21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: For Better or Worse, Sort Of: Why More Married Couples Are Having Postnuptial Agreements.
Archive for 2013
July 12, 2013
AT AMAZON, hot new releases in Movies & TV.
ROBERT X. CRINGELY on Georgia Tech’s $7,000 online Master’s degree. “Georgia Tech is a major research university. In big research universities research and publishing count for everything and teaching counts for close to nothing, which is why there are so many bad teachers with endowed professorships. . . . Research grad students are slave labor while professional grad students are cash cows for their institutions and matter mostly for the money they can pay. Computer science is a research field but this new degree at Georgia Tech is specifically branded as being a professional degree. While that sounds extra-important what it really means is the students won’t matter at all to the University, which sees them strictly as cash flow — up to $18 million per year according to the business plan.”
JANET NAPOLITANO leaving Homeland Security to become President of the University of California. Henceforth, water bottles will be permitted in dorms and classrooms, but only so long as they’re smaller than three ounces.
JANET NAPOLITANO’S LEGACY: GITMO Detainees No Longer Getting Groins Groped, TSA Still Touching Yours.
POOCH POWER: Next In Wearable Computing: A Device For Dogs.
SPYING: Microsoft helped defeat encryption for NSA on Outlook, SkyDrive, Skype. “We’re still back to the issue of how much surveillance the American people will tolerate. This is just the nuts and bolts of how it worked. Until Congress can exercise effective oversight over the NSA — which will require administration officials to stop lying about it — nothing will have changed. Except, of course, that the Russians have started using typewriters rather than computers.”
NEWS YOU CAN USE: How I Tried Turning My Off-The-Shelf Drone Into A Weapon.
READER BOOK PLUG: From reader John Stonebraker, Armchair Warrior: How a Country Lawyer Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Law.
POPULAR MECHANICS: Surviving The Inevitable Summer Power Outage. “According to Dr. Massoud Amin, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Minnesota, 500,000 people per day in the U.S. lose power for at least two hours. Between 2005 and 2010 there were 272 power outages that each affected more than 50,000 people. In 2011 alone there were 136 weather-related power outages that snuffed out 178 million meters. The economic toll is equally intense, costing between $80 billion and $188 billion annually.”
Here’s a post on cheap backup power. And generator advice. Also, more advice from Insta-readers.
IN RESPONSE TO MY HAM SANDWICH NATION PIECE, reader Adam Hescock writes:
As a public defender, I have often discussed the concerns raised in your article. I absolutely agree with one of your main contentions: “Yet, because of overcharging and plea bargains, the decision to prosecute is probably the single most important event in the chain of criminal procedure.”
The problem, as you mention, is that the prosecutors have no real skin in the game. Most care about their conviction record, but win or lose they are going home after the trial. Requiring the state to pay for a defense if they lost would definitely influence the charging decisions where I practice, but I don’t see that happening anytime soon. Even so, I am encouraged that your article is fostering such a debate.
Well, that’s why I wrote it.
UPDATE: Some thoughts and criticisms.
IT’S ANOTHER GREENHOUSE MIRACLE! Some Trees Use Less Water Amid Rising Carbon Dioxide, Paper Says. “If the research holds up, it suggests some potential benefits for forests. They might be able to make do with less water, for instance, becoming more resilient in the face of drought and higher temperatures as climate change proceeds.”
IN THE MAIL: From A. Bertram Chandler, First Command.
TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 64.
WELL, THEY HAVEN’T EXACTLY BEEN COVERING THEMSELVES WITH GLORY LATELY: Pew poll: Americans hate journalists, even more than they did four years ago. “Not mentioned in the Pew story, but interesting and counterintuitive given the near-constant narrative of the last four years: business executive is the only occupation whose score went up since 2009. Granted, it’s only three points, from a paltry 21 percent who believe they contribute a lot to 24 percent, and it still resides near the bottom of the list, but it is curious that’s the one occupation trending upward as the last four years have taken a toll on every other category.”
WALTER SHAPIRO ON WASHINGTON: “Ultimately, everyone sells out.” Actually, that’s the message of the book he’s reviewing — This Town, which a lot of people in Washington are talking about. But he seems to agree.
BIGOTRY IS THEIR MIDDLE NAME: Federal Government Now Endorses Soft Bigotry Of Low Expectations.
In other words, minority students will need to meet lower expectations, while white students (and Asians) will be expected to reach higher proficiency levels.
This practice is not new. In an effort to escape the No Child Left Behind Act’s stringent standards for schools, a number of states applied for a waiver, which would allow states to keep federal funding if their schools met a limited number of benchmarks. Of the 33 states granted a waiver last year, 27 now have different achievement goals for different groups of students. And the Obama administration fully supports this measure, “as long as the low-performing students are required to make greater rates of progress, so that the gap between struggling students and high-achieving students is cut in half over six years.”
The issue of race is clearly still entangling a society that likes to think of itself as post-racial. Ironically, not only are the liberal democrats of the Obama administration not raising red flags when states ask to do this; they are actively supporting racial profiling in schools.
In practical terms, this is setting up a system in which some teachers will think they’ve succeeded as long as the black kids in a class reach a certain low level of proficiency. Meanwhile, they’ll keep pushing the others to do better. This hardly seems like a behavior we want to incentivize.
Depends on what you mean by “we,” I guess.
AT AMAZON, deals and markdowns on Bestsellers in Patio, Lawn & Garden.
Also, today only: Up to 50% Off Select Sony Memory and Storage. Memory cards, external hard drives, micro-SD cards, and more.
FARM BILLS IN A NUTSHELL: “Farm policy, although it’s complex, can be explained. What it can’t be is believed. No cheating spouse, no teen with a wrecked family car, no mayor of Washington, DC, videotaped in flagrante delicto has ever come up with anything as farfetched as U.S. farm policy.”
THEY’VE ALWAYS HAD A SOFT SPOT FOR STRONGMEN: When Hollywood Held Hands With Hitler. “Largely through the Third Reich’s vice consul in Los Angeles, Georg Gyssling, the Nazi-Hollywood relationship gave Hitler and his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, effectual power over what films got made, what scenes got cut, which stars and filmmakers were blacklisted, and which Jewish studio employees in Germany were fired. The Germans demanded say not just over American films shown in Germany but over those shown anywhere. Nazi emissaries visited theaters worldwide to report back on whether promised scene cuts had in fact been carried out. If not, the officials scolded the studios and threatened to close German production and distribution markets to them. The studios, year after year, would promptly grovel and comply. . . . Urwand found that Nazi officials considered some American films ideologically useful. . . . For instance, Gabriel Over the White House, an American fascist fantasia about a fed-up, divinely inspired president dissolving a chaotic Congress and whipping the United States into totalitarian shape, was touted by Frits Strengholt, an MGM executive in Germany, as resonating with Nazi work-mobilization, anticrime, and other efforts.”
WALTER OLSON: How The Ford Foundation Reshaped America’s Law Schools.