the Evil Line

2011-10-11T11:03:00.002-06:00

The number of people falling ill with tuberculosis has declined for the first time, according to the World Health Organization.
New figures show the global death toll has also fallen, to its lowest level in a decade, with major headway made in China, Brazil, Kenya and Tanzania.

2011-10-08T10:57:00.000-06:00

Let's check in with the local news in Louisiana for the week, shall we?

On October 5, Plaquemines Parish Sheriff Jiff Hingle was arrested for bribery. He is accused of taking $30,000 in bribes from developer Aaron Bennett for steering construction contracts his way.

On October 6, Michael Karl Davis of the Ouachita Parish Sheriff's Office was arrested for identity theft and fraud.

On October 7, Turkey Creek Police Chief Robert Moreau was arrested for theft. The details of this one are fun:

An investigation revealed the police chief stole items from a store and then returned the items without a receipt in order to get a gift card, which he then used to purchase guns and ammunition, Hammons said.
“All of this was done while he was wearing his uniform,” Hammons said.

Also on October 7, the former city prosecutor for my own fair city of Baton Rouge, Flitcher Bell, was permanently disbarred by the Louisiana Supreme Court. Bell received at least $30,000 in bribes for "fixing" traffic tickets.

One lesson, I guess, is that you shouldn't trust somebody who has an "i" in their name where you expect an "e" (Jiff Hingle and Flitcher Bell are both spelled correctly above). But there's another lesson:

“When the question is raised, with an African-American congregation or a constituency, whether they trust the Police Department, no one raises their hand,” White said. “That, in itself, is indicative of a problem, and we have got to win the trust. We have got to win the trust of that community.”

That is from an article from the Baton Rouge paper which carries the headline "Police lack city’s trust." Really? Shocking. I wonder why no one trusts the police?

2011-09-19T11:37:00.003-06:00

What else to lure me back to blogging but urban planning:

“A lot of people feel that they want to live in a cul-de-sac, they feel like it’s a safer place to be,” Marshall says. “The reality is yes, you’re safer – if you never leave your cul-de-sac. But if you actually move around town like a normal person, your town as a whole is much more dangerous.”

Also see Felix Salmon's comments.

2011-08-26T13:06:00.000-06:00

In the last ten years, 16 people have died because of terrorism in the United States. Bruce Schneier nails it, as usual.

Given the credible estimate that we've spent $1 trillion on anti-terrorism security (this does not include our many foreign wars), that's $62.5 billion per life saved. Is there any other risk that we are even remotely as crazy about?

Note that in the last ten years 400 thousand people have died in car accidents in the United States.

2011-08-24T11:41:00.000-06:00

It is hard to get a cartoon in the New Yorker:

When my life didn't offer usable material I started reaching for the low hanging fruit: desert-island gags and gorillas.

Some of his cartoons are actually quite good.

Also, this seems like as good a time as any to point you to a site that takes New Yorker cartoons and gives them the most literal, straightforward captions possible.

2011-08-17T12:12:00.001-06:00

P. J. O'Rourke starts with this fun sentence:

What is admired as whimsy could be awful as fact — real slithy toves in an actual wabe.

His article is about the architecture of Antoni Gaudí, and I found it pretty interesting, but probably mostly because I saw all the stuff he talks about pretty recently.

If a Gothic cathedral is (as some have said, misapplying their Shakespeare) a sermon in stone, then La Sagrada Família is a sermon in broccoli.

Somehow that sentence is a compliment. And one I agree with - I am no expert on architecture, but Sagrada Familia is the most astonishing building I've ever seen.

2011-08-15T17:11:00.003-06:00

In Warsaw, in 1941, a Jewish father is expecting to die at the hands of the Nazis. But he wants to save his daughter:

Leon Weinstein bundled Natalie, 18 months old, in heavy pants and a thick wool sweater. He headed for a nearby apartment, the home of a lawyer and his wife. The couple did not have a child. Weinstein hoped they wanted one.

He lay Natalie on their front step. Tears ran down his cheeks. You will make it, he thought. She had blond locks and blue eyes. They will think you are a Gentile, not one of us.

In New York, in 2011, a woman wants a child. But only one:

She was 45 and pregnant after six years of fertility bills, ovulation injections, donor eggs and disappointment — and yet here she was, 14 weeks into her pregnancy, choosing to extinguish one of two healthy fetuses, almost as if having half an abortion. As the doctor inserted the needle into Jenny’s abdomen, aiming at one of the fetuses, Jenny tried not to flinch, caught between intense relief and intense guilt.
[...]
"We created this child in such an artificial manner — in a test tube, choosing an egg donor, having the embryo placed in me — and somehow, making a decision about how many to carry seemed to be just another choice. The pregnancy was all so consumerish to begin with, and this became yet another thing we could control.”

2011-08-13T10:45:00.002-06:00

A very good sentence from Ta-Nehisi Coates, about the Civil War and the civil rights struggle:

Freedom was most literally achieved through the reception and infliction of horrific violence, and completed through the utter rejection of that violence.

2011-08-11T08:44:00.000-06:00

Tuesday we were talking about the social status of scientists on this blog. And last night I hear will.i.am on Marketplace talking about science, education, and what it's like to go to a robotics competition:

You know when you watch the movie Waiting For Superman, you're like, oh man. You're all, 'Aw man, we're so doomed.' And your heart breaks. This is the total opposite of that. Here, you would think like somebody sprayed magic dust and out popped genius little kids.

This is great, and I really do think he's doing a good thing by bringing attention to this and by playing at the "halftime show" of the robotics competition.

But (of course there's a but), the guy who gets interviewed on NPR is the musician, not the scientist. The Super Bowl is a big thing because it's the Super Bowl, and will.i.am at the halftime show is just an extra. This robotics competition is (now) a big deal because will.i.am is talking about it and playing a show there. Otherwise we wouldn't know about it.

2011-08-09T08:42:00.000-06:00

Tyler Cowen has a book, The Great Stagnation, which complains of a slowdown in innovation. His solution (to drastically over simplify) is to raise the status of scientists. Today, he has a blog post titled "The status of scientists" that links to a New York Times piece about scientists organizing to get involved in politics.

I'm all for raising the status of scientists. I might even be for getting scientists more involved in politics. But the two are completely unrelated - have you seen the approval numbers for politicians lately? That's not status. Take a quick look at the Google trends for today, or the popular Bing searches or whatever. There are no scientists. But there are no politicians, either.

Another thing. In the NYT piece you can take a quiz to see if you can correctly identify ten scientists - I scored 6/10, for what it's worth. But you're supposed to recognize these scientists by their pictures.

2011-08-03T10:07:00.000-06:00

I might move to Vilnius:

Fed up with the number of luxury vehicles parking in a bike path along a main thoroughfare in the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, the city’s mayor, Arturas Zuokas, released a video in which he uses some military-grade machinery to crush an illegally parked Mercedes Benz.

This goes way beyond the idea that the punishment should fit the crime. But it's entertaining anyway.

2011-07-18T12:19:00.001-06:00

Grade inflation:

By the end of the last decade, A’s and B’s represented 73 percent of all grades awarded at public schools, and 86 percent of all grades awarded at private schools.

Each semester I get a printout telling me what my grade distribution was (in case I didn't know...) and how it compares with other sections of the same course, other classes in the math department, other classes at LSU, and so on.

According to these printouts, stepping into my class (or any class in the math department, really) is like going back to 1988 or so, for good or for ill.

2011-07-16T11:16:00.001-06:00

Bill James echoes the Solzhenitsyn quote that gives this blog its name:

It's reductive to think of evil as something foreign and separate from the rest of us. Evil is part of everyone. We all have the capacity to commit evil acts.

2011-07-14T10:15:00.000-06:00

Matt Yglesias is in awe of our amazing technology here in Louisiana:

Here in downtown DC, for example, the tallest office buildings are 110 feet tall. In Boise, Idaho by contrast, they have technology that’s allowed them to create a 267 foot building, and in Baton Rouge, they’ve somehow figured out that it’s possible to build a 450 foot building. If we could somehow import that kind of know-how to DC, then I bet people would be employed first building the structures and then working in the buildings. [...] But how on earth would we figure out how to build a 450 foot building? What magical technologies have they developed in Baton Rouge?

Our magical technology was developed by a wizard, but unfortunately the know-how died with him.

2011-04-30T10:22:00.000-06:00

Paul Krugman and Jim Manzi both long for the freedom and safety of their childhood, of course. Everyone does. But the childhood of the 1950s was no safer than the childhood of today.

I would say a lot about this, but Alex Tabarrok does it much better, and I encourage you to go read what he says. The key bit:

Has childhood freedom been lost? No. Childhood freedom hasn’t been “lost,” it has been taken away by parents.

2011-04-20T11:48:00.000-06:00

My ING account is currently giving me one percent interest. I have thought about giving loans with Kiva, and I probably should, but it doesn't solve the interest rate problem. Which is why I was intrigued to hear about Prosper:

By putting lenders directly in touch with borrowers—rather than through the banking system—person-to-person lending sites claim that they can cut down on overhead costs, thereby making it cheaper to lend to people with poor credit.

And they claim returns for me, the lender, of around 10 percent.

Of course, it's probably just the next bubble, and as soon as I get involved it will pop.

2011-04-05T13:57:00.000-06:00

Bill James has a fun and interesting excerpt arguing that we are very good at developing sports talent, and saying that's a good thing. This has attracted some interesting commentary. We have Alan Jacobs, who says James got the math wrong, and Ross Douthat who basically just agrees with Jacobs. Most interesting is Ta-Nehisi Coates, who highlights what sports has to do with race and opportunity.

But the thing that struck me was one throwaway sentence that we in the United State are very very good at teaching people to drive automobiles.

It's true. Driving is not a trivial skill. It's moderately hard. As hard as learning calculus, I would say. But yet, pretty much everybody learns to drive, but not everybody learns calculus.

2011-03-25T11:41:00.000-06:00

You want to sell some carrots. Problem is, they're healthy:

The truth about baby carrots is they possess many of the defining characteristics of our favorite junk food. They're neon orange, they're crunchy, they're dippable, they're kind of addictive.
[...]
What a silly use of advertising dollars to tell people that vegetables are healthy.

2011-03-14T11:35:00.000-06:00

Want to make your drive to work easier? Build bike lanes.

If driving is to remain half as pleasant as Cassidy wants it to, it will only be because most New Yorkers decide against purchasing cars. And they’re only going to do that if the other options seem attractive.

Want to make your power supply safer? Go nuclear.

If Japan, the United States, or Europe retreats from nuclear power in the face of the current panic, the most likely alternative energy source is fossil fuel. And by any measure, fossil fuel is more dangerous. The sole fatal nuclear power accident of the last 40 years, Chernobyl, directly killed 31 people. By comparison, Switzerland's Paul Scherrer Institute calculates that from 1969 to 2000, more than 20,000 people died in severe accidents in the oil supply chain. More than 15,000 people died in severe accidents in the coal supply chain—11,000 in China alone. The rate of direct fatalities per unit of energy production is 18 times worse for oil than it is for nuclear power.

I say this knowing full well there is a nuclear power plant just a few miles upstream.

2011-02-01T08:53:00.002-07:00

Cyclists strike back.

Just remember, if you can record them, they can record you. Which is fair enough.

2011-01-26T12:13:00.000-07:00

Good news:

The U.N. Millennium Development Goals established the target of halving the rate of global poverty between 1990 and 2015; this was probably achieved by 2008, some seven years ahead of schedule. Moreover, using forecasts of per capita consumption growth, we predict that by 2015, fewer than 600 million people will remain poor. At that point, the 1990 poverty rate will have been halved and then halved again.

2011-01-25T09:24:00.002-07:00

Maybe poverty doesn't get the whole picture:

Experimental games are wonderful tools for studying the propensity to cooperate in social interactions. The results showed that students from the highest quality neighborhoods were most likely to cooperate in an experimental game, but that median income had a negative effect. The most cooperative kids came from high quality low income neighborhoods.

The big missing point is what he means by a "high quality" neighborhood.

2011-01-19T11:51:00.000-07:00

Most college students aren't learning very much:

The rest—most college students—start underprepared, and go to colleges that ask little of them and provide little in return. Their learning gains are minimal or nonexistent. Among them, those with a reasonable facility for getting out of bed in the morning and navigating a bureaucracy receive a credential that falsely certifies learning.

A lot of this commentary rings true. But there's always a crisis. That's how you sell books and get page views and attract attention - "Universities chugging along basically as they always have" is not a headline that gets noticed.

2011-01-10T11:45:00.000-07:00

Too many prisoners, says Michael Gerson, not enough opportunities for them when they reenter society:

While human beings are capable of great horrors that merit justice, they do not become trash to be thrown away. Even the least sympathetic - heroin addicts and jailed criminals and gang members - remain part of the American community, the human community.

2010-12-23T11:42:00.005-07:00

Slate has a series called The Wrong Stuff, about mistakes. Two recent interviews in the series have been very interesting, one from Josh Stieber and one from Chuck Colson.

2010-12-21T11:40:00.000-07:00

Almost two years ago on this blog we heard a prediction from mathematician Keith Devlin:

Within my lifetime I fully expect almost every living human adult, and most children, in the world to own [a mobile phone].

Now The Economist reports that we're halfway there:

Sometime in the next few months, the number of mobile phones in use will exceed 3.3 billion, or half the world's population.

"Halfway there" is also the theme of a recent funny post from another mathematician.

2010-12-17T11:27:00.000-07:00

Neal Wu is one of the best competitive programmers in the world:

He has competed in six coding contests run by Kolstad’s organization, the USA Computing Olympiad; he won three of them with perfect scores. Wu has the relaxed disposition of a star athlete; he’s confident without ever letting on that he is America’s Great Nerd Hope. “I hate to say he’s the Tiger Woods of computer programming,” Kolstad says, “but he shares the properties of cool, calm under pressure, and consistent, consistent performance.”

Probably went to some fancy-schmancy private school in the Northeast...

He just graduated from Baton Rouge Magnet High School in Louisiana.

...or maybe a public high school in a below-average district in the state ranked 46th in the country for math education.

2010-12-16T08:42:00.000-07:00

I had almost given up on blogging, but these two sentences inspired me to write at least one more post:

It is possible today to grow up in an American home with a 40-inch flat-screen television and a daily caloric intake so high that it actually becomes detrimental to health, but to lack access to basic medical and dental care, to run a material daily risk of rape or other profound physical violence, and to leave school functionally illiterate. Poverty today means something very different than it did in Dickens’ day, but it has not been abolished.

2010-11-14T18:57:00.001-07:00

Confessions of a professional paper writer:

I work at an online company that generates tens of thousands of dollars a month by creating original essays based on specific instructions provided by cheating students. I've worked there full time since 2004. On any day of the academic year, I am working on upward of 20 assignments.

Hmmm. Maybe I could hire this guy to lighten my load?

As long as it doesn't require me to do any math or video-documented animal husbandry, I will write anything.

Oh well. Back to writing my own papers, I guess.

2010-10-19T15:11:00.000-06:00

Alan Jacobs on education:

That so many universities put star lecturers online for free suggests that they don't think those lectures are central to what they provide. So what is central, then? To that question there's a cynical answer and an idealistic one, and both of them are true.

2010-10-12T15:47:00.000-06:00

Abstract of the day:

Two useless but true theorems are proved.

Two! My papers are lucky to have one useless but true theorem.

The paper is from Paul Krugman. Steven Levitt has some cutting remarks about the paper and its author.

2010-10-07T09:00:00.000-06:00

How we fight crime in Baton Rouge:

Both Evans and Thibodeaux are alleged by prosecutors to have accepted money or other things of value from St. Pierre in return for steering no-bid business to St. Pierre’s technology and crime-camera company, NetMethods.

Chester told the judge that Evans steered crime-camera work to NetMethods after he received gifts that included “tickets to approximately four New Orleans Saints football games; a 50th birthday party … and overnight trips at various hotels in New Orleans.”

NetMethods later was awarded approximately $3.5 million from the city-parish to establish a wireless network of surveillance cameras and a gunshot detection system in high crime areas in Baton Rouge.

According to a 2010 report from the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies, the wireless system is not robust enough for officers to consistently use while in the field.

Maintenance fees for the security canopy cost the Baton Rouge Police Department more than $400,000 annually and system failures appear to be frequent, based on a review of numerous e-mail exchanges and other written reports.

I'm not sure what to say.

2010-10-05T09:44:00.000-06:00

Slow it down:

“Talk about the number 1 for 45 minutes?” said Chris Covello, who teaches 16 students ages 5 and 6. “I was like, I don’t know. But then I found you really could. Before, we had a lot of ground to cover, and now it’s more open-ended and gets kids thinking.”

Apparently the latest fad in elementary education is "Singapore math", which takes its sweet time. I don't know anything about kindergarten, but my number one wish for my college students is that I could teach less material, and do it more slowly and thoroughly.

2010-09-23T15:22:00.001-06:00

Eric Fischer has a fascinating series of images that show racial segregation in our cities - different racial groups are marked with different colored dots. The Baton Rouge map is here.

When we were moving here, everyone told us to be sure to live east of Park Blvd., and south of Government Street. I've taken an excerpt from the map and helpfully highlighted the corner of Park and Government in black for you.

Bonus points if you can find LSU graduate student housing.

2010-09-09T11:53:00.000-06:00

How is a fractal like inequality?

Income is very uneven at large scales and at small scales.
[...]
We are going to go from global to the US to the New York City metro area to the neighborhood of NYU in Manhattan. At each scale, there is a remarkably high level of inequality across space.

The pictures are interesting and impressive.

2010-09-07T12:41:00.000-06:00

You can't teach "reading" by itself. Reading is always about something, and you can only teach the "something":

Reading is not an abstract transferable skill (except at the most basic levels of literacy). Hirsch and Pondiscio note that “poor readers” do well when faced with a passage whose subject matter is familiar to them, “outperforming even ‘good readers’ who lack relevant background knowledge.” The problem is that knowledge in one area usually doesn’t help you to comprehend a text covering a different area.

Which brings to mind the last two books I've read.

One, Anathem by Neal Stephenson, is about a group of robed monks who live in a clock and band together to deal with a nuclear-powered alien starship.

The second, The Beautiful Struggle by Ta-Nehisi Coates, is about a kid growing up in Baltimore.

And I found the first one much, much easier to read. Sad as it is, I've read enough cheezy speculative fiction to have the relevant background knowledge - I know about the different worlds such writers create, and I can pick out the things that are important in that kind of story.

On the other hand, I know nothing about black culture. What's a dashiki? What's dap? Or bop? Why does a recent haircut protect you from gang violence? None of it makes any sense.

2010-08-31T11:58:00.000-06:00

Half of Americans live in cities, but most (80% or so) professional athletes are from small towns. It's not clear exactly why, but one possibility:

An important advantage of small towns is that they’re actually less competitive, thus allowing kids to sample and explore many different sports.

The idea is that variety helps you avoid burnout. I feel like this is somehow related to a piece by Camille Paglia on education:

We need a sweeping revalorization of the trades. The pressuring of middle-class young people into officebound, paper-pushing jobs is cruelly shortsighted. Concrete manual skills, once gained through the master-apprentice alliance in guilds, build a secure identity. Our present educational system defers credentialing and maturity for too long.

Most school reforms focus on more: Pre-K, after-school programs, tutoring, longer school years. Maybe if we back off a little, and let students try a variety of things (shop class or art - not all reading and math), they'll turn out okay.

2010-08-18T13:43:00.000-06:00

On Monday I went to Opelousas, Louisiana, to the St. Landry Parish courthouse, to see if I could do something about a $200 speeding ticket.

We sit in the courtroom, but it's too small, so there's a bunch of people waiting outside. The assistant District Attorney reads a list of names from Group 1, a list actually printed out on a dead tree carcass. Those people leave and go somewhere else. He reads a list of people in Group 2 - they leave and go somewhere else. There are four groups. But the ADA has no way of knowing which people are waiting outside, so when new people from outside the courthouse come in and sit in the empty seats, he reads the same lists again, in their entirety. People leave, new people come in, and he reads the list a third time. Of course, I was in the category of "people not in any group", so I had to sit through the whole thing.

There were actually a lot of other inefficiencies in the process, but I'll just complain about that one. And leave the solution as an exercise to the reader.

What brings this up on the blog is this post about the dreaded telecom industry, home to the worst customer service in the world:

The business world runs on software, and most of it is bad software. The back end of just about any major company is a tangled mess of archaic, poorly coded, worse maintained, incompatible software programs written over the past forty years. When you’re dealing with millions of customers via thousands of customer service representatives, your company is only as good as your software. If Verizon had good software, none of these problems would have happened. The web site wouldn’t have let me place an order that would cause the back end to choke; the scheduling system would have gone out more than a month; the order status system would have had usable information; the billing system would have realized that I wasn’t using DSL; the tech support system would have realized DSL was down; a single customer service system would have shown each rep all of my previous interactions.

At least Verizon uses software.

2010-08-15T14:17:00.000-06:00

Free parking is not so free:

Yet the presence of so many parking spaces is an artifact of regulation and serves as a powerful subsidy to cars and car trips. Legally mandated parking lowers the market price of parking spaces, often to zero. Zoning and development restrictions often require a large number of parking spaces attached to a store or a smaller number of spaces attached to a house or apartment block.

The real world should be like Monopoly - one out of every forty spaces is free parking.

2010-08-11T12:38:00.000-06:00

William Easterly:

After every single lecture I have ever given, the first question is … What Can I Do to End World Poverty?

The answer?

Don’t be in such a hurry. Learn a little bit more about a specific country or culture, a specific sector, the complexities of global poverty and long run economic development. At the very least, make sure you are sound on just plain economics before deciding how you personally can contribute. Be willing to accept that your role will be specialized and small relative to the scope of the problem. Aside from all this, you probably already know better what you can do than I do.

2010-08-10T10:06:00.000-06:00

Evidence. I'm about to roll two completely separate blog posts into one, because in both cases I want to say something about evidence, about supporting an argument.

This interesting article about hiring and unemployment does it right. You start with an anecdote to give a face and some emotion to your argument:

"This is as bad now as at the height of business back in the 1990s," says Dan Cunningham, chief executive of the Long-Stanton Manufacturing Co., a maker of stamped-metal parts in West Chester, Ohio, that has been struggling to hire a few toolmakers. "It's bizarre. We are just not getting applicants."

But maybe his experience isn't representative. So later on, you back it up:

Since the economy bottomed out in mid-2009, the number of job openings has risen more than twice as fast as actual hires, a gap that didn't appear until much later in the last recovery. The disparity is most notable in manufacturing, which has had among the biggest increases in openings.

And there's more. The whole article is worth reading, and points to some problems with our economy and our social safety net.

That's what would be the first post. The second was going to be a long unhinged rant, but I've decided to make you do the work instead. Here's how.

Take out a blank sheet of paper. Draw a vertical line down the middle. Above the left half, write "Assertions about 'evangelical Christians'". Above the right side, write "Evidence (of any kind) for assertions". Then read this, filling in the chart.

That's all.

2010-08-06T12:37:00.000-06:00

The planned life versus the summoned life:

People with a high need for achievement commonly misallocate their resources. If they have a spare half-hour, they devote it to things that will yield tangible and near-term accomplishments. These almost invariably involve something at work — closing a sale, finishing a paper.

“In contrast,” he adds, “investing time and energy in your relationship with your spouse and children typically doesn’t offer that same immediate sense of achievement. ... It’s not until 20 years down the road that you can put your hands on your hips and say, ‘I raised a good son or a good daughter.’ ” As a result, the things that are most important often get short shrift.

I'm not sure splitting people into these two classes really works - I see some parts of my life as "planned" and others as "summoned" - but it's an interesting thing to think about.

2010-08-05T12:07:00.000-06:00

I'm not sure what to make of this proposed design for an apartment building on - and I do mean on - the Mississippi River here in Baton Rouge. It's kind of ugly. But we should certainly do something with the riverfront, which right now is mostly just empty space.

2010-08-03T15:33:00.000-06:00

A complaint about academia - it's the usual stuff, too many worthless journals, too many adjuncts, not enough actual teaching. But with a ray of hope:

Coming in one morning recently, I paused to watch a young man walk up and join three students who had pulled chairs together around a table. As the new arrival settled in, he let out the archetypal "That's awesome!" cry, loud enough so that I leaned in to see what he was admiring. He was looking at what appeared to be an animated differential equation making itself visual in stages embedded in a PowerPoint chart. As I walked by, he was practically chewing his lower lip off in his enthusiasm and was asking the laptop driver, "How did you do that?"

I would claim they were my students, but I hate PowerPoint, and I'm not in North Carolina.

More academic complaints here, just in case you need more.

2010-08-02T13:26:00.001-06:00

Jim Manzi says experiments (randomized field trials, or RFTs) in the social sciences are hard:

Criminologists at the University of Cambridge have done the yeoman’s work of cataloging all 122 known criminology RFTs with at least 100 test subjects executed between 1957 and 2004. By my count, about 20 percent of these demonstrated positive results—that is, a statistically significant reduction in crime for the test group versus the control group. That may sound reasonably encouraging at first. But only four of the programs that showed encouraging results in the initial RFT were then formally replicated by independent research groups. All failed to show consistent positive results.

The whole article is very interesting and thoughtful. I'm a little more optimistic than Manzi about the prospects of learning about society, though.

2010-07-27T12:16:00.000-06:00

Apparently I live in the laziest state in the country:

Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas are in the Lower Mississippi Delta region, which is "very poor, has poor medical service, and is hot, humid, and has few opportunities for physical activity."

There's also this:

The challenges to getting people up and moving are complex. Outside the big cities is a dearth of public transportation, bike paths, and sidewalks.

As a resident of Louisiana's second biggest city, I would say that inside the big cities is a dearth of public transportation, bike paths, and sidewalks. Especially sidewalks.

2010-07-21T11:42:00.000-06:00

Sports, redemption, and Manute Bol:

Bol's life and death throws into sharp relief the trivialized manner in which sports journalists employ the concept of redemption. In the world of sports media players are redeemed when they overcome some prior "humiliation" by playing well. Redemption then is deeply connected to personal gain and celebrity. It leads to fatter contracts, shoe endorsements, and adoring women.

2010-07-20T10:26:00.000-06:00

We need a new voting method. Maybe modeled after ancient Sparta:

Count each candidate’s stars or points, and the winner is the one with the highest average score [...]. This is known as range voting, and it goes back to an idea considered by Laplace at the start of the nineteenth century. It also resembles ancient forms of acclamation in Sparta. The more you like something, the louder you bash your shield with your spear, and the biggest noise wins.

Range voting is in some sense the best, but I like approval voting better because of its simplicity.

Besides fixing the voting system, math can rescue democracy in another way this year. We just finished a census, so now state legislatures will decide how to redistrict congressional seats. We can do better.

2010-07-17T15:18:00.000-06:00

A board game rock star:

A queue of autograph hunters forms at the Kosmos company’s stand: Klaus Teuber has arrived. Teuber, once a manufacturer of dental supplies, is an unlikely star. [...] But for four days in Essen, he is the biggest name of all: the designer of the multimillion-selling blockbuster board game, The Settlers of Catan.

Why do Germans make good board games?

“There are two schools of thought as to why the Germans love board games,” says Martin Wallace of Warfrog. “The Germans are of the opinion that it’s down to their superior education system. We English are of the opinion that it’s because German TV is [expletive].”

I enjoy Catan and other European-style board games. I also sometimes get annoyed that "European-style" often seems to mean "good" - bike lanes, board games, car size, food. If you feel the same, you might get some evil pleasure from this slide show.

2010-07-15T13:00:00.000-06:00

Seems that somebody is working on fall crawfish.

Actually, one of the things I like about the crawfish thing is that it's seasonal. Makes it seem more real, gives cajun life a rhythm.

2010-07-13T14:30:00.000-06:00

Every year, various publications publish lists of the best colleges and universities. I like the Chronicle of Higher Education's list and comments. It includes such famous academic juggernauts as Raritan Valley Community College, Berea College, University of Maryland-Baltimore County, and Western Oregon University.

Oh, yeah, and my alma mater:

The University of Colorado is capable of doing some things right. For example, in the undergraduate course, "Physics for Everyday Life," founded by the Nobel Prize winner Carl Wieman, the lessons are broken down into modules. A feedback system employing computers and clickers means that the lecturer never moves faster than the students.

2010-07-08T15:17:00.000-06:00

College students don't work as hard as they used to. Then again, neither do professors:

Instead of a dynamic where a professor sets standards and students try to meet them, the more common scenario these days, they suggest, is one in which both sides hope to do as little as possible.

2010-06-30T19:00:00.000-06:00

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.

2010-06-27T11:47:00.000-06:00

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.

2010-06-26T11:00:00.002-06:00

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.

2010-06-24T12:35:00.000-06:00

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".

2010-06-21T13:54:00.000-06:00

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.

2010-06-01T10:33:00.000-06:00

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.

2010-05-31T09:21:00.000-06:00

Apparently India has more cellphones than toilets. Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry asks, very effectively, "so what?"

In the developing world, cell phones are not just communication devices — though even that would be crucial in regions where none other exist. They are used by farmers, fishermen and traders to get the best market prices for their goods, significantly improving their standards of living. Cell phone minutes have emerged as something close to an alternate currency system that helps people store and move money safely in an environment where personal security is not a given. Telecoms operators in developing countries are at the forefront of mobile banking, and anyone who follows development has some idea of how important and transformational getting the “unbanked” into the formal financial system, and cell phones seem to be the best hope of that.

2010-05-15T15:55:00.000-06:00

Conor Friedersdorf interviews Matthew Yglesias on urban planning. Maybe surprisingly, I agree with almost all of it:

I'm against government-subsidized parking and government-mandated parking. I'm a liberal -- I believe in subsidies for public goods and in regulations to curb harmful externalities, but neither of those things exist when it comes to parking. If anything, it's the reverse -- cheap parking causes environmental hazards and traffic jams. I would let people build as much or as little parking as they feel they can profitably sell to people.

That's good enough, but later on there's this:

Uncontrolled streets. Scrap the traffic lights and stop signs and paint, scrap the sidewalks and the bike lanes, just let people pay attention and try to pilot themselves or their vehicles safely.

Where have I heard this "shared space" idea before? Maybe here. Or here or here or here.

2010-05-12T11:39:00.003-06:00

Rwanda is escaping poverty by making coffee:

First, the Rwandan government lowered trade barriers, and lifted restrictions on coffee farmers. Second, Rwanda developed a strategy of targeting production of high-quality coffee, a specialty product whose prices remain stable even when industrial-quality coffee prices fall. Third, international donors provided funding, technical assistance and training, creating programs like the USAID-funded Sustaining Partnerships to Enhance Rural Enterprise and Agribusiness Development (SPREAD).

2010-05-09T19:14:00.002-06:00

Say no to lawns:

So by simply using water that would have otherwise wound up in the sewer, I have one of the best-looking yards on my block and fresh produce to boot.

2010-04-26T12:31:00.000-06:00

If the volcano erupts again, bring back zeppelins.

2010-04-12T14:24:00.002-06:00

I'm still waiting for replies to the letters I sent to Mayor Holden and my metro council member, but at least the Advocate published my complaint.

2010-03-27T10:34:00.000-06:00

Let's review.

November 20, 2009:

A sister of Mayor-President Kip Holden pleaded guilty Thursday in an ongoing federal probe of bribery in the local criminal justice system.

Note that this is a federal probe, and that (at least) two Baton Rouge police officers have pleaded guilty.

March 14, 2010:

Baton Rouge police officers routinely harassed black people, resorted to unnecessary violence and conducted illegal searches in the days after Hurricane Katrina, out-of-state troopers claimed in reports recently released by the Police Department.

Note this is reports issued by out-of-state troopers.

March 25, 2010:

The Metro Council voted Wednesday to pay $300,000 to settle a federal civil rights suit filed by a Baton Rouge man seriously injured by police in a 2006 arrest.

Note this is again external pressure, a federal civil rights suit.

March 26, 2010:

The U.S. Justice Department confirmed today it is investigating complaints New Mexico State Police made about the Baton Rouge Police Department after Hurricane Katrina.

The U.S. Justice Department is investigating. You will recall that the BRPD's internal investigation is complete, and the case is considered closed, after a couple written reprimands and one officer's three-day suspension.

I'm glad there is outside pressure to clean up the BRPD. But this is not the way it should work. This should be dealt with locally, with the BRPD investigating its own officers. Failing that, local politics should deal with it, and officers should be fired after pressure from the city government.

I hope the next time I read about police misconduct in Baton Rouge, I hear about the officer being immediately let go and charged with crimes. I hope the police chain of command condemns the actions instead of defending them, and local politicians do likewise. Until then, I will continue to call for the resignation of Police Chief Jeff LeDuff.

2010-03-15T12:35:00.000-06:00

After Katrina, a bunch of refugees came here to Baton Rouge. And our police didn't like it:

Baton Rouge police officers routinely harassed black people, resorted to unnecessary violence and conducted illegal searches in the days after Hurricane Katrina
[...]
Officers said they were under orders to make life rough for New Orleans evacuees so they would leave town.

We still wouldn't know about it, except that police from other jurisdictions were here helping out after the hurricane, and they reported what they saw.

Most of the worst allegations don't have names attached, which makes me a little skeptical. But some do:

When the man protested being detained, Clark slammed him onto the hood of the patrol unit, cuffed him and put him into the back of the police car, [New Mexico State Police officer] Williamson said.

Williamson said Clark consulted with his colleagues about what he could arrest the man for, then cited him on counts of pedestrian in the roadway and disturbing the peace.

If I got arrested for "pedestrian in the roadway", I would be in jail all the time. Officer Kenneth Clark still works for the BRPD. In 2007 he got a "medal of merit".

The police's response to all this?

In January 2006, after investigating the claims, the Baton Rouge Police Department announced that one officer was suspended without pay for three days, one was reprimanded and three others were to be counseled by supervisors.

Three whole days. Harsh.

2010-03-12T15:32:00.002-07:00

Missing: 100 million girls.

2010-03-02T13:54:00.000-07:00

There's a blog dedicated to showing you the writing environment of various writers. That's not a surprise. Last month they profiled my next-door neighbor.

2010-03-01T13:49:00.000-07:00

Nicholas Kristof makes the shocking discovery that some people do actually practice what they preach:

A root problem is a liberal snobbishness toward faith-based organizations. Those doing the sneering typically give away far less money than evangelicals.

And in only slightly related news, Bob is giving his Red Mill to his employees:

The Employee Stock Ownership Plan Moore unveiled means that his 209 employees now own the place and its 400 offerings of stone-ground flours, cereals and bread mixes.

2010-02-24T13:31:00.000-07:00

You can't multitask:

Ask students to recite the letters A through J as fast as possible, and then the numbers 1 through 10. Each of those tasks typically takes around two seconds. Then he asks them to interweave the two recitations as fast as they can: "A, 1, B, 2," and so on. Does that take four seconds? No, it typically requires 15 to 20 seconds, and even then many students make mistakes.

2010-02-23T09:59:00.000-07:00

The Mexican mobster who owns the New York Times controls the story:

This is a scandalous story, involving one of the world's largest banks, a powerful federal judge, and two Mexican telecom giants. Under any other circumstances, the business section of the Times would be expected to cover it.

Unrelated, but I'll pass it along while I'm blogging: Megan McArdle explains simply why health care is expensive.

2010-02-18T12:07:00.002-07:00

A depressing article about unemployment:

A slowly sinking generation; a remorseless assault on the identity of many men; the dissolution of families and the collapse of neighborhoods; a thinning veneer of national amity—the social legacies of the Great Recession are still being written, but their breadth and depth are immense.

I warned you it was depressing - don't read it if you're unprepared.

2010-02-10T09:37:00.000-07:00

Fix poverty, not with aid, but by making charter cities:

Because Hong Kong helped make reform in the rest of China possible, the British intervention there arguably did more to reduce world poverty than all the official aid programmes of the 20th century, and at a fraction of the cost. And, if many such cities are built, fewer people will be trapped in the failed states that are the root cause of most humanitarian crises and security concerns.

Apparently "we" should just build a million-plus city from scratch somewhere on the coast of Africa with no fresh water, and the world will be transformed. Romer might have identified the right problem in this article, but his solution sounds ridiculous. Then again, it might just work.

2010-01-27T12:50:00.000-07:00

Today's theme: Corruption.

Police in D.C. lie to convict a man of selling heroin. This probably happens every day in every city.

Closer to home, a local politician gets kickbacks from red light cameras:

Redflex Traffic Systems of Phoenix, Ariz., planned to direct 3.2 percent of the fines it collects to Bryan Wagner, a former New Orleans City Council member and lobbyist who helped Redflex get the contract in Jefferson Parish.

Maybe I should pay my next camera fine with a zero dollar bill. It's working in India:

A corrupt official in a district in Tamil Nadu was so frightened on seeing the zero rupee note that he returned all the bribe money he had collected for establishing a new electricity connection back to the no longer compliant citizen.

2010-01-23T15:21:00.003-07:00

Good news:

Although world population has increased by about 80% over this time (World Bank 2009), the number of people below the $1 a day poverty line has shrunk by nearly 64%, from 967 million in 1970 to 350 million in 2006. In the past 36 years, there has never been a moment with more than 1 billion people in poverty, and barring a catastrophe, there will never be such a moment in the future history of the world.

The two charts of world income distribution are dramatic.

2010-01-22T08:41:00.000-07:00

More corruption in Louisiana. Yawn:

Among the charges is the allegation that Porteous took cash, gifts and other services from lawyers and a bail bondsman with business before his court.

I searched for this article in the Advocate, but didn't find it. Not newsworthy, I guess.

2010-01-20T10:48:00.000-07:00

Tyler Cowen has been blogging about the country of my birth a lot. There's this:

It is striking how much cooperation and heroism we've seen in Haiti. It's evidence that the Haitian social fabric is a lot stronger than many people thought. It also suggests that economic growth models with a one-dimensional "trust" variable are not furthering our understanding very much. I do expect the violence to get worse, as hunger and thirst continue, but so far the Haitian people have a lot to be proud of.

And some ideas of how to help:

6. Invite Haitians to occupy the empty homes in the run-down parts of New Orleans.

And Obama's challenge in Haiti:

Just as it's not easy to pull out of Iraq or Afghanistan, it won't be easy to pull out of Haiti.

Maybe you thought health care was a hard problem. Maybe you thought that cap and trade would make health care look easy. This may be the hardest problem yet and it wasn't on anybody's planning ledger. Obama won't have many allies in this fight either. A lot of Democratic interest groups might, silently, wish he would forget about the whole thing.

There's lots more, so follow my first link and just keep scrolling.

2010-01-07T14:56:00.002-07:00

Excellent teachers matter.

2009-12-18T15:19:00.000-07:00

Atul Gawande thinks the most important parts of the health-care bill might be the small parts:

Almost half of it is devoted to programs that would test various ways to curb costs and increase quality. The bill is a hodgepodge. And it should be.

The bill tests, for instance, a number of ways that federal insurers could pay for care. Medicare and Medicaid currently pay clinicians the same amount regardless of results. But there is a pilot program to increase payments for doctors who deliver high-quality care at lower cost, while reducing payments for those who deliver low-quality care at higher cost. There’s a program that would pay bonuses to hospitals that improve patient results after heart failure, pneumonia, and surgery. There’s a program that would impose financial penalties on institutions with high rates of infections transmitted by health-care workers. Still another would test a system of penalties and rewards scaled to the quality of home health and rehabilitation care.

He says health care is so complex, that in order to get a handle on it we need to first experiment on a small scale with a bunch of different ideas, and that a similar idea revolutionized agriculture. It's a good read, but I'm not sure I buy it.

2009-12-07T12:10:00.000-07:00

A year ago, Neel Kashkari was working himself to death at the Treasury Department, in charge of a $700 billion bailout. Now, he's building a shed:

"I had to do something with my hands. It's a big amorphous unknown -- what's going to happen to our economy. And the shed is solid, measurable. I can see it, I can touch it. It's going to be around for the next 30 years. It's the opposite of amorphous."

He has a new perspective now:

"This makes $700 billion seem small."

2009-11-25T11:58:00.000-07:00

Contributing to U2 awareness:

An expert commission of African leaders today announced their plan for comprehensive reform of music band U2. Saying that U2’s rock had lost touch with its African roots, the commission called for urgent measures to halt U2’s slide towards impending crisis.

2009-11-20T17:31:00.000-07:00

In other local corruption news, my senator is selling her vote on health care for $100 million.

2009-11-20T11:28:00.001-07:00

The city I live in:

Evelyn Holden admitted in federal court that she conspired with former senior Baton Rouge City Court prosecutor Flitcher Bell and others to fix criminal and traffic matters in City Court.

The mayor's sister is one thing. Corrupt police bother me even more:

Former Baton Rouge police Sgt. Darrell Johnson has admitted he took bribes to cause dismissal of criminal charges in City Court over a 19-year period. Johnson retired before pleading guilty.

Former Officer Leonard P. Jackson, who recently resigned from the Baton Rouge police force, admitted he sought and took bribes in a scheme to fix criminal and traffic charges in City Court.

I now officially don't trust the police in Baton Rouge, which is a terrible thing.

2009-11-12T10:51:00.002-07:00

Fraud in the humanities and in the sciences:

Most interesting is that Schön’s frauds actually benefited from rigorous peer review at elite journals, much as earlier forgers benefited from the advanced techniques of text-obsessed humanists. The critiques and suggestions that Schön received in referee reports told him exactly what it would take to convince skeptics about new findings. If his amazing plastics really did show evidence of superconductivity, reviewers pressed, had Schön checked for such and such effects or measured this or that parameter? Schön could then deliver those results right back, in perfect keeping with expectations.

I also like the takeaway:

The relentless rat race to produce new results quickly in order to secure the next round of funding or promotion is not without consequences. The cozy relationship between prestigious scientific journals like Science and Nature and journalists—who receive prepublication copies of “hot” articles under special embargo, allowing them to prepare accompanying news coverage—entangles scientists, laboratories’ press relations staff, journal editors, investors and others in dizzying webs of potential conflicts of interest.

2009-11-09T10:17:00.002-07:00

Give coffee addicts coffee and then have them do a challenging task. Tell half of them that caffeine is known to improve scores on the task, and tell the other half that it's known to have a negative effect. Independently, half get decaf and half get regular, but they all think they're getting caffeine.

Finally, no-one who got the decaf noticed that it didn't actually contain caffeine, and the volunteer's ratings of their alertness and mood didn't differ between the caffeine and placebo groups. So, this suggests that if you were to secretly replace someone's favorite blend with decaf, they wouldn't notice - although their performance would nevertheless decline.

Caffeine's not just a placebo, it does affect their scores - but the subjects don't notice it.

2009-11-06T13:34:00.002-07:00

Recessions. Ten-percent unemployment. Wars. Shootings. No decent sidewalks or bike paths. But not everything is getting worse:

We estimate that world poverty rates have fallen by 80% from 0.268 in 1970 to 0.054 in 2006. The corresponding total number of poor has fallen from 403 million in 1970 to 152 million in 2006.

They also find that global inequality has decreased.

2009-11-04T14:49:00.002-07:00

More about pedestrians and sidewalks:

Cities like Barcelona and Amsterdam—pedestrian paradises both—are proposing limiting entire tracts of the city to 30 kph (that's 18.6 mph, folks), and in places like the "Skvallertorget," or "Gossip Square," in Norkkoping, Sweden, the legal right of way is shared equally, and safely, among pedestrians and drivers, without clear markings, because car traffic has dropped to human speeds.

2009-11-02T12:02:00.002-07:00

I'm on a quest to discover why there are no sidewalks in Baton Rouge. This is a start:

Take The Millennium Towne Center apartment complex on Jefferson Highway. It has no way for residents to actually walk to the shops at Towne Center just two-tenths of a mile away.

“That should never have been built without a sidewalk,” says Metro Council member Alison Cascio, a former Planning Commission staff member. “You can’t even take a back pedestrian walkway.”

Bunch explains the Planning Commission approved the development with a 5-foot sidewalk along Jefferson Highway. As to why it’s not there, he can’t say.

The article is long, and boring in the way that only local politics can be. But it's just a little interesting.

2009-10-17T15:22:00.002-06:00

It's transportation week at the Evil Line. Today, Slate asks if bicycles should obey traffic laws:

"If there weren't cars, we wouldn't need stop signs," says Andy Thornley of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition. "They're not there for bicycles." Bikers can safely slow down, look both ways, and proceed without sacrificing the momentum necessary to keep cycling, says Thornley. Lawmakers tend to favor the full-stop, in part because not all cyclists are skilled enough to judge the safety of proceeding through an intersection. During a debate in the Oregon state legislature, one representative admitted that he doesn't like stopping at signs. "But I do it because it's the law," he said. Plus, if bikes can cruise through stop signs, why not cars? Why do bikes deserve special treatment?

This piece also has an interesting distinction between "vehicularists" and "facilitators". I think I'm a vehicularist, but I can see both sides.

2009-10-15T11:22:00.003-06:00

The London congestion toll is working. But people hate it:

London Mayor Boris Johnson recently conducted a survey on expanding the London Congestion Charge Zone and found that 67 percent of respondents were opposed.

This is a problem with shared space traffic control, also. It works, but people don't like it. They like their cars, and like not having to pay attention when they drive.

Also on the transportation beat, mass transit may not be quite as green as you might think.

2009-09-15T09:58:00.001-06:00

Readers will know that I'm a fan of Bruce Schneier. His best blog entry to date was yesterday.

2009-09-08T20:08:00.003-06:00

Improve education by making the geek culture the cool culture:

"The driving force in the life of a child, starting much earlier than it used to be, is to be cool, to fit in," Grodd told the group. "And pretty universally, it's cool to rebel." In other words, prepare for you and your netbook to be jeered out of the room. "The best schools," Grodd told me later, "are able to make learning cool, so the cool kids are the ones who get As. That's an art."

It's hard. You do it, according to the article, by breaking the youth culture - having lots of adults around all the time, everywhere.

2009-08-26T10:06:00.002-06:00

This is why I read Slate:

Going to prison is a little bit like heading off to college. The first step is finding an institution that's right for you. Then there's a lot of anxiety: Who will be your roommate? Where is the library? What time does the dining hall close? How do you make a good impression with the people in charge? Will you make friends? A prison consultant addresses these concerns.

2009-08-20T12:08:00.003-06:00

A new approach to development aid:

The idea is simple: The payment of a basic monthly income, funded with tax revenues, of 100 Namibia dollars, or about €9 ($13), for each citizen. There are no conditions, and nothing is expected in return.

An approach like this says that the people you're trying to help are productive, hard-working, and smart, and that they know better what they need than you do. If they get drunk, you're wrong, if they start businesses, you're right.

2009-08-18T09:26:00.001-06:00

The main barrier to bike commuting is bike parking:

On the flip side, people would be much less likely to drive into Manhattan if they knew their expensive car was likely to be stolen, vandalized, or taken away by police. And yet this is what was being asked of bicycle commuters, save those lucky few who work in a handful of buildings that provide indoor bicycle parking. Surveys have shown that the leading deterrent to potential bicycle commuters is lack of a safe, secure parking spot on the other end.

The math building here at LSU doesn't seem to have a single bike rack, and that's on a college campus. Sad.

2009-07-23T12:48:00.002-06:00

You've got sensitive data on your laptop, or you don't, but either way you don't want customs agents nosing through it. So you encrypt it twice, mail one key to a trusted friend near your destination, shred that key, use your laptop on the flight with the other key, and shred that key just before customs.

At this point, you will not be able to boot your computer. The only key remaining is the one you forgot in Step Three. There's no need to lie to the customs official; you can even show him a copy of this article if he doesn't believe you.

This idea from, who else, Bruce Schneier.

2009-07-22T11:22:00.000-06:00

PowerPoint is evil:

Students in the survey gave low marks not just to PowerPoint, but also to all kinds of computer-assisted classroom activities, even interactive exercises in computer labs. "The least boring teaching methods were found to be seminars, practical sessions, and group discussions," said the report. In other words, tech-free classrooms were the most engaging.

2009-07-15T13:40:00.000-06:00

Fix the economy by improving the reputation of manual labor.

2009-07-14T13:46:00.003-06:00

Seed offers a debate about competing energy technologies. My favorite is from Gwyneth Cravens, the nuclear power advocate:

And as far as pollution goes, 120 million tons of unregulated coal fly ash pours into thousands of American slurry pits each year. It contains toxic heavy metals and enough U-235 to run all of our 104 power reactors. Coal pollution exposes people within 50 miles to low-dose radiation—about 100 to 400 times greater than from a nuclear plant.

But several contributors disagree with her, and they have some good arguments. So make up your own mind.

2009-07-07T13:42:00.001-06:00

Caitlin Flanagan on marriage:

There is no other single force causing as much measurable hardship and human misery in this country as the collapse of marriage. It hurts children, it reduces mothers' financial security, and it has landed with particular devastation on those who can bear it least: the nation's underclass.

It's a great article - go read it.