Maggie's Farm

From Vedder at Minding the Campus.

Math and science are difficult, and they aren't all about "what I think" and "what I feel." Failure is a good thing in a meritocratic field because it separates those with potential from those without. Whether it's banks or students, America needs more room for healthy failure.

Failure is more important than success, because more can be learned from it. In the end, success in achieving goals is better, though. Much more enjoyable.

We usually just pop leftovers in the microwave, but a better thing to do with them is to make fritters out of them.

These aren't true Potato Pancakes, but they're tasty. I call them Mashed Potato Fritters.

The wonderful Nicole Gelinas has an essay up at City Journal which reviews the history of the idea of retirement (invented, as you know, during the Depression in an effort to move older folks out of the work force), and the financial challenges would-be retirees are facing today.

People, especially men, are postponing retirement.

As one of those cussed, cranky Yankee types who intends to die at his desk, I don't think much about it, but for those greying Boomers who aspire to exit the world of productivity, many of them have more debt and less assets than they thought they might have. A quote:

Thanks to Botox and treadmills, the boomers are aging well. Their finances? Not so much, as some Federal Reserve numbers show. Baby boomers, like most Americans, have seen no wage gains for two decades. In 2007, families headed by younger boomers—those aged 45 through 54—earned a median income of $64,200, almost exactly the same, in inflation-adjusted dollars, as families in the same age group earned in 1989. (The comparison doesn’t work well for the older boomers—those aged 55 through 64—because, as we’ll see, people are retiring later these days, which skews their incomes.)

Read the whole thing. I have often said that what people seek, more than retirement, is financial independence. When they have that, they enjoy working more.

I got a spanking in the comments on my college post yesterday from Dos Amigos, and perhaps did deserve it. (Well, everybody deserves a spanking anyway, just on general sinfulness principles.) 

So let me inquire of our readers:

If a person comes to you with a college degree in hand, what, if anything, do you feel you ought to be able to expect them to know (besides how to bait a beaver trap)?

I have made it clear what I expect, and I am on our interview committee. Beware of me, new grads, because I am a demanding SOB who will ask questions you might not anticipate including math tricks to check your wit and quotes to check your knowledge, and will expect no less of you than I have expected of myself!

Iffy as an investment, especially in the liberal arts, but a good thing for a kid who is desperate to deepen his thinking and expand his mental life but who cannot do it on his own. After all, even Thomas Jefferson and Bill Gates took one or two years in college before they quit.

Occupy Academia:

The Occupy Wall Street protestors are right to be angry about the failed promise of higher education. Colleges and universities have fallen down on the job of developing the human capital we need to improve our economy and civic life.

The villain is not the lenders who played an incidental role in providing capital to creative writing majors, however. It’s the tenured bozos who gave them Derrida and finger painting in their formative undergraduate years instead of Plato and Aristotle (or a good course in computer-aided drafting). The Zuccotti Park crew should drop their beef with the banks and demand change from academia instead.

WSJ: Is an Ivy League Diploma Worth It? - Fearing Massive Debt, More Students Are Choosing to Enroll at Public Colleges Over Elite Universities

Most people I know would rather hire a University of Indiana Physics major than a Harvard English Lit major.

Mead: Ditching the Ivy League.

A national Baccalaureate exam? Fine with me, as long as I get to design it - and as long as anybody can take it whether or not they attended college because it would be an exam on what is often regarded as post-high school academic knowledge, however acquired. I would not trust anyone to design this thing except me. Among other things, it would contain Trig and Calculus, Physics, Astronomy, Plato and Aristotle, Shakespeare, the Bible, Econ, mechanical engineering, Ancient Greece, Biochemistry, Music history and theory, Civics and American history, Anatomy, Geology, Roman law, Statistics, Architectural history, accounting, a sample essay...and many more things of substance and rigor which one typically thinks of a college grad as knowing, plus special sections on subjects of claimed expertise. There are smart and ambitious high school grads who could possibly pass the exam. This would be an elite degree representing broad and deep achievement, which people could make of it what they will, and not replace the shoddy, ordinary college degree which only means you paid your bills for four years. I doubt my Baccalaureate exam would mean much to the job market, but it would be a meaningful life credential to parade around and would be challenging enough to supercede a college BA and maybe even a Rhodes Scholarship. I'd aim for a Pass rate of around 2-10% of those brave enough to take it.

Well, I'll get to work on a sample exam right now - if there's any money in it for me. Or perhaps just a separate blog post.

Dubya and Me - Over the course of a quarter-century, a journalist witnessed the transformation of George W. Bush.

It is difficult for me not to like the Bushes. My kind of people, with the sorts of flaws that I can put up with.

"I suppose, indeed, that in public life, a man whose political principles have any decided character and who has energy enough to give them effect must always expect to encounter political hostility from those of adverse principles."

Thomas Jefferson

It's about greed and the Blue Food Bowl. The middle class of America is increasingly dependent on government money, directly or indirectly, rather than on private industry - and the financial industry is in with the whole program. There are good reasons for the financial industry to be almost entirely Democratic and in political alliance with the government food bowl.

The Liberal yet Venerable Mead uses the Bronx as a political metaphor for the nation. Despite the beginning, this is not about NYC cops. One quote re the strange political alliance:

What all three groups share is a burning desire for more: a hunger and demand for ever larger amounts of government revenue and power. Money and power for the government enable the upper middle class good government types to dream up new schemes to help us all live better lives and give government the resources for the various social, ecological and cultural transformations on the ever-expandable goo-goo to-do list that range from a global carbon tax to fair trade coffee cooperatives and the war on saturated fat. All these programs (some useful in the Via Meadia view, others much less so) require a transfer of funds and authority from society at large to well-socialized, well-credentialed and well-intentioned upper middle class types who get six figure salaries to make sure the rest of us behave in accordance with their rapidly evolving notions of correct behavior.

That is, in accordance with our betters.

and

The cops, the teachers, the firefighters, the sanitation and transit workers: these are most of what remains of the backbone of what used to be the organized working class. Many who don’t work directly for the government work for the health care industry, where government and private insurance payments have kept the blue model alive for employees. Others work for infrastructure and construction companies – much of whose business comes from government. Their ranks were once swelled by reasonably well-paid manufacturing workers and other private employees in what was once a job-rich metropolitan environment. A few private bastions of the middle middle class remain (workers in the cooperative buildings where the überrich live, for example), but these days the purely private sector middle middle class is in full scale retreat in cities like New York and public and quasi-public sector employees take the lead.

This group doesn’t get paid as well or enjoy the prestige of the goo-goos, but they have built structures and institutions that secure them a middle-middle class existence. In the public sector at least they have done surprisingly well at passing their jobs and connections down to future generations. As the urban middle middle class shifted from a largely private sector group to a group primarily dependent on public sector spending and jobs, the political balance also changed. Like the goo-goos, the urban middle middle class needs more revenue from the rest of society: people in this group want the number of jobs in their institutions to grow and naturally enough they want to be better compensated: more take-home pay, better benefits, a younger retirement age with a more generous pension.

and

Threats to the food bowl both unite and divide the Party of Blue. All of them agree that federal revenues should be higher and that much of that money should flow to the cities and states. This preference helps hold the Democratic Party together and – combined with other groups (like big agriculture) that get fat subsidies – helps the Party stay competitive at the national level.

But when cuts must be made, or when limited resources must be divvied up, the groups divide. The goo-goos are willing to cut middle class entitlements and government pensions to fund upper middle class social priorities. Which, they will argue, is more important: to pay (excessive, irrational) pensions to superannuated firemen and cops. or to build a pathbreaking carbon cap and trade system that could save the planet? They are ready to sell state unions down the river, as Democratic politicians ranging from California’s Jerry Brown to Chicago’s Rahm Emanuel to New York’s Andrew Cuomo are doing as I write. But they prefer a peaceful and gradual approach that does not reduce the Democratic Party to a state of civil war and can present themselves to the unions as a lesser evil than Republican red staters who want to kill the unions altogether.

Government employees have a simpler point of view: they want the money and they want it now. They want it without reforms and they want it while they continue to enjoy their traditional privileges and perks.

It's not a Big Tent, it's a giant food bowl provided by a shrinking base of taxpayers. See Greece...

An RCT is a "randomized controlled clinical trial."

We have discussed the scientific fallacy of "data mining" here in the past in which, instead of testing an hypothesis (aka the Scientific Method), the researcher simply asks the computer to find any correlations in the mountain of collected data. That is not science. This is typically done when a researcher has a mound of data which did not support his hypothesis. So as not to waste it, he asks the computer to find something else in it.

In any mountain of data, some correlations can be found if only by laws of randomness - see the legal hoax of so-called Cancer Clusters.

Often enough, when you read "Study says...", you are reading a report from data mining. Our readers know that a statistical correlation often - or usually - means nothing, but data-mining "information" is non-information. Generally speaking, newspaper reporters never passed Statistics 101. (I did, but found stats difficult to explain to innumerate juries who even get confused by basic algebra.)

Junkfood Science discusses Beware the RCT. One quote:

Even medical professionals get taken by this growing technique. It's most common when secondary studies use the database from participants in a randomized controlled trial to look for correlations not to scientifically test a hypothesis, let alone one the original trial had been designed to fairly test. Carefully controlled clinical trials are concerned with causes and effective treatments. In contrast, multivariate analyses of large databases, with their statistical manipulations and regression computer modeling, are statistics. Statistics is about correlations. It's not biological research.

It's close to being the perfect food, containing pretty much all you need to survive. How the Potato Changed the World - Brought to Europe from the New World by Spanish explorers, the lowly potato gave rise to modern industrial agriculture.

What is "lowly" about the sacred Mashed Potato? asks I. We only grow the pre-mashed varieties at my house, genetically-modified to contain the butter, salt, and cream genes.

The premium varieties of potato, of course, come with a thick rare rib-eye on the side.

(It's remarkable to consider all of the things from the New World which changed the Old World: corn - maize, potato, tomato, syphilis, squash, etc.)

The chemistry and biochemistry of winemaking.

The great Louis Pasteur, you will recall, got his start by trying to improve fermentation processes.

That's the title of a piece by Kling. A quote from his fascinating essay about post-industrial work:

The recent trend in job polarization raises the possibility that gains in well-being that come from productivity improvements will accrue to an economic elite. Perhaps the middle-class affluence that emerged during the latter part of the industrial age is not going to be a feature of the information age. Instead, we could be headed into an era of highly unequal economic classes. People at the bottom will have access to food, healthcare, and electronic entertainment, but the rich will live in an exclusive world of exotic homes and extravagant personal services. The most popular bands in the world will play house concerts for the rich, while everyone else can afford music downloads but no live music. In the remainder of this essay, I want to extend further this exercise in imagination and consider three possible scenarios.

The people who used to be bank tellers are not the same people who design and build ATM machines. Clerical jobs are disappearing fast. Secretarial jobs have already disappeared. Sales and service jobs are entering the maw of the internet: people buy their insurance, cars, and books online. Semi-skilled jobs are disappearing. Soon, teaching jobs will shrink with digital education. Productivity (ie, fewer employees) abounds. Outsourcing of everything, including legal work, abounds. Heck, even Wall St. jobs are disappearing. (However, there will always be work for skilled labor: carpenters, painters, electricians, plumbers, gunsmiths, firemen, masons, etc)

Kling wonders what the immediate future might hold for people who want to work, but who, despite education, lack specific skills. As I have said often here, a gentleman's liberal arts education is a wonderful thing indeed and helps produce good dinner companions but it is not work-related. It was never meant to be.

As Vanderleun guotes:

The graduate with a science degree asks, "Why does it work?" The graduate with an engineering degree asks, "How does it work?" The graduate with an accounting degree asks, "How much will it cost?" The graduate with a liberal arts degree asks, "Do you want fries with that?" -- Jane Haddam

A re-post from last December - it's not snowing here yet this year - except for last weekend -

Still snowing heavily up here. Lovely evening for a smoke or two and a Scotch or three, and, as usual in the winter, I am encountering the problem of maintaining humidification.

I generally like to keep them in the mid-high 60s, but mine keep dropping to nearer to 50% in the dry air. And yes, I do keep them well-packed with good and bad smokes of all sorts.

Here's one bit of advice on the topic but, unless you have an electronic system, I suspect you just use solid heavy wood boxes and try to do your best to smoke 'em all - and not try to save a large collection. You can always buy more.

Here's something even better:

A pal who read my piece about humidors in winter was thoughtful enough to deliver me an Opus X along with two 72% Boveda gel-packs. Those packs are news to me. He promised that putting two Boveda packs in there will get your humidor through three months in the winter up here, where our humidity can be quite low in winter. The packs don't activate until opened.

Thank you, friend.

America does have social classes, to some extent, based on all sorts of familial tribal signaling and shared understanding, but the mystery to most pundits especially on the Left is income mobility among economic levels. Social class and income are not the same thing. See "genteel poverty."  Via The poor don't stay poor, the rich don't stay rich:

The data showed that fully 56 percent of those who in 2001 were in the lowest 20 percent quintile of income earners had moved up to a higher income quintile by 2007. At the opposite end of the spectrum, 66 percent of those who in 2001 were in the highest quintile of income earners dropped at least one quintile by 2007. And, as Perry notes on his Carpe Diem blog, lest anybody think the period spanning those years might not be representative because of the housing boom that triggered the Great Recession of 2008, data cited by the Fed point to the same pattern of high income mobility from 1996 to 2005. Fully 57.5 percent of those in the top 1 percent of income earners dropped to a lower quintile by 2005, while 57.8 percent of those in the lowest quintile in 1996 moved to a higher one by 2005.

In America, economic "class" is just a moment in time for most people.

We all must adapt! With Global Cooling hastening our certain death and doom by freezing to death, we offer this info in our annual Winter in New England series. God willing and if we survive Climate Change, we will extend this series next fall with some new additions.

Let's face it: 4 WD is is for petite blond yuppie wives who do not know how to drive in snow and mud while chatting on their cell - and for hunters who like to take vehicles to gnarly places. There's a cheap solution.

Snow and mud tires are called "Winter tires" nowadays. They are made of a softer rubber (so as to provide better suppleness in cold temperatures), which is why they don't last as long as regular tires. That's the reason to put them on in November and to take them off in March or April (around here, anyway). At that rate, they will last 3-4 seasons at the minimum.

Important safety considerations with winter tires: Always put them on all 4 wheels and never replace just one: replace all 4 at the same time.

Decent snow tires will turn your old Chevette into the rough equivalent of a 4 WD. But how do you know whether you need them? In my opinion, if you need them, you will know it - but here's a piece on the subject.

With global cooling picking up its pace, everybody may need them soon. 4 WD is good but, where you need them, winter tires are as good or better.

A book, How Risky Is It, Really?: Why Our Fears Don't Always Match the Facts, via Powerline's Thinking About Risk:

Fears don't match facts, often, because people want to pretend they are in control of Fate. Eat your broccoli and tofu and skip your immunizations, suckers.

Dr. Merc does not seem to believe that we're all going to drown anytime soon.

However, the science is settled (via Watts): there is probably or possibly a short-term (centuries) warming trend, if the data is worth anything (about which I am a skeptic). Nothing to think twice about unless you plan on bringing farming back to Greenland in 300 years:

Note the dramatic correlation with global CO2 emissions! None. Here's a better correlation which shows some real proof: Global temperatures caused by decrease of Mediterranean pirates.

QED - it's a linear inverse relationship This cause is therefore settled science, and the obvious solution to refrigerate ourselves is to import more pirates into the Med until we are cold enough.

Story at Volokh.

Fascists.

Occupy Wall Street has a point about student debt—sort of. 

A quote:

At WhatWillTheyLearn.com, students can click onto ACTA's recent survey of more than 1,000 American four-year institutions—and find out how their colleges and universities rate. Two findings jump out. First, the more costly the college, the less likely it will require a demanding core curriculum. Second, public institutions generally do better here than private ones—and historically black colleges such as Morehouse and service academies such as West Point amount to what ACTA calls "hidden gems."

Alas, much of the debate over the value of a college degree breaks down one of two ways. Either people pit the liberal arts against the sciences—"Is it a vital interest of the state to have more anthropologists?" asks Florida Gov. Rick Scott—or they plump for degrees that are thought to be more practical (e.g., business). Both are probably mistakes.

Sounds like a very good idea to me: Check Out This Alternative to College:

The idea is that employers can decide which certificate level they would like to see in the hands of applicants in order to match them to the job at hand. (They can also check with ACT to verify that a certificate is genuine.) The NCRC test avoids such high-school stumbling-blocks as algebra, geometry, grammar, and advanced vocabulary—the stuff of the SAT and the regular ACT test. Instead the NCRC test, designed to focus on real-world in contrast to academic aptitude, contains just three WorkKeys: "Applied Mathematics," "Reading for Information," and "Locating Information." Still, while the skills assessed in the three WorkKeys are fairly basic, (Applied Mathematics requires no more than eighth-grade math), to perform well enough to earn a Platinum-level certificate would probably challenge many college graduates.

I tried out the most difficult of the sample NCRC questions on ACT's website and found myself delving deep into memory for the formula for calculating the volume of a cylinder (Applied Mathematics), attempting to correlate two complex soil-sample graphs (Locating Information), and poring over a legal document (Reading for Information). Critical thinking and the ability to use abstract data to solve concrete problems are clearly among the skills assessed. ACT has also developed a list of additional WorkKey assessments that employers in search of specific talents such as business writing or applying technology, or "soft" interpersonal skills such as listening, conflict resolution, or working in a team, can use to fit applicants to the specific demands of a job.

This thing sounds more useful than a BA.

I am not a Cain supporter. I don't know him well enough yet. However, this makes me sympathetic: MSNBC Analyst: GOP Sees Herman Cain as a 'Black Man Who Knows His Place'

The notion that a black man cannot be successful or free thinking is incredibly insulting. Racist, in fact. Is every black person supposed to stay on the plantation of victimization, helplessness, and dependency just because of skin tone? Is that American?  And heck, what about Obama? Oh, well he's a Leftist who deeply disapproves of America so it's OK for him to be successful.

As for Cain, it seems he believes that "his place" was CEO of a major business, and that his next "place" is on PA Ave. Good for him.

Meanwhile white limousine Liberals who "care about People of Color" and want them to remain needy and victimized at all cost begin to hate him for running off the plantation. The Lefties and Dems prefer cop-killer Mumia to men like Cain. It is disgusting.

Related: Is Cain a Jeremiah for black Americans? A quote:

For all Mr. Obama's yammering about "hope and change," nothing much has changed for millions of African-Americans -- you know, all those underclass blacks in Detroit, East St. Louis, Newark, Camden, Cleveland, and Philadelphia. Check that. What has changed is that Mr. Obama has sought to make his fellow African-Americans more, not less, dependent on government -- therefore less, not more, free. The president has sought to take the black model of government dependence and make it the standard for the rest of the country.

Mr. Obama is, of course, ideally positioned to make an historic challenge to so-called civil rights leaders and black, mostly urban, politicians who keep African-Americans down. Yet Mr. Obama hasn't been even a scold. Instead, Mr. Obama has acted like any white Chicago Democrat ward-heeler, currying favors by spreading government largesse -- by helping corrupt black leaders and white enablers further entrench their positions through the doling out of taxpayer dollars and more government.

A Cain presidency would be a cosmic irony -- a towering affront, an epic challenge -- to African-American leaders and white progressives who profit from the bondage of African-Americans -- bondage in the form of welfare dependency, and bondage in a subculture that advances resentment, victimhood, and retribution.

It's not just black people. The Left wants everybody on the plantation, but having some color makes them feel more holy.

From Malanga: How Harrisburg Borrowed Itself Into Bankruptcy

Spending money you do not have is the easiest thing in the world, especially when the debt is somebody else's problem.

With more women than men attending college and grad school these days, straight men are becoming an oppressed and intimidated, if not castrated, minority.

From Farrell's The Chilly World of the Campus Male:

Professors in engineering and the hard sciences don’t speak out much about the politics of male-female issues. What we hear emanates strongly from departments of women’s and “gender” studies and is adapted by psychology; social work; sociology; anthropology; literature; schools of education; and the seminaries. At the prestigious universities, most of these departments are now 80% to 95% female.

My advice to guys in college these days is to pretend that you're gay or tranny or some sort of mixed vegetable, get in with the chicks, and then happily surprise them with the Halloween treat they've been longing for.

The great Heather MacDonald on L.A.’s misbegotten teen dating curriculum.

It is difficult for me to believe that taxpayers want to pay for this crap. As she notes, if social work fixed social dysfunction, everybody would be functional by now. One quote:

Schools have been piling on social services for decades, yet the illegitimacy rate continues to rise, most cataclysmically among blacks (73 percent) and Latinos (53 percent). (Teen birth rates have gone down since the early 1990s, though they are still magnitudes higher than in Europe and Asia.) The social dysfunction that results from this spiraling illegitimacy rate provides the pretext for further increasing the school social work bureaucracy.

Via Insty, Did Utah Valley University fire business prof for being too tough?

That's what I have been talking about lately - students evaluating teachers, dumbing down to please students, etc. A quote from the piece:

According to a lawsuit filed Oct. 14 in U.S. District Court, Maranville’s lawyers allege UVU administrators justified the dismissal based on student complaints that his “capstone” course in business strategies was too rigorous and his Socratic style intimidated them.

“A number of students liked him a lot and said so. The brass came in and liked what he was doing. [Maranville] wanted students to get together in small groups and chew over the topics they were studying,” said his attorney, Robert Sykes. “They get him up here and toss him under the bus because some of the students wanted high school.”

Boo hoo. Tough Socratic teaching and interrogation is typical in elite colleges, laws school, medical school, and business school. If they think a prof is too rigorous, they oughta see real life.