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.

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.

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.

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).

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.