapt attention as the media pontificates about every sexual transgression of a politician and cynically turns these events into morality plays. I wish America could be realistic about sexual desire and politics, but I expect sanctimony to be the standard response for at least the next few decades.

The Gieretics

2011-06-08T06:00:00.000-07:00

As I've posted a few times before, I'm a proud fair weather fan when it comes to sports. Athletic contests are supposed to be entertaining. Losing makes for bad entertainment. Why would I want to root for a team that loses a lot, especially a professional one. Would I buy a stock in a company that loses money every year? Would I watch the movie The Betsy - the worst movie ever made in my humble opinion - twenty times just because I think Robert Duvall and Laurence Olivier are wonderful actors? It makes no sense to me.

I follow a team fervently when it wins. But if that team starts losing year after year, I happily ignore it. Fickle passion has worked for me for decades now. However, baseball poses a special challenge.

I love baseball. It's really the only sport I care about. My team of choice is the Oakland Athletics. I adopted them when I moved to California, having been without a team for many years. The Milwaukee Braves left me and my hometown city with all the selfishness of a child-support-dodging dad - hyperbole I know, but I couldn't resist - when I was young and by the time the Brewers came into town, I was too into drugs to even notice. The Giants were in closer proximity to my new California home, but their ballpark at the time, Candlestick, was the worst place to watch baseball in the country by far. It was cold, foggy and damp most every night and sometimes during day games as well. The swirling wind was a constant and the fans were loutish drunks. Fights would break out next to me at games. Yuck. Oakland was far better.

The A's weren't very good when I arrived in California so like the proud fair weather fan I am, I barely paid them any mind and only went to a few games a year. But the late 1980s and early 1990s were dream years and my fanaticism for the A's blossomed. I even bought season tickets!

Lately though, the A's have been a depressing bunch. They got a new owner several years ago who sees the team strictly as an investment, starves the team's payroll, and lives off major league baseball revenue sharing. Every year is the same. By the end of June, the A's are so far behind that the season is effectively over. So it will be this year.

I still go to A's games now and then. However, even a die hard fan's ardor would be tested by what the current owner is doing to the team. Neglect is, after all, perfectly valid grounds for divorce, but that's not my style. Instead, I've decided a new approach is needed this year. I need to broaden my horizons. I'm doing what many neglected spouses do. I'm cheatin'. The Giants have a nice ballpark now and they are playing pretty good ball (and miraculously won the World Series last year). I haven't taken drugs in decades so I now know my hometown Brewers exist and they're playing well, too.

I'm not a glutton for punishment. I've decided to hedge my bets and root for three teams this year, the Giants, the Brewers, and the Athletics. I'm calling this three headed beast the "Gieretics" (pronounced ji-er-eh-tics). It's the best idea concerning baseball that I've come up with in years. After all, I have legitimate reasons to root for all of these teams. The Giants are my proximity team. The Brewers are my hometown team. The A's are my adopted team. Go Gieretics!

My new approach has already yielded great benefits. When I scan the box scores in the morning, the chances are that one of my teams has won. Winning is, as I've noted, entertaining. Being associated with one or more winners most every day has greatly improved my mood. I no longer shout out "my team stinks" to no one in particular most every morning as I read the sports section. Three heads are indeed better than one.

On The Shopping Theory of Grade Inflation

2011-06-01T06:00:00.000-07:00

One of the stranger things about looking at college grading is the bizarre theories people use to try to explain grade inflation. It's not just the uninformed that do this. Professors do it too. They even publish papers about their bizarre theories. I don't understand it. It's as if a detective were to come upon a crime scene, see a dead body, see a knife in that body, find a man hiding in the kitchen covered in blood whose fingerprints match those on the knife and declare, "Space aliens came and killed this poor victim." OK, I'm exaggerating, but you get the point.

What has caused grades to rise nationwide? Professors are grading easier year after year. Look at the data class by class. The data are undeniable.

But to admit that this is the case would be admitting that professors are abrogating their responsibility to challenge students. No one wants to do that, especially the professoriate. It's a pathology, I guess, to not admit guilt. It creates a professoriate that believes in fantasies. For example, there's a chapter in a book that surveys professors about grading practices. If I remember that chapter correctly (I need to go back to the reference to make sure of the numbers) a minority admit they inflate grades, yet a majority believe that their colleagues do so. It's funny, this pointing of fingers at "the other guy," but it also causes people to come up with bizarre excuses for grade inflation and maybe even more bizarre grading policies.

One of the stranger theories about grade inflation is that it's mostly the students' fault. The theory goes like this. Students shop around and find the classes with the highest grades. They do more and more careful shopping every year. Grades go up as a result. This theory is really an extension of "the other guy is doing it" idea. It says that many professors are truly responsible, but there are weak links in grading and students exploit those links to the maximum (and that maximum keeps rising). It's a nice theory in that it removes culpability from a good portion of the professorate. Too bad it isn't true.

Grades are, in fact, going up class by class. There are differentials between departments, of course, but those differentials have been in place for decades. Grades are going up in physics, English, psychology, economics, et al. They are going up almost everywhere. The last decade saw some plateauing of grades in a small number of departments and universities that defied national trends; there are also a handful of schools that have worked hard to make sure they grade honestly. There are few strong links in the chain.

If the shopping theory were true, one would expect that students would flock to the humanities, where grades are as high as an elephant's eye, and avoid the sciences in increasing numbers every year. In fact, science enrollments, in terms of percentage of students enrolled, have been static for decades nationally. In contrast, humanities enrollments have dropped precipitously.

Here's a link to a paper that extols the shopping theory. It examines undergraduate grades at Cornell over the 1990s to the early 2000s. To be fair, it does admit that there is plain old "classic" grade inflation caused by other factors, but it is loathe to admit that professors are simply grading easier (instead it seems to assume that the other principal cause of inflation is that students are getting smarter and smarter).

The paper is mishagos to the third power. Not only does it say that students are shopping more and more, but also that Cornell is facilitating that shopping by posting median grades of its classes (examples of the postings can be found here and here). Students are supposedly flocking to these postings and preferentially selecting easy A classes. But if that were the case, wouldn't grades be going up at a higher rate since the time median grades began to be posted?

Median grades have been posted online since 1998. Here are the data on grades (in terms of percent A grades awarded) at Cornell from 1988 to 2004. Where's the acceleration in grade inflation from 1998 onward? It isn't there. In fact, Cornell has had garden variety inflation for about 25 years now, the same as just about everywhere else even though it's only one of a small percentage of schools that posts its grades in detail online. None of the other schools that post their grades, some with far more detail than Cornell, have particularly high rates of inflation relative to national averages either. Yes, students shop for easy grading classes to some extent. They shop by word of mouth in some schools. In others, they shop by looking online. But are they shopping more than in the past? The data - both national and at Cornell - say that if they are, it's a minor effect at best.

The paper admits that not all of the observed rise in grades is due to student shopping. It tries to make estimates of the contribution of the shopping effect and, surprise, surprise, finds that effect to be significant. In other words, Cornell would hardly have any grade inflation compared to other similar schools (who don't post their grades) if students didn't shop.

How does it make that claim? The paper states that students are enrolling in high grading classes at a rate faster than the rate that those high grading classes are being created. Here are the data for high grading Cornell classes in liberal arts (classes in the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences excluding cross listed classes because quite frankly I got bored with cleaning up the data files past about 500 classes for each year; it's still a very good highly representative sample); by high grading, I mean classes that report a median grade of A- or better.

The percentage of easy grading classes - and there are 1500 classes represented in this chart total - keeps going up at essentially the same rate as the number of students who enroll in easy grading classes. Students weren't preferentially selecting easy grading classes in 2010 with any significantly greater frequency than in 1998; the lines are essentially parallel. Over the 13 years encompassed by the data, the percentage of students who enroll in high grading courses do outpace the creation of those courses but the effect is tiny; the two lines were 23 percent apart in 1998. In 2010, they were 20 percent apart. That narrowing could be due to course shopping. It could be due to noise. It's a minor secondary influence at best.

Let's say that 3 percentage point differential is indeed all due to increased shopping. What does that mean in terms of a rise in GPA over 1998 to 2010? Probably about a 0.01 increase in GPA or less in terms of university averages. It's a big nothing.

So what's the real story at Cornell? Grades are indeed going up. There are a ton of easy grading classes nowadays, more than ever before. Professors keep lowering their standards, and have made A the most common grade awarded by far. Students keep enrolling in about the same assortment of classes as before. At least in the liberal arts at Cornell, there is no readily observable shopping effect. Is the shopping effect a major component of grade inflation in other classes like engineering? I doubt it. Why would students even need to shop carefully when two thirds of all classes have a median grade of A- or better? Random selection will find them lots of easy A's. The shopping theory for Cornell likely is fiction.

Cornell has about the same level of grade inflation as its peer schools, although its GPA's historically have been a little lower than Harvard et al. Just like at its peer schools (with the exception of Princeton, which has made a real effort to control grade inflation), professors keep grading easier year after year. At quite a few (if I include elite liberals arts colleges as well as research universities), the percentage of A's has already crossed the 60% threshold. Cornell probably won't get there until the mid-to-late 2010s.

Lots of dopey papers are written and published every day. So this paper shouldn't be a big deal. It should be ignored. But here's the crazy thing. It hasn't been ignored. In fact it has influenced Cornell policy. As a result of this paper, Cornell has decided to no longer post median grades. Apparently, the professors of Cornell really believe that by doing so, they'll quell grade inflation. Good luck with that.

I have a better idea, of course, for Cornell. Listen up. You really want to tackle grade inflation? Tell your professors to stop being such easy graders. And what about that shopping theory of grade inflation? It may be a minor secondary effect with or without data postings online and is nowhere near as important as professors desperate to blame anyone but themselves for high grades would lead you to believe. Or maybe space aliens are the real cause of grade inflation. Anything is possible.

Where I'll Be In October 2012

2011-05-18T07:00:00.000-07:00

I've always paid attention to the news. It's a habit I learned from my father, whose interest in current events in 1939 helped save his life. He read the news in the US for much the same reason that he read it in Poland. It was his view that your standing in the world could change in a heartbeat. You had to be informed and ready to move fast. It's why he insisted on all of us having current passports. It's why he had gold coins stashed away. Unlike my father, I don't consider my place in the US to be tenuous, but I still read the news every day.

Stability is something I expect from the US. In fact, I never really cared that much who was president. It seemed like a figurehead position mostly. There are so many checks in the US system that a president's power is limited. Even someone completely incompetent can't really screw up the country too badly or so I thought. Then W. came along. I had to rethink my position on the importance of the presidency.

Bush made me realize that a president can truly create chaos in every way imaginable. I'd never seen such a thing. The presidency was a critical position after all. I decided to get proactive in 2004. I'd had enough of massive deficits created by irresponsible tax breaks and two wars, destruction of basic things that government is designed to do like emergency disaster services (this problem would come to the fore in Bush's second term), and faith-based baloney. I didn't like Kerry much, but anything was better than the incompetence of Bush. I donated money to Kerry. I made phone calls.

By 2008, Bush had created even more disasters. I quickly signed up to work on Clinton's campaign. The staff consisted of me and thousands of women of a certain age. The campaign had no energy and joy. It was dominated by grimness and determination, but it was competent and well funded. In the end, misogyny - the language used by the pundits and the press to describe Clinton was consistently laced with nastiness - triumphed over racism and Obama won the nomination. I didn't skip a beat and signed on to Obama's campaign for the final election.

There was joy in Obama's troupe. There was beaucoup enthusiasm. But there was also a ridiculous level of naivete. The people on that campaign were convinced that Obama was a liberal who would bring back the 1960s emphasis on social services, get us out of both of our wars, and make miracles. I didn't understand where this sentiment came from. Pundits went gaga over Obama as well and threw around the word "transformative". I'd look at the man and his policy statements - he wanted 27,000 more people in our military forces and wanted to double down on Afghanistan; his golfing buddy was a bigwig on Wall Street - and I thought this guy with his middle of the road values and his emphasis on being a good dad was a modern (and richer) version of Ward Cleever.

There would be no transformation with Obama. We'd stay a center-right nation. If we were lucky, he'd be a quick learner - the man had no real administrative experience and didn't seem to have any real back room political ability - and prove himself to be as competent as Clinton. If we were unlucky, he'd fumble along.

It's now 2011. How has Obama done? He certainly hasn't been transformative. I didn't expect or want a new wave of liberalism so I'm not disappointed. Overall, I'd give Obama a C+ (and that's including grade inflation). On the minus side, it's clear that Obama doesn't have Bill Clinton's competence and ability to work with others. Obama has shown no leadership in getting Congress to move. He's shown no negotiating prowess. He's wasted time on a quixotic quest to achieve peace in the Middle East and has shown much naivete in the process. He doubled down on Afghanistan, wasting money and losing lives.

Obama is a middle-of-the-roader who is fabulous at giving speeches in an arena and uninspiring one on one. He is conflict averse and not at all creative. He really is a modern day Ward Cleever, kind of boring and sincere (with the big exception that he really is a wonderful orator).

Still, Obama has done some things reasonably well. The health care law is messy and flawed, but necessary (even if it took too long to pass). He is slowly but surely getting us out of Iraq. Obama has brought back competence to basic necessary functions like emergency disaster services. The EPA is no longer being dismantled. We have a sort of sane energy policy that places some value in energy conservation. I'm getting a little less competence with Obama than I hoped for, but I'm getting about what I expected policy-wise.

The one thing that I didn't expect was that the Republican Party would be taken over by lilly-white, right-wing extremists while Obama was in office. I thought that the Republicans would actually move a bit more to the center in anticipation of 2012. They needed another five or ten percent of the vote to win and I guessed that they would spend their time trying to go after a portion of the Hispanic vote. It would have been a good play for 2012 and for the future.

Boy was I wrong. Instead of leaning toward the center and trying to appeal to America's broadening multi-cultural base, they decided to double down on whiteness and attract the kookie Ruby Ridge fringe. It was a crazy strategy. It worked in 2010, but I can't imagine it will have any positive impact in 2012. It's going to take the Republicans a good half-dozen years to recover from this misstep.

Presidential elections are truly important. It took me decades to figure that out. Call me a slow learner. Come 2012, the Republicans will have to nominate someone who appeals to its lunatic right wing fringe. I don't know who it's going to be, but there doesn't look to be a whole lot of competence out there in the Republican field. On the other hand, the Democrats will have the devil I know, Obama. Actually, I wouldn't call Obama a devil. He's a perfectly decent man with not very good political skills.

I'm sure liberals won't be on the phones and going door to door for Obama in 2012 in quite the same numbers as in 2008. They had unrealistic expectations about what Obama would accomplish and don't seem to understand that the American people just aren't interested in liberal 60's policies updated for the present day. But I'll be there. I'll be knocking on doors. I'll be backing Obama with words and with money. I'll have the same level of enthusiasm as I had before. Just like in 2008, Obama won't be anyone I can get excited about. He's just not my kind of man; he has just a little too much deer in the headlights earnestness mixed with a lack of panache for my taste. But given the alternatives, I view Obama as the most attractive candidate by far.

The Good, Bad, and Sketchy of Customer Service

2011-05-11T06:00:00.000-07:00

I grew up in a time when conspicuous consumption was viewed as gauche. People who were rich tried not to show it. Displays of money were crude and if you went into clothing stores, the cash register was not infrequently hidden in a back room. You talked to the sales clerk, picked your items with his or her advice, provided your cash or check and he or she would go to that back room to wrap up your item and get your receipt.

During that time, there were ridiculous warranties on some items. For example, there was this brand of jeans, Billy the Kid's, that my mom used to buy.

If your jeans wore out at any time within two years, you could return them and get a new pair, no questions asked. As a kid, I'd go through jeans in about six months. My mom would buy them a little big so she could get the same size for free six months later. Then they fit perfectly. Six months after that she'd get another free pair and they'd be a little tight, but wearable for another few months.

Sears did this too with their jeans into the 1980s. I became aware of this policy when I was working at a Denver Sears in 1978 during the Christmas shopping season and a drunk derelict came into the store, took off his jeans, stood at the cash register in his underwear, and said to me, "These are worn out. I need a new pair."

The jeans were filthy and down to the threads with holes in quite a few places. "How long have you worn them?"

"I dunno, about a year and half I guess."

"You wear them every day?"

"Yeah, ever day."

"These were good jeans then."

"Yeah, but they're worn out. Sears gives me a new pair every time."

"Every year and a half?"

"Yeah."

"Let me talk to the manager." I walked upstairs and was told that indeed this man was fully deserving of a new pair of jeans. I walked back to the cash register, the derelict still standing there in his briefs and told him to go pick out a new pair.

In the 1980s all that ended. Money and conspicuous consumption became a national obsession. We now live in a cruder and shallower society. I can't say I like the crudeness. Somehow with our new love of the crude and rude, interest in satisfying the customer was abandoned at run of the mill stores like Sears (although they still guarantee their Craftsman tools - which cost a pretty penny - for life). It became something that was only present at places where wealthy people shopped. That's been true for decades now.

I was reminded of the fact that we only believe in customer support for the upper class this past month when I had to deal with two problems: my laptop video card went haywire after two and a half years; my cell phone keyboard went dead after three months.

The laptop problem was an easy fix. It's an Apple. You pay a premium for an Apple laptop, about 30 percent more than the equivalent generic PC. It's worth it. Laptops are complicated pieces of machinery. Apples, I've found, are so well built that I can get years out of them. The longest a name brand IBM or clone laptop has lasted for me is 20 months. Plus the Apple operating system is far slicker. Then there is the subject of customer service.

Let's look at the case of my video card problem. With any other company, I would have had to talk to a customer service agent from some place like Bangalore, be put on hold for who knows how long, be probably be told I was S.O.L., and finally be told to "have a nice day and thank you for calling HewlettLenDellShiba".

But with Apple, I had my choice of two Apple stores within two miles of my house. I made an appointment at one of them. I walked in. They looked at the laptop promptly. A guy brought it into a back room. I waited five minutes. The guy came back and said, "Well your laptop is out of warranty, but the video card - and you may know this from looking around the web - is defective so we'll replace it for free."

"Free?"

"Yes, free. Just sign the paperwork and we'll have it done in a done in a day or two."

I signed the paperwork. Eight hours later, I got a call that my laptop was ready to be picked up. You really do get what you pay for.

This brings me to my other electronics problem in April. I had a cheap cell phone provider, Virgin. For $25 a month, I was promised unlimited messaging and internet plus 300 minutes of call time. I bought a phone from them in November. In early March, the physical keyboard on the phone started to act up.

The phone was under warranty so I sent Virgin an email. Three and a half weeks later Virgin sent me a refurb replacement. The refurb couldn't do internet except through wifi. I called Virgin - someone answered from the Philippines, I think - about 4 times about this. They had me do this, that and the other thing with the phone and kept telling me "wait four hours everything will work properly". It never did work properly.

I was polite with my conversations each time. Then out of the blue, my phone service was disconnected and Virgin dropped my phone number completely. They didn't know if they could get it back, but said they would try and gave me a temp number. It took a week before they reinstated my phone number, which meant people who had my business card and tried to call were out of luck for a week.

Virgin also sent me another new refurb phone. Again I had the same absence of internet. Again I kept calling customer service. Sometimes I'd talk to someone in the Philippines. Other times it was someone in Mexico. Again they had me do this, that and the other thing with the phone and kept telling me "wait four hours everything will work properly". It didn't. Finally, they sent me a third refurb phone and told me that this time they were sending me a "Class A refurb". I asked them what they had sent me in the past. The answer? Class B. They were sending me defective phones.

Thirty two days after I received my first refurb phone, I finally had a cell phone that worked completely. I probably spent close to 10 hours total dealing with Virgin over that time. I don't consider Virgin all that unusual in its atrocious customer service. I'd actually say it was par for the course although I have changed to a new cell phone provider in the hope that I'm wrong.

What's the take home message from this? America has definitely become a rougher and tougher place. We are less trusting. We are more money conscious. Customer service is a dicey thing. I note that yesterday I went in to have a couple of funny moles on my face biopsied. As I left the dermatologist's office, the receptionist shouted, "Wait!"

"Do I need to fill out some paperwork?"

"No, you need to pay."

"Huh?"

"We don't bill you. And we've already checked and found out you haven't met your deductible."

"You want me to pay for the visit?"

"Yeah, and the biopsy, too."

I sighed. "You haven't even done the cultures yet and I have to pay in advance?"

"Yes."

"Oh dear. American Express?"

"Visa or Master Card only." I handed her my card. I signed the little piece of paper and I thought of my mother, the careful shopper, buying Billy the Kid's jeans for me in a little store in Milwaukee, Wisconsin called the Squire Shop where they hid the cash register in a back room.

In Praise of Obscure Government Research Labs

2011-05-04T06:00:00.001-07:00

In graduate school, I studied the esoteric of the esoteric, flow through porous media with application to understanding earthquakes. Hardly anyone else was doing this kind of work and hardly anyone else was doing the “broader” work that it was based on, groundwater hydrology. The research from my dissertation has been cited in the literature about 150 times; that’s not exactly an indication of overwhelming impact, but in groundwater hydrology it’s hitting a homerun research-wise. There are maybe 300 groundwater researchers in the world of any note and about 10,000 who work on very applied problems – water supply, water contamination and whatnot – in the field.

Why did I study something so esoteric? I liked it! Plus unlike math, it was a field with reasonable employment prospects in research. If I could manage to get accepted into a highly regarded school and do well dissertation-wise, I knew I would have a reasonable shot at a real research job or academic position. That’s exactly what happened. I took a job with an obscure government agency that offered a tremendous amount of research freedom, the US Geological Survey (USGS), well before I received my Ph.D. In fact, that agency funded my Ph.D. research.

At the time, the USGS was a research powerhouse in geology and geophysics. There were some incredible people there, smart and enthusiastic. The quality of research was, on the whole, better than you’d find in any academic institution. Some of the senior researchers were members of the National Academy of Sciences. But it was clear that the heyday of academic research in the government was coming to a close in all but the health sciences. I felt that I was a member of the last group of Ph.D. research-grade hires that would be made in the agency.

It was a plum job in a lot of ways. There was one big problem, though: with every senior researcher who retired, the place got emptier and emptier. It got to be sad just how cavernous the office was getting. In my section of the building, I walked in to turn on the lights every morning. At the end of the day, I was also the one who turned them off. I started to get the feeling that if I died behind my desk, I wouldn’t be discovered for a week.

I’m a recluse by nature, but this was too isolating an environment even for me. I took an academic position at Duke after two years at the USGS even though from a research standpoint I knew I was taking a bit of a step down.

Most of the group of hires of which I was a part stayed. They are in their 50s now. All of them could have done what I did, taken an academic job at a good to great school, but they tend to be even quieter and more reclusive than me. In fact, I was considered the outgoing and outlandish one of the bunch. It’s all relative, I guess. I’m eccentric as hell and not at all shy, but outgoing and extroverted? Um, no.

I was right in my assessment that no new hires would be made. Those 50 year old men and women that were hired with me are still the “young people”. In another fifteen years, they will collectively turn out the lights of the place.

Will anything be lost with the demise of the USGS? Its employees are doing esoteric research in an organization known by almost no one. At face value, the answer to my question is a definite no. But that surface-based assessment is undoubtedly wrong. Here is an example why.

Last year as everyone knows, a BP well exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. At first the engineers at BP tried to get a handle on plugging the hole on their own. They didn’t know what the f*ck they were doing. The government intervened. Who did they bring in as experts? People who knew about drilling wells and about flow in porous media. In fact, they brought in friends of mine from the USGS, those obscure researchers from an obscure research agency.

One of my friends got a call from Houston while he was on his way to Nome, Alaska to do research. “We need you here to stand up to these jerks from BP,” he was told.

My friend declined. “Well hydraulics isn’t really my area of expertise,” he said. “You need Dr X.”

“But Dr. X won’t be able to stand up to those assholes. Sure he knows his stuff, but he’s too quiet and shy. They’ll never listen to him.”

“He knows more about that field that anyone. If they don’t listen to him, they’re idiots.”

“Are you sure, you can’t come?”

“Yeah, call Dr. X.”

“If this doesn’t work out, we’re calling you back and flying you down here.”

The end result was that the government people from Houston, with great hesitation, flew Dr. X in. Dr. X really does, in fact, understand well hydraulics as well or better than anyone in the world. He is quiet, it’s true. But he is also very smart, very articulate, and works like a demon. He sat at the table with all those jerks from BP and even they seemed to realize that this man knew what he was talking about and knew far more than they did.

A critical juncture in the BP disaster occurred when a temporary cap was put on the well. Pressures in the well did not recover as expected. This was horrible news. It meant that at face value, the well was still unstable. It could potentially explode again; if it did there was zero chance that the gusher could ever be plugged permanently.

Dr. X was back in Menlo Park, CA at the time. The situation in Houston was extremely tense. The experts had to make a decision about what to do with the temporary cap. The evidence they had suggested that the cap should be removed. The night before the decision was made, Dr. X decided to do something highly unusual. He went back to his office, took a computer model written for groundwater flow and modified it for oil. Then he stayed up all night and used that model to simulate oil production in the oil reservoir tapped by the BP well.

Dr. X wasn't allowed access to BP data to check his model results with real world numbers, but someone essentially stole what was needed by taking a picture of some data with a cell phone camera. With those data, Dr. X could feel confident about what he had done. His results indicated that the pressures were low in the well because the reservoir had already been partly depleted by prior pumping from other wells.

In his opinion, the temporary well cap was doing its job. The BP well was stable. The cap could stay until a permanent one was fabricated.

Without Dr. X’s work, the temporary cap would have been removed and oil would have gushed out of the BP well for I don’t know how many more weeks. There would also have been doubts that a permanent cap could be effective. Dr. X’s all-nighter of computer modeling saved the day.

Take away that obscure researcher from an obscure government agency, and I know the outcome would have been far worse. Suppose, in fact, there had been no USGS at the time of the BP spill. The government likely would have had to bring in an academic to counter the cowboys of BP. They would have brought in someone like me. Would I have done what Dr. X did? Would even my friend working in Nome, Alaska done what Dr. X did? The answer is undoubtedly no.

It’s not just a matter of expertise. It’s also a matter of mood and attitude. I know what would have happened had I been in Houston. I would have gotten caught up in the emotion of battling those cowboys from BP. I would have been steaming too much to go into reflective mode, sit in my office, be creative, and just do the work necessary to show what was really happening in the well. You needed someone quiet and calm for that job, someone relatively egoless. People in academia, including me, just aren’t like that.

Dr. X’s real name is Paul Hsieh. I’ve known him for decades. My hat is off to him. And when they shut down research at the USGS in another fifteen years or so, this nation definitely will be poorer for it.

The Passover Singing Pack

2011-04-18T04:23:00.000-07:00

I probably could write 50 of these in a day. But I think five are more than enough! Guaranteed to enliven any seder. Happy Passover.

Four Questions
(sung to Maria)

Four questions
Why won't someone ask the four questions?
In English or Hebrew
Either language will do tonight
Four questions
Why won't someone ask the four questions?
It's just four little whys
There's no need to be shy or contrite
Four questions
Without them there is no real seder
And one hell of an angry creator
Four questions
We need to just ask the four questions

I Hope Elijah Comes This Time
(sung to Get Me To The Church On Time)

I'm getting everything so ready
Horeses, the matzohs and the wine
I have the haggadahs and sponge cake from mother
I hope Elijah comes this time

I got a silver cup just for him
He could have a drink and dine
We'd feed him knaydles and Passadickah bagels
I hope Elijah comes this time

Gefilte Fish and Carrots
(sung to Gary, Indiana)

Gefilte fish and carrots
Are a combo of great merit
They’re the highlight of our family’s seder meal
Gefilte fish and carrots
Though the children grin and bear it
The adults eat every morsel with great zeal
Make sure to add a spoonful of horseradish
And every piece of fish will quickly vanish
It’s a grand tradition not something that’s faddish
It’s the kind of food that puts you in a good mood
Oh..
Gefilte fish and carrots
Are a combo of great merit
They’re the highlight of our family’s seder meal
Gefilte fish and carrots
There’s nothing it compares with
When it’s kosher it’s the real deal!

Let’s Call The Seder Off
(sung to Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off)

You say haggadah, I say haggudah
You say zeroa, I say zeroya
Haggadah, haggudah, zeroa, zeroya
Let’s call the seder off
You say chametz, I say choometz
You say charoset, I say charoyses
Chametz, choometz, charoset, charoyses
Let’s call the seder off
But oh, if we call the seder off
We’ll break the chain
Of all the generations
Who ate matzah
Mixed with chrain
So you say haggadah, I’ll say haggudah
You say zeroa, I’ll say zeroya
However we say it, it fills us with joy-a
We’ll never call the seder off
Oh we’ll never call the seder off

Ten Plagues From Hell
(sung to Heartbreak Hotel)

We once were slaves in Egypt
Then we found a new place to dwell
When Pharaoh wouldn’t let us go
We gave him plagues from hell, oh baby
Gave him ten plagues, oh baby
Gave him ten plagues, oh baby
Gave him such tzooris, that he cried

We turned the blood to water
Then we gave him frogs
Gnats, disease and pestilence
For all the Jews he flogged, oh baby
Gave him ten plagues, oh baby
Gave him ten plagues, oh baby
Gave him such tzooris, that he cried

Then came all the boils
Hail and locusts too
Darkness and death on the land
Such pain we put him through, oh baby
Gave him ten plagues, oh baby
Gave him ten plagues, oh baby
Gave him such tzooris, that he cried

Getting Nostalgic About Insider Trading The Old Fashioned Way

2011-04-06T07:00:00.000-07:00

Several years ago, I asked a friend, a die hard Yankees fan (love the man, hate his taste), to go to the ballpark with me to see the Yankees play the A's. He was excited about the prospect and immediately began to talk trash. Then about two weeks before the game, he called and said I should sell my tickets. "We're going first class," he said. "We're in the tenth row and our food and drinks are comped." I asked how this happened. "Buddy of mine is a hedge fund manager. He's taking us."

True to his word, we went to the ballpark and sat several rows in back of the A's dugout. We paid not a penny. While I watched and scored the game, my friend and the hedge fund manager were having an extended conversation about my friend's high tech company. I mostly tried to ignore the banter, which was full of tech lingo, but I quickly realized what was going on. In an open public setting, my friend was giving the hedge fund manager insider information.

Egads! That's illegal! Well yes it is. But so is smoking pot. And both insider trading and pot are so common in the Silicon Valley that whatever laws exist are almost always unenforceable. As they say in the Valley, this is how we roll (I should note that whenever someone says this to me, I make a mental note to ignore this person for the rest of my life). Every once in a while, though, the government does try to make the public aware that those laws are in the books. The ability of these efforts to actually alter public behavior is debatable.

I've been reading with casual interest about the Galleon Group insider trading trial in New York. Hedge funds cheat. That's how they make a ridiculous amount of money.

As Balzac astutely noted, "The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been found out, because it was properly executed." Hedge funds and Wall Street make their money the old fashioned way. They properly execute crimes, some of which they find a way, through coercion and bribes, to make perfectly legal.

You really can't make a ton of money any other way. And that's the goal of Wall Street, to make obscene profits. Of course what happens eventually is that these scams crumble. The government then has to pick up the pieces. After the dust settles, Wall Street goes on to a new scam and the cycle starts all over again. Welcome to the American economy in this golden financial age.

For example, let's examine the latest financial scam on Wall Street. Hedge funds and bankers like Goldman Sachs get high speed access to trading data through financial arrangements with security exchanges and can, with computers, take advantage of up to the millisecond information on large stock purchases to beat the rest of the market. There is no purpose to high speed trading except to skim a few pennies of profit off large trades using insider information provided by the markets themselves. It should be illegal. It isn't.

The volume associated with high speed trading is huge, as is the leveraging necessary to make money on these little ticks in stock prices. One day, high speed trading will cause the market to crash (it almost happened already). There will be investigations as to how these shenanigans came to be. People with 20/20 hindsight will say it was bound to happen. We built a financial trading market based on hot air. Sound familiar?

The same thing, of course, happened in the mid-2000s. The properly executed crime was to create trillions of dollars worth of junk securities and get them rated AAA. Apparently this was all legal. No one has been charged with any crime. Many of those players, who through their shenanigans caused the collapse of the world economy in 2007, are still at their jobs and are now working the high speed trading scam.

With legal means to cheat, why on Earth does a hedge fund manager resort to doing things like meeting people at baseball games for word of mouth tips? I have no idea really. As the current insider trading trial in NYC shows, occasionally you can end up in serious trouble doing that. I guess that Balzac would call what's currently going on with the hedge fund manager of the Galleon Group the consequence of an improperly executed crime. In comparison to what constitutes major scams in modern finance, it actually seems kind of quaint and maybe even a bit charming.

On Misplaced Priorities, Part 37

2011-04-04T06:00:00.000-07:00

In this country we set limits for exposure to potentially deadly chemicals by cost benefit analysis. We literally assign a value to a single life, count up the potential lives we place at risk and weigh that against the cost of reducing that risk. It's a gruesome calculus, but we simply don't have the money to protect everyone from all known chemical hazards.

Similarly, we cannot save everyone in the world from murder by brutal dictators. We can't even save most. The money just isn't there and the actions necessary to accomplish such a goal aren't clear either. We need to prioritize and at best save some lives, far less than would be ideal or even allow us to claim that humans can be expected to behave humanely and value human life as a precious gift.

It's strange that given our limitations, a world that watched millions die in North Korea and Cambodia, nearly a million die in Rwanda and continues to watch hundreds of thousands die in Darfur suddenly decided to go all out and save a few thousand innocents in Libya. We could probably save that many or more at home with a similar amount of money by improving our care for the sick in areas of poverty.

Despite Obama's rhetoric about the humanitarian motivation for our involvement, we wouldn't be involved if Libya didn't have oil. Our actions to save lives world-wide have for the last 30 years (probably longer) have really been about our economic interests and have been expensive enterprises that have not been well thought out. So it goes with Libya.

We have no plan in Libya, just a hope that Gaddafi will be removed. But there is no guarantee that this will happen and even if it does happen, there is no guarantee that his replacement(s) will be better. If we are going to try and save lives with an open ended, expensive and vague plan, we should do it where many, many more lives can be saved. Right now that place is Darfur. Why aren't we there?

The Battle Hymn of the Whack Mom

2011-03-23T06:00:00.000-07:00

A couple of months ago I was having coffee with an old acquaintance, a woman of Chinese descent and mother to two daughters. She asked if I had read the recent op-ed in the WSJ about Asian methods of mothering. She blushed as she asked me. I said I hadn't. She said that if I did, please understand that it had nothing to do with how Chinese women behave toward their children. She was very embarrassed about the stereotype conveyed in that op-ed.

The op-ed piece was written by Amy Chua to promote her new book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mom. It worked like a charm. As a result of the outrageous 1000 or so words in the Wall Street Journal, the book took off and became an instant bestseller.

Now I've read the book. It was entertaining, but I have no idea what the fuss is about. The Battle Hymn is maybe a 60,000 word thing, not a book really, about a very whack woman who has decided to write a long essay rationalizing her crazy behavior with her children (and her dog). It's inadvertently funny as hell and some of it is undoubtedly exaggerated; maybe more than a bit is just plain made up. There is no doubt about one thing: Ms. Chua is nuts. She's a functioning lunatic sure, but she's still a lunatic. She tries in paragraph after paragraph to put a smiley face on her behavior, but this book is sociopathy dressed up as a parenting guide.

The main conceit of this book is that Amy Chua's behavior with her children, her pet and her husband are normal for her culture. That's just not right. As my friend warned me, Ms. Chua has taken the cultural stereotypes of Asian upbringing and upped them to the 18th power. Along the way, she seems proud to display her bigotry and her consistent pathologic efforts to stereotype the behavior of others. There really is not a lot of difference between Mommy Dearest and this book except that here Ms. Chua tries to couch her dreadful behavior as being something necessary for the advancement of one's children.

There is a big fallacy in this book: children can be molded like pieces of clay into whatever form a parent wants. Ms. Chua believes in this fallacy fervently. She also believes she is behind every success that her children experience. The woman is more than a bit delusional.

It's ironic that Ms. Chua's father is one of the leaders in the science of chaos theory, a field that examines order in nature and physical systems that is essentially unpredictable. That's how children are. You can influence children certainly. But your actions as a parent have an inherently unpredictable component that grows as the child gets older.

The Battle Hymn is a fun read for the inadvertent one liners sprinkled throughout. I laughed out loud at the rationalizations Ms. Chua makes time and time again. It's quick to get through, not particularly well written, and is funny for all the wrong reasons.

The degree to which Ms. Chua pushes her children seems to be what has made this book a lightning rod. How much pushing is too much? I certainly have no idea. Early on in my efforts at parenting, I met someone like Ms. Chua. He wasn't Chinese. He was a European math professor. We had him over for dinner. He kept looking at our daughter the whole time. Afterwards, he talked to me in our living room.

"Your daughter has great math aptitude. She could be a prodigy," he said with all seriousness. How did he determine this by just watching her at dinner? I didn't ask.

"Well she is very bright," I said. I note my daughter was all of three at the time.

"Are you teaching her math?"

"Like what? Counting, yes."

"No, no, not that. A girl like that. She could know calculus by six."

"No, I haven't gone beyond counting."

"You have to! You owe it to your child. You owe it to the world!"

Mr. Math Professor was nuts. I was not going to teach my daughter algebra when she was five and calculus when she was six. Could she have handled it? Who knows? Maybe. But why would I want to do that? I guess I could have done it. Then I could have written a book about it, The Battle Hymn of the Jewish Father. And I would be just as crazy as that math professor and...Amy Chua.

Instead, that one event eventually made me start to write what I'm working on right now, a novel about a math prodigy and her family. Sure there is some mental torture that takes place in the novel. If there wasn't there wouldn't be much of a story, would there? But it's all made up. Made up torture is fun. Really torturing your child with calculus at six is, on the other hand, a very bad idea.

My talk at UNC-Chapel Hill, March 28th, for those interested in such things. 4:00 PM. 265 Phillips Hall.

2011-03-11T10:20:00.001-08:00

The Great Dilution: The Decreasing Component of Academics in the Undergraduate Experience.

Abstract: American undergraduate education has been subject to a “great dilution” in academic content for the past 50 years. This dilution has been caused by several factors, but the principal drivers are a nationwide emphasis on making higher education available to all and trying to maintain reasonable retention rates for the many poorly prepared students that increasingly enter the academy. Curiously, this dilution has also taken place at the 300 to 400 colleges and universities of high merit in the U.S. even though their students are, on paper, often of better quality than in the recent past. This change has significantly altered the nature of educational achievement in the nation, creating both an increasingly more educated citizenry and a poorly educated intellectual elite. An effort to claw back rigor for the nation’s best and brightest would be difficult, but highly desirable.

Academically Adrift: Much Ado About Some Things But Not Others

2011-03-07T06:00:00.000-08:00

As anyone who reads this blog knows, I like to cite evidence that we do a lousy job with undergraduate education in the U.S. I have my own data - that grades have been rising for the last 25 years - but there are several other lines of evidence that show clearly just how undergraduate education has degraded.

Last January, a book came out that summarized many of those lines of evidence (but didn't reference my work with Chris Healy and had other important omissions on adolescent development that would have been even more apt given the subject matter of the book), Academically Adrift. It has been called the most important book on higher education in years.

Academically Adrift's big take home message - the one that has been stated I don't know how many times in the press - is that a large percentage of students aren't learning key critical reasoning and writing skills during their first two years in college. Supposedly, almost one half of the 2300 students tested at 24 schools show no improvement in the higher kinds of learning we expect college to provide.

That's a damning indictment of the undergraduate experience if it is to be believed. You'd think that just about anyone with some curiosity would improve his or her critical assessment and communication skills at least a little bit (with or without college) between the ages of 18 and 20.

One rule I've learned over the years that I've looked at scientific papers is that if someone comes up with a counterintuitive result, it's usually a whack paper. Another rule I've learned is that if someone needs to invoke weird mechanisms to explain results, those results must have significant measurement error. I think both rules are sometimes at play with Academically Adrift. Here I want to focus on rule number one. Maybe I'll talk about rule number two and this book in another post, but probably not.

The take home message of the study is based on taking the difference between two test results, one test taken by students as freshmen, the other when they are sophomores. The test used, the CLA, has unknown measurement error. As far as I can tell (reading the text and appendix), the authors essentially assume no measurement error in the tests. The CLA is supposedly like measuring someone's temperature with a good thermometer. Then they use a student's t test to determine the percentage of students who scored significant gains.

But the student's t test is generally used to determine whether two sets of populations are statistically different. The assumption is that the meter used for your measurements of the populations is highly accurate. You want to examine the hypothesis that the two populations are not identical. It's not designed to be used with an error filled measure like the CLA and estimate the percentage of the population that exceeds a certain threshold and is "significant".

The approach the authors use would be applicable to testing something like whether aspirin reduces fever in patients. You'd take a group's temperature before they took aspirin. You'd take it after. You'd test whether aspirin works by testing whether there is a statistically significant difference between the temperatures collected before and after aspirin was used. The authors have apparently decided to extend this test by using the two sigma "error" in the differences in the CLA test to estimate the percentage of students who have had no "statistically significant gains" in their scores.

I don't know why they do this. It has no basis. The authors in the appendix state that other measures give them even a higher percentage of students with no statistically significant improvement. But the measures they mention are arbitrary as well.

If the CLA test was a perfect assessment of critical thinking and communication skills, all changes - plus and minus - would be significant. If it was a completely random assessment, obviously none would be significant. The CLA test undoubtedly measures something about learning, but how much error is in the test and, since the test is different each time, how much does the difference between two test scores over time simply represent differences in what is being tested? Who knows? Alexander Astin, the dean of higher education analysis, says much the same thing here.

What is apparently true is that, statistically speaking, the test scores are significantly higher in the aggregate for sophomores in comparison to the aggregate scores for freshmen. What this means in terms of overall learning is anyone's guess. Somewhere between 0 and 100 percent of students have learned something significant over two years. What percentage exactly? I have no idea. Neither do the authors at this point in time. They're just guessing. A guess is not a scientific result.

This is a blog, not a research paper or a formal response to the book, so I'm not going to go into depth here about what the results of Academic Adrift mean and don't mean. Here's a figure that at least at face value would indicate something about assessing the "value added" by a college education that tends to show up in CLA friendly publications:

I don't know where these numbers come from (given the numbers and the quantity of datapoints, it looks like a one school dataset for a big satellite or state flagship school, but that's just a guess), but numbers like these could be used to assess approximately the noise in each test and noise in the difference between each test. I don't know why that wasn't done in Academically Adrift.

Regardless, (unlike the graph here which shows results when the same test was administered to freshmen and seniors in the same year) you'd still have the mystery as to whether one test was more difficult than the other. CLA tests just might not be suitable for studies that try to identify changes over time.

The above graph does indicate that CLA scores are highly correlated with SAT/ACT scores at least in the aggregate (the correlation is more modest at the individual student level). So to some extent there is likely some overlap in what these tests all measure. The authors in Academically Adrift note that GPA's explain about 12 percent of the variance in CLA scores (.35 correlation) and seem to think this buttresses their argument that the CLA tests are measuring real learning. They don't show the data (I asked for the data and they said no), though, and an r2 of 0.1 isn't exactly anything to hang your hat on. Here are some data from one school, Kalamazoo, that I found from an online publication:

This is not exactly an impressive correlation. I'm a critic, certainly, of what today's inflated grades measure in terms of learning. There is noise in grades, but over the course of 35 classes, one would think that better students - those with superior critical thinking and communications skills - at a decent liberal arts college would do better than others. Knock out the one stray data point in the lower left and the relationship between CLA and GPA would be almost random. If the CLA is measuring well what it says it's measuring, one would expect better correlation.

There is a good deal of interesting and useful material in Academically Adrift. The results of their survey on grades correspond to the work that Chris Healy and I have done and their survey on study hours corresponds to the work of Babcock and Marks. Their survey questions indicate that student work loads (in particular the expected amount of required writing) are light as well. But the results of Academically Adrift on the value added of college education are cloudy in some cases and not even worth noting in others.

Why all the hullabaloo about this book? Two words. Confirmation bias. Many, including me, believe that colleges are doing a bad job. So they, not including me except on first read of this book, are uncritical of works that agree with their beliefs. Add in the fact that Academically Adrift purports to quantify the bad job colleges perform, and you have a perfect device for media attention.

Toward Better Social Networking

2011-03-02T06:00:00.000-08:00

Recently, I read that Facebook will be getting rid of its Share button. Like will be the new Share. One less button doesn't seem like a good idea to me. In fact, I'd like to see many more buttons besides Like and Share.

I've been on Facebook for about a year or so. I've read posts of my friends and there are some common responses I've had, but rarely type. I'd like to have a button for each one. Here are just a few.

Bigoted button. People tend to say things on the internet and expose their hearts and minds in ways they never do in real life. It can be wonderful to read those thoughts. It can also be very disturbing. I think I've managed to get rid of all my Facebook friends who turned out to be bigots. But even the nicest people sometimes end up with nasty comments from their "friends". An official "that's a bigoted comment" button would help immensely.

Racist button. See the discussion on Bigoted button.

Very Cute button. Sometimes I'm in the mood for one of those "my dog/boy friend/cat/hippo/etc. is so cute" photos and comments. I just want to hit a button that says that.

Funny button. I don't want to type out haha. I'm too busy laughing. Just give me a button please.

Brilliant button. Brains should be lauded. It's too embarrassing to be gooey with praise in text. Just let me click on brilliant.

Unoriginal Left/Right Wing Tripe button. You get a lot of rants on Facebook. People type derivative thoughts whose origins come from Ayn Rand/Karl Marx/Frank Rich/Glenn Beck/wherever. Yuck. A simple click to call them out on it would be useful.

Boring button. No I don't care that you got your haircut or your car is in the shop. We need a little button to warn of clutter.

Congrats button. People do something good or get some award or have a kid or bowl 300. They deserve a quick huzzah huzzah click.

Enough With the Self Promotion button. Yes, you're trying to get ahead in this world. But I don't care. I'm not going to buy your book or see your movie or go to your show just because you ask me. We need a button to put these self promoters in their place.

I Wish I Had Your Brains button. Some people are just plain brilliant not only occasionally, but most of the time. They deserve their own button.

Off the Meds Again Are You button. When someone goes postal and pulls a Charlie Sheen, a flood of people hitting this button might bring them back to reality.

Now that I'm in the swing of things talking about improvements, there is also the issue of "friends". I'm having a hard time with this friends business. I have some real friends and relatives on Facebook. But most of the people aren't and never will be real friends. It's doubtful that I'll never meet them. Some, even though they are "friends", seem more than a little scary to me and I know, while they are interesting, I'd never want to meet them in person unless I had a flack jacket and a bodyguard. We ought to be able to make real distinctions.

Friends - these are people you know personally and like.

Enemies - these are people you know, don't like, but somehow ended up as a Facebook friend.

Frenemies - if you're on the fence about someone you know, you ought to be able to declare it.

I've Never Met You But You Seem Interesting - there is a supreme difference between knowing someone personally and having internet based exchanges with someone. This category is for someone who seems cool, but you've never met before.

I've Never Met You And Never Want To - sometimes you do wonder if this person you have as a Facebook friend is a potential axe murderer. It should be duly noted.

You're a Hero of Mine - I like this better than just Fan. Nelson Mandela deserves more than fandom, for instance.

I'm sure that if you've read this far you can think of your own improvements. I imagine that Facebook - given that it is not very versatile - will die in the next couple of years and be replaced by something else. Who knows, maybe you and I can work together and make the next Facebook. If our "new Facebook" takes off, I know just the person who should play me in the movie version, too.

No, not Jesse Eisenberg. We've been there, done that. Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close up.

Only In Wisconsin

2011-02-28T06:00:00.000-08:00

I haven't lived in Wisconsin for 34 years so you can take all I'm about to write with a grain of salt. But reading about the protests over Governor Walker's attempt to break the public employees union (and, denials aside, that's exactly what he's trying to do), there is one thought that enters my mind again and again: only in Wisconsin could this happen. It's only there that in the middle of winter you'd find tens of thousands of people protesting for weeks on end over a political change that adversely affects the little guy.

It certainly isn't a Midwestern thing. Six years ago Indiana's governor did exactly what Walker is trying to do now. I'm sure there was a political battle, but nothing happened of the magnitude of what's happening now in Wisconsin. I can't imagine huge protests taking place in California, my current home, should a Republican governor try to break the public unions.

There's just something about my native state that engenders this kind of grass roots populism. It's a populism that can swing both right and left. When I was working for the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign the word that kept coming up to describe Wisconsin was "quirky." I kept telling people in the campaign that Wisconsin would swing for Clinton. Their poll results kept showing something else.

I told them to screw the polls, that Clinton was viewed as someone more moderate (I didn't believe there was actually much difference between the two candidates, but the press kept saying otherwise), that the state (sadly) still had a strong racist component, and there was no way all those little old ladies and men on Milwaukee's South Side would vote for Obama. I was wrong. Even the South Side swung big for Obama in the primaries and Obama won the state in the presidential election with ease. Wisconsin is...quirky.

Yet this same state had Joseph McCarthy as its senator for many years. George Wallace, whose presidential campaigns were 100 percent about racism, garnered 34 percent of the Democratic primary vote in 1964. Wisconsin kicked out a quirky Democratic Senator, Feingold, this past year and replaced him with a far right Republican who couldn't articulate any real views except a hatred of all things Washington. Right, left, right, left. Wisconsin, more than any other state I know, likes to swing toward extremes.

It's a state that also can organize large public rallies easier than most. When the public turned against the Vietnam War, Madison was a major national center of protest. I marveled at those protests when I was a kid. I knew protests weren't happening with anywhere near the fervor and frequency elsewhere in the Midwest. What was so special about Wisconsin then? The same thing that makes it special now. It's an inherently quirky state.

Part of it I think is the cold weather. It promotes a certain internal strength. It forces you to plan ahead and always be prepared. Part of it I think has to do with the amount of alcohol people consume. In the winter, a significant segment of the population stays almost perpetually tipsy. They aren't afraid to tell you what they think.

The ingredients necessary for the current battle in Wisconsin were fairly simple. First you needed a new politician on the scene, one that had yet to build any goodwill with the state. Walker is a newly elected governor. Second, that new politician had to be filled with hubris. That's certainly true of Walker. Third that politician had to be an ideologue with a tin ear for what the people want. Walker has said explicitly that he's a conservative and holds at least mild disdain for what he calls "pragmatists".

Essentially to set up this battle, first and foremost you needed someone who could play the role of an uncharismatic dogmatist, and enemy to the little guy. Walker has fit that role perfectly.

Then you needed little guys who had a history of not taking crap from anyone and organizing against powers that be. Wisconsin has historically had strong unions and has a long history of people working on assembly lines for big corporations. Although most of those jobs have been gone for a decade or longer, ordinary folk are used to battling against the big guy over wages and benefits.

Put a dullard ideologue in office, have him get power hungry and overreach, and in most if not all states aside from Wisconsin, the people would grumble and scream, but quickly give in. That's probably what happened in Indiana several years ago. But in Wisconsin, it really is different. People are feisty. They don't like being pushed, even if the person doing the pushing was someone they elected by a wide margin.

After Clinton lost the primary in Wisconsin, I told myself I'd never try to predict what would happen in my home state again. Wisconsin is just too much of a wild card. I'm not going to try to predict what will happen with Walker over the next few years. I can easily imagine his term of office, as a result of his ham-handedness concerning the employees union, will be rough. But I could well be wrong. Two years from now, the people in the state could love this guy. You never know. With Wisconsin and politics anything is possible.

My Time As a Member of the Wisconsin State Employees Union

2011-02-21T07:25:00.000-08:00

There have been I don’t know how many commentaries about Wisconsin Governor Walker’s plan to take away state employees’ right to collectively bargain. Few of these commentators have spent any real time in Wisconsin and fewer still have actually been a part of the employees union. I have, although it was long, long ago. I’ve been thinking of those days as I’ve read about the protests and the AWOL Democrats in the State Senate.

My title as an employee was Clerk Typist II. I earned $4.63 an hour, which was, if I remember correctly, about double that of minimum wage at the time. For my salary, I sat at a desk near the entrance to the UW-Extension building, directed visitors to the offices they were seeking, typed remittances on carbon paper, and handed out paychecks every other week (people in the building loved me for this and I felt like Santa Claus).

I was basically the receptionist for the building. I’m sure that job doesn’t exist anymore. What buildings, aside for hospitals and Walmarts, still have greeters who tell you where you need to go? Nowadays, you’re supposed to just figure that piece of information out yourself.

It was my second job out of college. I was waiting for my sweetie to graduate in six months. Employment opportunities in college towns for recent graduates are usually very slim. Madison, Wisconsin was no exception. My first job was working for about twenty cents over minimum wage as a temp in the Wisconsin state unemployment office. I started out in the mailroom, but they quickly “promoted” me to client correspondent. My job was to write letters to people who had been given, through error, too much unemployment compensation and to try to claw back the money with threats.

Some people did pay back the money. Most didn’t. I’ll never forget the response one of my clients sent back to me, written in cursive on greasy lined paper:

Dear Mr. Rochecker,

You’ve got about as much chance getting money from me as you do sticking hot axle grease up the ass of a tomcat.

Yours,

X

I hated my job. The pay was crap. Taking back money from the unemployed seemed cruel to me. I was in the basement all day. Fortunately, the part of the unemployment office that got new job announcements was one floor above and I convinced a girl who worked up there to pull the good ones for me the second they hit the job board.

That’s where the Clerk Typist II position showed up. The requirements were good communication skills, a good wardrobe, and an ability to type 35 words per minute. I called the number immediately. I showed up at the UW Extension building one hour later ready for my interview. I lied about being able to type at the minimum required speed, told my future boss I’d do anything to get the job, and bowled him over with my enthusiasm. He hired me on the spot.

I spent the next weekend in our apartment with a “how to type” book from the library and practiced for probably about 15 hours until I had the rudiments of touch-typing down.

How well could I live at $4.63 an hour back then? Not very well, but I didn’t starve. I could pay my share of the rent in a shared apartment, buy food, go out once a week with my sweetie for some cheap Chinese, and go to the movies. I was more than OK with this mind-numbing job, though. My goal at the time was to be a full time novelist. I thought this is what novelists did, took stupid jobs that didn’t tax them too much so they’d have the mental energy to write when they were at home.

I wrote and wrote my first novel on nights and weekends - page after page – a picaresque. I’d go to work dutifully every day, dressed like I thought a male receptionist should dress. The people around me were conscientious and serious, but there was one funny exception.

Every once in a while, I’d walk down to the basement to the copy office to get some paperwork Xeroxed. The door to the copy office was always locked. There was a little slot through which you were supposed to slide your papers. At 3:00 PM your copies would be placed outside the door for pick up.

I was intrigued about this locked door. Why were these people copying in secret? So I’d always try to open the door when I dropped off my paperwork in the hope that I could actually see what was going on inside. One day I succeeded. The door was unlocked and I opened it to find five guys sitting around a table playing a German card game that I knew well, sheep’s head.

What these folks did was play cards all morning and through lunch. Then at 1:00 or so they’d take all the copying jobs for the building and run the papers through the copy machine. They were getting paid eight hours for a two hour work day. So, yes, there was some waste and sloth going on in the building. But it wasn’t widespread.

My wife graduated. That summer, I stopped to critically read my novel (it was about half done). Oh my lord, I thought. This is utter crap. I definitely need to do something else for a living.

We moved to Denver at the end of the summer and I kissed my Clerk Typist II position good-bye, but not before I trained my replacement, a very weepy young woman who had just divorced and talked non-stop about her marriage and how she missed her husband. She was 26. I had just turned 21. I thought she was ancient.

Nowadays a job like I had pays about fifteen dollars an hour. That’s an improvement relative to the cost of living over my salary, but not a dramatic one. You can probably afford to rent your own apartment with that kind of money, and make payments on a decent used car (I didn’t own a car during my stint as a Wisconsin state employee).

The improvement from a barely livable wage to a modest but livable one for clerk typists in the state of Wisconsin over the last 35 years was, no doubt, the result of collective bargaining. Without it, jobs like the one I had would, I’m guessing, be ten dollar an hour things. Can you really live on ten dollars an hour? Sort of, if you’re twenty years old, sharing an apartment with your sweetie, don’t have kids and don’t own a car.

Governor Walker would like to strip collective bargaining from state employees. What would be the long-term outcome? Crappy pay and expensive benefits. Eventually you’d probably have a sea of employees earning Walmart kind of wages. Eventually you’d have a state where a large percentage of employees – both public and private – earned wages that caused them to struggle to just make ends meet every month. This isn’t progress for the state. This isn’t progress for the country.

Governor Walker has noted that Mitch Daniels, who has axed the budget of Indiana as governor, is a hero of his. The data say that Daniels’ dramatic budget cuts have, in the end, made it more difficult for your average Indianan to make ends meet. No one should mistake this as a change for the better.

When someone works an honest job, they deserve not the world, but the ability to be able to feed and raise a family (with some help from their spouse’s income), keep that family healthy, put a modest roof over their heads, and keep their cars running. When a job doesn’t allow for these modest benefits of employment something is wrong in America. This Walmart model for employees essentially is the future the Governor Walker is planning for Wisconsin state workers. Who benefits from such a plan? Only a sliver of the populace, the wealthy. It’s a plan that is undeniably wrong.

Uncle Stuey Watches The Grammys

2011-02-16T06:00:00.000-08:00

I'm a voting member of the Grammys. It doesn't take much to be a voting member. You have to have worked on some CDs (if I remember correctly two is the minimum number) that have been sold through a national distributor. There are about 10,000 voting members out there, musicians, engineers and producers who care enough to pay their annual dues. The criteria for membership means that the age of the voters is a lot older than that of the pop listening public. So the vote skews old in terms of taste.

I watched the Grammys at the annual Bay Area party for Grammy members with a friend, a classical composer. The party used to be a nice affair, but the music industry is in a tailspin, which means people have stopped paying their dues, which means The Grammys don't have the money to do much in the way of entertainment. They dropped their annual Christmas party this year, and the Grammy watching party was kind of a sad thing. There was a tiny amount of food, the venue was a dump of a bar, and the attendance was low, consisting mostly of people who paid $25 for the right to shmooze with people like me, people who couldn't help them not a bit with their musical aspirations.

But I did watch the show on a big TV. I thought the Grammy organizers did a good job all things considered. There had been some work and practice beforehand on the part of the performers, people weren't just winging it, and the effort paid off. The numbers were big on dance and spectacle, with flames, rocket blasts and lots of hunky and sultry chorus dancers slithering around. That's what entertainment is mostly about today, spectacle to delight your eyes, so the effort made sense.

The music, though, was incredibly boring. Basically, it consisted of singers imitating singers of old. Bruno Mars imitated Jackie Wilson and not very well (Jackie Wilson was just too talented to be the kind of singer that can be mimicked with any sort of accuracy). Justin Bieber did a good job of imitating Shaun Cassidy (actually, he's much better than Shaun Cassidy as a singer). Lady Gaga imitated Madonna (who imitated Marlene Dietrich) minus the sex appeal (the point of that approach escapes me, but others obviously feel otherwise). Muse imitated Blondie (and Blondie imitated Jefferson Airplane). Mick Jagger, who has made a great career out of being a white version of James Brown, imitated Solomon Burke (and surprisingly showed that like Brown once did he can still bust a move in his 60s). Cee Lo Green imitated The Four Tops with the addition of the F word and the S word (kudos to Mr. Green for his wonderful drag get up, though). In the weirdest moment, Bob Dylan imitated himself and did a good of it (although Maggie's Farm isn't a song that anyone has to hear on national TV).

Pop music changed with Elvis, Motown, and the Beatles, but that change occurred 50 to 60 years ago. Every decade since has been full of a recycling of those old sounds and chord progressions. Rap dropped the chord progressions, but simply sampled those old sounds for background music and nowawdays seems to have retreated to using a very traditional verse-chorus structure, with the rapper talking out the verses and some big voiced person taking over the chorus.

I keep wondering when is "next"? When does pop music leave the Beatles behind and truly make something new. My classical music composer friend says the same thing is happening in contemporary classical, people are simply recycling the "contemporary" music of the 1950s. Sooner or later, though, it will happen. Someone will come on the scene and truly revolutionize pop music, make it new the way the Beatles did. We just aren't there yet.*

I voted in about 20 categories for the Grammys. There are over 100 categories and many of them contain "music" that is just plain unlistenable, at least to me. I think that my vote matched the winner about 20 percent of the time, which is a new high for me in terms of "success." One of the winners that lined up with my vote was Esperanza Spalding. When her win for best new artist was announced, every black person around me at the party (and me) shouted out (martinis will do that to me) in celebration. The rest wondered who is she?

Ms. Spalding isn't a pop musician, but you can get an inkling about what I mean by moving ahead from her version of jazz. She's conservative in what she does. She's not about to break with the past, but she's trying to stretch the boundaries of what makes jazz music. Ms. Spalding is also very talented. She'll be around a long time. Pop musicians would do themselves a favor if they spent some time listening and watching her instead of trying to imitate Blondie and Madonna.

*And maybe one day country singers will learn how to actually dance when they are on stage instead of being statues. We're not there yet either.

Why Something So Tiny Gets So Much Attention

2011-02-14T06:00:00.000-08:00

About a week ago, the Tea Party Senate Caucus held its first public meeting. There are a grand total of three members of this caucus, three nuts from three of the reddest states in the country. All three are essentially libertarians. If they would call themselves the Libertarian Senate Caucus maybe no one would pay them much attention. But I guess it's all about the packaging. Three Tea Partiers getting together makes news and gets covered by a room full of reporters.

Why? Three people don't make any sort of caucus. They don't even fill a booth at McDonalds. If anything, whatever press coverage these three looney tunes received should have been derisive. Look! A caucus of three. Hahaha. If they ever get to four, they could form a bowling team!

But no. The press took this pathetic attempt to show impact seriously. They covered it as legitimate news. In the background of press motivated events like this is the idea that the Tea Party has transformed the political landscape. It hasn't except for a few states. But the press would like you to believe otherwise.

Why does something so tiny, the Tea Party, and ultimately ineffectual get so much attention? I think partly it's because these people are acting against racial stereotype. They are a group of white middle age and older Christian people. Think Ward and June Cleaver.

We expect people like this to be polite and considerate, unlike our stereotypes of people of color or non-Christian religions. So when we see white grandmas and grandpas screaming at town hall meetings about government being too big, about the threat to take away Medicare, we think this is unusual and ultimately, newsworthy. It's the equivalent of Ward and June Cleaver going postal.

When liberals and lefties marched against the Iraq War, the press hardly noticed. That was just the angry left behaving as expected. But the angry right? That's a twist, according to the press, something worth covering. Having spent time listening to Ward and June Cleavers go postal over the potential election of a black candidate, I happen to think that the "angry right" isn't unusual at all.

But that doesn't cover all of why the press pays attention to the Tea Party. I think it's also because, anger or not, these people are on the far right. For whatever reason, the far right is covered a lot more by the press than the hard left.

For example, CPAC just held its annual meeting and had a straw poll of Republican presidential candidates. These nut jobs voted for Ron Paul. They voted for Ron Paul in 2007 as well. What chance does Ron Paul have of winning the Republican nomination? He's a fringe candidate and the answer is zero. What is the purpose of giving significant press coverage to a meeting of a group of people who think that a nut job who wants to abolish the Fed is presidential material? Beats me.

In the 60s, the left used to get uber-exposed the same way. Nobodies with big hair and outlandish words like Angela Davis were in the news frequently. Now they are old hat.

I guess that press obsession with the hard right simply represents press fashion. In another decade or so there will still be screaming white Christian grandmas and grandpas of course. But the press will go ho hum, we've seen that before. They'll be on to something new and supposedly fresh, like, I don't know, maybe a group of screaming Park Slope moms with high end strollers. Until then, we're stuck with coverage of the Tea Party that is, as one national reporter admitted to me, mostly overblown.

Jewish American Fiction and Literary Fashion

2011-02-09T06:00:00.000-08:00

I found this book on my local library's new book shelf, Promised Lands, an anthology of previously unpublished new Jewish American fiction. The book isn't selling. Partly that's because it comes from an academic press. Partly it's because short stories don't sell. But it's also because Jewish American fiction had its hey day forty to sixty years ago. It's out of style as a subject area in literary fiction.

People still write this material of course. But fashion - established partly by the New Yorker, but also by public taste - dictates that fiction must now come from immigrants from the developing world, India, Africa, Haiti, etc. It's politically correct to focus on such authors. I'm OK with that, I guess. There are more quality writers of literary fiction than there is an audience for them. We have to prune down the list of darlings somehow. This arbitrary designation that authors from the developing world will have the spotlight preferentially shined on them is as good as any arbitrary filtering system.

I note that I'm working on a novel. It's hard work to do such a thing. But I will finish sooner rather than later. Of course this novel is very Jewish. How could it not be so? If I'm lucky, it will find a reasonable publisher. If I'm lucky it will sell a few thousand copies. I'll be very happy if all that transpires.

Anyway, here is my funny review of the anthology written in the style of the king of Jewish American short story writing, Bernard Malamud.

Promised Lands: New Jewish American Fiction on Longing and Belonging (Brandeis Series in American Jewish History, Culture and Life)
by Derek Rubin

Rosh, a lapsed academic whose mother always thought should have been a doctor, walked into the neighborhood library and scanned the new book section. An inveterate reader ever since he, as a teen, had to stay inside one summer because of a mysterious sun rash that simply would not disappear, Rosh perused the titles and fingered several volumes. What was he looking for? Like many readers, he was searching, no longing, for a transformative experience, a book that would lift his weary soul and make him see the world in a new light.

Rosh pulled down a colorful paperback with the title Promised Lands and saw the words "longing" and "Jewish" in the subtitle. His cell phone rang as he looked through the pages quickly scanning the words. Rosh ignored the call and didn't notice the librarian's look of irritation as the cell phone played the same four seconds of a Chopin sonata again and again. A paperback, Rosh thought. They probably didn't have the money to make a hardcover.

Still, he pressed on and read the first story, by Dara Horn, while standing next to the bookshelf. Oh my. So Jewish. So clever. So trenchant. Who knew people built on Singer, Malamud, and Roth to create their own Jewish fiction for a new generation? His heart, a sluggish thing most mornings, began to beat with a new fervor.

Rosh brought the book home and began to read the other stories in this collection eagerly on his favorite chair, a leather thing, probably the last piece of furniture still made in the USA. But none were nearly as good as the story by Ms. Horn. He sighed. You cannot have irony and pathos in literature when you are constrained by political correctness, Rosh thought. This is literature defanged by academic culture. There is too much tiptoeing going on here in story after story. Lust, when shown, is only politically acceptable for women. Unlike the Jewish-American literature of old, there are no men in rapture, banging women with breasts like melons on the kitchen floor. Is this a good change? .אפשר יא, אפשר ניט

Rosh wrote the name Dara Horn down as an author worth future reading. He put the book Promised Lands into the pile of other library books to return and sighed. Rosh stood up, as if in a sleepwalking trance, and went to the bookshelf in his man cave. There it was. The collected stories of Bernard Malamud. No one has written better short stories about Jewish life. Probably no one ever will do better. But they are trying it seems. That's worth something.

How To Sing The Star Spangled Banner

2011-02-07T07:00:00.000-08:00

I'm about as patriotic a person as you will find out there. I'm extremely sentimental about this country that allowed my parents entry after WWII. Sure, I believe that America comes up well short of an ideal in many ways. But I can't think of a better place for my parents to have immigrated, not even close.

I place my hand over my heart with enthusiasm whenever our national anthem, the Star Spangled Banner, is played. I sing along usually and feel immense pride when I do so. My expectation of the lead singer when I'm at an event where the anthem is sung is simple. Sing on pitch. Don't make the song all about you. It's the nation's anthem, not your anthem after all. Show some modesty, hit the notes, bow, and walk off.

Yesterday, before I don't know how many tens of millions (hundreds of millions maybe) of television viewers Christina Aguilera did this to the Star Spangled Banner:

She's so busy trying to insert notes that were never written into the anthem in an effort to impress that she blows the words. Then there is that raspy, he-done-me-wrong thing that she does in a few places. No, Ms. Aguilera, The Star Spangled Banner isn't a torch song. What were you thinking?

Here, in contrast, is another version at an earlier football game this year. The guy isn't a professional singer. He's a hockey player, Jim Cornelison:

Mr. Cornelison stands there like a tank and belts out the notes. He's sincere. Yes, the notes are a little pitchy, but he's singing not to wow you. Rather he's simply trying to honor this country the best he can in voice. Now that makes me happy.

You don't have to be a professional singer to do justice to our anthem. I'm hoping that we move away from having pop singers butcher the Star Spangled Banner at nationally televised events like the Super Bowl and get more strong-voiced, straight-ahead singing amateurs like Cornelison. Here's to hoping.

I also note the Green Bay Packers won the Super Bowl yesterday. As a native cheesehead who adored the Packers as a kid, that makes me even happier than hearing Mr. Cornelison sing.

A History of "Your Best Entertainment Value"

2011-02-02T06:00:00.000-08:00

Sometime in the 1980s - when the music CD was king, and record companies raised prices so that what used to cost $5.99 as an LP cost $12.99 as a CD - record companies began to slap a sticker on their CDs that said, "Music, your best entertainment value." There was some truth to this statement. For example, you could buy a book or go to a movie with your date for about the same price as a CD, but that was a one shot deal. In contrast, you listened to a CD over and over. On a per use basis, music was, even at $12.99 for a dozen songs, cheap entertainment.

But the public didn't see it that way. People grumbled about the price of music in the 1980s. I heard that grumbling from friends. The price doubling on the part of record companies that accompanied the format change from LP to CD was looked at as a greedy grab. And it was.

Something else changed during that time period that also led to grumbling about price. People stopped actually "listening" to popular music. By that I mean that from the 1950s through the 1970s, a teen or twentysomething would sit with their friends and for entertainment turn on a new LP and...just...listen. Music was entertainment in and of itself.

That wasn't true anymore in the 1980s. Pop music was either something in the background or something that accompanied a video on MTV. It simply was no longer valued in and of itself. So its price - which reflected its former use as a source of standalone entertainment - was no longer reasonable.

It's cliche to complain about the quality of 80s music. Pop music probably was worse from a musical content standpoint. But it was serving a different purpose than it did in the 50's through 70's. Pop music in the 80's was by design a vehicle for visual entertainment.

It's easy to see why the public glommed on to mp3's and pirated downloads. Pop music had lost its primacy. The existence of downloading sites meant the public didn't have to pay for something they thought of as an entertainment accessory. Then in the 2000s, the iPod came along to firmly establish the subsidiary, but ubiquitous role of pop music. It is now something you have in your ear that doesn't demand too much attention and serves the role of background mood elevator.

I think that the subsidiary role that music plays today is the big difference between music and other media. Books and movies are still sources of entertainment that command the full attention of the reader/viewer. As such they still have the same intrinsic value to the consumer that they always did. It's true that like music, books and DVDs face downward price pressure. But there doesn't seem to be quite the same mad rush to grab free and illegal digital books and movies as there was with music. Part of that difference is due to differences in format, sure. A digital movie is still hard to watch on TV and a digital book isn't for everyone. But I think part of the pause on the public is that authors, publishers and movie makers are still respected and valued.

The end result of the mad rush to free music is that the music industry is essentially dead. Yes there is, of course, still music being made. But the ability of anyone to make money off it aside from a handful of stars is gone.

The public doesn't care about this. They still have plenty of music to chose from, more than they ever had before. They make all kinds of ridiculous statements to justify the fact they aren't paying for their music. There is the "who cares about the greedy record companies" defense on the part of the public. There is the "bands get exposure through my downloading and sharing they wouldn't get otherwise" defense. They don't have to pay and get indignant about the idea that they should pay for music. The public's "best entertainment value" is now beyond ridiculously cheap. It costs nothing. As a result, it's almost a given that music businesses will lose money.

There was hope that legal digital downloads would eventually serve as a reasonable revenue source for record companies and musicians. But that isn't happening. Music licensing - for TV shows, movies and commercials - has always been a good backup source for revenue, but there has been some unexpected collateral damage from illegal downloading. Once the public began to expect that their music would cost nothing, Hollywood and ad agencies began to think the same way. They demanded a dramatic lowering of licensing fees. Music is being licensed out at about 10 percent of the old rates with the exception of things like Beatles and Sinatra tunes.

It's a wonderful time for music consumers. They can choose from a ton of music and pay nothing for it. But for music makers, free music means no revenue. A 100 year long era when a significant number of popular/folk musicians could make a living has come to an end.

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You May Deny It, But You Do Retain What You Learn In College

2011-01-31T06:00:00.000-08:00

I have a good friend who enrolled in a masters degree program after about a 20 year hiatus from school. During her second semester, for some strange reason, her degree program decided she needed to retake calculus four weeks into the semester. She hadn't taken a calculus class in 23 years and hadn't used any calculus since she received her bachelors degree.

She walked into the calculus class during that fourth week and a common anxiety dream for many people happened in real life. The class was having its first exam that day. She sat down and took the test cold. How did she do? She ended up with a B-, which put her in about the 40th percentile of the class.

I don't think she's that unusual. She's smart, sure. Lots of people are smart. She was a very good, but not great student as an undergraduate. My guess is that if you were to do this to most science majors - give them an intro calculus test after a 20 year hiatus of using higher math - they'd do more or less just as well.

I mention this because commonly I hear people say something along the lines of, "I don't remember a thing of what I learned in college. I barely studied. I had a good time. But the education? It's just a blur." Here's a softer version of that statement from the undergraduate dean (Nowicki) at my old school, Duke, that I read in a newspaper article a few days back: “But when I look back on my college experience at Tufts [University], I cannot remember much about what I learned in classes specifically... but I cannot possibly imagine being successful without [that] education."

I happen to think statements like these are bullshit. I know these statements don't apply to me. I wasn't a great student as an undergraduate. If I liked something, I paid attention. If I didn't, I'd blow off assignments and I'd pull out decent grades by doing well on tests.

I took about 35 classes as an undergraduate, and the fact is that I still retain a great deal of that information. No I can't remember specific names and dates, but the ideas and the concepts? Most of them are there 35 years later. I think that's true for many graduates. They just won't admit it.

An average baby boomer graduate of college didn't "barely study." The data say they studied on average about 20 hours a week in addition to attending class. The idea that somehow they've lost every bit of knowledge they gained after being a real student for 35 hours a week for four years is ridiculous.

Why do people discount what they learned? Why do they say something that for many has no basis in reality? I think it's because it isn't cool to admit that you have any intellectual interests. We live in a profoundly anti-intellectual country. So - like girls were taught to do when I was a kid in a crazy effort to not threaten men - people feel pressured to play dumb. Even past presidents of the US have publicly stated how pathetic they were as students in college. Look how stupid I was, they have been proud of saying. They don't use the word stupid, true. But that's what they imply.

None of these statements wash. They don't even wash for George W. Bush. Even in the era of the Gentleman's C, students put in their hours. If they didn't they would have flunked out. They read. They wrote. They learned and what they learned shaped them in ways they may not want to recognize and don't stop to identify.

Most students of today are learning as well. They don't put in as many hours studying, about one half to two thirds the number of hours of yesteryear. They are learning less, on average, but they are learning something. I'm sure, just like students of my generation, five years from now they'll boast how they spent four years being stupid. But it isn't true for most students. It never has been.

My Nominees for The Worst Critically Praised Movies of 2010

2011-01-26T06:00:00.000-08:00

I note that the Razzies for 2010 were announced a couple of days ago. They're kind of interesting, but I never go to see the movies that make their list. They're obviously bad. Why would I want to see an obviously bad movie? The fact is, though, that I do manage to see a good number of awful movies every year.

You know how it is. You go to the effort to be a careful consumer. You read the reviews. You consult rottentomatoes.com. And even then more often than not you sit in a theater and end up thinking about a half hour through a flick, huh? This turkey was widely praised? Why?

What should we call these movies that critics laud for reasons you can't fathom. The name Razzy has, of course, been taken. So has, of course, Oscar. I have to come up with another name and I know just what, too. I'm going to call my "dewards" the Bruces because ever since I was a little boy, I've hated people named Bruce. I am an unrepentant anti-Bruceite. And here are my nominees for The Bruce, the worst critically praised movie for 2010. I'm including both DVDs and stuff I saw in a cinema.

Easy A
A John Hughes kind of teen age comedy that's completely unbelievable. There are no American high schools like the one depicted here. There are no teenage girls - a kind of Juno except smarter and even more resilient and willful - like the main character, Olive. No parents are like Olive's parents either. Every once in a while, something funny does happen, but generally, the laughs just aren't there. Easy A does have a standout cast. Unfortunately their talent is wasted. Then there are the holes - huge ones - in the plot, such as it is. Maybe if you're a teen this movie will work as a light piece of comic fantasy. But if you're over 25, I think you'll be as bored as I was.

Black Swan
The best I can possibly say is that the Black Swan is a beautiful mess. The beauty comes from Natalie Portman who really does a magnificent job playing the role of a psychotic ballerina. The mess is the movie itself, which is often incomprehensible and just plain puerile in its depiction of what is necessary to pursue art. Every aspect of the movie aside from Portman's performance is very clumsy. There's a tremendous amount of handheld camera work and the end result is that the viewer (me) gets more than a little nauseated from the resulting shaky images. The score - aside from Swan Lake - is so loud and over the top in its orchestration that it takes you away from the film. The dialogue is something out of a high school made play. Sometimes the scenes were so ridiculous that I found myself laughing out loud. Did I say Portman was good? She's the only possible reason to see this disaster.

Babies
OK, there are a bunch of babies that a troupe of filmmakers take tons of footage of from pre-birth to the point where they start walking. The babies are cute, sure. The filmmakers have culled 80 minutes of the cutest footage. At about the 30 minute mark - which is when they show a baby obviously having a bowel movement - I thought, this is enough. I've seen enough cute baby footage for the day if not the month. All in all, this would make a great Youtube video. But a movie? Nope. This one is strictly for those who are baby crazy.

Inception
If I were 12 years old I'd think this movie was boffo. But I'm not. I'm an adult. And as an adult, I thought this movie was dopey and about as exciting - despite all the crashes, bullets, blood and mayhem - as listening to someone recite the phone book. The dialogue is so wooden that it's unintentionally hilarious. The soundtrack borrows so much from Beethoven (7th symphony), Mahler (Das Lied von der Erde), and Wagner (Die Walkure) that Hans Zimmer should be arrested for grand musical theft. If I had known you could do this, I'd have become a film composer myself! Then there are the holes in the plot, those major flaws that Hollywood never seems to think anyone notices (but we do!). For example, the lead character, DiCaprio, will do anything for a chance to go home to the US to see his kids, who live with his parents. But the guy is wealthy. Why doesn't he just fly them to whatever country he lives in? He has a gazillion airline miles undoubtedly. What's he saving them for? Mix a little bit of The Matrix with that old chestnut of a movie Fantastic Voyage, and you get this sci-fi hokum minus Raquel Welch's boobs and curves. On the plus side the acting is leagues above The Matrix. DiCaprio does a good job with what he's given as does Gordon-Levitt in his trusty sidekick role. Just like in almost all sci-fi, the women are silly caricatures of real people. Christopher Nolan started out with Memento, a clever low budget psychological thriller. With Inception, he spent 200 million dollars. The result is an overblown mess that seemed far, far longer than two and a half hours in length.

It's Complicated
It's not that complicated. The movie is silly, chick flick fluff, a superficial look at relationships with a couple of nice sight gags. One of those sight gags, at about the 90 minute mark, is so good that I'm giving this movie two stars. The flip side is that you have to wait 90 minutes to get to it. It's Complicated is too long by 30 minutes and everyone is so cleaned up and shiny that the movie is wholly unbelievable. Yes, Meryl Streep is wonderful and Alec Baldwin is surprisingly good at doing physical comedy. Without those two quality performances, this movie would have been a true snooze. Imagine Kathryn Hepburn and Cary Grant trying to carry a screwball comedy with cringeworthy dialogue and you'd get something close to this. The score by Hans Zimmer is painfully bad and repetitious; it's pure elevator music. I can only guess that the writer/director wanted the music to be painfully bad and so that's what Zimmer delivered. They paid a fortune, as well, for some of the songs in the background (Beach Boys, Tom Petty, etc.). I'm guessing the music licensing budget was well over a million dollars; the money would have been better spent hiring a script doctor.

500 Days of Summer
The script is painfully trite. The cinematography is painfully predictable. It's almost as if they gave a bunch of precocious eighth graders a few million dollars and said make a romantic comedy involving twenty somethings. I kept watching - the two leads are in love and wow they go through a tunnel of love; they're not in love and wow it's raining - and thinking oh my this is one long cliche. What saves this movie from complete boredom is the acting. The lines they have to recite are complete bathos, but these actors are excellent at finding some way to change the rhythms of speech to make it watchable. The leads obviously know what they are doing. But the creators of this movie don't understand the human heart worth beans. To be fair, it's very hard to do romantic comedy. Usually it's forced and unbelievable. This one is forced, unbelievable and just plain infantile.

A Serious Man
Beevis and Butthead do Job. This is a very non-serious movie, a sophomoric look at a story that has been examined by many serious people for many, many years. Right from the start, something is very wrong. It opens with a non-sequitur, a pseudo-Yiddish fable set somewhere in the Polish-Ukrainian Jewish Pale. The lead has no command of the Yiddish; he's just mouthing a transliteration. The Chassidic rabbi speaks with a Lithuanian accent. The tale is something out of Zombieland. The movie then fast-forwards to the American Midwest, circa 1967. This is a territory I know well. I lived this life. In an episodic way, the Coen Brothers try to create a dream-like, modern, satiric look at Job. Ignoring all the Jewish self-loathing in this movie, making a satire of Job is a lousy idea. It isn't funny. Neither is this movie. The Coen Brothers are very hit and miss type of film makers. They do best when they keep it light. This one is a definite miss.

Big Fan
I don't know what to make of this movie. It's certainly not a comedy. The cinematography is very rudimentary and the plot and writing have a very 1960s feel. The question I have is why should I care about the lead character? He's emotionally stunted, living a bleak life. You can feel sorry for him, but aside from pity what am I as an observer supposed to feel? There was a book from the 1960's with a similar vibe, A Fan's Notes by Frederick Exley. In that book, the main character - like the main character in this movie, he's a sports nut obsessed with a football player - had a working brain and insights. Here the main character is just a dope. I kept thinking that this movie was a remake of the old Ernest Borgnine shmaltzfest, Marty, with every possible positive aspect tossed out on purpose. This movie is depressing for depression's sake.

And the winner for this year's highly praised turkey, The Bruce, is...Inception. Rarely has so much money been spent on something so ridiculous.

No More Sad Songs, Sad Movies or Sad Books, Please, Part 2

2011-01-24T06:00:00.000-08:00

Since I last wrote on this topic, I went to see one of the very movies I said I'd ignore, Black Swan. OK, I'm not very consistent. But I have sort of a good excuse. My sweetie was out of town for the week, I have a bunch of free movie tickets and keep getting more, I was getting cabin fever working on a manuscript, I needed a two hour break, there weren't that many movie choices, and Natalie Portman has been getting rave reviews for her performance.

Ms. Portman was, indeed, wonderful. The movie? Oh my. Yes, it was very sad. But it was also very lame. I closed my eyes a bunch of times during the gorier parts. Then there was the sex. I happen to like movie sex scenes much more than movie gore. Ms. Portman did for masturbation what Meg Ryan did for fake orgasms in When Harry Met Sally. Sad to say that was the highlight of the movie.

I never suspended my disbelief. In fact, I'm thinking the whole movie was an extended dream sequence. The major theme of the movie - that to pursue art you have to be tortured, unhappy and driven - left me cold. I don't believe that is the case at all.

I will, in fact, still go to see a sad movie or read a sad book now and then. But the bar is very, very high. I watched The White Ribbon last year and was mesmerized. That was true of Winters Bone as well. The book Nothing To Envy was depressing as hell, but I couldn't put it down. Ditto for Russell Banks' Continental Drift. And Ian McEwan's Antonement literally made me cry as I was reading.

So there are exceptions. I just don't seek the depressing anymore. The fact is that there is a bias in art. If you're a serious artist, you're supposed to be depressing. I don't get that bias. Comedy is viewed as some lesser thing. I disagree. But the end result is that if you're interested in any art that is carefully made, you're always awash in works full of anguish. You can't avoid them.

A couple of months ago, James Wood railed in the New Yorker about the British comic novel. In particular, he railed about two novels of Howard Jacobson, the Finkler Question - which won the Booker Prize this past year - and Kalooki Nights. I've read Kalooki Nights, which I wouldn't call a great novel. It was a bit clumsy both in its comic touches and its construction, but it did have a lot of heart and its affecting moments. James Wood wouldn't agree, but I'm afraid Mr. Wood is just a sourpuss. Or he doesn't get or appreciate shtick and misdirection, classic aspects of Jewish humor. He's entitled, of course, to have his personal taste. If he wants to be miserable and stick with art steeped in misery that's just fine with me.

Yesterday, Robert Pinsky (my latest Facebook friend) mentioned to me the late great writer (and former colleague) Reynolds Price's classification of Southern writers: Good Ol' Boys, Southern Gentlemen, and Rascapalions. Jewish writers can be similarly divided into bulvans, kvetchers, and tachshits (musclemen, complainers, and impish troublemakers). Mr. Wood appreciates kvetchers like Philip Roth. Mr. Jacobson is, on the other hand, by and large a tachshit. I happen to appreciate tachshits. Kvetchers like Roth? Not so much.

I like shtick and misdirection. Like is actually too modest a description. Love is more true. Ironic shtick and misdirection are even better. It doesn't have to be Jewish. I don't know how Mr. Wood feels about V.S. Naipaul, but in one of my favorite novels, the very Dickensian A House for Ms. Biswas, there is a section where the Biswas family opens up a little grocery. The enterprise takes off, easily stealing business from the established store. All is well until someone else has the same idea as the Biswas family. The customers, in search of the latest/greatest purchasing thrill flee the Biswas' shop to the even newer store. That's just fabulous shtick. You laugh and cry at the same time.

Maybe the truth is that my love of the sad and depressing was just a phase, albeit a forty year long one. I've always liked to laugh first and foremost. If a movie doesn't have a single joke in it, I'll likely never watch it more than once. On my iPod, the popular music I have stored is dominated by clever musicals like Sweeney Todd (if you don't think this musical is funny much of the time, I don't know what to say) and Guys and Dolls, zany shtick like Mickey Katz, and a boat load of Tom Lehrer. For me, a clever novelty song beats just about anything else out there. Even my old 45's are dominated by novelty songs although I must admit that nowadays things like Leader of the Laundromat don't quite hit my funny bone the way they did when I was eight years old.

I can't remember which comic said that comedy was a response to anger and despair so profound and thorough that you couldn't deal with it directly. You had to find another way. I don't think that's particularly right. Comedy is a salve, though, for life's difficulties and it can be a pure expression of joy. For me it's actually the highest form of art. Anyone can kvetch. But to find that sliver that makes someone smile or laugh, that's work, serious work indeed.

What Would Rashi Say?

2011-01-17T06:00:00.000-08:00

I grew up in the most provincial of settings. In our home, we spoke a mix of English and Yiddish that no one who didn't come from Jewish Eastern Europe could possibly understand. I went to Hebrew school four days a week taught by black hats from New York City. They came to Milwaukee to try and make some money teaching Torah and Talmud, something they couldn't do in the major league Jewish community of their home town. Some, even though they were born in the US, barely spoke English. Then there was our rabbi, a sage arbiter of all disputes involving family and business in our little community of war survivors. I don't use the word sage lightly. The man truly had devaykus, the spirit of God inside him.

Our rules of living were based less on Western law than they were on the source of much but certainly not all of Western law, the Torah and Talmud. Our community behaved as if we knew better than American judges and cops about what was good and bad, and what required punishment and what didn't. I felt the same way.

I still have those rules of the old neighborhood embedded in me. They are the first thing my mind conjures up when something bad happens in my interactions with others and with groups of others. I instantly think, WWRS, What Would Rashi Say, even though I haven't believed in God in four decades.

Jewish law is amazingly intricate. The rabbis of old spent an incredible amount of time discussing contingencies (most possible, some not) in human interactions and how they should be governed based on interpretations of the Torah. Some of those contingencies require little or no interpretation. They are fairly explicitly laid out in the Torah.

For example, and most pertinent to this post, are the rules of borrowing and safekeeping. Suppose for instance, a friend gives you his car because he's going away for awhile. You take good care of it, but something bad happens. Let's say for example, you park the car on the street next to your house, and some drunk drives into it while it's parked, smashing the door. Do you owe your friend anything?

The answer can be found in Exodus. "If a man gives a donkey, an ox, a sheep or any other animal to his neighbor for safekeeping and it dies or is injured or is taken away while no one is looking, the issue between them will be settled by the taking of an oath before the LORD that the neighbor did not lay hands on the other person's property. The owner is to accept this, and no restitution is required." The car is like a donkey. The car is damaged while no one is looking. The friend didn't create the damage. He's off the hook. End of story.

In fact, the above incident happened to me when I was in graduate school. Not with a donkey or course, but with a friend's car. He gave it to me because he was going out of town for awhile. I parked it safely, I thought, in front of my house. Some drunk bashed in the door with his car. I even knew who the drunk was. I confronted him. He wouldn't confess. By Jewish law, I was off the hook.

But...here's the rub. I don't live in my little Jewish shtetl of war survivors anymore. I live fully in the Western World dominated by modern law. And while my mind may instantly think, WWRS, Rashi doesn't play well outside of the shtetl world. The fact is that my friend isn't Jewish and even if he were, wouldn't likely understand or appreciate me invoking Exodus and Jewish law. The car was in my hands. Someone smashed it while it was in my possession. If I valued my friendship, I'd get that car fixed.

Plus, this event is a grey zone in the law, actually. I probably should have parked the car off the street somehow, just to be extra sure it was safe. Also, I did use the vehicle and didn't just house it. I barely hesitated, said to hell with Jewish law, and sent the car to the repair shop. Thirty years after this incident we're still good friends, partly as a result of me ignoring my instincts and doing what was "right" in terms of American law and culture.

Many years later, something like this happened to me again. This time is wasn't a car but a friend's laptop. He's from Lebanon. It was an old laptop. I borrowed it for a week. I turned it on one day and through no fault of my own, the hard drive crashed. Sh*t happens. The hard drive crashed during normal use; all I did was turn the thing on. Rashi likely would say I owed this friend nothing. He says about this situation, "Just as [the animal's] dying naturally is something he cannot prevent, so, too, the case of injury and captivity [must be such] that he had no way of preventing it." Or as one of my old rabbis might say, "Suppose you borrow a bat. You're just using it at a game. You swing and the bat cracks. You apologize, but you don't have to get your friend a new bat. That's just normal use. The bat was probably ready to crack. But...suppose you strike out and then out of anger pound the bat against the ground. It cracks. Now, you're liable."

But I knew my friend wouldn't see it that way. Exodus isn't exactly anything my friend values as a legal document. He wanted his laptop fixed. I agreed. My old rabbis and maybe even Rashi might have rolled their eyes, but I ignored Jewish law and followed the rules of America. When in Rome do as the Romans or something like that.

But recently, I put my foot down. I had borrowed a DVD of a Yiddish movie from a Jewish library. It was old and heavily used (Who knew people watched Yiddish movies?). As I pulled the DVD out of its case, the brittle thing cracked in two. I brought back the DVD and a week later was sent an email telling me I was being fined $36.

Again, Exodus came to mind. And this time, I wasn't dealing with a Christian or a Muslim. This was a Jewish library. And Jewish libraries, even ones in the United States, should follow Jewish law. Yes, the DVD was cracked. But it was like the donkey in Exodus. It was damaged through no fault of mine. I owed them nothing.

I wrote back the library telling them their rules on damages were not halachic (adhering to Jewish law) in the least. I quoted Exodus. The Jewish interpretation of this rule of the Torah is very explicit:

"SHO'EL - the borrower is one who borrows an item in order to use it and becomes obligated to take care of it. He is liable for damages in cases of Peshi'ah (negligence), theft or loss, and Ones (an unavoidable accident). He is exempt from damages only in a case of "Meisah Machmas Melachah," when the item was damaged in the normal manner of usage, or if the item was damaged while its owner was working for the borrower ("Be'alav Imo"). The intention is to use the item but not to guard the object."

How did the library respond? How could they respond? The library let me off of course. I owed them nothing. For once, maybe the only time in my life, the rules of the shtetl of war survivors where I grew up actually applied to the real world. Hooray! In the end, I also wrote the library a check for seventy two dollars so they could buy a new DVD or two of their choice. After all they are a charity service. I think that both my old rabbis and Rashi would have approved. All is well except for one thing: the library emailed me (as I was typing this post, actually) to say they don't want my donation. It wouldn't be right, they've told me. I have one response to that. What would Rashi say?

No More Sad Songs, Sad Movies or Sad Books, Please

2011-01-12T06:00:00.000-08:00

I was at a concert last week where three young men from Brooklyn took klezmer music - something that's designed for weddings and other simchas - and turned it on its head. They used the basic building blocks of the genre and improvisation to create something new and hip, which in this case meant something utterly disturbing and depressing. To make matters even more dark, they started to throw in poetry from a despairing Yiddish poet of the early 20th century into the musical mix - never mind that as far as I can tell all early 20th century Yiddish poets were despairing and depressing - although it was clear the orator/singer didn't really know Yiddish.

The room was packed with a lot of old Jewish people mixed with college students. No one looked at all happy to hear this slit-my-wrist music although I'll give the players credit for decent musicianship. At about the forty minute mark, someone I know - a Russian émigré - shouted out in frustration, "sphiel a fraylach," (play a happy dance tune), which is I guess the Yiddish equivalent of screaming "play Freebird." The trio of musicians was not amused and more importantly, didn't oblige.

There was a time, particularly as a teen, when I loved stuff like this. The more depressing the music was, the better I liked it. That was true with movies. It was true with books, too. My parents were not at all happy about my artistic taste. They hated anything that wasn't suffused with happiness.

Their logic was life was hard. Who needed to be reminded of that while paying good money to see a show or movie? You went to forget, have a good time, and go home with a smile on your face. If they had been at that concert last week, and heard my acquaintance demand from the peanut gallery that happy music be played, they would have nodded their heads in complete agreement.

As a teen, I would have been appalled by such a request at a concert. As a teen, I was appalled by my parents taste in art, too. It was sooooo shallow. I, in the absurd generosity of youth, cut them some slack though because they had lived through war and, from experience, knew what real life was about. But me? I wanted to know about real life in all its misery. I didn't want to avoid the darkness. That was what art was about after all.

But now, at my august age, I've moved over to the show me some happiness side of things. And when I heard, "sphiel a fraylach" at that concert, I had to suppress the urge to shout out, "Eyre is gerecht. Ich geheryt geneeck off dus dreck. Shpiel eppes underish!" (He's right. I've heard enough of this crap. Play something different!)

I've become allergic to sad songs. Ditto for sad movies. Ditto for sad books. Take the big book of the year last year, Freedom, for instance. I've looked at it in the library and in bookstores. As a teen, I would have eagerly gobbled it up and enjoyed every page. But now? I read Franzen's last novel several years ago. It was about a f*cked up American Christian family, and it was well done but depressing as hell. This new novel is also about a f*cked up American Christian family. Do I really want to spend my time reading what is probably a different telling of the same story?

Life is hard. I'm sorry but living is hard enough. It takes work, lots of work, to be happy and stay that way. I'm not going to learn anything of value from fictional depressing Christian white people that I don't already know from thirty years of reading depressing novels and growing up in a Jewish family prone to screaming, dysfunction and depression. Next book please.

Then there are movies. Black Swan is all the rage right now. I'm going to skip that one, thank you very much. Why do I want to watch a crazy ballet dancer battle with her demons? That doesn't sound like very much fun to me plus the director isn't exactly the most nuanced and intelligent artist out there; he tends to be puerile. Then there is Blue Valentine. A couple has a bad, bad break up. I could have seen that movie for free at Pixar's screening room before it came out and I love to go to Pixar's screening room. What am I going get from watching two wonderful actors depress the hell out of me (and be especially effective at it because the leads are two of the best young actors in the business)?

I'll finish this up with my next post.

Uncle Stuey Votes for the 2011 Grammys

2011-01-10T06:00:00.000-08:00

Grammy nominations are a strange thing. It's as if they came from a random play generator. There's a lot of just plain awful music that gets nominated. Still, like any random selection, there's usually something decent. I do like to go online and listen to the stuff to find the occasional gem.

I only vote in categories where I've found something that's at least somewhat interesting and listenable. Here's what I liked on the ballot this year. Note that my votes line up with the winners about 10 percent of the time.

Album of the Year
Arcade Fire The Suburbs
Joyful, exuberant, quirky and depressing all at the same time.

Song of the Year
Miranda Lambert House The Built Me
Allen Shamblin knows how to write an effortless lyric. Sorry, just can’t vote for a song with the hook F*** You.

Best New Artist
Esperanza Spalding Chamber Music Society
A real musician in this category and one you definitely should see live. Oh yeah, there’s another person in this category…Justin somebody or other.

Pop Performance By A Duo or Group
Train Hey, Soul Sister (live)
Writing a song this catchy and infectious is very hard to do.

Traditional Pop Vocal Album
Barbra Streisand Love Is The Answer
Because my mom would have wanted me to vote this way.

Alternative Album
Arcade Fire
The Suburbs
Joyful, exuberant, quirky and depressing all at the same time.

Male R&B Vocal Performance
Kem Why Would You Stay
Nice hook, old school, almost as good at Al Green.

Female Country Vocal
Gretchen Wilson I’d Love To Be Your Last
Yeah, the country white trash act gets old, but this girl can absolutely sing.

Male Country Vocal
Macon Jamey Johnson
Mr. Johnson is the best country singer/writer out there right now by a mile.

Country Perfomance By A Duo
Little Big Town Little White Church
One of the few fun and interesting songs on the country charts this year.

Country Album
The Country Song
I'll say it again. Mr. Johnson is the best country singer/writer out there right now by a mile.

Best Jazz Vocal Album
Dee Dee Bridgewater
Eleanora Fagan (1915-1959): To Billie With Love From Dee Dee
Lots of thought went into this album and the musicianship is first rate.

Improvised Jazz Solo
Keith Jarrett Body And Soul
He’s been doing this kind of stuff so long and so well he’s almost up there with Sonny Rollins.

Jazz Instrumental Album
Clayton Brothers The New Song And Dance
Straight ahead jazz done with some verve.

Contemporary Blues Album
Bettye LaVette
Interpretations: The British Rock Songbook
Oh that voice and phrasing, very yummy even if the songs are sometimes cheesy.

Traditional World Music
Ali Farka Toure & Toumani Diabate
Ali And Toumani
Very chill, but still fairly interesting.

Musical Show Album
Original Broadway Cast With Barbara Cook, Vanessa Williams, Tom Wopat & Others
Sondheim On Sondheim
The singers here are absolutely the best of the best; I wish I had seen this live.

Classical Crossover
Matt Haimovitz
Meeting Of The Spirits
Pretty much defines what this genre should be.

Sometimes Ashes Should Stay Ashes

2011-01-05T06:00:00.000-08:00

A while back I got a call from an entrepreneur. He'd made his money by opening a bunch of coffee shops back in the 1980s when lattes became all the rage "They cost seventeen cents to make and then you sold them for two bucks. Now that's capitalism," he said. He called me because he had a new high profit margin idea. Higher education. He was going to open up an online university.

He'd identified a school - a private college with a beautiful campus in a cute town - that had gone bankrupt. He was going to buy it. That was going to be his base, the pretty bricks and mortar that would be featured in pictures in his online catalog. Mr. Latte needed some legitimacy in the academic community, someone with a Ph.D. who was a professor at a top notch school who would lead the academic side of things. That's where I would come in. He wanted to meet me. I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I didn't want the job, but I definitely wanted to meet this guy. He sounded fun.

Mr. Latte flew in with an investor - a retired military officer with a permanent scowl - and we chewed the fat over brunch at an airport hotel. It turned out Mr. Latte had read just about everything I'd written about higher education. Since I've forgotten most of my, for lack of a better word, oeuvre, I didn't realize at first that lots of times his conversation consisted of parroting my words from years back.

I have no idea what happened to Mr. Latte or his plans. Maybe he bought his school. Maybe not. He seemed more of a pie in the sky kind of person than a doer, but first impressions can be way off. His idea was actually a great one. Many companies, including the Washington Post, have mined higher education for profit over the years. Lots of profit.

The most prominent among them is the Apollo Group, the company that owns the University of Phoenix. The story of the phoenix, the mythical golden bird that rises from ashes, is well known. But when it comes to the University of Phoenix the story isn't apt. The University of Phoenix isn't anything of beauty. It's a putrid diploma mill that takes advantage of hundreds of thousands of people - most prominently women - who don't have much money and loads them up with student loan debt in exchange for the potential of a college degree. I got an email from a writer for the University of Phoenix yesterday asking me to talk about college grades for an in-house publication. I said no. Life is about the company you keep.

As a chronicler of grades in higher education, I sometimes get asked the question, "What about grades at for-profit schools like Phoenix?" The answer is always I don't know their grades. I've tried to find out. For example, twice I've called the University of Phoenix to ask about their grading policies. Twice I've been disconnected after a few minutes of discussion and being told that they would get back to me with the information I'm requesting. There are nicer and more professional ways of saying no.

The literature of the University of Phoenix says there is a recommended grade distribution for instructors (that instructors don't have to follow) in their college catalog. I've looked through that catalog. It's not there. But the catalog does have one tidbit of interest on the topic of grading. It notes that to receive honors a student must graduate with a GPA of 3.85 or higher. That's a very high GPA cutoff. At Yale for example, which has rampant grade inflation (average GPA in excess of 3.5), the GPA cutoff for honors is about 3.75. Putting those two pieces of information together suggests that the average GPA of a graduate of Phoenix is among the highest average graduating GPAs in the nation.

GPAs for graduates of Phoenix are probably, on average, considerably higher than they are at Harvard, MIT, Duke, Dartmouth, Michigan and at just about any top notch school. The quality of the students though is a mystery since Phoenix doesn't publish that information. How smart are those students? They're the types of students dumb enough to pay $12,690 a year for an education inferior to that which can be obtained from a community college at one tenth the cost. All you need is a GED. Basically, if you can fog a mirror and can get a student loan, you can be a University of Phoenix student. Despite the apparent easy grading, graduation rates at Phoenix are sixteen percent according to the Department of Education, less than one third the national average. I'm guessing that it isn't academic rigor that keeps students from graduating. It's the time involved and the price of the diploma.

Phoenix has an annual revenue of about four billion dollars and over 85 percent of that money comes from student loans. Essentially, you and I through our taxes make Phoenix profitable because we pay for the Pell grants, loan subsidies and get stuck with the bill from defaulted loans. The rest of Phoenix's revenue comes from the poor people who have to pay off their loans even though they probably didn't graduate.

What about University of Phoenix graduates? Are they employed? What salaries do they earn? One of their graduates is Shacquille O'Neal. He has done very well for himself it's true, but it's not because of his degree. The median income of Phoenix business majors who have jobs is about 50 to 55K. In comparison, if you went to Arizona State and majored in business, you'd earn on average about 20K more per year.

Let's do a a simple consumer-based comparison of University of Phoenix and Arizona State. In-state tuition is $8100 at Arizona State. It has a 52% graduation rate. So all in all, going to ASU is cheaper and yields a better outcome in terms of the potential for a degree and future wages. If ASU were a bottle of wine it would be a decent 12 dollar cabernet. In comparison, Phoenix is MD 20/20 at a ripoff price of 18 dollars in a local convenience store. If ASU were a car, it would be a late model Toyota Corolla. Phoenix? A 1974 Chevy Vega. OK, enough with jokey comparisons.

Of course, University of Phoenix offers the flexibility of on-line education. At a place like ASU, you are required to show up at a real bricks and mortar school at specific times. That requirement does create a major logistical hurdle for many. But given the cost of attending the University of Phoenix and the poor outcomes of its students, the advantage of time flexibility is an illusion.

Conservatives love to taut the virtues of private enterprise and private education. Supposedly government can do no right in anything but military matters. But the most prominent example of just what private enterprise does in the realm of higher education isn't a pretty sight. It offers poor quality at a high price and burdens its gullible students with debt.

This nation's economic greatness is, despite conservative rhetoric, built on a vast network of public schools from the elementary level on up through college. That network of schools has provided us with an educated workforce that was once the envy of the rest of the world. Over the last thirty years, we have through government policy chosen to, bit by bit, let much of our educational infrastructure decay. Schools like the University of Phoenix have taken advantage of that policy change and have reaped tens of billions of dollars in revenue. In return, what have they provided? Two things: poor education and an economic burden on our tax rolls.

The Permanent Have Nots

2011-01-03T06:00:00.000-08:00

Allow me to be pessimistic. Vo den? But while my own life is without - lucky me - any real difficulty and I'm, more or less, a happy sort, I do worry that this country of mine has undergone a profound shift over the last 30 years that will make life perpetually miserable for many, as much as 20 percent of our population, and just plain difficult for another 30 percent. They will have limited prospects - no matter how hard they try - of overcoming their dire economic straits. In contrast, people like me - because the system is rigged to benefit those already prosperous - will have to be true idiots not to do better and better.

Here's a sobering graph for you. It comes from Population Bulletin Vol. 63, No. 2.

The US has, since the 1950s, increasingly relied on non-manufacturing jobs to keep its workforce employed. The trend really took off in the 1970s, which is, not coincidently, when wages for the middle class stagnated. We now employ less of our workforce in manufacturing (on a percentage basis) than any other Western nation.

We don't make stuff. Instead we push paper. Much of our economic growth is being driven by the financial industry, which does not do much of anything productive for society. Currently 56% of all trading volume related to stocks consists of high frequency trading. Securities are bought and sold by computers in a matter of seconds or less. That's just a high speed casino. Another avenue where Wall Street earns much of its money is by creating new financial instruments that go pop every ten years or so. Bankers, when they fail as a result of these pops, get big time bailouts from the government.

If you're a banker, you're doing great this year. If you're a white, college-educated worker who earned 125K or more in 2007, the chances are that you are still comfortably employed and doing fabulous as well. But what about the have nots, those whose parents weren't wealthy and connected, who didn't get to go to a fancy college, state flagship or private, where they would meet other children of the wealthy and connected? Chances are, they are struggling.

Worse yet, chances are they will continue to struggle for the foreseeable future. That's true for the old. It's also true of the young. Even if the young have nots manage to beat the odds, go the commuter college route and earn a degree, their financial prospects are limited. They can be expected to earn tens of thousands of dollars less per year than those who go to the fancy schools. The median income of a CSU-Northridge graduate is about $63,000 dollars a year. Just try and raise a family on that income in Los Angeles. And if, as is more than likely, the young have nots don't go to college and earn a degree, their financial situation will be, on average, much worse.

We are currently undergoing a financial recovery. Stocks are up, which is great for people like me who can afford to invest in the stock market, but does nothing for those that can't. One reason stocks are up is that the Fed has created a stock market bubble by making bonds and CDs yield so little interest that people with cash are more or less forced to throw money at equities. Another reason stocks are up is that corporate profits are up; corporations have figured out how to use less and less of the American workforce to make their bottom lines fatter and fatter.

So jobs are not up and good paying jobs haven't been "up" for over 30 years. We compensated for that fact by adding more women to the workforce.

That little trick worked until the late 1990s. Then the percentage of working women plateaued and perhaps even declined a bit in subsequent years. The middle class family is cooked.

I don't see how we're going change anything for the have nots in this country. The rhetoric from DC is that we have to create a more educated workforce. This makes some sense from a historical standpoint. Education is what created our country's pre-1970's financial boom. But how much more quality education can we squeeze out of our populace? Colleges are already filled with people who need remedial classes.

We can likely increase the number of people with associate degrees, but really now, how much is that going to help? Corporations will continue to prefer to hire overseas where the salaries are a fraction of what they are here. High tech jobs are increasingly going that route, which is a key reason why Silicon Valley employment has been stagnant for the last 16 years.

I fear we have created a permanent two-tier economic system in this country. There are the educated people who went to the right schools and have good paying jobs with 401Ks (another reason why the stock market bubble keeps inflating) and decent health insurance. Then there are the rest, who at best struggle with lousy jobs with few benefits (and it's likely their children will struggle as well). Basically, we've created an economy where you're either at least upper middle class or you're shut out. I don't see any effort out there to change the loss of economic mobility in America.

11 Good Things: My Favorite Books and Movies For The Year

2010-12-19T12:46:00.000-08:00

In no particular order.

Nothing To Envy
There are few books like this written today: concise, well-researched, plainly yet effectively written, and free of hyperbole. This book is a very personal account of six lives in the failed state of North Korea. The level of deprivation and humiliation these people endure is heartbreaking. The book reads more like an outstanding piece of social anthropology than it does cut and dried journalism. The author is to be commended for her ability to get inside both the hearts and minds of the people she has interviewed.

I think that Nothing To Envy is a landmark book, a study of a culture and political system gone horribly wrong, that will be read for decades. As the author notes, North Korea is the last of its kind, a state with an entrenched despotic, supposedly Marxist, leader who denies not only basic freedoms but also the basic provisions necessary to maintain any quality of life. Reading this book in the comfort of my own well heated home, I felt both pity for those that live in North Korea and anger for the inability of the rest of the world to do anything while North Korea's citizens starve to death. The impact of this book is both emotional and intellectual. I highly recommend this book to anyone concerned about the social welfare of people and the role that government plays in people's lives.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
This is a finely told and absorbing tale about scientific research and the real lives that can be impacted by that research in unexpected ways. There are really two major stories here. One is a straightforward science story about how Henrietta Lacks' cancer cells have been a prominent part of biological research for over 50 years. The other is how the Lacks family, in particular Henrietta's sole surviving daughter, have been pushed, pulled and torn by that research. It's the human drama of the Lacks family that makes this book special.

The language is simple and this book is very accessible. It could be read by middle school children as well as adults. The author spent many years collecting the data and organizing this book. The hard work and careful thought shows throughout. The book is seamless.

In terms of rating this book, the only aspect that I thought detracted from the story was the author's too common presence in the narrative. Sometimes that presence was necessary and enhancing, but there are sections here and there, particularly toward the end of the book, when the author's personal interactions pulled me away from the story of the Lacks family. That's a minor quibble, though.

Finishing The Hat
I'm a lyricist so this is more than just a book for me. It's is an essential text. Right now, I have a library copy, but it's clear that I'm going to have to buy my own. It's all there, lyrics from 28 years worth of writing in one volume. No this isn't poetry as Sondheim makes clear. But if you want to know the essentials behind world-class lyric writing, careful reading of these lyrics will prove rewarding. I know almost all of the tidbits included with the lyrics, but if you're just a casual fan of musicals, you probably don't know them and many are amusing. The asides and basic lessons about writing in the margins are probably best for a general audience.

Sondheim comes across as a generous priss in his writings in the margins and by that I mean he's not at all afraid to show the good and bad of his personality. He is as smart, reflective and analytical as he is talented. If you are in the business of music or musical theater this is a must buy. If you love musicals it will be a fun if kind of geeky read. If you like to understand the minds of engaging eccentrics practicing their craft, you'll find this book amusing even if you ignore the lyrics. Finishing the Hat is not designed as a beach or casual read. All in all, I'd say this book is best for careful readers who like musical theater.

Super Sad True Love Story
My review copy of this book had been sitting on my night stand for about a month. Part of me just didn't even want to look at this thing. I'd always found Shteyngart to be an agonizing read because with every paragraph you could sense the unfulfilled potential. He was a writer smug and satisfied to go for the cheap joke, more comfortable to amuse than enlighten. I would read his books and get angry at the misuse of talent.

This book, however, is different. It presents a fully realized world that while ostensibly is about the future, is really about the aliterate and hyper-"mediazed" world of today. It's also funny as hell. At times, Shteyngart does get too clever for his own good (this book could have used some better editing), but you can forgive that, because the writing is, overall, splendid. The only bad thing I can really say about this book is that it has the stupidest title I've encountered in quite some time.

Shteyngart uses an epistolary format to paint a romance between a Korean valley girl and his alter-ego, a balding uber-kvetchy-shzlubby-mensch, that is as believable as it is hilarious. There are some set scenes - when the charming couple meet both sets of parents - that are raucously funny and trenchant. It's Jane Austen meets Thomas Pynchon meets Gorky. Whatever it is, this book is wholly original.

It may be the case that this book will not resonate with everyone. In fact, it may be the case that this book will only resonate with bookish children of Eastern European immigrants. It is loaded with the irony-infused dyspepsia intrinsic to Eastern European culture that I know from experience isn't to most American's taste. But for someone like me, this book was a wonderful ride.

Winter's Bone
Dark and gritty, Winter's Bone takes you to a bleak and emotionally intricate world, the hardscrabble life of the Ozarks. A teen-age girl, already burdened with the job of taking care of her younger siblings and her sick mother on a subsistence farm, is placed in dire straits by the irresponsible and dangerous acts of her father. The girl's journey is the stuff of Greek tragedy. Jennifer Lawrence and John Hawkes give fine, nuanced and entirely believable performances in a movie that is riveting, the most powerful I've seen in years. I walked out of the theater emotionally stunned, as did my wife. The story is simple and the budget for this movie obviously was small, but Winter's Bone slowly takes you in and never lets go. I'm sure not many will see this film. It's subtle, somber and not at all designed for the mass-market. But if you like serious well-made films that are far from the standard stuff of Hollywood, you'll find Winter's Bone to be an unforgettable tale, exquisitely told.

Toy Story 3
An old fashioned yarn that somehow miraculously borrows from movies like Stalag 17 (which Chicken Run also did) and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in a way that's both fun and suitable for kids over six or seven (I think the little ones might be scared to death), Toy Story 3 had my wife crying over the pull at your heartstrings ending. That's right, a grown woman was crying during a kids movie, she was so emotionally involved with the characters. The Toy Story series, which sank a bit with Toy Story 2, ends on a high note with the third installment. Here the characters have to come to terms with their purpose: should they be loyal to their grown owner Andy or should they be used for enjoyment by someone young who loves toys. Along their journey, both emotional and real, there are chase scenes galore, pathos and humor. The quality of the animation is absolutely superb. We saw the movie in 3D - which was well done - but 2D would be just as good because the story and emotional lives of these little toys carries the day.

Beaufort
Take Hurt Locker (and the director of Hurt Locker undoubtedly saw and borrowed from Beaufort), add sharper dialogue, remove some cliches, maintain realism and you get this. Beaufort is a gritty, realistic look at modern war, which often is mired in ambiguity and pointlessness. There's an old Israeli movie about the 1948 War of Independence, Hill 24 Doesn't Answer, and in some ways Beaufort is an updating of that one. Here a group of very young men is stuck on a hill, symbolically an ancient fortress, being bombarded every day by Hezbollah. Their presence serves no purpose, they know it serves no purpose, and yet they must "soldier" on. Their interactions are emotionally both difficult to watch and captivating. You won't find a more intelligent war movie out there.

The White Ribbon
Normally, I don’t like long dark subtitled movies, but this one is very well crafted. It reminded me of a cleaner version of Werner Herzog movies of 30 or so years ago. The pacing is deliberately slow and the film is in black and white, but somehow I found myself interested the whole way through. A bleak town in early 20th century German has dark secrets. Will they be uncovered? The language is sharp and the cinematography is alluring and occasionally intentionally repelling. The is a very quiet and compelling film with memorable performances by some child actors. If you like long, art house films, youll probably like this one. If you want some happy Hollywood blockbuster, you’ll likely hate this film.

Zombieland
This is the best zombie film I've seen in a few years. Then again, it's the only zombie film I've seen in a few years. OK, enough joking. This is really a comedy, not really a scary film at all. And it's a very funny comedy. It uses three classic film story-lines - a dystopic end of the world adventure, a buddy travel adventure, and a zombies invasion - and melds them into one in a fairly seamless way. The acting is solid. The zombies are as funny as anything. From the first scene on, this film is on the right track, and many of the jokes are laugh out loud funny. I'd say that this is a slightly better version of another zombie comedy (not a big genre I know), Shaun of the Dead.

In The Loop
Everyone talks at a mile a minute in this movie, which has more dialogue than I've probably seen in any flick made in the last 40 years. Much of what they say is hilarious. No there isn't much of a plot in this movie; it's about a bunch of political maneuvering related to a war more than vaguely like the US/UK-Iraq conflict. But I didn't really care because the dialogue was so snappy and fun. It reminded me a lot of A Fish Called Wanda that way. If you want a well plotted story heavy on a lot of "action," ignore this movie. But if you like silly, witty, banter heavy British comedies - from the Lavender Hill Mob on up - this movie will be a lot of fun.

Please Give
One of the more thoughtful movies I've seen this year with also some of the most terse and sharp dialogue. Nicole Holofcener is on the literate side of movie making. Characters and motivation matter to her much more than visuals. In many ways, I would describe her as a female and American version of Mike Leigh. It's not a style that will suit every movie goer, but it works for me. The ensemble cast works together well. I wouldn’t say that any of the performances stand out save for one, that of the cranky and unintentionally funny grandmother. But everyone holds their own and there are some difficult roles here to carry convincingly. Perhaps more than most Holofcenter movies, this one has more than a trifle of a story. Theres a real arc to the plot. Please Give is a satisfying, quiet, true to life film about relationships in urban America today.

The New John Henry

2010-12-14T14:27:00.000-08:00

I "wrote" this in honor of Ken Jennings going up against a computer on Jeopardy this coming February. You can substitute Ken's name for John Henry in the song if that's your thing. Perfect for your next stint on the chain gang.

The New John Henry

John Henry he knew trivia,

He could whistle, he could sing

He went on to Jeopardy one fine day

Just to hear that Daily Double ring, Lord, Lord

Just to hear that Daily Double ring.

Just to hear that Daily Double, Lord, Lord

Just to hear that Daily Double ring.

When John Henry was a little baby,

Typin’ on his daddy's PC

He went on to Google to find some facts

Said trivia will be the death of me, Lord, Lord

Said trivia will be the death of me

Said trivia will be the death of me, Lord, Lord

Said trivia will be death of me

Well John Henry's fam'ly needed money,

Said he didn't have a pot to pee

If you wait 'til the red sun goes down

I'll get it from Alex on Jeopardy, Lord, Lord

I'll get it from Alex on Jeopardy

I'll get it from Alex on Jeopardy, Lord, Lord

I'll get it from Alex on Jeopardy

Well John Henry went to Mr. Alex

Said Mr. Alex, what can you do

I can answer back, I can talk a little smack

I can ask a question or two, Lord, Lord

I can ask a question or two

I can ask a question or two, Lord, Lord

I can ask a question or two

Well Mr. Alex said to John Henry,

Gonna bring me a computer 'round

Gonna bring me a computer out on the show

Gonna whup your ass up and down, Lord, Lord

Whup your ass up and down

Well John Henry said to Mr. Alex,

Oh a man ain't nothin' but a man

'Fore I'd let your computer beat me down,

I'd die with my clicker in my hand, Lord, Lord

Die with my clicker in my hand

Well John Henry said to Mr. Alex,

Looka yonder what I see,

Wi-Fi done choke, computer done broke,

And it can't answer trivia like me, Lord, Lord

Can't answer trivia like me

Oh no, it can't answer trivia like me, no no

Can't answer trivia like me

Well John Henry flew into Burbank,

His clicker was strikin' fire

He clicked so hard he broke his poor heart

And he laid down his clicker and he died, Lord, Lord

Laid down his clicker and he died

He laid down his clicker and he died, Great God

Laid down his clicker and he died

Oh they took John Henry to the White House

And they buried him in the sand

Everyone came by, broke down and cried

Says there lies a trivia answerin’ man, Lord, Lord

There lies a trivia answerin’ man

Says there lies a trivia answerin’ man, Lord, Lord

There lies a trivia answerin’ man

Well Mr. Alex says to John Henry

I believe this show's cavin' in

John Henry said to Mr. Alex,

'Tain't nothin' but ratings sweep season

The man that invented the computer,

Thought he was mighty fine,

John Henry made his fifteen answers,

The computer only made nine,

The computer only made nine

I'm busy

2010-12-01T06:00:00.000-08:00

I'll be back in January. Have a wonderful holiday season!

Musical Offices

2010-11-22T06:00:00.000-08:00

A man needs an office. Well maybe not every man. But I know I do. You can have a house (I'm lucky to have one). You can have a man-cave (I'm lucky to have that too, complete with four guitars, one keyboard, and two ukuleles). But an office is a place where real work gets done. You walk in and you know, this is it. You put on your work face. And. You. Work.

I don't understand how anyone can work at home. I'm writing this blog post in my man-cave but a blog is not work. It's just some sideline fun thing. Work for me is producing something truly designed for others to use. Writing a book. That's work. Writing a song is usually work, too. So is writing a science paper or putting together a report for a client (something I'm not doing that much of lately). If I'm doing any work, I have to get out of my house.

It's not the distractions that are a problem. It's that no ideas come if I'm at home. Sure, I'll get a seed of an idea in the shower or while cooking or even cleaning. But if I'm going to follow through on that idea with any creativity or spark, I need to get out of my blissful domicile.

I got my first office in graduate school. I can remember that first day putting together my office, which I shared with a very nice guy from Indonesia. I pinned up a little picture of Billie Holiday as I decorated. "Who's that, you're mother?" My new office mate asked me. It's true, the resemblance between Billie Holiday and me is uncanny!

Eventually, I had three offices at one time in graduate school. One at the U. One at the local U.S. Geological Survey. And one at the Illinois State Geological Survey. This would turn out to be my high water mark in office space acquisition. I think of it as my Mormon period. I got work done in all three offices, but the one at the U was best even though it was bug infested (the Department of Entomology was upstairs and apparently they suffered frequent bug leaks). Every night before getting on the bus to go home, I'd shake my backpack to get rid of the random exotic cockroach that had managed to crawl inside.

I was down to a mere two offices at Stanford, one at the U and one at the regional headquarters of the U.S. Geological Survey. Someone who is undoubtedly reading this was one of five or six females who shared my U office with me. It was cramped. I didn't use my desk except to pile papers high on my way to the U.S. Geological Survey or, more commonly, the Math Library. The desks were jammed together and my paper pile would, once it had exceeded its angle of repose, slide onto my neighbor's desktop. Sorry!

At Duke, I got to design my own office, walls and all. It was fabulous with a beautiful view. Unfortunately, my wonderful office was the best part of my job. I'd hunker down in there trying my best to focus on my research and avoid all the nasty and unpleasant people that tend to occupy academia.

When I moved back home to California (North Carolina was never really my home; I lived there for 11 years but never sold my old California house and never even got a North Carolina drivers license), Stanford was nice enough to give me an office for a couple of years. That was great! All those university resources without having to ever attend a department meeting or serve on a university committee. Ahhh, utopia. Then I rented a little cottage in back of a house nearby for several years. It was very cute.

About a year and a half ago, I decided - partly because my landlord was going bonkers - that maybe I didn't need an office/cottage anymore. I'd just go back to my undergraduate model and use libraries. It was an interesting experiment. I'd bring my laptop with me and play the role of library bedouin. Sometimes, I'd go to Stanford's libraries, which were a little too eerie for me; college students don't use libraries anymore - they seem to get everything they need online - and Stanford's libraries are essentially ghost towns. You spot an occasional middle age guy or gal like me and that's it.

In the spring and summer, I liked to go to the Los Alto library because they have a beautiful apricot orchard visible from some desks. It was inspiring to see all that organized photosynthesis. But most public libraries aren't at all quiet anymore, and seem more and seem more akin to shopping malls. People talk and use cell phones. Little kids run around and scream. No one even tries to shoosh someone else. I'd have to use earplugs to get work done.

Mountain View's library was a little better on the quiet front. A cop would literally come by to keep the racket down and get rid of any bums who reeked of alcohol. But still, I'd put in earplugs when I worked.

After a year or so of being a library bedouin, I started to long for some privacy. The guy next to me mumbling New Testament bible verses whenever the cop wasn't around to shut him up was starting to get to me (I probably would have been OK with Old Testament bible mumbling because I've been blocking that stuff out all of my life). I wanted four walls around me and a window. You know, a room with a view. I'm not an undergraduate anymore. I'm a grown man. And as I noted above, a man needs an office.

I went on Craig's List and tried to find an office. Things weren't looking too promising. But I'm a patient man and times are hard. There's a lot of empty office space out there. There was one place listed whose initial price was too high (like all the others). Next month it was slightly lower. The next month it was lower still, reasonable. I called the realtor up, took a look at the place, and knocked him down another $25 a month. I went on Craig's List again and found a room full of Ikea furniture - futon, desk, end table, dining room table, two office chairs, and four dining table chairs - for 120 bucks.

Voila. I have a furnished room with a view. My back didn't seem to mind all the hauling around of furniture either. That's the advantage of buying Ikea stuff; it's junky, but hardly weighs anything. Next week I'm officially moving in. It feels good.

Hollywood Consistently Gets Country Music Wrong, But I Guess That's Not Surprising

2010-11-17T06:00:00.000-08:00

Since I've been on a country music kick, I think that I should end the week on that topic before I go on to something else. I know most people who read this blog hate country music. Tough. I don't. Most of country music is not good, I agree. But it tends to be way better than any pop music out there today. A fair amount of it is at least tolerable to listen to. That's not a ringing endorsement, I know. But I do listen to new country music for a couple of hours every month.

I note that every once in a while Hollywood decides to make a country music movie. For example, this January they're coming out with a new one, Country Strong. Making country music themed movies is an odd thing for Hollywood to do because as far as I can tell, Hollywood doesn't have a clue as to what country music is about. Instead Hollywood directors make these movies using cliches and never do the homework to see how their preconceptions differ from reality.

I guess that's not surprising. Hollywood directors do the same thing with college themed movies. Usually, they focus on some English professor and his ability or lack thereof to transform students. But English departments and the humanities have been in decline for decades. Less than ten percent of all student enrollments are in the humanities. If it weren't for distribution requirements that force students to take humanities classes, the numbers would be even smaller. Earth to Hollywood: English professors don't matter anymore. Want to really depict college education? Focus on an accounting or economics professor, please.

So it goes with Hollywood and country music. The disconnect with reality maybe began in the 1970s with the widely acclaimed Robert Altman movie, Nashville. Henry Gibson rambled on and on singing songs that wouldn't make it within 100 yards of a country radio music station, and we were supposed to believe that this little pipsqueak was a Nashville country music legend. You've got to be kidding. The movie was completely unbelievable. Nashville was hailed for its slice of life realism, but in fact it was a fantasy.

Last year, Jeff Bridges kept the tradition of Hollywood creating an alternate reality for country music alive. Bridges won an Oscar for a performance as a country music legend has been who is forced to play bowling alleys to try and make a living. Sorry Hollywood. I guess the closest real life analog to the Jeff Bridges character Bad Blake would be George "No Show" Jones and as destructive as he was, Jones could (and still can) always find a decent gig. Earth to Hollywood: there's a lucrative county and state fair circuit for country music has beens. Country music fans stay loyal to those that made hit albums decades after country music radio has forgotten them.

But forget about the stupid stories Hollywood comes up with. I want to focus on the music for a bit. Hollywood seems to think that country music is still all about losing your truck, your wife, and your job set to a melody that is backed by a mere three chords. It hasn't been that way for decades. Just like Hollywood is lost in the 1950s with regard to college campuses (English professors not only don't matter anymore, they don't wear tweed and bow ties anymore, either) they are in a time warp with regard to the music country radio plays.

There are still songs about loss in country music. Here's the best of that today, Jamey Johnson:

Jamey Johnson is a wonderful throwback, and I only wish that Hollywood would find someone who could sing and perform with half his power in their little fantasies. But you hardly hear people like Jamey Johnson on country radio today. What dominates country radio is what Hollywood knows everything about, fantasy. It's often about love gained - either god or a man or woman - rather than love lost. It entreats people, like a Sunday sermon, to do better. Here's one of the practitioners of that brand of country music today, Josh Turner (actually he mostly does treacly love songs, but here he is singing from his heart about God, albeit in a treacly way):

And much of country music today is about affirming the superiority of Red State values and attitudes with ass-kicking drums and rock guitar as Montgomery Gentry do with just about every song they perform (they're not exactly one of my favorite country bands, but I do have a photo of me and Eddie Montgomery arm in arm somewhere on my laptop):

But most significantly for me is that country music is about being funny, laugh out loud funny. That side of music used to be present in pop as well. The Beatles weren't afraid to be jokey in their music, that's for certain. But sometime between 1968 and now, humor left pop music altogether. That's not so in country music, whose king jokester is Brad Paisley. He made his name with this cute little number:

Jamey Johnson, Josh Turner, Montgomery Gentry, and Brad Paisley are just a slice of what country music is about today. It's mostly about - like Hollywood movies - wish fulfillment. Mr. Turner and Mr. Paisley are both clean living, Belmont University graduates. Eddie Montgomery works out religiously and has had his teeth whitened to such a degree that when he smiled at me I suffered from temporary snow blindness. Why does Hollywood focus on broken down performers singing about their hard luck when it makes country music movies? Hollywood likes its cliches and in its movies it tends to avoid real life. Country music is about loss according to Hollywood. Colleges are about teaching poetry. And don't get me started about how Hollywood treats the EPA and EPA employees in its caricatures.

I don't know if I'll go see the movie Country Strong. In it, Gwyneth Paltrow plays a country diva just coming out rehab. That's a bit of casting against type, but who knows, Paltrow is a solid professional and just might be able to carry it off. Her comeback song in that movie, though, leaves me a bit worried. Here's Ms. Paltrow performing it live recently to promote the movie:

That's a very impressive performance for a singing amateur. But is that a hit song? Yeah, maybe in 1979. It's the kind of thing that Vince Gill (singing backup) would have written for his old band, Pure Prairie League. Hollywood is, as always with regard to country music, stuck in the past.

Taylor Swift Can't Sing or Write, But That Doesn't Matter, and No I'm Not Being Mean, Part 2

2010-11-15T06:00:00.000-08:00

When I was going to Nashville pitching songs, most of my effort was centered on new female acts. It seemed to be where my songs consistently found the most interest. At any given time, record labels had a combined six to ten acts like this and for each one they were looking for "the song," the one undeniable hit that would launch a career.

I'm trying to remember the names of these singers signed to major labels, but they all kind of blur: Catherine Britt, Lauren Lucas, Jessica Harp and many more. They were all young and gorgeous. They all had major league voices. They were all like Carrie Underwood, very nice girls with demure personalities. But how many Carrie Underwoods does the genre of country music need? The answer is one. Once Underwood's career was launched, there was no oxygen left for similar performers.

Still, the record companies insisted on developing these new singers. They'd listen to thousands of songs for each one. For reasons I never understood, they'd never put these acts on the road to generate buzz and get the singers seasoned for live performance. No, these girls would just hang in Nashville and wait a year or two to be launched on the radio.

The record companies would release play it safe singles for each of these acts that hit all the "right" buttons - songs that proclaimed that the singers were sweet country girls and proud of it - that were overproduced out the ying yang. The songs were accompanied by promotional campaigns emphasizing the girls' country bona-fides with lots of pictures of the girls sweetly posing in country settings. In every case, these girl acts instantly flopped.

It was always a mystery why these record companies kept beating this dead horse. When the act flopped they'd shake their heads and say, well girls are a tough sell. But that wasn't it at all. Girls aren't a tough sell. They just can't be sold the way country record companies usually try to sell them.

Over the time I was visiting Nashville regularly, there were four female country acts that rose to stardom. None of them fit the sweet country girl with a big voice mold. One was Jennifer Nettles aka Sugarland, who sang Mamas and Papas type songs written with her co-performer, an obviously butch Kirsten Hall. Another was a rather homely woman a little long in tooth, Gretchen Wilson, who had spent years being a top-flight demo singer, and whose songs played on her trailer trash "heritage". Then there was Miranda Lambert, a gorgeous girl with a not-so-great voice, who sang and wrote songs about shooting things, usually men.

Finally, there was Taylor Swift, who has risen higher than all those three successes I just mentioned, and who, as I noted in Part 1, invented the sub-genre of country-kiddie-pop. Her first album sold a ton. Her second album, Fearless, which was a slicker version of the first, took off in a hurry. Some of the songs were co-written with her collaborator on her first album, Liz Rose. The songs on the second album focused again and again on teen-age love. Liz Rose made sure the songs were well crafted and followed the well established rules of country radio.

The launch of Fearless was accompanied by an incredible slew of positive reviews, some in places that normally would have nothing to do with country music. Even the New Yorker called Taylor Swift a "prodigy." I didn't get this. The album was run of the mill country radio fluff. But it did fill a niche that had never been filled before. Kids loved this thing. If it hasn't happened already, Fearless will soon have achieved 10 million sales worldwide, a number that's phenomenal in today's depressed music market.

A couple of strange things happened with the promotion of this album. One was a very public brouhaha involving Kanye West at an awards show. I've actually never seen the video clip, but apparently Mr. West did something very bad and disrespectful to Ms. Swift on television and the video of their interaction went viral. Taylor Swift wasn't just a singer anymore. She was a very public and sympathetic personality.

Second, Taylor Swift sang on the Grammys in 2010 and absolutely stank. Worse yet, she sang not just one time, but twice. Even if you were inclined to be sympathetic with her mangling her first performance, you got annoyed in a hurry by bomb number two.

The fact is that Taylor Swift cannot hit her notes live. She is a studio manufactured singer who couldn't make it in the music world without Auto-tune. While these performances generated much negative publicity, most of the public is tone deaf anyway and musical ability has never been an important thing in the world of kiddie pop. From Fabian on to Britney Spears, kiddie pop is all about personality and looks, not musicality.

This month, Taylor Swift released her third album, Speak Now. She shed her collaborator on her first two albums, Liz Rose. She is now too old to be a kiddie pop singer - although she still has a big pre-teen and teen following - and so she redefined herself with Speak Now. Ms. Swift doesn't sing about high school romances. Instead Speak Now is about weddings and adventures falling in and out of love with famous movie and music hunks. Her fans can be voyeurs as they listen to Ms. Swift sing about what a rat John Mayer is or how she's sorry she broke up with Taylor Lautner. It's a reality TV show set to music.

The songs aren't very good. Without Liz Rose, Ms. Swift seems to have forgotten about the importance of a good hook, making sure a song's central theme is all about that hook, and keeping a song tightly structured. Speak Now has a bunch of messy and sloppy songs that just don't stick. Be that as it may, singing about breaking up with famous boyfriends is a time honored way for a pretty female singer to have a good career (note these two, Joni Mitchell and Carly Simon). Speak Now went platinum in its first week.

Can Taylor Swift be a long-lived star? I have no idea really. It's always a mystery to me why certain stars fade and others shine bright for decades. No, Taylor Swift can't really sing, but that doesn't matter as I've noted above. Plus, she's finally discovered the value of Live Auto-tune for performances and as a result, she no longer sounds so awful on TV.

Taylor Swift can probably keep singing about losing famous boyfriends for another album or two, but then that's going to get old. She doesn't have anywhere near the talent of Joni Mitchell and can't sing nearly as well as Carly Simon, so she's going to have to rely on her personality to carry her. It is a pleasant and winsome personality. Lord knows, we could always use more pleasant and polite people in this world.

I imagine that in another three years Taylor Swift's records will start to go stiff and her career will shift to playing state fairs and whatnot. But I also note that Britney Spears - someone with less talent than Taylor Swift and a whole lot of emotional baggage and bad publicity - made something on the order of 60 million dollars last year. Madonna - who in terms of talent is at about the same level as Taylor Swift - is still an improbable big draw at the age of 52. So maybe Ms. Swift will be around singing badly about love lost for decades. Stranger things have happened.

Taylor Swift's Newest Song, Dear Jake

2010-11-12T06:00:00.000-08:00

I haven't gotten around to writing Part 2 of my Taylor Swift post. But while doing my "research" I noted Ms. Swift was currently dating Jake Gyllenhaal. Since her m.o. is to sleep with some famous guy for a couple of months and then write an "emotional" song about it, I decided to beat her to the punch.

Dear Jake
By Taylor Swift (and Stuart Rosh)

Dear Jake, it’s been nice
But I have to say good-bye
Coz my career requires
I write, all these songs
About breaking up with famous guys
So I can't stay ‘round too long

I gotta put an album out next year
And you know what that means
I gotta throw out boyfriends like stale beer
And write how they all hurt me
And break my poor little precious heart
Like you have!

Dear Jake, yeah you’re cute
But so were all the others
And I’m giving you the boot
Besides, I’m worried
I saw you kiss another man
In that creepy cowboy movie

I gotta put an album out next year
And you know what that means
I gotta throw out boyfriends like stale beer
And write how they all hurt me
And break my poor little precious heart
Like you have!

Bridge
You’ll be a new teardrop on my guitar
As I write about how I've lost
My hunky movie star
(Breaks down and cries and sobs and then says: I’m getting vehrklempt here, that’s a word that my new best friend Barbra taught me.)

I gotta put an album out next year
And you know what that means
I gotta throw out boyfriends like stale beer
And write how they all hurt me
And break my poor little precious heart
Like you have!
Dear Jake! Dear Jake! Dear Jake!

For those who want to endure listening to this thing, you can find it here. I think the song begins, after a rambling monologue, at about the one minute mark.

Taylor Swift Can't Sing or Write, But That Doesn't Matter, and No I'm Not Being Mean, Part 1

2010-11-10T06:00:00.000-08:00

If I remember correctly, I was Taylor Swift's friend number 520 or so back in the recent past when Myspace was the thing. She was about 16 and had signed a contract with a new tiny Nashville record company, Big Machine. On Myspace, she'd post tidbits about songs she was working on and hooks she had come up with. For those who don't know song lingo, a hook is a catchy musical phrase or song title that's used in the chorus. In Nashville, hooks are always song titles.

At 16, Taylor Swift was already well aware that a song lived or died on its hook. I didn't know it at the time, but she was working with and learning from a songwriter I vaguely knew, a Nashville songwriting veteran at a tiny publishing house. The writer was a suburban mom who probably related to Ms. Swift well. And clearly she was being a good mentor.

I had a lot of young female aspiring Nashville stars as friends on Myspace back then. No I wasn't being a stalker. But if you're going to write music for the Nashville market, the odds of getting a song signed to a major star are almost non-existent (when I heard from a publisher that Tim McGraw was going to record a song of mine, I felt like I was going to die and go to heaven; but neither - going to heaven nor having Tim McGraw sing my tune - happened). So the better bet - still remote - is to find talented young aspiring stars in Nashville and write songs with them. Male singers tend to think they can write songs on their own (they're usually wrong). But female singers know they can't.

The standard strategy of a songwriter in Nashville is to try to be avuncular and helpful with as many young female Nashville singers as possible and co-write with them. The hope is that one day one of them will get a record deal and record a song on her first album that you co-wrote. That approach used to be surprisingly effective - if time consuming and inefficient - for quite a few people I know.

Big Machine Records was one of many boutique labels that popped up in Nashville after the downloading-induced collapse of the record industry. Midas, Cloud 9, Broken Bow, Montage (I'm trying to remember the names of record companies I visited fairly regularly off the top of my head). A lot of rich people from god knows where who had Nashville record company dreams started labels at the time. They'd hire people to head them who had gotten laid off at RCA, Sony et al. Their chance of success was ridiculously remote.

Taylor Swift was, I think, one of three initial acts signed by Big Machine. No major label would have signed her. It's not that she was too young. It's that she can't sing. At the time, singing ability was an essential requirement for females who wanted to get signed by RCA or Curb or Warner or Capitol. You really had to have serious vocal chops. You had to sing on pitch. Major country labels had old school standards about female singers, not so much for male singers. Taylor Swift wasn't even close.

But either by luck or genius, Big Machine was on to something with Ms. Swift. Unlike any singer that came before her, she ignored the types of topics that were the staple of country music, tales of long-lasting love, hardship, nostalgia, and hard won wisdom. Instead, she sang about teen age boys in a winsome way. She and Big Machine invented a whole new sub-genre, kiddie-country-pop. And it took off.

Before Ms. Swift, the dominant market for country music was the suburban red-state mom, the kind that played CDs in her minivan while shuttling kids to soccer, baseball, dance class or whatever. Every Nashville artist and every song had to pass the suburban red-state mom litmus test. These women were the ones who bought their CDs at Walmart. And Walmart drove country music sales.

Major labels and publishing houses were well aware of the importance of the suburban red-state mom and Walmart. They were dismissive of newbies like Big Machine because they assumed rightly that little labels couldn't get the financing and credibility to push for major purchases at Walmart. The feeling was that a new record company might be able to generate a hit on radio, but if it did, CD sales depended on Walmart having at least tens of thousands of copies of the song in their warehouses three weeks before it took off. Newbies like Big Machine couldn't make that happen. They were doomed as a result.

The first song that hit the charts for Taylor Swift was a cute-kiddie-pop thing named Tim McGraw (after the singer). It was about a teen relationship that ended badly co-written with Taylor Swift's mentor; in the song, hearing Tim McGraw on the radio is supposed to trigger a memory. The song broke a cardinal rule in pop songwriting, the chorus needs to lift up. But Taylor Swift has only about a one octave singing range. It's hard to lift a song by a fourth or fifth in the chorus when the singer can only hit eight notes. Instead of lifting to maintain audience interest, the chorus in the song has a rhythmic change to separate it from the verses. This little trick has turned out to be Taylor Swift's signature style.

The song started very slowly on the country charts. Big Machine made a music video of Taylor falling in and out of love with a cute boy that was popular on CMT. It was Blue Lagoon without the sex. And they also did a very clever thing that endeared them to country music stations. There's a line in the final chorus,"some day you'll turn your radio on," in that song. Big Machine sent a personalized version of that line to every radio station; they included Ms. Swift singing the radio station's call letters in the song. It was a cute idea and Taylor Swift was cute as a button.

Slowly but surely teen and pre-teen girls started to get interested in Taylor Swift. They'd never been courted before by country music. That music was the stuff their moms listened to in their mini-vans not them. They listened to pure pop, people like Avril Lavigne, on their headphones.

Those kids liked what they heard. Tim McGraw kept rising in the charts. An album was released in the fall. On the strength of the slowly building radio play of the single, Walmart bought tons of album copies. About 40,000 CDs were sold in the first week, numbers unheard of for a boutique label. Big Machine had created an entirely new sub genre in pop music and they had that sub-genre's only practitioner. Teenage and preteen girls have a lot of disposable income. The album went platinum.

In May of 2007, rising star Taylor Swift appeared at the Academy of Country Music show in Las Vegas for the first time. I was there. Two things were obvious. One, Taylor Swift couldn't really sing. Two, she was extremely confident, poised and could easily connect with an audience.

Taylor Swift's success wouldn't depend on her music. It would depend on her message and personality. She wasn't a singer, but for lack of a better word, a "singtertainer". Her role models weren't Pasty Cline or Trish Yearwood, but performers with weak voices and big personalities like Madonna. She would have to re-invent herself every couple of years to maintain interest. And that seems to be what is happening. I'll continue this next time.

When Grade Inflation Really Began

2010-11-08T06:00:00.000-08:00

One of the stranger excuses for grade inflation is that it's always been present so it's nothing to get excited about. There's a quote from Harvard from 1894 that is tossed around as "proof" of the longstanding and persistent nature of grade inflation:

"Grades A and B are sometimes given too readily -- Grade A for work of not very high merit, and Grade B for work not far above mediocrity . . . One of the chief obstacles to raising the standards of the degree is the readiness with which insincere students gain passable grades by sham work."

The assumption is that Harvard in 1894 represents all of higher education in 1894 and decades thereafter. No data usually back up these attempts to dismiss grade inflation by making it seem common as dirt for over a century. The only person I know that has attempted to use data is Harry Lewis from Harvard, who meticulously examined Dean's Lists over time at that school. Here are the trends in the percentage of Harvard students who made the Dean's List (from Lewis' book, Excellence Without A Soul):

Looking at this chart probably makes you inclined to agree that significant grade inflation has been going on since at least the 1920s at Harvard. A greater percentage of students end up on the Dean's List every year.

But Dean's List percentages are not grades. They are a proxy for grades. Actual grades at Harvard show a different story:

You can see just why Harvard was concerned about high grades in 1894. A's and B's, according to 1890 data, were being handed out 47% of the time. The university wasn't particularly selective then in its admissions either. They accepted very run of the mill students and there is no way that those students were producing good to excellent work nearly half the time. Harvard was in fact, being too easy on its students back then and the ease wasn't just in grading as is documented in the recent and excellent sociology book The Chosen by Karabel.

But then in the 1900s, Harvard decided to get serious about education again. Grades dropped accordingly. It wasn't until the 1960's that A's became as common as they were in 1890.

Was there grade inflation from 1920 to 1960? Yes, but it was, like at other schools (as I and Chris Healy documented in our 2010 Teachers College Record paper), very modest. B gradually replaced C as the most common grade. A's were still uncommon. The change was to be expected. Student quality did get better at Harvard over that time. Students also didn't drop out as frequently, which meant they increasing took upper division classes; these classes traditionally have higher grades. Nationwide, part of the modest rise in grades at that time was due to a new requirement that a 2.0 GPA or greater be required for graduation.

But the changes in grades prior to 1960 at Harvard and elsewhere pale in comparison to the grade changes in the Vietnam era and beyond. A's rose dramatically in the 1960s. By the 1990s, A was the most common grade at Harvard. As Chris Healy and I show in a paper that should be published before the year is out, A became the most common grade not only at Harvard, but on average nationwide in the 1990s. By early in the 2000s, A was by far the most common grade at Harvard, easily eclipsing the once common B; this too happened, on average, nationwide. Excellence became ordinary.

Has grade inflation truly been with us for a century or so? At Harvard the answer is no. Not surprisingly, that's also true at the other schools for which we have extensive historical data. Grade inflation is really a Vietnam era and beyond problem. I note that Harry Lewis, after seeing the grade chart I show above, agrees with this assessment for Harvard.

Overhyped and Weak Tea

2010-11-03T06:00:00.000-07:00

Given all the press coverage the Tea Party received this year, you would have thought a revolution was in the works. The media, always desperate for something to fill the 24 hour news cycle, covered every little twitch, protest sign, and shout in anger of the Tea Party for over a year. Somehow the press was convinced that photos and videos of deranged white people were an audience magnet. Every day, the news looked more and more like the Jerry Springer Show.

And what happened to this revolution? Sharron Angle? Gone. Christine O'Donnell? Gone. Ken Buck? In a dead heat with 85 percent of the vote in a race that should have been a walk. Joe Miller? Kicked to the curb by a write in vote. So much for the revolution.

Had the Republicans put forth center-right candidates instead of Tea Party nutters, they would have won control of the Senate. The Tea Party hurt the Republicans this election. Despite all the hype and press, the Tea Party represents a fringe movement. It's very weak tea.

The screaming people at health care Town Halls and the Glenn Beck gathering on The Mall were a side show. This country remains on average, center-right in its politics. I know it doesn't make for exciting news that people want social services, like Medicare, as well as defense and low taxes, but they do. They also want jobs, which is why they voted for the "other guy" this election. The disconnect between the press hype about anger and right wing rage and the reality of how people actually voted was huge.

Will the press start to get responsible and change from Jerry Springer type coverage of angry white people to real news? Not unless the public says no to the titillation and instead demands to hear information of substance. Ultimately, we get the press we deserve.

Tea Party winners like Paul and Rubio spoke like they were gods in their victory speeches, men with a vision of the dramatic change Americans want. These people are crackpots. There has been no massive political shift in the American public. The public wants an economy that works. They aren't suddenly going to be buying millions of copies of Ayn Rand, demand that Social Security be privatized, and roll back civil rights laws from the 1960s.

If there is still high unemployment in 2012, the public will vote the Republicans they just elected out of office and probably vote out Obama as well. Tea Party, Shmee Party. Just like in every election, it's the economy stupid.

Driving the Car of the Future

2010-11-01T06:00:00.000-07:00

Electric power can be derived from a number of relatively cheap and plentiful energy sources including coal, natural gas, dams, and nuclear fission. Internal combustion engine power principally comes from an increasingly difficult to extract and expensive resource, oil, whose price is partly controlled by a cartel. As the price differential between electric power and internal combustion engine power generation increases, it will become economically unattractive to rely on oil to provide the energy for our cars.

It actually is already economically unattractive. The cost of driving an electric car per mile of use is 1/2 that of driving my Prius, which means it's about 1/4 that of driving a typical gas powered car. Drive a car 15,000 miles per year and you're spending about $1300 extra annually for the privilege of using oil and supporting oil rich nations that don't like the US very much. Why would anyone do that?

The answer to that question was easy in the past. Electric cars required an expensive initial cost relative to mass produced gas cars. They typically had to be charged every 40 miles or so, making them impractical even for a typical commute. Their top speeds were often on the low side, making them unusable for the highway. In short, they were impractical.

But increasingly, those negatives aren't true. I recently drove two all-electric cars, the Tesla Roadster and the Nissan Leaf. The Roadster has been out for awhile, at least a couple of years. On the negative side, it's basically a toy for rich people. The cost is well over 100 thousand dollars, and there is room for no more than two people and maybe one bag of golf clubs. The body comes from Lotus and it drives like a 1000-pound-too-heavy version of an elite gas-powered sports car. The handling is kind of clunky. Basically, the Tesla is a very expensive muscle car.

On the plus side, the car has a 230 mile range and its acceleration provides blood-boiling excitement. Personally if I were very rich and wanted a sports car, I'd just go for the gas-powered Lotus, which I'm sure handles much more nimbly. But the Tesla Roadster does have its uncompromising power.

Then there is the Nissan Leaf. I drove that car last week and it will be available for sale in December. If I remember correctly, 50,000 or so will be built the first year for worldwide use and in the US, every one of the cars that will be available for the first six months or so is essentially already sold. Why? This car is amazing.

The cost of the car after a federal rebate is in the 25-27K range. About 10K of that cost comes from the batteries themselves. I have no doubt that, like Toyota did initially with the Prius, Nissan is pricing this car below actual cost. But as the cost for batteries drops and production becomes more efficient, the Leaf will turn a profit.

What do you get for about $26,000? A Toyota Corolla type of car with a hatchback, comfortable seating for four with lots of headroom, a top speed of 90 MPH and a range (with the air-conditioning off) of about 100 miles. The acceleration is much better than my Prius. The handling is much better than my Prius. On the outside, the car looks boring, but it's actually very fun to drive. The handling reminded me of those old Civic hatchbacks from the 80's, "sportscar-ish" even though it's a front-wheel drive car.

It's true you can buy a similar gas powered car for about 8K cheaper. It's going to take you several years of driving to make up for the initial extra outlay of cash for a Leaf, and that's assuming your don't earn much interest on the cash you'd save by buying a gas car (which is certainly true today). Right now when you buy a car like this, you're really buying it - like the Prius of several years ago - for that feeling of moral superiority.

But wait a few more years. Battery costs will continue to drop dramatically. Battery efficiency will increase. With mass production, the cost differential between electric and gas cars will shrink to almost nothing. The range of these cars will stretch out to 200 miles or more. Basically, as I drove this car I became more and more convinced I was driving the car of the future.

Nissan has a couple more electric models in the works. Volvo is supposedly coming out with an electric car based on Nissan's technology as well. I'd be inclined to buy the Leaf next year regardless because the battery packs are designed to be upgradable. For me, the future is essentially now. My guess is that for many, electric cars will become a very attractive potential purchase by 2014.

The Polls Say The Democrats Will Control The Senate And They Are Probably Right

2010-10-27T06:00:00.000-07:00

I've written about polls before and how much I dislike them. Their track record for presidential primaries isn't very good at all and I think presidential campaigns, the public and the news services get too caught up in the data. They try to see trends in time and space that aren't there. But I have to give credit where credit is due, and while the success of polls can be scattershot, the fact is that polls for US Senate races have - at least in the aggregate - done a very good job of predicting winners over the last two elections.

In 2006 and 2008 combined, there were 26 senatorial races where significant polling took place before the election. Using the averages of those polls to predict winners resulted in only one off pick, the 2008 Minnesota race. Now a good deal of the success of the polls was the result of many races never being close in the first place. Only 10 of those races had an average poll prediction with less than a seven point margin of victory. The polls were successful in picking the winner in three out of the four races with a predicted margin of victory less than four percent. That's not enough of a sample to say how good polls are at picking the close battles. My guess is that poll stated error bounds in predictions are too small.

If you look at all of the races, you find that the predicted margin of victory is often significantly off, and there is a strong tendency for polls to under-predict victory margins by a few percentage points of more. The biggest errors tend to be associated with races that were predicted to be blowouts.

What does this mean for the 2010 Senate? If poll results can be believed - and I think they can be believed - there are seven very tight races this year. For five of them at this point in time the predicted margin of victory is less than any reasonable expected error in polling, 2.6 percent. Four of them, if the averages are to be believed, lean slightly Republican. One leans Democratic. The other two races that are tight lean Democratic in a way that's close to the bounds of expected error.

In a nutshell, for the Republicans to win the US Senate, they are going to have to win all four of the Republican leaners - Colorado, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Illinois - and the one Democratic leaner, Washington. All five races are statistical dead heats, so that's the equivalent of tossing heads five times in a row. Then the Republicans are going to have to win one out of two states, California and West Virginia, where polls so far show a margin of victory for Democrats that's in the three to five percent range. What are the chances of all this happening? Slim and none. The Democrats will hold the Senate. The House is another matter entirely.

I note that I recently gave some money to Russ Feingold, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Wisconsin. The polls heretofore show him to have a snowball's chance in hell of winning. Of particular note is a Daily Kos Democratic poll that shows that a majority of the electorate disapproves of his performance.

Have I thrown my money away? Maybe. But this is a race where I think the polls may be misjudging the electorate. The Green Bay Press Gazette - a conservative newspaper - finds Feingold's opponent Ron Johnson to be so much of an empty suit that even they can't support him. They state, "We think that with time, Johnson could become a viable candidate for national office...." Ouch.

There is one week to go. The nationwide Tea Party fervor ginned up by the press seems to be waning. Voters seem to be moving from being mad as hell to just being resigned and tired. I'm half thinking and half hoping that my money was well spent. But maybe this is just one of those elections where stupid wins and does so with ease.

A Visit To Yad Vashem

2010-10-25T06:00:00.000-07:00

After I dropped my daughter off at the airport near Tel Aviv a couple of weeks ago, I decided to go back to Jerusalem for a couple of hours and visit Yad Vashem. I wanted to see what resources were there to look up names of my relatives. It was hard to find the place - which was on the edge of West Jerusalem - but I kept asking directions from people in neighboring cars, usually in Hebrew, and once in Yiddish to a black hat driving who was a bit startled to hear me speak "mama looshen". Eventually, I got there.

Yad Vashem was already crowded by 10 AM. Soldiers are required to make a visit and there was troop after troop taking docent-led tours. But mostly there were busloads of Christian European tourists. There were hardly any people that came on their own. The museum was actually so crowded near the entryway that I decided to go through the exhibits backwards. I got about halfway through before I ran into the wave of 10 AM tourists and stopped. I already knew the story. I didn't have to see the whole thing. What I saw was well done, serious and emotional without being affected.

I watched as an old man stood and looked around with his son, who was about my age, and talked in Yiddish. "This is how it was," the old man said, his head scanning the visuals and looking a little overwhelmed.

Part of me wondered who needs to see this? Not me. I lived these experiences just about every day of my childhood. The European visitors? It's the ones who have no wish to see such things that should visit, not the kind-hearted souls that I saw that day. The soldiers, all fresh faced and so young? I can understand the wish of the Israeli Army to have its troops be aware of the Holocaust, although Israeli students already study it in school.

If you read the British press or writings on Israel by the American left, there are two twisted strains of thought concerning the Holocaust that come up not infrequently. One is that Israel plays the "Holocaust card" to generate sympathy and justify its misdeeds. Israel has supposedly turned the Holocaust into a political tool. This idea is both idiotic and callous. Yes, the Israeli state would never have been created without the Holocaust. Yes, there is the fervent belief that mass murder of Jews will never be allowed to happen again. But there is no trivialization of the Holocaust for political reasons.

I think what the left and the British press are saying is that they wish the Holocaust wouldn't be so powerful an event. They don't like the Israeli state, but they can't get rid of it. If only the Holocaust weren't so tragic a symbol, I think is what they are saying.

I heard this same sentiment once while having a conversation with a Palestinian from Gaza. "Don't you think the Jews overemphasize the Holocaust?" He asked me. I was driving a van when he asked me this question. I nearly pulled over and thought about slugging him. "There are 15 people in this van," I said. "Imagine 200,000 vans like this. Those are the Jews of Poland, including all of my grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. Now imagine the people in 180,000 of those vans being pulled over and systematically murdered. That's what happened in Poland. You want me to trivialize this mass murder?"

This brings me to the second twisted strain of thought that I have read in the British press: that the Holocaust has made the Jewish people and the state of Israel too paranoid and too sensitive to slight and insult. The idea is that we Jews are psychologically damaged, so much so that we can't be trusted to govern a nation responsibly. This strain of thought is anti-Semitic plain and simple. It's bad enough that Europe - suffused with centuries of anti-Semitism - at best turned a blind eye to mass murder. Now some of those same anti-Semites are saying that because of the "scars" of mass murder, Jews continue to be suspect. It's not only anti-Semitic to express such a view, it's also horribly cruel.

As I noted earlier, I went to Yad Vashem not to visit the museum, but to see what resources were available for research in its library. There wasn't much there. There are testimonies of people who bore witness - some direct witnesses, most from friends and relatives who simply knew what happened - to the millions who died. There are some four million testimonies like this so far. The picture above comes from the physical collection of those testimonies, binder upon binder of pages in Yad Vashem's Hall of Names.

I looked online on one of Yad Vashem's computers and noticed that there were no pages for any of my family who died. My parents I know visited Yad Vashem. So had some of my relatives in Israel. But somehow no one filled out any forms in memory of their lost loved ones. I wanted to make up for that omission.

I could have filled out the witness forms online. But there was something about taking a piece of paper and filling out the forms physically at Yad Vashem. I took two sheets of paper, one for my grandfather and one for my great grandfather. I filled in the names and their backgrounds. I could have filled out several more forms for other relatives as well, but I wanted to make sure I had the details right before I did so.

It felt both satisfying and terribly sad to write down, ever so briefly, what I knew of these two people. I handed a clerk the forms. He took them without looking at me, and put them in a file drawer at his feet.

Am I psychologically scarred by the Holocaust? Certainly. I lived with and loved two people who would never and could never forget what happened to them during WWII. But my parents loved me dearly and I've known many who have suffered far worse during their childhoods than I did because of all those dark WWII stories. I happen to think those stories and the mood of my childhood home - aware of the past and defiantly trying to be joyous and productive despite that past - gave me strength.

You go on regardless. After visiting Yad Vashem, I went to Herzliyah, a coastal town named after the father of Zionism. I lived there at my great aunt and uncle's flat when I was a teen. I barely recognized the city, it had become so gentrified. When I was there as a kid, there was an older man, a Holocaust survivor who would hang out on the street near our flat day after day and just stare off into space. I asked my aunt about him once - the man was disturbing and scary - and she said he'd lost his wife and children in the War. That's how he was. He wasn't ever going to get better.

That man died I don't know when. My great aunt and uncle died several years ago. There are no daily reminders of the Holocaust in Herzliyah anymore. There are no daily reminders of the Holocaust anywhere in Israel or the US for that matter. All we have are places like Yad Vashem. Is that enough to keep the world from losing its humanity again? I thoroughly doubt it. Be that as it may, I'm thankful that Yad Vashem is there for those that wish and need to be reminded.

Democrats Hate Science Too

2010-10-22T06:00:00.000-07:00

I read recently that President Obama will be appearing on an upcoming segment of the science TV show Mythbusters. I think that's just great. No I've never watched the show. I'd probably wince if I did. But even cheesy popular science has value and, who knows, this show may actually be pretty good popular science. Any time a president supports geekiness and science in action is just great.

That all said, Obama has not, despite rhetoric used in his campaign, been a big user of science. OK, he and the Democrats are better than the Republicans, who in general still deny both evolution and global warming. Republicans are in fact complete idiots when it comes to science. They loathe us calculator toting geeks as much as they loathe liberals with Ivy League educations. Basically if it looks smart and acts smart, Republicans hate it. They are the party that wholly embraces and is proud of ignorance.

OK, enough Republican bashing. Democrats and Obama hate science too. They are better when it comes to evolution and global warming, yes. But I don't know if their agreement with scientific orthodoxy on these issues represents an acceptance of science as much as it is in accord with their generally gloomy world view. If you're a dark soul, which your typical Democrat tends to be, then maybe it's cool to think you come from apes and maybe it's cool to think in a Malthusian way of fouling your own nest by burning fossil fuels. Maybe Democrats aren't being rational, but just globbing on to something that they like emotionally.

Why do I think Democrats hate science almost as much as Republicans? First, I've had to deal with Democrats on the issue of high level radioactive waste storage. All they seem to care about is that high level radioactive waste is dangerous (which is true) and Harry Reid doesn't want it in Nevada (also true). If you point out that keeping high level waste at power plants near metropolitan areas around the country is not exactly a good idea and that Yucca Mountain, Nevada is probably as good as it gets for a place to store the waste since the area has been nuked to hell already by atomic testing, they don't listen. The science of nuclear waste - the billions spent on testing Yucca Mountain - doesn't matter. The Democrats and Obama say no. When politics are at play, science gets thrown into the ash can for both Democrats and Republicans.

Ditto for the BP oil gusher in the Gulf. After so much bad news on all fronts - the economy, Iraq, Afghanistan - the last thing that the Obama administration wanted was scientists making proclamations of just how bad this gushing well was. So throughout the crisis the administration consistently downplayed the well's negative impact and worked with BP to keep science from being done that might prove to be bad PR.

First the administration went with rates of oil loss that were obviously way, way too low. Then they tried to dismiss the idea that there were any deep gulf oil plumes. The farce continued whey they made the ad hoc claim that 25 percent of the lost oil had already been consumed by bacteria. This wasn't the Obama administration embracing science. Rather they were embracing science fiction.

The aspect of the Obama administration ignoring or purposely pushing aside science that I noticed the most was in their handling of the effort to plug the well. There was all this falderal about top kill, which got everyone excited even though the odds of that procedure working were nil. It was a big side show. Then a plug was installed, which was great, and there was all this talk of the plug capping the spill, which it sort of did. But when it was clear that the pressure readings indicated that there was some leakage of the oil into rock formations above the oil reservoir - known as cross-formational flow to those in the well biz - all of a sudden the news went dead as to the pressure in the well. Why? Because no one wanted people talking about cross-formational flow.

In the end the well was plugged from below, which was definitely the right thing to do. But the way the Obama administration handled both the transmission of information over the months of the spill and handled scientists trying to work on various aspects of the spill was likely not a whole lot different than how Republicans would have done it. Keep the scientists away. Refute statements by scientists that convey bad news. Obama likes to say that he values science. But his actions say he values science only when it is politically convenient to do so.

A Grown Up Nation

2010-10-18T06:00:00.000-07:00

"When there is peace in the Middle East, everyone will realize that the real war is between the Christians and the Moslems and the Jews don't really matter." That quote comes from a cousin of mine. He said it as we were walking the streets of Tel Aviv on the way to the beach. It was Saturday at dusk and the cafes were full of people eating al fresco along the sidewalks. I hadn't been to Israel in a long time, thirty seven years.

A lot can happen in thirty seven years. People warned me I wouldn't recognize the country, it had changed so much. And they were right. Thirty seven years ago, Israel was an austere kind of place. Life was hard and a leisure class barely existed. Now Israel's median family income is close to that of the UK. Investments in high-tech have created a class of multimillionaires that simply didn't exist twenty years ago. And cafes with night life are aplenty.

My cousin's mother was born in Libya and his father was born in Poland. In the 1950s, Jews simply were not wanted in both countries. Israel was the only real option for his parents. When people tell me that a Jewish state isn't necessary, I have to wonder what planet these people live on.

My cousin assumes that peace is inevitable. I'm not so certain. I talked to quite a few Palestinians in Jerusalem during my visit. None of them were interested in compromise. One merchant complained to me about the lack of tourists, about how people were too scared to come to Jerusalem. I noted that if there was peace, he'd have more tourists than he knew what to do with, that he'd be rich. He looked at me like I was from the moon. "The kind of peace you want isn't possible," he said. He wanted the Jewish state to disappear. That's not going to happen.

I understand the Palestinian's pain over the creation of Israel. I understand their frustration over being under the control of a Jewish state. But it's been 60 years since the creation of Israel and 40 since Jerusalem was no longer in Arab control. Israel is not going away. Jerusalem may well be an international city one day, but the chance that Jerusalem will return to be being an Arab city is zero. Until Palestinians accept this, peace is indeed impossible.

The change in Israel over the last thirty seven years isn't just about economic comfort. The Israel I remember was full of hubris over what it could accomplish with military might. Time and time again I would run into men who truly believed they were masters of the universe or at least masters of the Middle East. You could see it in the swagger of Israeli soldiers, in the confrontational way people would talk to you even about mundane things. The country was suffused with arrogance and many men were simply unbearable to be around. The swagger and hubris are mostly gone now.

The thousands of lives lost in the 1973 Yom Kippur War and the disaster of the invasion of Lebanon in the 1980s had a profound impact on how Israelis view their military. It's no longer expected to accomplish miracles. Future wars will be hard fought. The gains from wars can at best be illusory. Instead of hubris, there is now a realism about Israel's place in the world and in the Middle East.

When I last visited Israel it was all of twenty-five years old and I like to think that it was in an ugly adolescent phase. Now it's all grown up. The view of Israel that you read in European newspapers of it being a military aggressor and the creator of an apartheid state is just a new version of the old anti-Semitism that has defined Europe's view of Judaism for centuries. Instead, the Israel I saw was one with a clear identity as a Jewish state and with a sense of calm and pride in its existence. Israel and the Israeli people have mellowed.

After I talked with my cousin, I drove up to a community farm on the outskirts of Tel Aviv for the birthday party of my surrogate mother from when I lived there thirty seven years ago. She's eighty-five now. She came from the Czech Republic. Her husband, who died a few years ago, came from Poland. Both were fervent Zionists. About twenty five years ago, they came to visit me in the US and her husband launched into a speech haranguing me for living in the United States when I could be making a useful contribution to the Jewish people.

I thought about that speech at the birthday party. Dozens of people sat around and sang songs while the birthday "girl" - radiant with joy - and her daughter played accordion and guitar. I even got up and sang a song of my own. These were delightful people to be with and yes, they were my people.

Could I live in Israel? Certainly. Do I want to? No. But I will always be a supporter of the country and its people. For me, a Jewish state is a necessity. I can find fault with Israel just as I can find fault with the US. But I will never let my ability to find flaws change my fundamental pride in the existence of a Jewish state.

Hollywood Can Save The American School System

2010-10-04T06:00:00.000-07:00

For almost 100 years, Hollywood has been assaulted in print and in speech for causing the degradation of American culture. It's supposedly the reason for violence in our youth. It promotes idol worship of our criminals and maybe even worship of the devil. It degrades women, encouraging our young maidens to neglect their studies and become tramps or worse. At best it's a distraction from our day to day. But mostly, it promotes the kind of behavior in our children that is antithetical to good morals and counterproductive to achieving an educated populace. In a nutshell, for almost 100 years people have been saying that movies make us stupid.

Now I won't tip my hand as to how I feel about these assessments. Actually, I will. People are by and large stupid with or without movies. I mean, have you hung around people with 100 IQs? It's depressing. Back to the subject at hand.

Public education in this country used to be held in high esteem, but for upwards of forty years, it has been the subject to the kind of derision that makes criticism of Hollywood tame in comparison. Johnny can't read. Janey can't read. I swear that every 12 minutes someone in this country comes up with a plan to reform American education. Those reforms don't work. There are those who believe that education should be privatized. But those people are just nut job right wingers who have conveniently forgotten that it was public education that made America a world economic power, that in the absence of public education America would be a backwater. Public education is a necessity. How can we make it work?

Since everyone in America has their own plan for education reform, I should have mine. And I do! It came to me while I was watching the movie The Social Network the other day. I liked the movie, very entertaining. It's portrayal of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was so juicily mean - he's the 2010 equivalent of "greed is good" Gordon Gecko - that in an effort to salvage his reputation as a human being Mr. Zuckerberg up and donated 100 million dollars to the Newark, New Jersey school system.

Thinking of Zuckerberg's donation made a lightbulb go on in my head. Hollywood can, in a complete reversal, save American education. If it plays its cards right no one will ever criticize Hollywood for destroying the fabric of America ever again.

All Hollywood needs to do is follow the blueprint of The Social Network and put out more nasty biopics of billionaires, lots more. There are about 400 billionaires in the US. If every one of those billionaires had a nasty biopic made about them - and believe me there are no nice billionaires in this world - all of those billionaires just might try to rehabilitate their public reputations by making a large donation to something.

Now let's say we encourage those billionaires, seeking to prove that they are wonderful human beings, to follow the Zuckerberg model. Every one of them gets to pick a public school system to give 100 mil. That's 40 billion dollars, ten times more than Obama is spending on his big education effort, Race to the Top. That's a big chunk of cash.

Now you say that money can't solve our problems with education. Maybe. But one thing those nasty billionaires will demand with their donations - because they are greedy bastards who won't want a dime of their money to go to waste - is accountability. They'd probably even get competitive with each other about whose 100 mil has the most impact. And right-wingers will love the idea of "entrepreneurs" leading education professionals around like pets on a leash because of their mega-buck donations.

There might even be a good movie or two to come out of this. I mean look at Bill Gates. That guy I'm sure has done a boat load of illegal and slimy things. There's a great story in their somewhere just waiting to hit the silver screen. And who knows what shenanigans have taken place with the Walton family (no not the TV Waltons with John Boy, the Walmart Waltons).

Hollywood can make up for its sins and probably make up a ton of money in the process by putting out a slew of bad boy billionaire films. The end result would be nothing less than the resurrection of American public education.

The Ph.D. Glut and National Academy Ratings

2010-10-01T06:00:00.000-07:00

The National Academy of Sciences came out with their first rankings of Ph.D. programs in over a decade. It was a huge task, I'm sure, to make these assessments. And while I'm not inclined to value rankings, if I did rank schools in a serious way (ignoring my jokey rankyourcollege.com web site), I'd do much the same thing as the NAS. I'd come up with a bunch of metrics by asking experts what they felt was important. Then I'd run Monte Carlo simulations where I randomly changed the weight of each metric to come up with a range of rankings.

No you don't get a single number from such an approach. But you do get some interesting information about the relative merits of each school. The folks who did this work for the NAS should be commended for producing something of value rather than some statistically meaningless ordering of departments.

There are some 5000 Ph.D. departments examined in the NAS report across over 200 universities. That's a tremendous number of Ph.D. programs and as the report notes, there are more Ph.D. programs now than ever before. Ph.D. programs are like that plant in the Little Shop of Horrors. They keep growing in number. And they are a menace. They keep devouring smart young students who are being deluded into believing that there will be jobs for them after their seven years or so of study. For most, those jobs aren't there.

How many of these Ph.D. programs are necessary? I'm going to make a very crude stab at answering this question by examining a field of Ph.D. study that I know well, Earth and Environmental Sciences. Over my years as an academic, I graduated four Ph.D. students. That's not a whole lot, but I consciously kept the number low because I didn't want to contribute to a glut of unemployed Ph.D.'s. Two of my students ended up with tenure track academic jobs at good schools, which in this day and age is a miracle. One was working for Exxon last I checked and Exxon loved her last I checked. The other was working for the federal government in a good paying job last I heard. OK, let's get away from the personal and onto the general.

The NAS ranked 140 Ph.D programs in the earth and environmental sciences. Which of them are really worthwhile? To examine this question, I want to look at what I view as the most important aspect of quality in a graduate program, the research impact of its professorate. In a good department, almost all professors should be publishing. Their papers should be well cited. And since awards for intellectual prowess are handed out easily by professional organizations, professors should have received awards.

I'm going to make the following ad hoc cut off based on the assumption that a good department should have on average professors with significantly but not grossly less impact than I had when I was an academic. My cutoffs for a good department are: 1) faculty should on average publish 2 or more peer reviewed articles a year; 2) their papers should be cited on average at least two times a year; 3) about half the faculty should have a real award from a professional organization attesting to their intellectual contributions.

Out of the 140 departments evaluated in the earth and environmental sciences, less than 20 meet this criterion for a good department:

Caltech ES&T
Caltech Geochemistry
Caltech Geology
Caltech Geophysics
Caltech Planetary Science
Columbia Earth & Environmental Sciences
Georgia Tech Earth & Atmospheric Sciences
Harvard Earth & Planetary Sciences
MIT Geology, Geochemistry & Geophysics
Princeton Geosciences
Stanford Geophysics
UC Berkeley Earth & Planetary Sciences
UCLA Geology
UCLA Geophysics
UC Santa Cruz
U Michigan Geology

That's it. The rest in my estimation just don't cut it. Their faculty members are on average not very good. Less than 12 percent of the Ph.D. departments ranked are truly of intellectual value if you believe my assessment.

Now my cutoffs, while they seem reasonable to me, are probably a bit too tough. There are another 16 or so programs that come close to the ones above. But beyond 30 or so programs there's really not much meat there. You could easily shut down 100 Ph.D. programs in the earth and environmental sciences and the world wouldn't even notice.

What should those 100 departments of little distinction do? There is a need for M.S. students in many aspects of the earth and environmental sciences. I graduated about a dozen M.S. students and all of them easily found good jobs. I imagine another 30 to 40 schools that currently have Ph.D. programs could serve the demand for earth and environmental science M.S. students in government and industry.

As for the rest, they really have no reason for being at the M.S. or Ph.D. level. They are producing students with dim employment prospects. I can't tell you how strongly I feel that professors that accept students when they damn well know there are no jobs for them are scoundrels.

Now I'll make an even bolder step (or more absurd step depending on your view). I'll scale my crude analysis to all of the NAS schools and programs examined. I'm going to assume that my numbers apply to every field of study examined.

Given that only 25 percent of all earth and environmental science Ph.D programs are of any intellectual value (according to me at any rate), it's probably a decent guess that only about 1200 of the 5000 or so Ph.D. programs really need to be in existence. The rest are there to satisfy the egos of the professorate and their associated schools. They are, like vanity presses, vanity Ph.D. programs. In a world free of vanity, they would likely for good reason, all be shut down.

The Tenure Trap, Part 4

2010-09-27T06:00:00.000-07:00

I've recently read two books on higher ed, Higher Education? and Crisis on Campus, that make the claim that somehow ending tenure will help to create an entirely new kind of university. Of course, letters defending tenure have been sent by the bucketful to any magazine, newspaper or major website that reviews these books and concurs with this assessment. Those letters warn of a mass calamity should tenure be abolished.

I don't think either claim is correct. What do I think would happen if tenure would be abolished? It's true that making predictions about the effect a change will have on any system is almost always a fool's errand. But since there have been so many willing to be fools on this topic, I might as well join them.

First I note that both books bemoan all the old fart professors on campus who are no longer productive. Abolishing tenure will supposedly get rid of them. Huh? The existence of those tired professors, the authors damn well know, isn't the result of tenure. It's the result of the age discrimination legislation created by the late Congressman Claude Pepper. Before those laws, there was mandatory retirement. After those laws, there wasn't. Tenure has little or nothing to do with any of this.

Let's say we abolish tenure. A professor turns 65. The light is barely on in his brain (I'm not trying to condemn all 65 year old professors here, there are plenty that are still vigorous; I'm just using a single example), but he's teaching courses, attending department meetings, and taking part, when required, in faculty governance. Students don't complain about him because he grades easily and his work loads are light. Just how are you going to get rid of this person without ending up with an age discrimination lawsuit?

So getting rid of tenure is not going to eliminate deadwood faculty. It won't save money either. Those same senior faculty members will still be there thanks to the late Claude Pepper. I have no idea why an editor didn't hit the authors of these books over the head when they made their claims concerning abolishing tenure and said, dude get a brain.

Getting rid of tenure will likely have other effects, though. Professors will no longer be de facto part owners of their schools, something that tenure confers to them. Instead, they will be just regular employees that happen to have Ph.D.s. That means that it is possible that they will have less freedom in the classroom; they may be forced to teach in certain ways and on certain topics.

I think that change is more than possible. It's likely. Overall, I'd say that change would be a plus. Professors are often awful instructors and are inclined to teach their own arcane area of research regardless as to whether there is any interest or need for classes on their research area. Having a boss man or boss lady doing a little lording over their teaching might be a good thing.

On the negative side, that same lording over would likely take place with regard to research. Given the financial constraints on institutions, it's likely that professors would be pushed to go where the money is research-wise. To a large extent that's happening already. For example at Duke, a joint college/medical school department in anthropology was put in deep freeze mostly because it wasn't generating as many grant dollars per square foot of lab/office space as other departments in the medical school (yes, some bean counter dean actually had that calculation done for him). Abolishing tenure, would likely make such decisions even more common.

Besides being crass, the push to chase after money - essentially making professors the Ph.D. equivalent of ambulance chasing lawyers - will diminish the intellectual quality of research on a campus. The fact is that granting agencies with a fair amount of easy money tend to want very mundane work done.

My guess is, though, that the influence on both teaching and research will be minor. Deans and even department chairs only have so much time on their hands. Some may micromanage and actively try to alter the teaching and research habits of professors. But most won't. It will be the same old, same old, except professors will be on contract.

I think the most profound change with the loss of tenure would take place with faculty governance and the management of a university. Currently at most colleges and universities, the faculty's role in management is a curious thing. The faculty has committees and a senate body to look at school policy. But most faculty members hate working on these committees or being a member of a faculty senate.

The reasons for this lack of interest in faculty governance are two-fold. One, as noted in an earlier post (part 2, I think) professors are far more interested in impressing their colleagues at outside institutions with their research than they are in influencing their own school. Their promotions are based on research prowess and as a result their loyalties are less with their school than they are with their professional research organizations. Why should they waste their time on something that gets in the way of them being productive researchers?

Second, these faculty bodies hardly have any power. Usually, they are advising bodies only, and usually they are expected to simply rubber stamp changes wanted by leadership. And that's what they almost always do. Why do tenured faculty do this? Why don't they exert some influence? I think it's partly because of the loyalty problem described above. Basically, professors don't give a sh*t.

It can get to be comical, this dance between faculty and leadership. A few years ago, the faculty at Notre Dame wanted to abolish its faculty senate because it was so toothless and a waste of time. The faculty wasn't allowed to do so. Leadership basically admitted that the faculty was powerless, but they insisted that professors go through the motions with their committees and "governing" bodies.

At Duke when I was there, the faculty senate related to undergraduate affairs completely fell apart for a few years. There were no senators. There were no meetings. University leadership forced it to be resurrected. I know what these senate meetings were like. The head of the senate talked. Virtually no one listened and instead read research articles, student papers or worked on their lecture notes, raising their hands yes when asked.

This I know sounds completely cynical. But I'm just reporting what I observed. It was a farce.

Despite all this lack of real power, for some strange reason leadership remains fearful of faculty opinion. Getting the faculty to agree on policy takes time. The faculty will almost always say yes, but you still have to go through a lengthy process of getting professors to meet in committees and then getting a vote in a faculty senate. It can take months.

There may also be one loose canon faculty member who decides not to go along and suddenly energizes the other faculty to delay leadership's desires for at least for one or two meetings or maybe even a year (I did that once or twice).

The presence of tenure gives the faculty the kind of power - even though they barely exercise that power - that makes leadership slow down. It's a check on the system. Remove that check, and leadership can swiftly move.

This sounds like a potentially good thing. But look at the quality of leadership on American campuses. It's not a pretty sight. We've have had decades of poor leadership across the country. For example, I served under three presidents at Duke. They were all bad. They all had serious lapses in character and integrity. They were all incredibly thin skinned. They didn't do their homework and understand what was really happening at their university (basically, they were too distracted with raising money to effectively manage anything).

Serving under them were deans that were rather pathetic as well. They all aspired to be future college presidents. In all my years, I admired one provost. He left to go back to teaching after one year on the job. I admired one dean. She left after a few years to be a provost elsewhere and now works in the Obama administration. That's two out of maybe 20 people in positions of leadership with whom I had to interact that I felt deserved any respect. That's not a good track record.

Given the general absence of competence and integrity in university leadership, those checks that tenured faculty put on the system are actually a good thing. They limit the damage that leadership can do.

This little discussion has gone on for far, far, far too long I know! It needs an editor. But if you've gotten this far, you might be wondering why I haven't mentioned the reason tenure is defended time and time again, free speech. I peripherally mentioned it with regard to research. Pushing faculty to chase money instead of good ideas is in a way, restricting free speech. Should tenure be abolished, would faculty be more circumspect in what they say? No doubt.

I'll end with a pre-tenure story about a university in about 1900, Vanderbilt. The school wanted to beef up its science and had some idea about developing a nationally recognized geology department. They hired a Harvard educated Ph.D. to head up this effort. After a few years, it was clear there was a conflict. The professor believed in evolution. He taught evolution in his classes as any geologist would. In Nashville at the turn of the 20th century, teaching evolution was not at all acceptable. The professor was canned. The department was essentially eliminated. Vanderbilt never developed any research prowess in geology.

Now I doubt in today's environment that a professor or department would run into trouble teaching evolution (except at places like Liberty and Oral Roberts). But it's likely that the elimination of tenure would occasionally inhibit the teaching of controversial ideas.

What would the abolition of tenure do to colleges and universities? It would be a mixed bag. Given the awful quality of university leadership over the last few decades, the overall influence would likely be negative. Should the quality of university leadership dramatically improve nationwide, I might give tenure abolition a thumbs up. But I don't see that happening anytime in the near future.

The Tenure Trap, Part 3

2010-09-22T06:00:00.000-07:00

When critics bemoan tenure, the attack is usually about the fact that no one deserves a job for life. There needs to be some accountability - a job needs to have some risk associated with it - otherwise people will eventually become irresponsible. I'll get to that argument in a bit. But first I'd like to assume tenure has value and ask, under that assumption, are we granting tenure for reasons that truly enhance a campus?*

I think that the answer is at best mixed. As I noted in Part 2, the preponderance of professors are not good at research, but we pretend they are. We create a fiction that universities are all inhabited by top notch scholars. Universities are certainly not alone in creating delusions like this. Many heart patients across the country swear that their heart surgeons were the absolute best in the business. It gives us comfort.

Tenure currently encourages excellent research and that is a wonderful thing. But there is far more need for professors to teach than there is a need for professors to do research. The money just isn't there to support them. In most fields of which I'm aware, grants available for potential ground breaking research have a 90 percent or more rejection rate. You can up your percentage significantly by applying for "directed research" money, but there's usually not much scholarship in that kind of work at all.

Because the money is limited and the number of applications is so high, the pie for research is often cut into skinny little slices that impair a researcher from doing the work necessary to truly do high impact research. Take away two thirds of the applicants, and the situation would be healthier and would still instill competition.

Creating a tenure system focused on research alone essentially forces professors to do something for which most aren't particularly skilled and for which there are far too few dollars available, anyway. Of course, those professors may think they are skilled. Their accomplishments say otherwise. Worse yet, they produce Ph.D.s who can't find jobs (this is particularly true in the humanities). It's a waste of resources across the board.

You can see where this is leading. You probably, if you've been reading this thing from the beginning (you must not have a job!), could see where it was heading at about paragraph 2 of Part 1. If a university is going to have tenure, it should de-emphasize research in tenure considerations. It should go partly back to the good citizen model, a model still used by many liberal arts colleges today.

Such a transformation would have many benefits. It would allow professors to work from their strengths. If they are great researchers, more power to them. They can continue to follow the model of today, publish and get grant money. If they are great teachers, they can give up the pretense of trying to be researchers, and focus on inspiring undergraduates. If they are wonderful at interacting with colleagues, they can use most of their time moving the college or university forward programatically by running committees and faculty councils.

One end result would be that the quality of teaching would likely improve. Also, I would hope that such a change would, because professors would no longer be obligated to do research, help ease the glut of papers and books that never get cited. It would likely ease the glut of Ph.D. students as well, since in the current climate the number of Ph.D. students you graduate are like notches on your research bedpost.

Finally, this change would move a significant number of professors away from focusing on trying to satisfy outside scholars to actually being of direct benefit to their schools. We'd likely have fewer obnoxious jerks. Professors would have to work harder at getting along with others in their own institutions. The environment would be saner.

I can't think of a single downside to allowing professors to achieve tenure through strength in one or two aspects of their work instead of strength in only one, research. The only barrier I can see to making such a change would be that the academy would have to admit that the current model doesn't work. No one likes to admit mistakes, I know. It's probably true that the research-focused model for the professorate we use today worked fine in 19th century Germany. It probably worked in 1920, too. But scaling up that model 100 or more fold in an ad hoc way, which is what we have done, doesn't make any sense at all.

All of this assumes tenure has value, and I started out part one with a tease about the attack on tenure. Should we have tenure at all? Crap. I've used up my alloted hour of typing. That discussion will have to wait until part four. And then I absolutely have to finish!

*As I side note, I've been typing in Yiddish and Hebrew all day, and this left to right writing that I'm doing right now looks very strange to me. I'll probably lapse into Yiddish sentence construction even more than I usually do.

The Tenure Trap, Part 2

2010-09-20T07:15:00.000-07:00

Tenure wasn't always based on research prowess. That change was mostly a 1960s phenomenon. The US government began to invest in basic research after WWII and universities decided to go after a large share of that research pie. In the process, they transformed themselves into institutions where teaching was number two on the list of priorities. By the 1960s, the rise of research was fully established, and it was then apparently that tenure committees began to look primarily at research prowess - books and articles published, grants obtained, etc. - to determine tenure.

Before that time, a professor simply had to be a member in good standing in the university. Basically you had to play the role and...look professorial. Teaching, committee work, not pissing people off, and being a good citizen were the important things. Those criteria still hold at many liberal arts colleges today.

But at the big schools, both public and private, the criteria moved away from being a good citizen. Instead it was all about how you were viewed by other scholars outside your university or college. This created a profound shift in a professor's loyalties. It was increasingly becoming possible to be a bad citizen - you could teach poorly, avoid committee work, and just focus on your research - and still get tenure. Professor X could in fact be an asshole and as long as he was an extremely productive researcher and outside scholars viewed him as a star, he'd be awarded a job for life.

In fact, that's what started to happen at universities and colleges in the 1970s. Real jerks whose only abilities were to crunch papers, write books and get funding started to dominate faculty rolls. They were obnoxious. They was nasty. They were unhappy and miserable. I know. I was surrounded by people like this. The older faculty members - who had been granted tenure under the old be a good citizen rules - tended to be perfectly fine people to be around. The newer ones - who came along in the 1980s and beyond - were, with some wonderful exceptions - horrible, obnoxious people. I did my best to avoid them.

Modern tenure assessment - focused on research prowess only - has created a faculty loaded with jerks. Also, as I noted in Part 1, even at top notch universities most faculty aren't doing much research that's either worthwhile intellectually or practically. The majority of research papers published never even get cited. Yet, as the criteria for tenure increasingly shifted toward research prowess, the number of academic journals exploded to accommodate more and more obscure research.

One would think that the community of scholars that were, through their external evaluations, the de facto judges of tenure nationwide, would do serious policing to separate the good from the bad. But a strange thing happened over time. Honest external evaluations became difficult to find. Instead a buddy system developed in an ad hoc way. After all, who wants to be responsible for getting some young bright eyed person fired when you see him at conferences every year and know he has a couple of young kids? I speak from experience in writing external tenure letters for such people. I sure as hell didn't want anyone canned.

Instead, in this buddy system we created the fiction that most research was of value.

In the end, a tenure process based on research evolved into a system where people were promoted for churning out minutiae. Not everyone does this. A significant number of people at top notch universities do in fact produce research of significant worth. But nationwide, I'm guessing that the percentage of young professors doing worthwhile research in the sciences and engineering is on the order of 20 percent. In the social sciences and humanities - which hung onto the coat tails of science funding in academe to create, by and large, artificial research communities of their own - the percentage is lower.

Add the fact that as noted in Part 1, even productive researchers usually cease to be productive after they reach fifty or so, and the percentage of all professors on a campus doing worthwhile research at any university - even the best ones - is alarmingly small. Yet research is what defines these institutions' prestige.

We have created a strange system where the end all and be all in universities - research - is not something many professors are good at. The community of scholars at a university consists of a tiny percentage of people actively doing something worthwhile, another small percentage that because of the inevitability of aging is resting on its laurels, and a huge percentage of pretenders. We don't challenge these pretenders. In fact, we pretend right along with them. It makes them happy. It also feeds the ego of the university and its community if everyone suspends disbelief and gives into the idea that everyone is a top-notch scholar.

I'll finish this up with my next post.

The Tenure Trap, Part 1

2010-09-15T12:38:00.000-07:00

Lately, I've been running into writings that bemoan tenure in universities. Here's one. And here's another. These articles (and chapters in books) that call for the abolition of tenure make arguments that tenured faculty are too expensive and tenure promotes faculty irresponsibility and laziness.

I should first note that the article in the LA Times I linked to above has a big error that the authors have admitted to me via email. Senior professors use up nowhere near the percentage of salary dollars claimed in their article. They also don't dispute that their salary data, culled from the annual AAUP surveys, might be off.

All that aside, the arguments against tenure sound an awful lot like the diatribes against union labor. Salaries for full professors are supposedly too high. Yet, salaries even for established full professors at decent universities are in the 80K-90K a year range (higher for big name and elite schools, but nowhere near the average salaries that are given in the AAUP annual faculty salary surveys). This is nothing to write home to mom about. I know that for a fact. My mom would, in a nice way, frequently tease me about what was, in her opinion, my very meager professor's salary.

No, tenured professors aren't overpaid. And the argument that somehow universities will save money by eliminating tenure partly implies that senior professors will end up being paid less in a tenure-less university. Great. We'll put downward salary pressure on people with already modest salaries relative to their level of education.

I actually doubt that senior professors would see significant salary cuts or increases if tenure was eliminated. I actually doubt that the elimination of tenure would have that much substantial financial impact at all. It would however, significantly change the culture of a college campus, and probably not for the better.

Before I discuss how campus culture would change, it's worth examining the life cycle of a tenure track faculty member. Let's call this person Professor X. Let's also call Professor X a male because if I call my model professor a female, the description below might be twisted into a sign that I'm female bashing. I'm just professor bashing here. Let's get that straight.

My model professor gets his job at the age of about 30 give or take a few years.

Professor X is likely very, very fortunate to get any kind of tenure track job. He had to somehow beat out 80-400 other applicants for his position. Every one of them had a Ph.D. Twenty percent of them had stellar applications with recommendations that said the applicant virtually walked on water intellectually (recommendation inflation is as common as grade inflation).

It's likely that Professor X is energetic and brimming with new ideas. Most of the time, unfortunately, those ideas are arcane and will result in little impact in the intellectual world. But no one has told Professor X that. He truly believes he's a world beater. And about ten percent of the time he is. By that I mean, he has the kinds of ideas that, if he successfully works on them during his career, will be cited at least hundreds of times by other scholars.

Here we are at fallacy number one in academe, the fallacy of the importance of research. Tenure or no tenure, almost all professors are engaging in research of little value to anyone, intellectuals or otherwise. Even at a top notch world class university, most professors are churning out meaningless drivel. We shouldn't have so many professors dedicating themselves to research, tenure or no.

But let's say Professor X is truly a quality researcher. He's produced a wonderful dissertation that will be cited by others for years to come once it has been published in book or article form (it it hasn't already been published). He has lots of good ideas. He gets money and support for his future research despite long odds. For the next ten years he's a whirlwind of productivity research-wise and publishes many interesting and provocative papers or books. He gets tenure along the way, sometimes early because of all he has done. It's a happy story, yes? I agree! Except for one thing.

Let's advance this happy story ahead in time. Sometime in his forties, those ideas just don't come as frequently anymore. And they aren't as good as the ones he thought of in his thirties. That laser-like focus he once had for minutiae isn't there anymore either. He has, oh my god, aged! The fact is that academic research is best for the young. I've rarely seen anyone over the age of fifty doing interesting research. I've never seen anyone over the age of sixty doing it. Your best ideas come in your twenties and thirties.

And it isn't just Professor X that has become a bit lame intellectually. It's also his field. Over a period of twenty years, an area of research that was once brimming with new discoveries can, as a result of those new discoveries, essentially dry up. Everything that will be found of note, has for the next several decades at least, been found.

For those that think I'm writing a quick and dirty autobiography - that Professor X is me - you're wrong. There are parallels sure, but there are also significant differences. Back to the subject matter.

Professor X could, in theory, pick up and go to an entirely new field. But in fact, that's a very, very hard thing to do. First, Professor X must be intellectually agile in his 40s, something that's not very likely. He needs to go back to the library, study and learn everything anew. Second, the people already established in the new field must accept Professor X into their fold even though his fame comes from another field entirely; that's not likely going to happen either.

Now that doesn't mean that Professor X should bow down to the effects of father time on his brain and field of study and quit his job (or jump off a cliff for the more dramatic Professor X's in this world). I'll continue this thing next time.

Three Chords And a Version of the Truth, Part 2

2010-09-13T06:00:00.000-07:00

I was listening the other week to some archived interviews with country music musicians and songwriters on NPR's Fresh Air. The host of that show does best when she talks with musicians. You can tell by the warm tone in her voice that she's in her comfort zone.

So it was with her conservations with Willie Nelson et al. Probably the best line in the interviews I heard was at the end of her interview with the late Waylon Jennings, when Jennings said something to the effect, "You asked some pretty good questions there little lady."

I can't say I particularly like the music of Jennings. It's too simple and the lyrics don't do much for me. The same can be said for most country music written before about 1975. The songs were, in general, long on heart, but short on craft. I find most of that music unlistenable.

But sometime in the late 1970s country music began to change. The lyrics became much sharper. The melodies started to occasionally have something vaguely interesting going on. What happened was that a lot of East Coast and West Coast songwriters migrated to Nashville because pop and rock performers were increasingly writing their own material. Songwriting gigs on the coasts completely dried up. That wasn't so true in country music. Singers and record labels still depended on songwriters. Nashville was the last place in America where songwriters could work their trade.

From the 1970s through the 1990s there was a tremendous amount of cross pollination between the pure country writing set and those who came in from the world of pop and rock. Nashville music publishers started the practice of arranging for co-writing sessions between songwriters to foster that cross-pollination. The music got better. A lot better.

Country music was still sentimental, of course. It's a tenant of modern intellectualism that sentimentality is bad in art and entertainment. I've never understood that. Families and family life are often overloaded with schmaltz and sentimentality. If you choose to ignore what's sentimental, then you are in fact creating art and entertainment divorced from reality. For example, here is what is widely acknowledged as one of the best songs ever written in country music (written by Bobby Braddock and Curly Putnam):

Musically this song is as dull as anything. It's also as schmaltzy as anything. But there's that twist at about the two minute mark and if you think that twist is hokey, I'd have to disagree. I'd have to say you don't really understand what enduring love is about and you don't understand what the South is about. A case in point. I worked with a kid from Mississippi one year in the 1970s. This kid, when he wasn't working with me, was going door to door spreading the gospel. He said to me once, "You know my momma loves my daddy so much that when he dies - and he's a lot older than she is - she wants to have his head stuffed so she can put it on the fireplace mantel."

I'm not kidding. He really said that. And he really meant it. Using the relationship between my old work buddy's parents as a barometer, the song "He Stopped Loving Her Today" is about as sincere and truthful as anything in this world.

Even if you think that George Jones singing about enduring love is pure trash, I hope that you admit that this song, written by Lucinda Williams, is about as honest and heartfelt as they come:

Again, musically there isn't much here, although it's far better than He Stopped Loving Her Today. But those lyrics are damn solid and the idea of a woman demanding what is "my right" is just damn wonderful.

By the 2000s, the spark in country music had pretty much died out. The lyrics got dull again. The music emphasized beat and volume. And those songwriters from the coasts who came to Nashville lost the last gig for songwriters in America because Nashville producers and record labels decided performers should write their own material.

But for over two decades, there were some fine songs written in Nashville by people who truly understood how to write music. Here's one written by Beth Chapman, Down On My Knees. The production is crappy - that's typical of Nashville - but Trish Yearwood couldn't sing off pitch if you put a gun to her head and this song is as good as any r&b tune written for Motown:

If you had put a hard three on the beat and had Luther V. sing Down My Knees, it would have been on the r&b charts for half a year. Instead the tune was a minor hit for Yearwood. Schmaltzy? I don't think so. Have you ever thought about what it would be like to lose the love of your life. Damn, I'd be down on my knees, too Plus craft-wise this tune is as solid as granite.

Long ago, the dean of Nashville songwriting Harlan Howard described country music as three chords and the truth. I'd say it's three chords and a version of the truth, one that comes from a life where family and love are first and foremost, where people are frail, and where hard luck and poverty are often pervasive.

I don't think, in the end, I'm a very good country music songwriter. Mostly I'm imitating the music. A discerning country ear knows that's exactly what I'm doing. But every once in a while, I come close to "three chords and the truth." The song here is one of those times. It has four chords not three. It's a little story song, a fictionalized version of a day in my own life when I had to deal with the demons inside my own brother. We were living in Wisconsin, which is about as far from the South as you can get. But Harlan Howard grew up in Detroit. Country music isn't about where you're from. It's about, and this is corny as hell but also true, what's in your heart.

Three Chords and a Version of the Truth

2010-09-08T06:00:00.000-07:00

One way of thinking of songwriting is that there is an optimal amount of information content in any song. On one end of the spectrum is a song where one note is repeated with an even rhythm and a one word lyric. For example, love, love, love, love, love and so on. That wouldn't be a hit. Too dull. It's a high entropy message. On the other end of the spectrum is a song where rhythm signatures and dynamics vary starkly, there are key changes and odd intervals tossed around, and the lyrics talk about some esoteric subject like how to properly build a chicken coop. That wouldn't be hit either. Too complicated. It's a low entropy message and is called contemporary jazz.

A songwriter intuitively or analytically knows that there has to be something mostly old and predictable (mostly high entropy) in a song and that the trick is to add something new and interesting onto that boring base that excites the public. So the idea is to somehow balance all aspects of a song when writing and make them all just a little interesting: rhythm, dynamics, melody, and lyric. I don't mean that the balance needs to be or should be equal. Usually one element sticks out more than any other. Very few writers have the ability or interest to have a mix of strong elements. People like Paul Simon and Joni Mitchell come to mind; they think of the whole song.

But most songwriters are specialists. The fact is that if you do one thing extremely well, the other aspects of the song don't really matter or just might get in the way. Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and Tom Waits are essentially lyricists who happen to add melodies and rhythms (dynamics in pop music disappeared with modern mastering about 40 years ago). For Dylan and Cohen, that emphasis on lyric (with a drone-like background) likely comes from where they heard music first, the synagogue. Every time I hear a song from those two, I have an image of an old guy in robes reading the Torah on a Saturday morning.

Most pop music is not lyric focused. The lyrics in fact are almost always complete cliches. From Frankie Avalon in the 1960s to Beyonce today, no one is saying anything particularly important, clever or interesting lyrically. The emphasis increasingly has moved from melody to rhythm. The idea is to simply shake your hips.

There's one exception to the lyric as a silly accessory rule in popular music today, country music. The melodies, chord progressions, and rhythms in country music are almost always predictable. But the lyrics often aren't. Or at least they didn't used to be.

I get a lot of grief for liking country music. No, I don't listen much to what is on the radio today as I'll get to later. But the stuff from about 1970 to 1995 can be damn good. I also know I'm not the only Jewish middlebrow intellectual who gets grief for liking country music.

I've written a lot of country music and I've gotten a lot of grief for that, too. None of my songs have been recorded by major country musicians. But they have been good enough to get me access to all but one major record company in Nashville. Before the music industry collapsed, record company execs would invite me into their offices, listen to my tunes, and take a song every now and then for potential use. Here's a link to one. I'll continue this discussion next time.

On College Science and Engineering Bashing

2010-09-01T06:00:00.000-07:00

I was reading a new book, Higher Education? by Hacker and Dreifus. It had its good points, but not infrequently I would shake my head and think, no that isn't right. One of my head shakes related to their discussion of engineering education. They lamented the high drop out rates in engineering and put the blame on the professorate. According to them, engineering professors must not be doing their jobs right. Then came the kicker. They suggested that engineering be thrown out of undergraduate education altogether and be made into a discipline for graduate study only.

Hah, hah, hah. Earth to Hacker and Dreifus. This country needs engineers to keep our economy humming. Engineering students already spend four or more years (because of extensive requirements, it sometimes takes more than four years even with a full course load) learning the things they need to practice their profession. That's already a lot of time and expense. Do you really expect them to get an undergraduate liberal arts degree as well?

Hacker and Dreifus seem to be of the opinion that if students don't like a class it means that the class isn't very good. They also espouse the idea that everyone has the ability to go to college. Neither are true.

I'm not going to make the claim that every engineering class is taught by a wonderful and dedicated instructor. They aren't. But the reason most students dislike engineering classes is simple. They're damn hard and the work loads tend to be heavy. Students don't like doing all that work, especially when they know their dorm-mates are majoring in things like sociology, and as a result can party all night long and still end up with B+ averages. I'm not making this up. I've talked to lots of engineering students. I had voting rights in Duke's engineering school, and taught and advised many engineering students. That's what they've told me.

And no not every student is capable of doing college level engineering work. Hacker and Dreifus are engaging in wishful thinking when they say every student is capable of doing well in college. Let's talk about just engineering and the sciences first. I'm going to make an ad hoc guess that about 20 percent of all college students today have the intellectual horsepower and work ethic to major in engineering. That's the same percentage of college students today that likely could major in the sciences. The rest just can't cut it. They can't do the math or they can't stand the work load. It's just too damn hard for them.

Don't believe me? Here's a new paper that has its quirks, but is interesting. The author, an Oregon physics prof, looks at test scores in an introductory astronomy course popular with non-science majors. We aren't talking hard science here. Most of the math is thrown out to keep it easy. The syllabus calls it "checkbook" math.

Over a period of four years, less than 30 percent of the class scored a 60 percent or better on tests. Fourteen percent withdrew from the class before completing it. Fifteen percent scored less 45 percent on tests. University of Oregon is a flagship school. It gets pretty good students relative to the national pool. The subset of their students taking what's designed as a science class for those without much science aptitude is struggling to score 50 percent of better on multiple choice tests. Perhaps the professor is an ogre who just creates impossible tests; I supremely doubt it.

What about students who don't take science and engineering courses? How many first year students in college today are capable of truly doing college level work? Based on drop out rates and the typically low GPA's of those that drop out, I'd say about sixty percent can cut it. The other forty percent simply should not be in college. They lack the intellect or discipline necessary to even perform modestly well.

The engineering bashing of Hacker and Dreifus I believe has its roots in science and technology phobia. I've heard the same type of bashing from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching's former head, Lee Shulman, who says that the worst of higher education is science instruction. These people are confusing student kvetching about work with substantive criticism. Science and engineering are hard. You have to think. You can't just b.s. and get a B+. You have to do homework assignments to hone your skills. To do science and engineering well requires brains and discipline.

Instead of bashing science and engineering education, I wish those doing the bashing would simply look themselves in the mirror. Are you expecting your students to really work? Are you expecting them to stretch themselves intellectually? When I look at the social sciences, the education schools, and the humanities, the answer to these questions is no. Students aren't being pushed. They coast and earn high grades. I would argue that the worst of higher education involves non-science and engineering instruction. If students ever start kvetching about the workloads outside the sciences and engineering, I know that higher education will be on the right track.

Weak Tea

2010-08-30T06:00:00.000-07:00

The other day Glenn Beck held a rally in Washington DC. I didn't know who Beck was until sometime last year because I don't watch TV. But this rally apparently was heavily promoted by his employer, FOX News. For a good solid week, coverage about the impending event was splattered all over the media. This was supposed to be the mother of all events for the Tea Party crowd.

The end result? About 90,000 people showed up. That was it. Ho hum. Seems like very weak tea to me.

I don't understand why the Tea Party gets the attention it does in the press. It's a small fringe group. It operates best in states that attract more than their fair share of skinheads, places like Alaska, Nevada, and Idaho. In real states with real people the Tea Party is pretty much a non-entity.

Its political successes have been modest - a few Tea Party people have beaten out traditional Republicans in the primaries - and it looks like they have no chance of growing. We're not talking about a political shift in the youth of America that will have lasting impact. Mostly, we're talking about the Fox News crowd, a demographic with an average age of 65. Even one of the Tea Party's rare successes - the Republican nominee for Senate in Florida - has had to backtrack and abandon some key Tea Party points of view in order to try to get elected in November.

So why is this group getting all this undeserved attention? I note that about seven years ago I was part of huge rallies - bigger than Beck's affair - in San Francisco and DC to oppose the impending war in Iraq that were largely ignored by the press, who dismissed the participants as a fringe element. Why isn't the press doing the same with the Tea Party?

Tea Party people aren't generally particularly colorful or interesting. Every once in a while one will carry a sign that's outrageous. Who cares? In the South, strange people with megaphones attached to the tops of pickup trucks routinely shout out that the end is near and exhort you to find Jesus. No one pays these nut jobs any mind. We should do the same with the Tea Party.

But for some reason the press (and the public) can't let go of this fringe group. I don't get it. After all, we have one senator who is a bona fide socialist. That's probably how many Tea Party senators we'll have in 2010. Is the press covering socialists (and no, Obama is not a socialist) in America with the same fervor that it's covering the Tea Party ?

I think one reason for the over-coverage is that the Tea Party does have a great name. It's also true that the party is new. Then there is the fact that it is white and Christian. For some reason, white Christian America seems to get over-represented in the news in general. But I think the main reason that the press covers the Tea Party with such fervor is that the public can't keep its eyes of this train wreck of a group. The public loves to rail about Sarah Palin, Beck and the people in the Tea Party crowds with their crazy misspelled signs.

So in the end, what seems to be driving coverage of the Tea Party is not its political impact, but its ability to serve as an agent of lurid curiosity. The press is blowing up the significance of the Tea Party because ultimately, the press is part of a business that depends on attracting eyeballs for its economic well being. So instead of real news, we get images of a fat, ignorant, grey-haired, entertainer on the Washington DC Mall pretending he's a moral and political leader. Whatever is motivating this coverage one thing is certain. It has nothing to do with responsible journalism.

How Did The Phrase "Rock Star" Come To Mean Something Positive Anyhow?

2010-08-25T06:00:00.000-07:00

I don't really understand rock and roll. The blues I do understand damn well. But as the song goes, the blues had a baby and they named it rock and roll. As far as I can tell, that baby is one nasty bastard child born amidst the strange mix of boredom, affluence, ennui, and privilege that defines white suburban life. It's horrible stuff.

Somehow the term "rock star" is a positive one. I don't get that at all. What is there to envy and admire about grown men who behave like spoiled children? Mick Jagger is someone to admire? The man is selfish and narcissistic, plus like almost all rock performers he doesn't even know how to sing (more on that later). Keith Richards? The man has no brain cells. Eric Clapton? Borrows a lot of licks from talented old blues guys who are dead and died in poverty. Paul McCartney? Now you've got me there. I admire him. But he has more in common with Tin Pan Alley than he does with Woodstock.

Really now, no one should buy an energy drink named "Rock Star." To me it sounds like something whose imbibition will drive you straight to the hospital with a bad drug trip or a case of cholera. Guitar Hero? There are no guitar heroes. You're talking about a group of people with the intelligence of amoebas that spend more on heroin in a year than most people pay for their homes. What is heroic about that?

Why would anyone even aspire to be a rock star? OK, there's the money. OK, there are the women. But you have to pretend you're a 17 year old for the rest of your life. Do you remember life at 17? The stupid and vapid in high school smiled and everyone with half a brain sulked. Yuck!

But I do have some equanimity. I can tune the crap rock and rollers call music out pretty well. I'm willing to let bygones be bygones. You can have your money, Mr. or Miss Rock Star. You can have your women (and men). My hat is off to you. Except for one thing. Stay out of my music! You understand? Stay away from recording real music. You don't deserve to sing it. You don't even deserve to listen to it.

Now I finally get to the point about what this post is about. My music. Not the stuff I write. I mean the good stuff written by smart people who understood basic music theory, were literate, wrote about real adult things, and were both musically and verbally clever. Like, for instance, the Gerswhins. George wrote the melodies. Ira wrote the words. They didn't always work together. For instance, here's the song for my sweetie and I. We listened to this tune an ungodly number of times when we were falling in love. The words are by Ira Gershwin, but the music is by Vernon Duke.

Ahhhh. Now that's music. And that's the incomparable Billie Holiday with the amazing Lester Young on that tune. They were shipped off to some third rate studio in New Jersey and played this tune and others in probably one take. They'd have 12 tunes done in a day. And they made music, real music. No pretentious hoo hah. No multiple tracking. No Autotune. They made magic instantly because they had real honest to god talent. Yes, I know Billie Holiday's life ended tragically and in a rock star-ish (look I've turned "rock star" into the pejorative it should be!) way. I don't admire Holiday as a person, but my lord what a voice and what amazing phrasing she possessed. There are so many people who have stolen her phrasing - including me - that if she could have copyrighted it, her heirs would be zillionaires.

The Gershwins and others wrote classic songs. And I have a simple request that will no doubt go unheeded. All you rock stars out there reading this listen up. Stop singing my music! Cease and desist at once. I can't stand it anymore!

Last week Brian Wilson, of Beach Boys fame, came out with one of those "I'm-going-to-sing-standards-badly-to-make-some-money-off-people-with-tin-ears" CDs, Reimagining Gershwin. One by one he butchered perfectly wonderful tunes. He should be arrested for desecrating the Great American Songbook. Don't believe me? Listen to this, a "duet" I mashed together of Wilson and Rosemary Clooney singing They Can't Take That Away From Me.

Brian Wilson is 67 years old and trying to sound like a teenager. His phrasing is lifeless and lumpy. His vocals are over-processed to such a degree that he sounds like an android from a 1960s sci-fi movie. The thing is that the lyrics aren't about anything related to teens. They are about real romance with real adults, not puppy love. But Wilson doesn't have a clue how to sing like a real adult.

Now contrast that with Rosemary Clooney. Like the Billie Holiday sessions, she didn't do this work in a fancy studio. The recording was never intended for sale, but was probably a practice session for her 1956 TV show. Michael Feinstein discovered the tapes from this session in Clooney's house. On this recording she's 28. And she's not trying to sound like a kid. She's convincingly singing like a grown woman who has been in love. "The way you changed my life. No they can't take that away from me." Listen to that fabulous phrasing. Wow. This is probably done with just one take as well. Perfect intonation. Listen to the band, real musicians. This is real music! And do you have any idea how much vocal control you need to sing so slowly so convincingly? I do. I know I can't do it. Rosemary Clooney was a singing goddess.

The next time some rock star decides he or she is going to sing standards, I think the president of the United States should step in to prevent such a national tragedy from occuring. We don't need the noise pollution. And what about the phrase "rock star"? It should be a pejorative. It should mean you're spoiled. It should mean you're irresponsible. And it definitely means you can't sing worth beans.

Learning How To Be A Grown Up

2010-08-23T06:00:00.000-07:00

It's official. Every time I look into the mirror, I'm reminded of how much I look like my father, or at least how I remember my father looked when I was a kid. I don't think I'm seeing things that aren't there, either. A couple of months ago, I walked into a hotel room to meet an Israeli cousin I hadn't seen in decades and he did a double take. "It's like looking at your father from thirty years ago," he said. "Exactly the same."

It's the wonders of genetics. And by the way, my cousin looked so much like his mother (my great aunt), that I did a double take as well.

I'll make what surely sounds like an obvious statement and say that as long as I knew my father, he was a grown up. But by that I don't mean he looked like an adult. That's the obvious part. I mean he played the role of grown up very well. I'm not saying he was particularly mature emotionally. He wasn't. Neither am I. But he was definitely an adult. He felt comfortable being in charge. It was his milieu.

Where does that come from, that feeling of confidence and comfort in a world that can be harsh, arbitrary, and cruel? As long as I knew him, my father always had it. But surely there must have been a transition from some other state that I was too young to witness.

The fact is that until very recently I felt like a kid on the inside. Oh sure, the face and body said otherwise, I hadn't been carded in decades, and young men and women increasingly addressed me as "sir," but in my mind I really wasn't a grown up.

I had a mortgage. I had a child. I was married. I behaved, more or less, responsibly. That all said, I found all the "sir" laden salutations strange and I would rebuff any student's efforts to get me to serve as any sort of emotional mentor. Who was I to be a guide to anyone? I was still a kid at heart.

But over the last several years, that has no longer been true. I don't feel like a kid at all, although certainly I have my playful moments. I feel like a true adult. The little bit of grey at my temples, I think, suits me. I'm more than OK with the grey hairs on my chest, the wrinkles around my eyes, and the widows peak, my father's widows peak, that defines my forehead. I'm an adult. This is how adults are supposed to look.

I don't mind being in charge. If someone wants mentoring, I'm happy to do so. I offer advice when asked, something I never, ever did before. Where did all this come from? When did my mind and my body suddenly match up? I have no idea. But it seems without any real effort and no awareness of it happening, I suddenly became a grown up. I don't know if this magical transformation happens to everyone or most or hardly anyone at all. All I now is that it has definitely happened to me.

Why Higher Education Is Refractory To Criticism

2010-08-18T06:00:00.000-07:00

When defending American higher education, the phrase "the envy of the rest of the world" frequently comes up. That phrase came up in the recent health care debate as well. I know American health care isn't envied much although we are good at finding exotic cures for the sickest of the sick. The lack of envy is why no one has chosen to copy our lousy health care system. With regard to higher education, I know we're overselling our prowess as well.

We have a marvelous system of graduate education in the sciences and engineering that is indeed the envy of the rest of the world. But when it comes to undergraduate education, we're lousy. Our education is expensive. It's scattershot in its quality. The preponderance of students spend four years lightly studying, go to classes with generally uninspiring faculty who expect little, earn degrees in majors with no real structure or significant intellectual thread, and end up with a ridiculous amount of debt. About half don't graduate. There is nothing to envy in how America does undergraduate education.

Criticism of our lousy efforts at undergraduate education is common and probably longstanding. You can find it in the wonderful autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams (1906), and in the prescient and iconoclastic The Higher Learning (1918) by Thorstein Veblen. How these criticism were received back then I do not know. But it is true that undergraduate education improved around the time of their publication.

My awareness of criticism of higher education came in the late 1980s with the publication of The Closing of the American Mind (1987) by Allen Bloom. If I remember correctly, this book sold hundreds of thousands of copies. It was an unexpected huge hit. It is also largely incoherent and unreadable. But Bloom's book had this kernel of an idea that the academic left was brainwashing our children with political correctness and that idea resonated with the public. It smacked of a conspiracy, and for some reason conspiracy narratives are popular.

Bloom's book was quickly followed by Charles Syke's Proscam (1988), which blasted the professorate as lazy, good-for-nothing lefties. It was a 100 percent rant and its evaluation of our nation's professorate was akin to a father's evaluation of a daughter's no-good boyfriend. This book sold a few hundred thousand copies as well.

Despite the popularity of these books and the debates they fostered, the response of higher education to their criticisms was one big nothing. Higher education continued to do what it had done since the end of WWII. Grow dramatically. Ignore undergraduates and focus on the prestige of scholarship and graduate education. Hire faculty who had little ability to teach and who were stupid enough to inject their own political commentary - on the right and left - into their classes. Raise tuition at a rate that made private schools unaffordable except to the wealthy.

Over the following years, there were further criticisms, some of them quite good. None of those efforts in book form sold anything close to the books by Bloom and Sykes (including one by me). The public had apparently gotten over its rage. The Carnegie Foundation under Ernest Boyer delivered concise and well thought out evaluations of higher education for over a decade (Boyer was followed by a politically correct education professor who turned the the Foundation's efforts concerning higher education into goo.). Bush's education secretary, Margaret Spellings, delivered a report very reminiscent of the earlier works of Boyer that was roundly and unfairly criticized by the left as being politically motivated.

The response of higher education to the criticisms of the last 20 years has been the same as the response to the Bloom and Sykes books. Pretend they don't exist. Pretend that there are no problems.

This year, three new books will have or have already come out by major publishers that are critical of the state of higher undergraduate education. The first was "Higher Education?" by two old style liberals (more concerned with class and social justice than with gender and race). It came out in early August. The authors got some great blurbs by famous people. They went on TV and on the radio with their message to make college more affordable and make professors more accountable. Like all books on this topic for the last two decades, it hasn't caught on with the public. I'm confident the next two, Crisis on Campus and The Lost Soul of Higher Education, will meet the same fate.

Why does the lamentable state of undergraduate education stay lamentable? Why doesn't the public demand change? Why is higher education so refractory to perfectly legitimate criticism?

The easy answer is that the powers that be in higher ed are stuck up, arrogant assholes, insulated from reality. There's truth to this assessment. I worked for three different college presidents as a professor, and two different college presidents as a TA. All of them were, in fact, stuck up, arrogant assholes, insulated from reality. It comes with the territory. But you could likely say the same for most CEOs of private corporations and most US presidents. The fact is that unsavory leadership does not automatically mean unresponsive leadership. These people do have to try to keep their jobs.

So why is there no change? I think the principal answer is that, in fact, colleges are providing the public what it wants. Survey after survey show very high levels of customer satisfaction with the college experience (at least among the students that do graduate). They hate the cost of higher ed. But they, by and large, love the product.

It's not as if colleges haven't changed much over the last 30 years. College life actually did undergo a significant transformation. While college leaders did little or nothing to improve education, they dramatically worked on improving the "college experience." Dorms were upgraded. Food was improved. High end gymnasiums were erected. Psychological services were added. College leaders decided that while the quality of education was light and lousy, they would provide enough distractions to make college fun. They turned colleges into high end summer camps.

It turns out that the public - parents and students - love this summer camp model. Again, they don't like the cost of it. But the actual experience is to a large degree tailored to the public's needs. They get a little education and a lot of socialization in a pleasant, pretty and usually safe setting. Who doesn't want to go to summer camp?*

Despite all the criticism, colleges are indeed responding to the wishes of the public. They have pushed education to the background, and embellished the college experience with all kinds of fun perks. It's not the education our country needs to provide our youth, but it is, sadly, the education parents and students do want.

In the book Bright College Years (1997), which is a very sweet description of modern college life with mild criticisms, Anne Matthews describes the silently understood "nonaggression pact" between students and professors today. Professors promise not to challenge students; students promise not to bother professors. I think what has happened on a larger scale is that there is also a nonaggression pact between colleges and parents.

Colleges promise to keep their students happy, provide little in the way of real challenges, and talk loftily about the education their students receive. Parents promise to pay tuition and not bother university faculty or leaders. In the current environment, debate is stifled because the stakeholders are participating in what amounts to a corrupt compromise. It's no wonder that colleges are refractory to meaningful change.

I expect in the coming decade more fair-minded and accurate criticisms of the lousy way we educate undergraduates will be published. But I doubt they will have any impact. They should. But they won't.

*Author's admission: despite my parent's frequent suggestions that I do so, I refused to go to any summer camps as a kid.

The Great American Novel

2010-08-16T06:00:00.000-07:00

This week Time Magazine did something that I haven't seen the mainstream media do in a long, long time: elevate a novelist to front cover status. I can't imagine this decision was popular with those concerned about Time's bottom line. Having some geeky guy with glasses that no one knows on the cover is no way to generate sales at subway kiosks. But Time Magazine isn't what it once was - the public has migrated over to cheesy 24/7 news and infotainment on TV - so maybe oddball moves like this aren't so damaging. It's hard to affect sales negatively or positively when not many read any magazines, much less yours.

Time is calling Jonathan Franzen a "great American novelist" and heaps lavish praise upon his upcoming novel, Freedom. I'll read the book and hopefully will snag a review copy. I've read one other novel by Franzen, The Corrections. I think that there are better novelists out there, but I'm not going to quibble with Time's decision. I'm just happy that they are promoting the idea that novelists and novels are important to this country.

I grew up in a time when novelists were a major part of popular culture. What novelists wrote mattered. Their books were discussed by high brows and middle brows at parties and around the water cooler. Even low brows knew who Hemmingway was. When Phillip Roth wrote Portnoy's Complaint, the lid blew off American Jewish community. Everyone had an opinion and in synagogue hallways I remember heated discussions about whether the book was anti-Semitic.

Literary novels have gone the way of news magazines. They are not completely gone, but they are largely forgotten. The authors don't even make it on late night talk shows anymore. What has happened is that middlebrow culture has been abandoned by the media. Instead it has been supplanted by the low brow - reality TV, Youtube, movie spectacles with blue people and whatnot. It's movies, not novels, that are discussed around the water cooler. We're in a visual age, not a literary one.

I would love to get people to read more. Movies cannot - at least given their huge budgets and their need to appeal to as broad an audience as possible - possess the intelligence and nuance of novels. I know I'm likely being completely naive, but I believe that if people spent the time to enjoy the experience of working through quality literature, they'd not only read a good tale, but also hone their thinking skills. It would help our nation if a significant percentage of the populace developed the ability to just sit down and look in detail at a book written with heart and sophisticated thought.

So my hat is off to Time for running this cover. I'm not hopeful that America's indifference to art and literature will change as a result of Time's action. But it certainly can't hurt.

My Hollywood Moment

2010-08-04T06:00:00.000-07:00

About a month ago, someone at a baseball game asked me to be an extra in an upcoming baseball movie. I said, why not? Yesterday was my Hollywood moment. Yesterday began early. There were about 500 of us filling out forms at 6:00 AM at the Oakland Coliseum.

The film was Moneyball, based on a bestselling book about the Oakland A's of the same title by Michael Lewis. The book took many liberties with facts. I've learned that Michael Lewis is, like Malcolm Gladwell, big on b.s. Both of them follow the "if a story is good who cares if it's true" method of writing. That method really works! The movie, written by a few people including Aaron Sorkin, is no doubt going to embellish upon the embellishments of Lewis. That's what Hollywood does.

But I'm an extra on this film. I'm not supposed to worry about that stuff. I saw the original script before Sorkin got a hold of it. It was dreadful. Whoops. I really have to stop doing this thinking stuff!

Moneyball is an A-list film. There's Brad Pitt, who looked great on the set, playing the part of the A's general manager. Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Art Howe, the A's field manager. Hoffman looked absolutely dreadful in a baseball uniform, like the Michelin Man after a two-week bender. But he definitely can act. Then there's Jonah Hill playing the brains of the operation. I have a sneaking suspicion that Moneyball is strictly a guy's film and that the female roles are very much subsidiary. It's probably true that there will be some gratuitous frontal nudity provided by some young hot girl. The original script did have a cheesy sex scene. Back to the subject at hand.

I was on the set to re-enact opening day of 2002 at the A's stadium. I had partial season tickets then (just like now) and probably went to about 10 games that year. It was a great season. The A's went on a 20 game winning streak, one of the longest in baseball history. They had three fabulous starting pitchers who were a joy to watch. I was a little younger and a little better looking in 2002. The same could be said for one of the athletes hired to play (I think) himself, James Mecir. When he was putting on his jersey on the set, he smiled and reminisced. "Yeah, my goatee has a little more salt and pepper now. Just a wee bit more." Both he and I were reliving a bit of our past.

At 6:30 AM when we started shooting, the clock on the stadium said 12:47. At 1:30 PM, when I left, the clock said 1:05. That's right. It took them seven hours to cover 18 minutes of baseball history. None of the actors or crew seemed to mind. The mood was upbeat and jovial. There were some kids in Little League outfits on the field having the time of their lives. But me? I found out I'm not meant to be an extra. I was bored, bored, bored. Even with three cups of coffee in me, I was dozing in the stands when I wasn't reading the latest issue of the New Yorker.

We reshot scene after scene after scene. I must have listened to the cheesy electric guitarist, Joe Satriani, play the same dreadful, wa-wa drenched version of the Star Spangled Banner fifteen times. I was supposed to stay until 2:30, but after seven hours, I'd had enough.

Will I be visible in the movie? Who knows? I do know that in the middle of shooting, they scattered me and a dozen more in the bleachers and said they would "CGI" us, which means that they plan to make multiple computer copies of us in the stands to make it look like the ballpark is filled to capacity. So it just might be that there will be about 100 or so copies of me in the stands. I doubt my face will be identifiable. If you see the movie next year, look for someone in a USGS baseball cap. If it's there, the head inside the cap will definitely be mine.

And what about my next Hollywood Moment? My days as an extra are over. After all, I've officially paid my dues. I can be picky now. I'm holding out for co-starring in a bromance with Mr. Pitt. If you're reading this, Brad, let's do lunch!

A Very Good Year

2010-08-02T06:00:00.000-07:00

Baseball is the only sport I follow with any regularity. I have three teams that I pay some attention to: Oakland, where I have partial season tickets, San Francisco, where I go to about five games a year, and Milwaukee for old time's sake. But I'm not really a fan of any team as much as I like the game.

I honestly don't know why I find it appealing to watch baseball, but I do. I think it's precisely because there is so little action and the pace of the sport is glacial. It gives you time to watch the nuances. You get to take note of the expressions on the player's faces, the little back and forth between the umps and the players. Plus it's outdoors and it's summer.

I grew up during a time when baseball was probably at its all time best in terms of quality. There were only 20 teams. The youth of America - black and white - still aspired to be major leaguers, and as a result, talent level was high. Pitching quality was excellent which meant scores were low. I loved games like that, 2 to 1 things that depended on good defense and smart base running. Games would be over in two hours give or take ten minutes.

But Major League Baseball decided to tinker with what I thought was perfection. They expanded the number of teams, created a playoff system, and created a new position, the designated hitter. At the same time, baseball declined in popularity among the young, and blacks abandoned the game for basketball.

Team expansion and the diminution of the talent pool meant that the quality of games went to hell. The pitching mound was lowered as well to give batters more of an advantage. Pitching talent was mediocre. Scores ballooned, defense was haphazard, fundamental skills were lost, and there were times when after three hours of watching with two innings still left to play, I'd just get up and leave.

Probably the low point of major league baseball was in the 1980s. The quality of the games was just plain awful. I barely attended. But then baseball started to seriously court Latino players, and eventually players from Asia. They shed one team (they should have shed a couple more). Quality started to increase. While steroids kept pitchers at a disadvantage, the game was watchable again.

Steroids were banned in the early 2000s, but players seemed to keep taking them until a few stars were outed. Now the game seems relatively steroid free. A significant percentage of players probably still take human growth hormones illegally, but the effects of those drugs don't seem to be quite as profound.

This year is really the first year in four decades where pitchers are in charge again. In the steroids era, hitters would be able to slam quality pitches for home runs. Now, those same pitches result in catchable fly balls. The quality of defense is high. Scores are lower. Players even seem to know how to bunt and run the base paths again.

I'm enjoying my trips to the ballpark more than I have in a long time. It has been a very good year.

Off Blogging Until August

2010-07-17T15:41:00.000-07:00

If you're reading this, you probably should be outside enjoying the summer weather instead.

On Loss

2010-07-16T06:00:00.000-07:00

I come from a small family. Growing up there was my mother, father, brother, uncle, grandfather, grandmother and me. That was it. We had relatives on my mother's side - cousins, great uncles and aunts and such - in Israel, but in the US there was nada. My father had zip in terms of relatives anywhere. There were less than 100 survivors from his home town of 20,000.

My parents and grandparents died years ago. I write this on the day of my brother's birthday. He died earlier this year. My brother and I grew up in a very atypical household in a working class neighborhood. We were the only immigrant family in the vicinity although about two miles away there was a four square block area composed mostly of war survivors where we spent a good deal of time. Our home might as well have been in a shtetl in Poland because when we shut our doors, we shut off - except for the presence of the TV - all of America.

I was der kleiner, the small one. He was der groiser, the big one. We were very close growing up, as probably can be expected from just how insular our world was. My brother chaffed against how Jewish and how outside the mainstream we were. I was prideful about it. He was wild. I was calm. He broke rules and let everyone know just what he did. I broke rules and kept it to myself. He married outside the faith and demanded that everyone completely accept the marriage. I never even gave more than a minute's thought, given who my parents and grandparents were and what they had lived through, to marrying someone who wasn't Jewish. I wasn't even going to marry someone who didn't at least understand some Yiddish; I wanted them to know when they were being talked about and what was being said about them.

We were different in so many ways. But the fact was that there was no one else who could possibly understand how I grew up and how I thought with as much knowledge as my brother. Now he is gone.

I saw him last about six months before he died. He looked far older than his years. His skin had the color of someone at death's door. I'd brought a camera with me. I'd wanted to take a picture of us together - the last picture I had of just the two of us was decades old - but the second I saw him enter the restaurant where we met, I knew that I wasn't going to take any pictures at all. I thought it would be twisted to keep a memory of him looking so ill.

A month before he died, he called me some time around midnight - like my mother he never really had any sense of time; my mother would call me at ridiculous hours under the assumption that if she was up, the whole world was up - and told me he was feeling much better. He was walking again. He proposed that we take a trip to Russia, just the two of us. He wanted to see Kamchatka. That was classic thinking from my brother; he never thought small. I told him we should first try a trip up to northern Wisconsin and go fishing. He sounded disappointed, but agreed.

A week or so before he died, we spent about seven hours on the phone over the period of a few days discussing a memoir I wrote about my parents. I hadn't really talked with him like that in a long time, many years. We went over that memoir sentence by sentence, correcting mistakes and adding things he remembered. He wanted to get it all down just right. As he talked about those days when we were growing up, he didn't express one hint of anger or resentment. He talked warmly of both my mother and father, mentioning little details of how they raised us that I would have never, ever brought up on my own. In the past, such memories would have caused rage to rise up in him.

He seemed calm and transformed, at peace with his past. Even though he was older than me, he had forgotten almost all of his Yiddish. I think he did this on purpose, trying to forget where he came from. But because of those conversations, his Yiddish started to come back. He said to me that after he would hang up, he'd remember strings of words, that he was even dreaming about them.

This was the week my brother and I were supposed to go fishing together. Then if he still felt well, we'd be off to Kamchatka in the summer of 2011. I think the last trip we took together was something on the order of twenty years ago. It wasn't a happy trip. But I was very much looking forward to this one.

I have a lot of pictures of my family. There is now absolutely no one with whom I can share them who can possibly understand the intricacies and unspoken language that made my family what it was. If my parents understood one thing through and through, it was the nature and tragedy of loss. I understand it now, too. It really has nothing of value. It's darkness. It's emptiness. It's a horrible sense of something missing. You don't learn a thing from losing those you love.

Here's a picture of my brother and I from long ago. Like always, he's der groiser and I'm der kleiner. You can't tell this from this picture, but I'm doing what my mother first asked me to do when I was twelve years old. "Watch out for your brother. Take care of him. He's not like you. He needs someone to make sure he doesn't do something crazy." But I hope you can tell that I'm enjoying myself.

I remember my mood clearly. I'm with my brother and this is exactly where I want to be at this moment in time. My brother is having a good time as well. I know exactly what he's thinking. He knows what's on my mind, too. He used to tease me about it in a friendly way, this watching over him. I never said I did it. But he knew. With how many people can one person feel that kind of closeness? A mother. A father. A sibling. A lover. A child. It's a rare thing, this kind of intimacy. And it really is the only thing that truly matters.

The Sanestream Media, Part 2

2010-07-14T06:00:00.000-07:00

Fifty years ago, alternative sources of news and information were there, but hard to find. For example, for some reason when I was a kid, we got this local anti-Semitic, John Birch Society type rag sent to us for a year. Maybe it had a total circulation of 5000. It had articles about fluoride being rat poison, fluoridation being a communist plot created for mind control, and blacks (not whites) descending from apes (at least they sort of believed in Darwinian evolution!). I was fascinated by this deranged stuff. When they sent us a letter asking us to renew for free, I sent back a definite yes. I really wanted to know how people who viewed my family as the embodiment of the anti-Christ thought.

Then about 40 years ago, alternative city weeklies came on the scene nationwide. I read those with avid interest, too. They had a different narrative. Government was corrupt. It was designed to control the poor, keep them that way and send their children off to fight wars. I liked this lefty narrative more than the righty rag I subscribed to. I still sort of believe the lefty narrative, but in a less sinister, more fatalistic way. The people with wealth have power. Even in a Democracy, they still call the shots. It's true in any form of government.

But back then, the MSM ruled triumphant. Everyone I knew watched Walter Cronkite. He soberly told you "the truth." You believed every word. The MSM said Viet Nam was a corrupt, bloody mess. You believed them. The MSM said Nixon was a crook. You believed that, too. The MSM took their job seriously. Fluff wasn't on the front page and didn't dominate the evening news.

I would argue that the MSM has abrogated their principle role as truth seekers. For example, the Iraq War has cost us on the order of two trillion dollars, 4000 soldiers lost, one hundred thousand Iraqis murdered, millions of Iraqis displaced, and created a failed violence-ridden democratic state without dependable water, electricity or sanitation. Yet, the MSM buries this negative information deep in their newspapers and it's barely mentioned in the evening news.

The MSM used to serve as a filter of real events and focus on the conventional wisdom of a story. It was "mainstream" because the narrative was middle-of-the-road stuff. The MSM avoided whacky conspiracy theories and One World plots and told you the news that most people would find believable.

Nowadays, though, you can watch the evening national news and see reports about UFOs. Walter Cronkite would have rather have gone on the air naked than spread word about a possible UFO sighting. The NY Times a while back had a front page story about Bigfoot. That's right, the "paper of record" decided that two scam artists from Georgia were legitimate discoverers of Northern California's mythical monster.

The MSM is not quite as sane as it used to be. Instead of being a strict filter it has decided to let urban legend creep into its narratives. But in comparison to what else is out there, it's still the sanestream media. Ever since the advent of cable TV and especially since the advent of the web, there has been an explosion of garbage pretending that it's news.

What's surprising to me is that the public has globbed on to these twisted narratives that make the MSM seem fully sane in comparison. FOX, MSNBC, the Huffington Post, and the Weekly Standard are full of reports of all kinds of conspiracies. It's paranoia 24/7. Then there are even more extreme news "sources" out there for the truly deranged. Basically, much of the public has decided it wants news that fuels its preconceived notions about how the world works. People want their biases verified as truths. In comparison the MSM is boring.

But what about those charges that the MSM omits the truth, the real skinny behind the news? The New York Times and the evening news still have important information. They just have less of it. It's not omission with intent to deceive. But they've lost so much of their audience that they are clinging to the people still watching any way they can. They try to entertain with quirky, fluffy stuff rather than inform. You can still find out that the Iraq War is a protracted, bloody, expensive disaster, but you have to look a little harder in the MSM to find it than you might have had to look twenty years ago.

I've looked at the current spate of non-MSM news services off and on. Left or right, I can't read or watch them. If I see Rachel Maddow or Keith Olbermann on the screen while riding on my exercycle in the winter, I quickly change the channel. Ditto for O'Reilly. I didn't even know who Beck was until about six months ago. I have a neighbor - a perfectly sane and polite, older gentleman - who used to watch Keith Olbermann every night that Bush was president. I once asked him why. "Because I like to hear someone say that Bush is an a**hole again and again," he shouted. Whatever floats your boat I guess.

Sure the MSM is fluffier than it used to be. And it's dying because instead of relying on the MSM for information, people flock to what they want to hear to fuel their anger and resentment. But I don't want to hear someone shouting at me or read about conspiracies and evil plots that couldn't possibly exist. Sure I get angry, but I want to get mad as hell on my own without anyone's encouragement. I'm probably not altogether sane, but I'm still an MSM kind of man and always will be.

The Sanestream Media

2010-07-12T06:00:00.000-07:00

I was reading the NY Times the other day and one of the major stories was about South Carolina's Democratic candidate for senate, Alvin Greene. It's a puff piece. Greene has zero chance of winning, but he is weird. The NY Times is trying to sell papers and ever since Bill Keller became editor they've been running "colorful" non-news pieces like this in an effort to keep readers. I doubt it's working.

The New York Times is at the apex of the MSM, the mainstream media. I don't know when the acronym MSM became popular. Maybe it was 20 years ago or so. But it seems that whenever anyone uses that term it's as a pejorative. Basically, they assume that the MSM doesn't tell or omits the "truth." If you're on the left and watch and listen to MSNBC or Pacifica radio or read the Huffington Post or Salon, the MSM represents corporate interests and the military industrial complex. It's telling a mass of lies and makes omissions to soothe the masses and keep them under the thumb of "the man." Yes, I'm laying it on thick. This is a blog, you know. I'm supposed to lay it on thick.

If you're on the right and listen to Fox and Rush, the MSM represents liberals who want to melt all your guns, take all your dollars and print money to give to welfare crack moms. It's telling a mass of lies and makes omissions as part of a plot to take away American's basic freedoms.

Now how can these competing views of the MSM both be correct? Well at face value they can't. At face value, both the left and the right are filled with lunatics who twist truths and don't like anyone who doesn't twist truths. So instead of reading the MSM, they read their own rags. They watch their own TV. They go to their own web sites and blogs. And all their nutty views are reinforced by people telling them that they are perfectly sane.

Here's an example of what I mean. Suppose you don't like Obama. I don't like him much either. But suppose you really, really, really hate our president. You're driven into a frenzy just by seeing his picture. Basically, you're a nut job with a nasty obsession about our president. Are you going to access the MSM to find out about who he is? Hell no. They'll tell you he is a Christian middle-of-the-roader when in fact you know he's a Moslem socialist or worse. So instead of reading or watching the MSM, you go to web sites like this. Read the comments on that site, please. Those people are 100 percent off their rockers.

And suppose you are on the left. You don't like Israel. I happen to like Israel more than Obama, but that's another issue. Suppose you really, really, hate Israel. You're driven into a frenzy just by seeing an Israeli soldier in the West Bank. You think that the US is supporting apartheid by giving Israel aid. You want a boycott! Basically you're a nut job with a nasty obsession. Are you going to access the MSM to find out about Obama's recent meeting with Netanyahu? No, you'll go to some place like The Nation and find this. It will confirm your view that Obama is a puppet capitulating to the Israel lobby and Jewish voters. Of course on the right's equivalent, you can find a completely different distorted view.

I'll continue this post next time.

A Failed Sport

2010-07-07T06:00:00.000-07:00

As a kid, I loved bicycles. I still do, but I don't ride 150 miles a week in the summers anymore. I worked as a bicycle mechanic in my teens. I had a girlfriend with whom I had little in common, but she had serious curves and her house was along the bike route where the annual Nationals were often held. I think I liked her location even more than her curves.

Wisconsin was oddly a bit of a bicycle haven back then. Mostly it was because bicycle riding was considered to be great summer training for speed skating. In college, I'd train with Olympic ice skating hopefuls, bicycling along the Wisconsin countryside. In those days, finding information about the Tour de France was almost impossible. In the Milwaukee Journal, the extent of Tour de France news consisted of three times a week two sentence articles about who was in the lead. I'd seen telegrams that were longer.

But then in the 1980s, Greg Lemond came on the scene. The US got interested in cycling. His story was the stuff of sporting legend. He won the Tour de France in 1986, could not compete in 1987 and 1988 because of a gun accident, and then miraculously won in 1989, taking the lead on the last real day of racing. After that win, bicycling became an American sport. But it's also true that sometime after that win, the Tour de France became wholly corrupted by doping.

Since the 1990s, two riders have outright admitted that they used drugs to win the Tour de France, Bjarne Riis and Floyd Llandis. One rider, 1997 winner Jan Ullrich, was banned from the Tour in 2006. Then there is the case of seven time winner Lance Armstrong. He's never tested positive for drugs aside from a minor violation in 1999. But Lemond says that Armstrong told him explicitly that he used EPO. Landis has stated again and again that Armstrong used PEDs.

Yes, Armstrong is an American hero. But I remember in 2003 after a series of tough mountain stages, Armstrong appeared to be completely shot. An acquaintance of mine who has invented a heat fatigue reducing device got a call from Armstrong's team in the middle of that race. Could he ship them the device overnight? He did just that. He has no idea whether it was used. But somehow, Armstrong managed to renew himself for the final mountain stages and win the race by a little over one minute. I remember thinking his resurgence was either a miracle or dope assisted. I don't believe in miracles.

Floyd Landis had a very similar miraculous resurgence on a mountain stage in 2006. That's the day he tested positive for doping.

I understand the American public's reluctance to admit the obvious. Armstrong's story is a miraculous tale of a cancer survivor turned sports champion. It's such a good story that no one wants to be a spoilsport and deflate it. But this is the same public that adoringly watched a baseball player who had obviously been transformed by steroids, Mark McGwire, break a hallowed home run record. We like our heroes of course. But the odds that Armstrong has not used PEDs are slim.

The one defense that can be made for Armstrong is that most in bicycling are dopers. In such a failed sport, it's impossible to win without cheating. I agree with that assessment. I understand just why Lance Armstrong had to use EPO in the 1990s. He's probably using something different now. I don't know what. Doping is a virtual requirement for participation.

I still love bicycling, but as for international competition, I view it as something akin to professional wrestling. It's not rigged, but it is fake. The sport is broken. It's no wonder that I, who once called the sports editor at the Milwaukee Journal as a teen demanding that he cover an event of international significance, haven't watched the Tour de France in years.

Why LeBron James Will Sign With Milwaukee

2010-07-05T06:00:00.000-07:00

I've been very occasionally reading about the free agency of NBA star LeBron James. The same teams keep popping up again and again as the likely ones who'll nab him. The New York Knicks and soon-to-be-New York Nets. The Chicago Bulls. The Miami Heat. Or perhaps he'll stay in his home state and continue to play in Cleveland. That's all well and good. But sports journalists are well known for their ineptitude. Most barely understand the English language. Their brand of journalism is to hang around the locker room or bar and write down whatever verbal diarrhea comes out of an athlete's or manager's mouth. I'm sure they are missing something vital.

In all of these articles, there is one team conspicuous by its absence, the Milwaukee Bucks. OK, you say that I'm probably the only one on Earth who would call attention to this "omission", and my view is distorted by my noble Milwaukee origins. But that interpretation would be pure psycho-babble. The sports journalists can pontificate all they want. I know what's going to happen. Like a behind the back pass to an open man that makes you blink twice because you're so surprised at what you see, LeBron will sign with the Milwaukee Bucks. There is no doubt.

It's fate, really. History repeating itself. Forty years ago, an Ohio native - one of the ten best basketball players in NBA history - left Ohio. His name was Oscar Robertson. Where did he go? Milwaukee of course! Why? To pursue an NBA title. Was he successful? Of course!

LeBron James wants an NBA championship, yes? Look at the teams those lame-brain sport journalists tell the world King James is considering joining. The Knicks. They have no talent at all. Ditto for the Nets. Both of those teams are truly pathetic. Will either of them be NBA championship material with the addition of LeBron James? No way. LeBron would be wasting his time going to NYC.

And Miami? They had a mediocre team last year and would have been as awful as the Nets had they not had Dwayne Wade. Wade is leaving and would be a poor fit with LeBron James anyway. Chicago? Not a bad team, but they lack a decent center and Chicago born Dwayne Wade would be a better fit for the Bulls. Cleveland? Lebron's been there and done that.

In contrast, Milwaukee went 46 and 36 last year and like the Bucks of forty years ago are on the cusp of being championship material. Just like forty years ago, they need one more puzzle piece, an Ohio native who longs for an NBA championship. I'm sure as anything that Ohio's last great ballplayer, Oscar Robertson, is on LeBron's speed dial. Given that the Big O is a natural at being a mentor, I'm also sure that he has been giving LeBron good advice. Here's my educated guess as to what they are saying.

LeBron: "Where should I go Big O?"

Oscar: "Milwaukee worked for me. It was the best decision I ever made."

LeBron: "They say they only have 40 mill."

Oscar: "How important is a championship to you?"

LeBron: "Everything."

Oscar: "Well then. I think you know what to do."

It's obvious what's happening. Sports journalists are missing the greatest sports story of the year. While they hop around like fleas to New York, Chicago and Miami, LeBron is talking on the phone every day to Oscar and the Milwaukee Bucks' owner Senator Herb Kohl. They're working out the details one by one. Come next week or so, when LeBron calls a press conference, I know what his first words will be. "Fear the Deer." Remember where you heard it first.

On Student Evaluations, Part 2

2010-07-02T06:00:00.000-07:00

When student-based evaluations of teaching consist of a series of numbers on a bubble sheet, they're worthless as a means of improving your teaching. Students are strongly influenced in their numerical evaluations by the ease of the course and the ease of grading. All the numbers on my evaluations really told me was whether or not I had dropped some assignments or graded higher or lower than in previous semesters.

Plus, a funny thing I noticed about student-based evaluations was that in some ways students were inflating their evaluations just as much as professors inflated grades. A score of 3.0 on a five point scale, the equivalent of a C (there were no zeros, one was the lowest score you could get) was a sign of truly miserable instruction regardless of ease or difficulty of the class. C was failure. But above 3.5, things got interesting. A score of 3.8, on average, could mean a professor was mediocre or a professor was outstanding and tough. It was impossible to tell the difference without reading student comments.

An average score of above 4.5 overall meant a professor had an engaging personality, could speak loud enough to be heard and expected little from students. Toward the latter third of my teaching career, my numbers shot up above 4.5 for a couple of classes. I was very sheepish about these scores. I knew I was being way too easy. In response, I expected more in terms of workload and graded a little tougher the following semester. Predictably, my ratings dropped down to the 4.3 to 4.4 range.

One thing about the student evaluations that had ample room for comments was that the tone of the writing was fairly adult and mature. Oh sure, there were people who used the written part of the evaluations for revenge or thought it was an opportunity to test their skills as a potential staff writer for late night TV monologues. But in general, the comments were free of sarcasm, and as I noted in Part 1 of this post, useful.

For those schools that still have evaluations with extensive comments, my guess is that the writing is still mature and mostly civil. However, that's not true on website based evaluations like ratemyprofessors.com. Those evaluations almost all look like they were written by spoiled ten year olds. I've looked at online professor evaluations of professors that I know. The professors who take their job seriously and are talented don't score above 4.0. Those that give out A's like candy and go through the motions intellectually get very high marks. I find it depressing to look at online public professor evaluation sites. If you take those reviews as an indication of student sentiment, you're left with the impression that all college students are illiterate brats who have no interest in learning.

Why is there a difference between the evaluations students write in class and those you see online? First off, those that write comments online are volunteering to do so. You're not getting a cross section of the student body like you are with in-class evaluations. So you end up with a preponderance of students who write because they are angry. Second, there is a tendency for people to write things online that they have the sense not to write on a piece of paper. Sanity and decorum seem to go out the window with the internet. All I have to do is look at some of the regrettable emails (and blog posts) I've typed in a hurry to know of the craziness of web-based writing.

Are student-based evaluations useful for professors? The online evaluation websites are completely worthless. In contrast, in class evaluations can be useful if there is room for students to write comments and students are given the time to be thoughtful.

Are student-based evaluations useful for students? If you're a slacker looking for cheesy courses, the online evaluations are fabulous. If you're a serious student, they are of no use. I still believe it would be valuable if schools published synopses of in-class evaluations if they included student comments. But my guess is that the online services have usurped whatever role in-class evaluations could play in helping students choose classes. In this day and age, crudeness is somehow taken as a sign of sincerity and authenticity. So a review of a class that's full of nasty language and insults is taken seriously. I don't understand why. But it is what it is.

On Student Evaluations

2010-06-28T06:00:00.000-07:00

By the time I started teaching as a full time professor, Duke had a longstanding program of student-based evaluations of teaching. The evaluations were very simple things, consisting of about eight questions for students to answer. Students would rate a professor on a scale of one to five on each of those questions (quality of lectures, level of student participation, how well organized was the class, etc.) and there was ample room for students to write something substantive after each rating.

I liked those evaluations. Students often took the time to answer thoughtfully. Yes, they tended to give high evaluations to those that graded and taught the easiest. But the written parts of the evaluations were helpful. Students had good suggestions. Some also had a good sense of humor. The evaluations were fun to read.

For the first year or two that I was teaching, the university let volunteers from student government look at those evaluations and write a short synopsis of the comments and ratings for each course. Those synopses were compiled in a fat booklet every year or so for all to see. The volunteers, I thought, took their job seriously. They filtered out the crackpot evaluations fairly well and their comments were usually spot on.

Professors hated the booklets. Bad professors were truly savaged in these things. But my feeling was, hey you're lousy at what you're doing. I know you're lousy. The students know you're lousy. You have no personality. You can't teach your way out of a box. Why shouldn't the world know you're a crappy teacher?

The faculty fought to remove student access to the evaluations. They succeeded. Then we got a new provost who was a complete idiot and screwed up just about everything he touched. One of the things he wanted to change was the student evaluation forms. He wanted more quantitative information from them so he changed the form into a 40 line bubble sheet questionnaire. The form consisted of one redundant question after another.

When students received the new form, they spent all their time filling out bubbles. They had a little space at the bottom to write one comment. Most wrote nothing. For one class, I received a "comment" from only one student; it was a sketch of male genitals. The drawing was actually quite accurate. He - I think it was a he from the drawing style - gave me high marks on the bubble sheet. I had no idea what possessed him to draw what he did. At any rate, evaluations were now completely useless to me as an instructor. Instead of worthwhile comments, I had an array of 40 meaningless numbers.

I'll continue this next post.

No We Aren't Europe But We Too Have an Unsustainable Model for Government

2010-06-25T07:00:00.000-07:00

I watched the second half of the US-Algerian soccer match in a little French-owned coffee shop near my home in Palo Alto. The place was full on a workday morning, mostly consisting of soccer fans. Not everyone knew the rules of soccer, but they were all interested in the game. One fan brought along an American flag. I'd never seen this kind of attention paid by Americans to soccer before. In 1994, World Cup games were held literally across the street from this coffee shop and hardly anyone cared. I was buying tickets to the games off desperate scalpers for five bucks a pop.

But now, it's different in Palo Alto. The soccer games are even on the public address system in the local Trader Joes. No it isn't like in Europe, but an interest in, if not mania over, the World Cup has taken hold. Then again, this is Palo Alto, liberal as liberal can be. Palo Alto, like most liberal communities in America has a longstanding European envy. Parking lots have more than a smattering of Mercedes, BMWs, Volvos, Audis, and Volkswagens. Palo Altans wanted European-style single payer national health care. They want the cradle to grave government assistance and pensions of Europe. I don't think they'd even mind paying European-size taxes.

The crowd in the coffee shop roared (except for the two people in Algerian soccer shirts) when Landon Donovan scored the winning goal that catapulted the US into the next round of the World Cup. I did too! But Palo Alto is not mainstream America. That's why I live here. I've lived in mainstream America for much of my life. I can't say that I liked it.

I know that on the West Side of Milwaukee, the hood (and it is a hood) of my youth, hardly anyone was watching that soccer game. Baseball? Sure. Basketball? Yeah, that too. Football? Now we're talking. Soccer? ZZZZZZ. The people in my hometown don't look to Europe for much of anything, although most probably still know a few catch phrases in German and Polish, dontcha know. They don't want European cars or shoes. They'd rather not have government assistance or "so-called social security" if they can help it (although they're not stupid; if the government is handing out dollars they'll take their share). They dislike and distrust government and they sure as hell don't want to be paying European-size taxes.

They have no interest in emulating the countries that their grandparents and great grandparents left. Why do you think they came here all those years ago? I do note that Wisconsin does not allow for capital punishment. That appears to be one area where the European model seems to work.

We aren't Europe. Basically, the way it works is that the US spends its taxes on bombs and soldiers. Europe, which looks to the US for military protection, spends its taxes on social welfare.

Oh sure, we spend money on social welfare, too. But almost all of our efforts are half-hearted things except for Medicare. We seem to believe in the "moral hazard" of poverty. We incarcerate people at rates that would make Europe shiver. Social security is nothing anyone could possibly depend on for their old age, although the checks do help more than a bit. Our new national health care program is a half-assed attempt, and is certainly nothing to get excited over.

The not-so-funny thing is that neither the European model - using the government to provide comfort for all - or the American model - using the government to be the sole feared military power in the world - are sustainable. They cost way, way too much money. Our military grows and grows and is currently costing us about a trillion dollars annually. It's essentially tracking the combined cost of Medicare and Social Security. Europe's social welfare model is creaking, causing exploding debt even in the presence of high taxes.

You can look at both the European and American models of government as 60 year experiments that followed WWII. And after 60 years, it's clear that neither model will be with us for very much longer. We'll have to reign in our military spending (and likely our social welfare spending as well) or we'll go bankrupt. Europe will have to reign in their pensions and health care benefits or they too will crash.

The next time I go to my little French coffee shop and see all those Palo Altans watching America in the World Cup, I'll be cheering right along. It will be USA versus Ghana, a country with a newly working democracy and without military might or extensive social welfare. As for my fellow coffee shop clients' European envy, part of me would like to tell them you're envying something that is, just like our way of doing government, crazy and broken. And why do you think the people who own this coffee shop moved from France to Palo Alto anyway? We're better than Europe. Stop the envy thing. We're the best frigging country in the whole damn world.

I could say all those things. But I won't. It's the World Cup, not time to be talking politics. I'm not interested in being a party pooper. Still, I might be thinking these things, now and then during the game, shame on me. Of course all distractions will end every time I hear the magic word, gooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaallllllll!