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Archive for 2011
December 19, 2011
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE:
From the Chronicle of Higher Education comes a story that should make every mediocre academic in this country shudder in fear. Mark Bauerlein has looked under the hood of the “research” that professors in English literature conduct and he has documented what many of us know but few want to think about: nobody reads much of this stuff.
Nobody. Not even the other scholars in the field.
As Walter Russell Mead notes, this is not a good sign: “Our universities today look a lot like the monasteries in the time of Henry VIII: vulnerable targets for a hungry state. State legislators are going to be wrestling with questions like whether to cut the pensions of retired state workers, cut services for voters, or raise taxes. In this atmosphere, the research university model (in the humanities and, economics and management excepted, the social sciences) may not long survive, at least in the public sector. . . . In the humanities and most of the social “sciences”, the Ph.D and peer review machine as it now exists is a vastly expensive mediocrity factory. It makes education both more expensive and less effective than it needs to be. There are islands and even archipelagos of excellence in the sea of sludge but we needn’t subsidize the sea to preserve them.”
TODAY IN TECH: Dec. 19, 1974: Build Your Own Computer at Home!
I saw one of these when they first came out. It was part of a roadshow passing through Knoxville that a friend’s computer-genius older brother took us to see. I looked at it and thought it was cool, but didn’t do much yet. About the same time, Bill Gates saw one — quite possibly the exact same machine — and thought that he could make some money if he produced software for it. And there’s the difference. . . .
To be fair, I was still in Junior High, and Bill was a bit older.
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FROM JOURNALISM TO JOURN-O-LISM: The New York Times Paints Holder As A Victim Of Fast And Furious.
Related: Want Answers About Fast and Furious? You’re a Racist.
WALL STREET JOURNAL: Gingrich’s Worthy Brain Pulse: An electromagnetic pulse attack is not a fanciful notion. No, it’s not, and it wasn’t Gingrich’s flight of fancy, either.
While William Forstchen’s One Second After is pretty much a worst-case scenario, even lesser catastrophes could be pretty awful. Plus there’s the threat of a natural electromagnetic pulse from solar storms, something that has already happened. We need to be hardening up our infrastructure against this sort of thing, along with other potential catastrophes.
MANUFACTURING: Can We Build Tomorrow’s Miracles? Sure! No problem! Oh, wait, you mean in the United States?
GIFT-GIVING ADVICE: Don’t Pair Something Expensive With Something Cheap. “The paper, which will be published in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Consumer Research, found that consumers don’t like packages that pair something expensive with something cheap. Think of the Dutch oven and the mitt. Or an iPod that comes with a single free song. To a consumer, the add-ons aren’t a nice bonus. Instead, they devalue the entire deal.”
CULTURE OF CORRUPTION (CONT’D): Four More “Friends of Angelo” in Congress. “With Congress about to wrap up its year-end business and head home for the holidays, there probably won’t be too much news made on Capitol Hill until next month. Why not conduct a whodunit instead? House Oversight chair Rep. Darrell Issa resurrected the Countrywide Financial influence-peddling scandal by informing the Ethics Committee that four current members received sweetheart deals on loans through the infamous Friends of Angelo program that sent former Senator Chris Dodd into retirement … perhaps to the Irish mansion he now owns.”
It’s a “cottage.” It just looks like a mansion to the untrained eye.
MORE ON THOSE UNDERFUNDED / OVERGENEROUS PUBLIC PENSIONS: Public retirement ages come under greater scrutiny.
After nearly 40 years in public education, Patrick Godwin spends his retirement days running a horse farm east of Sacramento, Calif., with his daughter.
His departure from the workaday world is likely to be long and relatively free of financial concerns, after he retired last July at age 59 with a pension paying $174,308 a year for the rest of his life.
Such guaranteed pensions for relatively youthful government retirees — paid in similar fashion to millions nationwide — are contributing to nationwide friction with the public sector workers. They have access to attractive defined-benefit pensions and retiree health care coverage that most private sector workers no longer do. . . . With Americans increasingly likely to live well into their 80s, critics question whether paying lifetime pensions to retirees from age 55 or 60 is financially sustainable. An Associated Press survey earlier this year found the 50 states have a combined $690 billion in unfunded pension liabilities and $418 billion in retiree health care obligations.
Something that can’t go on forever, won’t.
LET’S HOPE NOT: No Supernova Potential In Our Galactic Neighborhood?
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The Humanities’ Real Enemies. They may be boring from within, but mostly, they’re just boring.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: MIT Will Offer Certificates To Outside Students Who Take Its Courses Online. “Millions of learners have enjoyed the free lecture videos and other course materials published online through the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s OpenCourseWare project. Now MIT plans to release a fresh batch of open online courses—and, for the first time, to offer certificates to outside students who complete them. The credentials are part of a new, interactive e-learning venture, tentatively called MITx, that is expected to host ‘a virtual community of millions of learners around the world.'”
GOOD ADVICE: Don’t Break The Internet. “Two bills now pending in Congress—the PROTECT IP Act of 2011 (Protect IP) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House—represent the latest legislative attempts to address a serious global problem: large-scale online copyright and trademark infringement. Although the bills differ in certain respects, they share an underlying approach and an enforcement philosophy that pose grave constitutional problems and that could have potentially disastrous consequences for the stability and security of the Internet’s addressing system, for the principle of interconnectivity that has helped drive the Internet’s extraordinary growth, and for free expression.”
TAKE THAT, FRANCE: Fancy Cheeses From East Tennessee. Plus, a brilliant idea: “During the winter when our sheep stop producing, we get local Jersey cow’s milk and we’re going to make Cheddar. Traditionally, that means bandaging the wheels with cheese cloth and wrapping it with lard to flavor. But I’ve been speaking with Allen Benton [of Benton’s Artisan Bacon fame] and he’s going to sell us 30 pounds of bacon scraps to render down and use in place of the lard.”
And we’re not just talking pimento. Not that there’s anything wrong with that — especially, as you’ll see, when it, too, is improved with bacon! Bacon. Is there anything it can’t do?
CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Roll Call: Pelosi’s Expert Was Also Business Partner. “In May 2010, then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi took to a podium in the Capitol to introduce a half-dozen economic experts she had convened for a meeting on how to jump-start the economy. The group had met for several hours with top Democratic leaders, and Pelosi invited them to speak publicly on their perspectives on economic growth. What Pelosi did not mention is that one of the men in the group was her son’s boss and a partner with her husband in more than a half-dozen investments, including one that generated more than $100,000 in income for the Speaker’s family last year.”
CONTRAST WITH CALIFORNIA: Texas Cities Won the Recession, and They’re Winning the Recovery. Though in most places, the question is, what recovery? “Like I said, welcome to the third phase of the Great Recession.”
NOW THAT’S JUST MEAN: Jim Bennett emails: “Say, what is Captain Euro up to these days, anyway? You just don’t hear much about him any more, for some reason.”
MICKEY KAUS: “John Edwards invites his mistress Rielle Hunter to move in with him a few weeks before the start of his criminal trial, according to the National Enquirer. A heartwarming story of redemption! … P.S.: Isn’t Hunter a potential witness at the trial?”
FRANK CAGLE ON THE PROBLEM WITH JUDICIAL OVERSIGHT. “Defense attorneys and prosecutors cannot confront judges. They have no authority to tell them what to do and the prospect of having a judge mad at you (they think) is too terrible to contemplate. Judges can ruin your career and cost you your cases.”
Judges know it, too. When I was a fairly new law professor, I was at a cocktail party where a judge told me I should instruct my students to be extremely courteous as lawyers because a judge who’s miffed at a lawyer can cost his client a case. I’m all for courtesy, but I responded that harming a client out of pique at a lawyer struck me as a betrayal of one’s judicial oath every bit as serious as taking a bribe. He didn’t appreciate that, I’m afraid, but it’s certainly true. Either way the judge is abusing judicial power for personal gain.
THINGS YOU MAY HAVE MISSED THIS WEEKEND, if you were out, you know, having a life or something.
Did Dems secretly punt on the light-bulb ban?
Lefties unhappy with Obama on civil liberties.
Carbon footprint worries are for the little people.
Frank J. Fleming on the NTSB and cell phones.
Hope And Change: The Latest MAD Magazine Cover.
Europe: Herding Cats Over A Cliff?
Investor’s Business Daily on the NTSB cellphone ban proposal.
Keystone Climbdown Leaves Obama Supporters Scratching Heads.
BRYAN PRESTON: How The One Percent Spend Your Money. “President Obama tends to lecture the wealthy about how they spend their money — how they spend their money. This $4 million vacation, though, is an example of how he is spending our money.”