Louisiana now has jungle primaries, starting in 2012. This is a good thing. I also like this tidbit:

Both the state GOP and Democratic Party had gone on record as opposing the return to the open primary system.

But it still happened.

The letters to the editor in the Advocate have been debating a new property tax to support bus service. Rather than recap the whole thing, I'll just point to my favorite from David Lindenfeld, a history professor at LSU:

* Most people who ride the bus are going to and from work.
* They are not choosing to ride the bus from a menu of attractive transportation options. They are riding because they have no choice.

Cutting back bus services, then, means fewer working poor. Fewer working poor probably means more violent crime, which has already risen to alarming levels in our city.

The opposing letter writers have said the bus system should be "self-supporting." I'm sure these writers would be the first to support per-mile tolls on every road in East Baton Rouge Parish, so that the road system, too, can pay for itself.

Student evaluations. It starts with Stanley Fish, who says they're worthless:

Student evaluations [...] are all wrong as a way of assessing teaching performance: they measure present satisfaction in relation to a set of expectations that may have little to do with the deep efficacy of learning. Students tend to like everything neatly laid out; they want to know exactly where they are; they don’t welcome the introduction of multiple perspectives, especially when no master perspective reconciles them; they want the answers.

Stupid students. Don't know anything. I tell you, kids these days...

Meanwhile, Alan Jacobs agrees:

If we must have such evaluations, students should be asked for their responses to a course at least one semester after completing it. Instead, they are asked for their judgments near the end of a semester, when they are probably busier and more stressed than at any other time, and when they haven't completed their final work for the class or received their final evaluations. It’s a perfect recipe for useless commentary.

Apparently Jacobs thinks my evaluations of him back in 2004 were "useless commentary." I'm now sorry I spent ten minutes filling out that form.

I agree with Ross Douthat:

Such evaluations will always be necessarily imperfect measures of a teacher’s real quality. But in the context of a higher education system that has radically undervalued teaching skills in favor of a “publish or perish” model of professorial advancement, I think there’s a strong case for placing more emphasis on how students react to their classroom experience, however provisional those reactions may be.

Douthat wins this exchange because Fish and Jacobs are both too absolute. Of course student evaluations are imperfect, and maybe they would be better if they were given a semester later, and yes students aren't always the right judge of a good teacher. But evaluations do tell you something, and something important and useful.

A concrete example: my students last semester told me in their evaluations that I skipped too many steps when I did example problems in class. Next semester I was much more careful about this, and it went much better. Those teaching evaluations were worth doing.

Too many journals, too much publishing, too many mediocre papers. One suggestion for change:

Limit the number of papers to the best three, four, or five that a job or promotion candidate can submit. That would encourage more comprehensive and focused publishing.

If all employers took that to heart, it would change my behavior overnight with regard to how I "do research".

I'm learning more and more that the academic job market is very competitive, and I'm not taking it for granted that I will get such a job. I wouldn't say it was quite this bad, though:

The main difference between postdocs and migrant agricultural laborers, he jokes, is that the Ph.D.s don’t pick fruit.

The article in general is pretty discouraging - don't read it if you're a postdoc. Instead, stop surfing the web and get back to work.

A short quote from a long article:

Komanoff’s life has been driven by two passions: cycling and data.

The article, like everything else I link on the Evil Line, is about transportation. Specifically, how congestion charges will save the world but are politically impossible.

And a long quote from a short blog post:

Black sellers do worse than white sellers on a variety of market outcome measures: they receive 13% fewer responses and 17% fewer offers. These effects are strongest in the Northeast, and are similar in magnitude to those associated with the display of a wrist tattoo.
[...]
Buyers corresponding with black sellers exhibit lower trust: they are 17% less likely to include their name in e-mails, 44% less likely to accept delivery by mail, and 56% more likely to express concern about making a long-distance payment.

Both links are worth checking out.