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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.