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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.