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From McSweeney's. Sample:
Horatio thinks he saw a ghost.
Hamlet thinks it's annoying when your uncle marries your mother right after your dad dies.
The king thinks Hamlet's annoying.
Laertes thinks Ophelia can do better.
Hamlet's father is now a zombie.
In this recession there's a lot of vacant space in shopping centers. And merchants are concerned about signing long-term leases.
Answer? "Pop-up" stores.
To highlight its new denim offerings for the back-to-school season, J.C. Penney opened pop-ups at a handful of local malls, including Westfield Santa Anita in Arcadia and Montclair Plaza.
The spaces, which closed in September after a few weeks, featured interactive displays of the department-store chain's jeans. To appeal to tech-savvy teens, the pop-ups would send text messages to compatible cellphones when shoppers came within 35 feet.
Although the pop-ups didn't offer merchandise, getting landlords on board "was a pretty easy sell," said Gretchen Ganc, the chain's corporate strategic planning director.
"It's a win-win-win situation," she said. "It's a win for the customer -- it brings something new and different to the mall; it's a win for J.C. Penney because it allows us to step outside our traditional walls and meet a broader audience; and it's a win for the malls -- it gives them more traffic and a much prettier picture than a boarded-up storefront."
Net migration, both before and after the Great Recession, according to analysis by the Praxis Strategy Group, has continued to be strongest to the predominately red states of the South and Intermountain West.
This seems true even for those seeking high-end jobs. Between 2006 and 2008, the metropolitan areas that enjoyed the fastest percentage shift toward educated and professional workers and industries included nominally "unhip" places like Indianapolis, Charlotte, N.C., Memphis, Tenn., Salt Lake City, Jacksonville, Fla., Tampa, Fla., and Kansas City, Mo.
The overall migration numbers are even more revealing. As was the case for much of the past decade, the biggest gainers continue to include cities such as San Antonio, Dallas and Houston. Rather than being oases for migrants, some oft-cited magnets such as New York, Boston, Los Angeles and Chicago have all suffered considerable loss of population to other regions over the past year.
Why? Pay close attention, Blue Staters:
The problem here is more than just too-large government; it lies in how states spend their money. Massive public spending increases over the past decade in California, New Jersey, Illinois and New York have gone overwhelmingly into the pockets and pensions of public employees. It certainly has not flowed into such basic infrastructure as roads, bridges and ports that are needed to keep key industries competitive. [empahsis added]
Alan Richman energetically and lovingly recounts visits to "The Seven Temples of the Food World".
"Thinking About Opening a Restaurant? Think Twice." Yes, it does seem as though running a successful restaurant is an extremely tough job.
There are many issues in America today which need the attention of a responsible government-- Healthcare, Banking & Finance, Telecommunications, Intellectual Property, etc. etc. But we will never achieve the best possible regulations until we reform the body that creates those regulations--Congress.
I agree. We need a grassroots movement to reduce the amount of gerrymandering in the House and incumbent-protection in both Houses.
Honest, I'm not going out of my way to look for it. It just seems as though there's more of it these days.
Louis Menand, Bass Professor of English at Harvard:
Weirdly, the less social authority a profession enjoys, the more restrictive the barriers to entry and the more rigid the process of producing new producers tend to become. You can become a lawyer in three years, an M.D. in four years, and an M.D.-Ph.D. in six years, but the median time to a doctoral degree in the humanities disciplines is nine years. . . .
There is a sense in which the system is now designed to produce ABDs. . . .
In the sixties, the time-to-degree as a registered student was about 4.5 years in the natural sciences and about six years in the humanities. The current median time to degree in the humanities is nine years. That does not include what is called stop-time, which is when students take a leave or drop out for a semester or longer. And it obviously does not take into account students who never finish. It is not nine years from the receipt of the bachelor’s degree, either; it is nine years as a registered student in a graduate program. The median total time it takes to achieve a degree in the humanities including stop-time is 11.3 years. In the social sciences, it is 10 years, or 7.8 as a registered student. In the natural sciences, time-to-degree as a registered student is just under seven years. If we put all these numbers together, we get the following composite: only about half of the people who enter doctoral programs in English finish them, and only about half of those who finish end up as tenured faculty, the majority of them at institutions that are not research universities. An estimate of the total elapsed time from college graduation to tenure would be somewhere between 15 and 20 years. It is a lengthy apprenticeship. . . .
The effort to reinvent the Ph.D. as a degree qualifying people for non-academic as well as academic employment, to make the degree more practical, was an initiative of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation when it was headed by Robert Weisbuch. These efforts are a worthy form of humanitarianism; but there is no obvious efficiency in requiring people to devote 10 or more years to the mastery of a specialized area of scholarship on the theory that they are developing skills in research, or critical thinking, or communication. Professors are not themselves, for the most part, terribly practical people, and practical skills are not what they are trained to teach. They are trained to teach people to do what they do and to know what they know. Those skills and that knowledge are not self-evidently transferable. The ability to analyze Finnegans Wake does not translate into an ability to analyze a stock offering. If a person wanted to analyze stock offerings, he should not waste his time with Joyce. He should go to business school. Or get a job analyzing stock offerings. . . .
Put in less personal terms, there is a huge social inefficiency in taking people of high intelligence and devoting resources to training them in programs that half will never complete and for jobs that most will not get. Unfortunately, there is an institutional efficiency, which is that graduate students constitute a cheap labor force. There are not even search costs involved in appointing a graduate student to teach. The system works well from the institutional point of view not when it is producing Ph.D.s, but when it is producing ABDs. It is mainly ABDs who run sections for lecture courses and often offer courses of their own.
Continue reading "More blistering criticism of U.S. higher education" »
I'll let the student newspaper tell it:
The Office of Residential Life and Learning (ResLife) has added a new stipulation to its guest policy that prohibits any sex act in a dorm room while one's roommate is present. The stipulation further states that any sexual activity in the room should not interfere with a roommate's privacy, study habits or sleep. . . .
ResLife received a significant number of complaints last year from residents bothered by their roommates' sexual behavior. Ales-Rich said that this was one of the most commonly cited sources of conflict between roommates.
(Link via, of course, Fark.)
The Washington Post reports that Tufts's policy ". . . has reaped heavy publicity on college campuses, providing fodder for Conan and Leno and reducing the school to something of a national punch line." Awwwwww.
Some people on one side of the political spectrum--I won't say who, but let's just say they're on the more sinister side--don't approve of "Corporate Food" and "Big Food". They especially dislike big grocery chains. Well, in New York City, the residents are finding that grocery chains may have a significant advantage: "City's Gouger Grocers: Bodegas' Prices Soar Over Supermarkets'".
And there's this: "A Plan to Add Supermarkets to Poor Areas, With Healthy Results".
There may soon be a simple blood test to screen for colon cancer.
Doing away with colonoscopies would be a nice thing.
Not that he's all that optimistic:
“I'll probably vote Conservative. I mean, we're in a terrible state whichever way you look at it, socially, financially and politically, so just give the other guy a chance.
“I don't know what Cameron's going to do, but in the end you vote out of desperation. You just have to have someone new and see what happens.”
So I saw the above headline and I just had to look. Google is supposed to be stuffed with really smart people. The article quotes Peter Norvig, "Google's director of research, former Google director of search quality and former head of the Computational Sciences division at the NASA Ames research center" as follows:
One of the interesting things we've found, when trying to predict how well somebody we've hired is going to perform when we evaluate them a year or two later, is one of the best indicators of success within the company was getting the worst possible score on one of your interviews. We rank people from one to four, and if you got a one on one of your interviews, that was a really good indicator of success.
Sounds bad, right?
But it's not. As I preach to my students: always ask who's in the sample, and why. The article, two paragraphs later, quoting Norvig, tells us:
Ninety-nine percent of the people who got a one in one of their interviews we didn't hire. But the rest of them, in order for us to hire them somebody else had to be so passionate that they pounded on the table and said, "I have to hire this person because I see something in him . . ."
One percent of the time, Google overrides its own "hiring process" because those rare applicants have something important that that process evidently misses and those unusual applicants turn out to be excellent employees. The allegedly "broken" process is simply an example of sample selection bias.
Conclusion: as always, journalists could benefit from more statistics and more economics.
I was cleaning out a closet the other day and I came across my high school copy of Slaughterhouse Five. I liked the book--there are two great scenes in the book, among my favorites in fiction--but what I really liked were the two review quotes on the cover. Because of them, for a few months, I badly wanted to be a novelist.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. has written one of the major novels of the year . . . haunting . . . irresistible reading . . . poignant and hilarious, threaded with compassion and, behind everything, the cataract of a thundering moral statement . . . work of art. --Boston Globe.
Splendid art and simplicity . . . nerve-racking control . . . a funny book at which you are not permitted to laugh, a sad book without tears, a tale told in a slaughterhouse. --Life Magazine.
"[T]he cataract of a thundering moral statement . . ." Lord, at age 16 I loved the sound of that.
I still do.
. . . some forward-looking colleges like Hartwick are rethinking the old way of doing things and questioning decades-old assumptions about what a college degree means. For instance, why does it have to take four years to earn a diploma? This fall, 16 first-year students and four second-year students at Hartwick, located halfway between Binghamton and Albany, enrolled in the school's new three-year degree program. According to the college, the plan is designed for high-ability, highly motivated students who wish to save money or to move along more rapidly toward advanced degrees.
I absolutely support this idea. Even 35+ years ago, a year could have been cut reasonably easily from college or high school or both. It would be even easier today.
Get those kids graduated and get 'em working, so they can pay for my Social Security.
Jeffrey Miron explains it beautifully:
A friend comes to me and says, "I want to have an affair, but if I did I would feel guilty about increasing marital discord in the world. So I want you to forego that affair your were "planning" to have. That way, the net number of affairs does not go up, and I will not feel guilty."
