The Flow Pigou Effect.

This is what Paul Krugman has been saying for some time, but now from some official types at the Fed. It doesn't really seem that they have the instruments to stem the tide. We need a public works program. The ordinary Pigou Effect says that with a drop in the price level real financial wealth has increased so spending should rise on its own accord. The flow effect, however, predicts the opposite. If deflation is expected to persist, there are gains to be had by hoarding cash. That becomes self-fulfilling.

Subtle Shift Within Fed Toward Deflation Concerns - NYTimes.com via kwout

The curse of the early adopter

If there is one consistent lesson that one gleans by studying school reform over the past century, it is the danger of taking a good idea and expanding it rapidly, spreading it thin. What is stunningly successful in a small setting, nurtured by its founders and brought to life by a cadre of passionate teachers, seldom survives the transition when it is turned into a large-scale reform. Whether charter schools are a sustainable reform, whether they can proliferate and at the same time produce good results, is a question yet to be resolved. Whether there is the will to close low-performing charters remains to be seen. Whether there is an adequate supply of teachers who are willing to work fifty-hour weeks is unknown. The biggest unknown is how the multiplication of charter schools will affect public education.
The Death And Life Of the Great American School System by Diane Ravitch
Chapter 7, penultimate paragraph.

We early adopters think it should be otherwise. That our early success should readily replicate. We do not see ourselves as exceptional, so why not? Our greatest sin is hubris. But we aren't the worst sinners. At least, we react to evidence and try to keep our beliefs consistent with the data.

Weekend Edition: Bernanke’s Fairytale & Keynes’s Quote « Alpha Dinar- talking GCC finance via kwout

Are We Ketman?

I have been reading the Diane Ravitch book The Death and Life of the American School System after being intrigued by the review written by E.D. Hirsch. Once I realized this was the same Hirsch who authored Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know which, once upon a time, I actually read I was surprised by how much of what Hirsch said seemed reasonable to me. When I used to teach the large section of intermediate microeconomics (about 10 years ago) my experience was that many of the students couldn't read the New York Times and make good meaning of the pieces I encouraged them to read. I found a Newsweek piece from back in 1987, A Dunce Cap for America (this link is to Ebsco which your Library must subscribe to to get to the record) that talks about Hirsch's book and Allan Bloom's The Closing of The American Mind. The Newsweek piece actually has a line, "Should it take a Ph.D. to read The New York Times?" Then a little later in the piece it has a Pop Quiz:

Here are some things E. D. Hirsch says literate Americans should know in high school. He asks only general familiarity and common associations -- instant recognition, not encyclopedic expertise. (Answers are NEWSWEEK'S.)
1. 1066
2. absolute zero
3. beginning, In the
4. big bad wolf
5. Currier and Ives
6. demonstrative pronoun
7. Doctor Livingstone, I presume?
8. Earp, Wyatt
9. epistemology
10. flapper
11. Get thee behind me, Satan.
12. Hegelian dialectic
13. Hickory, Dickory, Dock (text)
14. I think, therefore I am.
15. Jolly Roger
16. Kafka, Franz
17. Knock on wood
18. lean and hungry look
19. Marx Brothers
20. Nantes, Edict of
21. n.b.
22. open shop
23. Planck's constant
24. Presley, Elvis
25. quadratic equation
26. Remember Pearl Harbor!
27. Remember the Maine!
28. Sherlock Holmes
29. Slough of Despond
30. Typhoid Mary
31. uncertainty principle
32. utilitarianism
33. vector
34. wave-particle duality.
35. Win this one for the Gipper.
36. X-chromosome
37. Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.
38. Zeitgeist

Answers 1. Norman conquest. 2. molecular motion ceases. 3. Genesis 1:1. 4. Who's afraid? 5. quaint printmakers. 6. this and that. 7. Stanley's greeting. 8. brave, courageous and bold. 9. knowing about knowing. 10. '20s party girl. 11. Jesus to Tempter. 12. thesis, antithesis, synthesis. 13. mouse in motion. 14. Descartes routs doubt. 15. pirate flag. 16. "Metamorphosis" author. 17. to ward off bad luck. 18. what yond Cassius has. 19. Groucho, Chico, Harpo, Zeppo and Gummo. 20. right for French Protestants, 1598. 21. nota bene (Latin: "note well"). 22. nonunionists allowed. 23. quantum theory cornerstone. 24. king of rock. 25. has a squared unknown. 26. World War II battle cry. 27. Spanish-American War battle cry. 28. Elementary! 29. swamp of despair in "Pilgrim's Progress." 30. famous carrier. 31. you can't know a subatomic particle's position and momentum simultaneously. 32. useful=good. 33. line showing size and direction. 34. light behaves like both. 35. Ron's gridiron tear-jerker. 36. the female one. 37. newspaper's reply to doubting tyke. 38. spirit of the age.

I didn't know a few of these - I'm a bit weak on religious references, especially Christian ones, I never read Pilgrim's Progress, and while I think I know what a relative pronoun is, that to which we refer, I was hard pressed to identify a demonstrative pronoun. But I took the point of the whole list. In order to understand stuff, you have to know other stuff. So as an author or a teacher it sure helps to know that there is some common ground of stuff that your readers or students can be expected to already know. Indeed this is true for any adult communication whatsoever. There must be a common base.

But I associate Bloom and Hirsch with the right wing on education, particularly William Bennett, to whom I have a distinct aversion. So I was surprised to read in Hirsch's Wikipedia entry that he is described as a Liberal, which perhaps explains why some of his review resonated with me, though I still had some reservations. Hirsch has it in for John Dewey and his disciples. So, I wonder. Does it really have to be one or the other but not a little bit of both? Must these ideas be argued in such a doctrinaire way? Can't we enjoy reading Hirsch and like reading Jerome Bruner too? If in fact we want to know what we should know then there appears no tension whatsoever, at least to me. The issues arise when it appears that ignorance is preferred and, then, what to do about it. I will write a subsequent post on Ravitch's book when I've finished reading it and try to take on those questions.

I found her history of the events immediately preceding and succeeding A Nation At Risk fascinating. I was an Assistant Professor at the time and pretty locked into my econ research, so this gave me a different perspective of what was happening in the Department of Education then. I should add that the ANAR document itself is well worth the read. It seems to hold equally well today as it did when it was written, though now the risks are even greater having gone through No Child Left Behind, and the emphasis on accountability that continues under President Obama.

Ravitch's history makes the following argument. Politicians shy away from divisive issues that split right down the middle. While in the immediate sequel of ANAR there was a push to define standards, the Left and the Right could not agree on what those standards should be. This produced stalemate that never has gotten resolved, a quagmire that might have produced a new synthesis if we persisted and worked away at it but instead generated a search for the quick and easy way out - which was found in testing and accountability. This part of the history has some interest to it since the evidence in support of the new approach apparently can be substantially questioned because aggregate test performance depends on demographic factors - race and income of the student families - and evidence that originally seemed to provide strong support for the learning benefit of the new methods in retrospect seems to be attributable entirely to a change in the composition of the population that received the treatment. But after reading this I started to get depressed because there was stonewalling on this point. It seemed like a WMD-type argument applied to student learning.

So I looked elsewhere for solace. What I found was this recent blog post by Tony Judt, which gives a comparative of Czeslaw Milosz's Captive Minds, written in the earlier 1950s and focusing on the plight of intellectuals living within the Soviet sphere who couldn't openly argue their ideas and ultimately succumbing to the totalitarianism, since then their thoughts didn't have to be challenged by an unwelcoming public, with current day intellectuals in the U.S. (and perhaps elsewhere in the West) who have remained too passive in the wake of WMD and the horrific excesses of capitalism that led to the burst of the housing bubble and what ensued thereafter. That thinkers get cowed and then ultimately come to be like that in some way because they feel they are not threatened is an interesting idea, one worth exploring. Milosz refers to these intellectuals as Ketmans - minds without moral backbones.

The thought hits close to home. Ravitch in a later chapter that I've yet to read takes to task the charitable Foundations which are providing funding for much of the new school reform - mistakenly applying business principles to the learning environment according to her. One of those is the Gates Foundation, which has recently funded a new Educause initiative, Next Generation Learning Challenges. Will Ravitch's concerns find their way into this program? I know too little about Ravitch's concerns and what NGLC is likely to do to comment intelligently on that question now. As I do learn more, if I see a cause for alarm I will chat this up a bit with colleagues. What then?

Is Daniel Pink Confusing Us About Motivation And Economic Incentives?

A couple of days ago I ended up in a "video trading" episode with Norma. She wanted me to watch this one, a mock radio broadcast, from a few folks at Michigan State. Norma liked the message of the show, particularly the bit near the end that a lecture was a lecture and can't we do better than that. I was less impressed with the video. Technique-wise it was too cutesy for me and message-wise I thought it was a bit too much singing to the choir. Focusing on the technique, I responded with this particular RSA Animate video, which is compelling to view even if I don't fully subscribe to its economic message. Since our group is constantly looking for ways to improve communication between instructor and students, I sent it partly to provoke Norma on whether it were possible to produce some of the effect of the video without the need for skilled animators. Norma responded with this other RSA Animate video that features the voice of Daniel Pink, reflecting on that video triggered this post but I didn't view it for a while. Then, getting back to a critique of the first video Norma had sent, I responded that I didn't believe faculty who lectured and were skeptical about the benefits of learning technology would be convinced by that video. This presentation by Eric Mazur (where he does lecture himself quite a bit) is more convincing because he talks not just about his teaching but also about the students response and in that describes "plug and chug" a method for arriving at the answer while not illuminating at all why the answer is correct. So Mazur had a need to change the teaching method because the students weren't "getting it."

I mentioned to Norma when we went for a coffee that I had seen Pink's TED talk so I knew most of what he was going to say. But afterward I felt that was too smug of me, so I did watch the RSA Animate video. I found it off putting so I watched again to figure out why. It begins with an attack on a straw man version of homo economicus, which given my disciplinary affiliation may have roused my hackles. But it's what he says later in the presentation that I believe is truly pernicious.

Pink is a very slick presenter and he does emphasize an important point, which I put in my own words as follows:

Main point of Dan Pink's talk: When we are already intrinsically motivated applying extrinsic motivation, in the form of reward for good behavior or punishment for bad behavior, is self-defeating because it detracts from the intrinsic motivation, a much more powerful force.

I completely agree with this point. When intrinsically motivated we lose sense of ourselves. We are totally into the activity, whether reading a great book, watching a fascinating movie, or working through a problem or puzzle that has captured our attention. The object of that attention becomes the entire universe. It is as if we are in a bubble that we are permitted to remain inside so long as we focus only on its contents. Extrinsic motivation of any kind makes us self-conscious. It bursts the bubble. Intellectually, it is like holding up a mirror. Once we look at ourselves, it is very difficult if not impossible to re-enter the bubble.

Some examples from the world of sport bring home this point forcefully. In the movie Chariots of Fire there is a scene were the coach, Sam Mussabini, is teaching the sprinter, Harold Abrahams, about why the one American sprinter, Jackson Scholz, lost the 100 meters race in the previous Olympics to his compatriot, Charles Paddock. The slide shows Scholz looking not straight ahead but rather to his side so he could eye his competition. The looking askance cost Scholz the race and the prize of being known as the "World's Fastest Human." In the recently completed British Open, the gracious and understated champion, Louis Oosthuizen, repeatedly gave the response to interviewers before he started the final round that what he must do on the course was to "stay in the moment" and not "get ahead of himself." He had an idiosyncratic method for doing that, with a red dot on his golf glove that he would look at just before making his swing, a reminder to focus on what was at hand. Golf more than sprinting gets at what Pink is talking about with tasks that require cognitive engagement because most of the time the golfer is planning and considering his next shot. So high caliber golf is mainly about management and planning. Then that gets interrupted periodically by the need to make shots.

Unfortunately, Pink can't leave well enough alone. His presentation creates the impression that we have a complete understanding of the psychological and economic incentives when acting in concert. On the latter he says the following: (The full transcript of the presentation is here.)

Fact: money is a motivator at work, but in a slightly strange
way. If you don't pay people enough they won't be motivated.
What's curious is there's another paradox here, that the best
use of money as a motivator is to pay people enough to take
the issue of money off the table. Pay people enough that
they're not thinking about money, they're thinking about the
work. Once you do that, it turns out there are three factors
that science shows lead to better performance, not to mention
personal satisfaction: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

This is a bad message for the rest of us to hear, at least in this form, because it creates the impression that the bubble can be preserved. That is wrong. Even sans the economic considerations, the bubble will eventually burst of its own accord. The movie ends; we finish the book we are reading; we find a complete resolution of the problems we have been working on. And economic incentives can intrude entirely from the outside. In solving that set of problems we come up with an interesting and novel resolution. Word about that gets out, in large part because others are interested in the solution. But then, some of that interest gets transformed into interest about us. Though we were happy with the job and what we were getting paid in it, that was then. This is now and now the situation is different. Or, perhaps more realistic at present, the economic downturn has forced the old economic relationship to become untenable. Now there has to be downsizing or wage givebacks or other economy measures to keep the institution afloat. These are changes unrelated to individual performance. They are nonetheless present and force employees to be self-conscious about their own employment.

I have been singing the praises of Maslow as of late. Maslow argues there is an ongoing tension in all of us. We must make a choice for growth or for safety. Having made one such choice we are soon confronted with another. Maslow is extremely generous in regarding the individual, arguing essentially that the choice made is always the right one because the safety needs are in conflict with the growth needs (which are realized by putting ourselves in a bubble) and while the latter are higher level the former are primary. The individual only opts for growth when safety appears assured and the individual himself is the best arbiter for when this is the case. (This seems entirely consistent with what I took to be Pink's main point.)

Pink does rightly point out that economic incentives are mainly about eliciting participation. Call it "buy in" if you will. But the need to do that is definitely not one and done. Just as with the individual choice for growth or safety, the economic unit must elicit participation of each individual on an ongoing basis. There is therefore an inherent tension between the next elicitation of participation and the desire not to want to burst the current bubble. Sometimes the schedule for annual performance reviews and annual salary increases (remember those?) comes while the employee is immersed in an important project. A supervisor does his or her best to balance these two out. There is no magic formula to manage both of them perfectly.

* * * * *

Now I'll be more pedantic and get at Pink's straw man. Pink begins with a presentation of a tournament or contest, where higher performers get greater rewards and then Pink segues to a piece rate scheme where an individual performer gets more reward the more (or the better) he produces. Pink seems to confuse the two though they are actually quite different and should naturally emerge in different circumstances. He then goes on to imply that economics taught us long ago the lesson that one of these two schemes is the best way to elicit effort out of people. When I was in graduate school (the late 1970s) the rage was implicit contracts, the birth child of Arthur Okun. There were no tournaments or piece rates in Okun's conception. Wages were flat and sticky. There were two core underlying reasons - risk aversion and fairness. Risk aversion argued that units which were large enough to diversify against economic risk should absorb risk from others who couldn't diversify. So firms should absorb the inherent productivity risk of their employees. Fairness meant that similar employees should be treated similarly. When performance differences could be readily attributed to idiosyncratic variations that the employees couldn't control, that meant flat wages instead of tournaments.

The implicit contract view was about long term relationships and required fulfillment of promises on both sides of the market in exchange for which both earned "economic rents" from the relationship. For their part, employees were obligated to fully engage in the work. Implicit contracts provide a view about work that I embrace and I believe many others do as well. Yet it is not perfect. Long term relationships based on promises rather than contractual agreements are subject to one or both parties "cashing in" at the expense of the other party. Indeed, this is a serious problem. But rather than focus on how to best mitigate the problem we seem to have arrived onto the belief that it is not possible. Enter Pink's straw man, who resides in a much more myopic universe.

Implicit contracts don't perfectly resolve the tension between encouraging intrinsic motivation of employees and eliciting their participation. Nothing does. But implicit contracts do give a much better tradeoff than does the naive economic incentives that Pink takes to task. Because of his visibility, Pink could do a big service to the economy as a whole by embracing a more sophisticated view of the economics part of the equation. In the meantime, the psychologists rule and the economists drool. And the rest of us scratch our head about how to get even a glint of intrinsic motivation into our employees as the economy remains in the crapper.

Troddle

Everything cycles back to kid games. When our boys were toddlers my wife taught them and me a variety of nursery rhymes. One of those was Trot Along. With one kid on your lap you'd say the magic rhyme inserting the kid's name at the appropriate place, and then having the kid fall over or in, depending on the verse. We loved it, great family fun.

Kids learn mispronunciation first so before long trot along got transformed into troddle. And silliness begats more silliness so I started to improv on the locations.

Troddle off to Italy.
Troddle off to France.
Watch out (kid's name).
Or you might lose your pants.

Troddle off to Ithaca.
Troddle off to Poughkeepsie.
Watch out (kid's name).
Or you'll turn into a gypsy.

Not too long ago I told a colleague about this sort of childlike improv. Now she informs me that she can't stop doing it and is getting her family to do likewise.

On a listserv I participate in, we've been discussing the Newsweek piece on the decline in creativity. Somebody on the list asked how we are doing about providing a good environment for creativity in our own workplace. I mentioned this to some of the folks I work with and got one response that people who need a creative outlet will find it outside of work if they don't have the opportunities at work.

Looking for a place to start? Try troddle.

Troddle off to Venice.
Troddle off to Rome.
This guy has been at work too long.
So now it's time to go home.

Lessons for Higher Ed from the NBA

When I was a grad student taking the middle of the three core macroeconomics courses, in early 1977, we got exposed to a debate that I didn't really understand at the time about economic policy - rules or discretion. This was specifically for "Monetary Policy" but thinking back I wonder if "Fiscal Policy" also was part of the equation for those advocating rules - mainly the so called Monetarists. Discretion was a Keynesian notion. The argument for rules was that it would help in the forming of stable long run expectations which, in turn, would drive the demand for money and affect other economic behavior. Discretion adds noise to the system, which would make things worse long term. This was the start of the Carter years and stagflation vexed many economists at the time. Carter mostly inherited the problem, a long run consequence of not taxing enough to finance the Viet Nam War and the ensuing Wage and Price Controls that were implemented under Nixon, which put substantial inflationary expectations into the system. The OPEC price hikes then served as a trigger to make things unravel.

At the time I was for discretion. The economy was under performing and we learned that stimulus was the way to move toward full employment. I still believe in that to a certain extent and mostly agree with Paul Krugman that we need another stimulus package. This country needs to do a lot more in the way of infrastructure spending, the renovation or replacement of bridges and the improvement of our water systems kind of infrastructure, even if investing in that is politically unpopular. And there is a need to boost aggregate demand near term. But I disagree with Krugman in his total fear of deflation. We need some targeted deflation in my view. The two most obvious areas are in Health Care and Higher Ed.

Before getting to that, take a quick look at this income distribution table. It is based on U.S. 2005 data, so before the financial crisis started. Roughly 3/4 of the over 25 population were earning under $50,000, with a majority of those earning less than $25,000. Some significant fraction of those must be retirees, but it is actually startling to consider the size of the low end part of the income distribution. The table shows that less than 7% of the over 25 population are making more than $100,000. (Those who work in the "cash economy" may have significant income that is unreported, though obviously that has fallen off considerably since the economy has gone into its tailspin. And even without that let's not fool ourselves into thinking people who reportedly make under $50,000 are well off. Mainly, they're not.)

Now let's briefly look at physician salaries. This post has a nice table that gives median salary by specialty. Do note that some component of the salary is a compensating differential for malpractice insurance premiums, which can be substantial and which correlate with salary. So it would be more informative to net out these premiums and have a table of that. Then one would like to see a time series of such a table. I don't have that here, but I think it not unreasonable to conjecture that there is hyperinflation - in physician salaries as a whole but particularly in those specialties that are at the high end in physician compensation. I bring this up simply to raise what I think is an obvious point. In the rather long and heated debate about Health Care Reform, there was comparatively little written that I am aware of of how much much physicians are compensated. There was much more on the form of compensation and that fee for service provides perverse incentives. Those perverse incentives don't, however, explain hyperinflation in salary. Something else explains that - persistent scarcity.

Now let's turn to Higher Ed, particularly research institutions. Here's a table of average faculty salaries by institution and by rank. It is important to note that faculty salaries in this table are given as 9-month salaries. The vast majority of these faculty earn an additional two ninths in summer salary, paid by a research grant or for additional teaching or other service rendered in the summer. A disciplinary division of these salaries would be even more informative. Humanities faculty are surely paid substantially below average, while Business faculty are paid well above. Stars in a discipline might command a substantial premium, earning double the average, perhaps even more.

The market for the stars has historically been a big driver in the Higher Ed hyperinflation. A star who is at institution X gets heavily recruited by institution Y. The star gets a big bump, whether movement ultimately occurs or not. The bump is mainly entirely orthogonal to the star's productivity. It is a recognition thing. The star will have pretty much the same productivity at either institution. Then, under the old rising tide lifts all boats theory that was in operation before the recent financial crisis, other faculty salary would also go up so they would not be envious of having the star present. If the costs could be passed on, either to donors who endowed chairs or to students in the form of higher tuition, why not? There has been historically little to no counter pressure to apply the brakes in the face of this salary escalation.

Now with revenue drying up the question has emerged, though still not yet front and center, what reasonable brakes can be applied. This piece, which appeared yesterday in our local paper, makes clear that leaders on my Campus are between a rock and a hard place. In spite of the economic downturn, the market for star faculty remains unabated. The Campus either runs the risk of losing its better people or runs the risk of raising expenditure at a time when it should be cutting spending. We've already had furlough days. Ask the rest of the the faculty and staff to take further cuts so the stars can get what the market will bear is a a very bitter pill to swallow.

This is a problem that can't be addressed on a campus by campus basis. It needs a systemic solution for Higher Ed as a whole. We are not the first sector of the economy to witness an out of control competition for the stars of the profession that had the potential to fully undo the profitability of the sector. The problem is a collective Prisoner's Dilemma played at the Department Head, Dean, Provost, Chancellor, and President level. We'll be better off if peers didn't compete for the stars, to hold salaries down. But these campus leaders can't afford not to. Just because the economy has gone into the tank, it doesn't mean this problem will go away on its own accord.

The world of professional sports has found an imperfect but workable solution to the problem - a salary cap. The salary cap doesn't completely rule out the competition, as all the to do about LeBron James surely demonstrates. But the cap does act as a real and credible brake on overall spending. So we witness stars voluntarily taking less so the team can better operate within the cap. And as a result of the cap the entire system is more transparent.

Applying a salary cap system would be much harder to do at the research universities. There is no one cartel like the NBA to administrate and enforce a cap system. There are many more personnel who would have to be covered by a cap and even if there were firm caps at the Campus level how those would get pushed down to have effective caps at the College and at the Department level would still be a significant thing to work through. But, cycling back to my original macroeconomics theme, rules could be designed that would do precisely that and we in Higher Ed could learn to play by those rules.

Of course the devil is in the details. Yet there is a lot of mileage to be had simply by recognizing that we need a solution that is systemic. Responses by individual institutions, no matter how well intended, can't solve the problem. We aren't there yet with that recognition. I hope we get there quickly.

In the meantime, however, there will be a look for other solutions. At my university the State of Illinois pays the lion's share of the benefits for employees - mainly health care, also retirement (though the state has not been making its contribution for the last several years). As the state pulls the plug on funding the university (and all other public higher education in the state) those benefit costs will be passed on to employees. That seems inevitable and appears to be a substantial savings, in reality a wage reduction to the faculty and staff. But the stars will have that cut offset and perhaps even see other increases, for the reasons I've already articulated. This will offset the savings and leave budgets out of whack.

There may then be a further adjustment, to select areas of excellence where this luring of the stars remains but then either to entirely get out of other areas of specialization or to stay in them but have a more cursory presence. This sort of response is predictable. But it is not stable, especially if there isn't coordination on this point across all of Higher Ed. One might envision regional cartels forming to counteract this. My university is part of the CIC, which could become a virtual mega university. Each member institution can maintain excellence by being part of the consortium and cut down substantially on the need to be great across the board. But I think that mainly a pipe dream. The member campuses, even if in fiscal straits, are strong while the CIC is weak. And further, even if the CIC were successful there are still other big publics (think about the big athletic conferences), the Ivy League, MIT, Stanford, etc. all who very likely will still be playing the game of competing for star faculty. So it won't truly solve the problem.

We really should be talking about a salary cap for Higher Ed as a whole. I wonder when that idea will see the light of day.

Sad

Bob Sheppard, longtime Yankee Stadium announcer, dies at 99 - ESPN New York via kwout

Running Economic Experiments Online for Teaching Principles and Intermediate

When I was in graduate school, probably during my second year though maybe it was toward the end of the first year, we spent an afternoon of fun doing tw0-sided auction experiments to do a live simulation addressing the question whether a market comes to equilibrium. I'm not sure the experience had a profound effect on me. Occasionally when I taught intermediate micro I would take part of a class session to do such experiments in an abbreviated format. Students want to know that a market will come to equilibrium. The session was aimed at providing the students with the requisite intuition.

Now many years later I've been thinking about teaching intermediate online and what might be done to engage the students. In the back of my head when I pose a question of this sort to myself, I have a technology in mind to facilitate the teaching. In this case It was the forms tool in Google Spreadsheets. Students could submit their information via a form and the spreadsheet could tabulate all submissions so the class as a whole could monitor that. (Also, the url can otherwise be kept private so the rest of the world wouldn't monitor the activity.)

For about a month or so I've been keeping this thought on the back burner, envisioning that the experiment would be done in rounds delivered asynchronously, perhaps one round a day. But I wasn't satisfied with that for a variety of reasons - students might find it insufficiently compelling so wouldn't be drawn in, the rules were that the first one who accepted an offer had the rights to it but that rule was inconsistent with asynchronous participation, and it just seemed clunky. Because I wasn't satisfied I didn't act on it.

Then a few days ago I asked - what if the auction were held in a live synchronous session, either face to face or online, but where all the the student participants submitted their offers via the forms. All of a sudden this started to make sense to me. I envisioned that if I could get this to work in the simple two-sided auction that I had participated in while a grad student then I could modify the economic environment and do many other experiments as a way for the students to "experience" the economics they'd be studying. So I started to play with this by building forms and seeing what would happen as I submitted various responses with the forms.

Envisioning this as totally online, I thought we'd do a live chat session during the auction. The spreadsheet would record the offers, but there were issues. What if a students made a mistake in submission and sent something in that was nonsense. That would have to be voided. Could it be done automatically or was there a need to do it manually. Likewise a student might want to withdraw an offer, seeing it disadvantageous relative to other recent transactions. How would that work? And when an offer was accepted that would have to be recorded and then then offer would need to be taken off the list of currently active offers. Could all this be automated too? I reasoned that if I'm the "auctioneer" then either I'd make mistakes with manual recording or it would be a time consuming process. So I wanted to automate as much of this as I possibly could.

Alas, I made a discovery yesterday with the Google forms. It is simply not possible to keep running totals of results. Each new submission adds a row of data to the spreadsheet. The newest data comes into row 2. All previous data gets pushed down a row. If you have formulas in other columns than where the data is being collected, those formulas get pushed down two. Not being able to keep running totals, it is not possible to automate the entire process. But I've come up with a reasonably Spartan schema for the manual recording.

You can check out the form and the spreadsheet. Make a submission or two or three to see how it looks. The key to the manual recording is that if a letter (A for Accept, W for Withdraw, V for Void) in front of a price, then from the spreadsheets perspective the entry has been converted to alpha format and so gets ignored in the calculation of maximum bid or minimum ask. The rest of the recording should be just a copy and paste. Still, I don't yet know if this really can work work for the students. They will need three tabs open - one for the spreadsheet, one for the form, and one for the chat. Perhaps each can be put into a frame within one page, and in the not too distant future I'll experiment with that a bit. But there will be a lot of info on the screen then and I'm not sure that will work. So that needs to be tested.

Also, I need to test how long it takes to run one round of such an experiment and how many students can be accommodated during it. Ideally you can do 4 or 5 rounds in an hour with a few minutes left to spare for reflection at the end. But that needs to be tested too.

I should also add that earlier I tested using mail merge in Outlook as a way of giving the students in advance the data they need to have to start the auction going. (Buyers know the value of buying one unit of the good. Likewise sellers know the cost of providing one unit of the good. Both the values and the costs are idiosyncratic. The students don't know their distribution in advance. At the end, the distribution can be shown and if the transaction price settles down it can be compared to the theoretical equilibrium price.) From a sending point of view, that works like a charm. There is quite a different issue whether the students read their email frequently enough to use this as a good way of distributing the information for participating in the auction. That too needs to be tested.

Assuming all those tests get passed, perhaps following substantial modification of how to teach the course, it then becomes incumbent to integrate these experiments with the rest of the class and to figure out how many of these experiments would be fruitful to use over the duration of the semester. In my head I've been able to come up with quite a few different scenarios to e run as experiments. Whether once the novelty has worn off students continue to enjoy participating in them and taking them seriously, I don't know. But I would like to try this.

Mumbling

The coffee in the army,
They say it's mighty fine.
It's good for cuts and bruises,
And tastes like turpentine...

* * * * *

Never Volunteer.

* * * * *

Facing external stress,
We are prone to repress.

* * * * *

In the seminar on the memoir that I took at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, we spent a good deal of time discussing and trying out techniques for unleashing dormant memories. These activities sensitized me to the need. In my book I want to argue for the proposition that intuition is largely a learned thing and that developing intuition is something others (friends and teachers) can foster. But based on my reading since I've returned, primarily Maslow and now Marion Milner, see my previous few posts plus the comments there, perhaps I've been underestimating the impediments. This got me to think about impediments in the development of my own intuition.

I started high school in 1968. Though I was a very good student, I had several serious sources of frustration. I was a fresser, completely undisciplined about my eating, and prone to use food as a safety valve. I had a poor body image, deeply ingrained from always having been the largest kid. And I didn't know how to be myself in front of girls, so didn't have a girlfriend. My parents were useless for helping to work my way through all of this. Indeed my mom, who pushed quite hard on things including making me choose to attend a high school that was inappropriate for me and which I transferred from after only a few weeks there, ended up seeming a source of authority that I had to contest or end up suffocating myself.

But I didn't know how to do this and lacked both the wherewithal to learn healthy coping strategies and the confidence that I could arrive at a good place on my own. Yet I couldn't shut down completely. That's not my nature. I had ideas, lots of ideas. They required some form of expression. So I started to mumble.

If the right people aren't there to listen, you end up talking to yourself. I still don't completely understand why that expression needed to be aloud. Somehow it is tied up with the urge to raise your hand in the classroom when you have the answer to the question and you know nobody else does. There's a showing off in that. I wanted to show off to my mom even while I didn't want her to hear my answer, resistance and non-resistance rolled into one. There is no courage in mumbling. But it demonstrates an unmistakeable need for self-expression. The doing something in the moment can trump a longer term sense of preservation.

I love Maslow but I think some of what he says requires refinement. He says that at every juncture we have to make a choice between safety or growth. That much is correct but then I believe he errs. I had a taste for growth. Much of my childhood was quite wonderful in that regard. When the need for safety became paramount after having opted for growth for quite a while, I didn't all of a sudden go cold turkey on growth. I looked for a compromise instead. With foresight, the compromise almost certainly can't work. Mumbling creates tension. Other people want to know what you are saying. The tension contributes to what can become a downward spiral.

The issues didn't instantaneously resolve when I went to college, but I believe the mumbling stopped when I moved away from home.

Could a friendly teacher or counselor have helped me to give up mumbling while I was still in high school? A variety of people tried to make me tougher, not to address the mumbling specifically, more as a necessary survival skill in general. I don't think it was the right answer. I needed something that was very gentle yet also strongly affirmative.

I will need to think a lot more about whether that can be produced with some abundance and, if so, how.

Gems from Maslow

These are all from the 2nd edition of Toward a Psychology of Being in hard cover.

The primal choice, the fork in the road, then, is between others' and one's own self. If the only way to maintain the self is to lose others, then the ordinary child will give up the self. This is true for the reason already mentioned, that safety is a most basic and prepotent need for children, more primarily necessary by far than independence and self-actualization. If adults force the choice upon him, of choosing between the loss of one (lower and stronger) vital necessity or another (higher and weaker) vital necessity, the child must choose safety at the cost of giving up self and growth.
p. 52

5. The person in peak-experiences feels himself, more than at other times, to be the responsible, active, creating center of his activities and his perceptions. He feels more like a prime mover, more self-determined (rather than caused, determined, helpless, dependent, passive, weak, bossed). He feels himself to be his own boss, fully responsible, fully volitional, with more "free will" than at other times, mast of his fate, an agent.

He also looks that way to an observer, for instance, becoming more decisive, looking more strong, more single-minded, more apt to scorn or overcome opposition, more grimly sure of himself, more apt to give the impression that it would be useless to try to stop him. It is as if now he had no doubts about his worth or about his ability to do whatever he decided to do. To the observer he looks more trustworthy, more reliable, more dependable, a better bet. It is often possible to spot this great moment - of becoming responsible - in therapy, in growing up, in education, in marriage, etc.
pp. 106-107

They also show a surprising amount of detachment from people in general and a strong liking for privacy, even a need for it (97).

"For these and other reasons they may be called autonomous, i.e., ruled by laws of their own character rather than by the rules of society (insofar as these are different). Is is in this sense that they are not only or merely Americans but also members at large of the human species. I then hypothesized that they should be more like each other across cultural lines than they are like the less-developed members of their own culture."*

* Examples of this kind of transcendence are Walt Whitman or William James who were profoundly American, most purely American, and yet were also very purely supra-cultural, internationalist members of the whole human species. They were universal men not in spite of their being Americans, but just because they were such Americans. So too, Martin Buber, a Jewish philosopher, was also more than Jewish. Hokusai, profoundly Japanese, was a universal artist. Probably any universal art cannot be rootless. Merely regional art is different from the regionally rooted art that becomes broadly general - human. We may remind ourselves here also of Piaget's children who could not conceive of being simultaneously Genevan and Swiss until they matured to the point of being able to include one within the other and both simultaneously in a hierarchically-integrated way. This and other examples are given by Allport (3).
pp. 181-182

In other words: (a) self-actualization is repressed by concerns for safety, which take precedence, (b) all of us have peak-experiences in which we are most completely human and true to our natures, and (c) the drive of the self-actualizers is essentially inward but it is also universal.

My career fork in the road framed as what to do in entering college

I've been thinking a lot about developing a personal philosophy and that perhaps the most important thing we can do in Higher Ed is assisting students in developing their own personal philosophies. A lot of this thinking is a selfish sort of reflection. I'm faced with options and opportunities because of my retirement, and I'm finding that instead of simply plopping into what's next I feel a need to give some definition underneath to what it is that I want and what it is that I value. So I suppose it is not surprising that I've been reading older texts to look for wisdom on this - Thoreau, Hoffer, and Maslow. And I've been thinking about the choice of what to do in college, partly because it seems so similar, partly because I struggled with that and ultimately transferred from MIT to Cornell at a time when I had a lot of trouble coping, and because my son is entering college now and while I know I can't push any of this on him I'd hope he would have some of the same sort of questioning. So, without further ado, here's my set of answers to what I'd do if I were going to college for the first time.

If I were attending college this fall for the first time, I would…

…find an intellectual hero to serve as my guide. The hero need not be in the field of study I will pursue. Maybe it’s better if he isn’t. But he must have a personal philosophy I can embrace. My entire college experience will be richer if I can frame it within a coherent personal philosophy. A current hero of mine is Abraham Maslow. I believe his humanistic psychology, particularly his emphasis on self-actualization via peak experiences, provides a very good norm that would serve most students quite well. Maslow’s book, Toward a Psychology of Being, is a great read. I’d hope most students find time for it, though it may be a bit much for an entering freshman. This transcript of an interview with the great man, Remembering Maslow, is more accessible and can be read in one sitting.

…discover the treasure trove that is the University Library, particularly its electronic resources. As wonderful as the Internet is as a ready source of information there will be much to read in college that I won’t be able to find on the open Internet, including most of the work of my professors. On occasion I will end up using the University Library without even being aware of it, simply by having been logged into the campus network. But that will not always be the case, so I must learn to use the electronic catalog to find full text articles that I want to read. The Remembering Maslow piece is freely available to students on my campus via the license from the publisher that the Library has procured.

…regularly place myself outside my comfort zone intellectually and socially too, where of necessity I’d have to take on my shyness, but not to the extreme of making me neurotic. This means persisting at reading things I’m apt to find more than a bit difficult. It means attending lectures and performances in areas with which I’m only vaguely familiar. It also means having one-on-one and small group conversations with faculty and with students of other cultures, even when there is some initial discomfort in doing that. Struggling in this manner provides a good source of empathy for the struggles of others. Over time, it likely will breed confidence though progress is apt to be gradual. Consequently, the admonition not to overdo is imperative because slow and steady does win the race.

…keep from over programming myself to assure enough free time for writing, reflection, and serendipitous conversation. I need some down time to chew on my experiences and what I’m learning. On days where every hour is scheduled with an activity, there is no opportunity for such introspection. Sometimes that will happen, but on an ongoing basis I want to carve out time for inward looking learning so I can keep in touch with myself and have a sense of what progress I’m making as well as to reckon with the challenges I’m facing. I also want to engage with others who are similarly situated so I can learn from their experiences and their thinking. Students are apt to become extremely competitive with one another. The over programming is one consequence of this competition. Alternatively, students can bounce the other way, becoming cynical and nihilistic. The habit for reflection provides a healthy alternative to both of these extremes.

…refrain from looking at the finish line to maintain as broad a perspective as possible and to recognize that I’m getting an education for a lifetime, not just to prepare for the first job that comes along. I know I will narrow later, as I get deeper into the major, where attending graduate school or getting a job becomes more proximate. I need not narrow straight away even if there is a tendency for my classmates to do otherwise. And even when I do narrow I want to maintain some balance by pursuing other interests in my leisure time. Ironically, students will find that having a diversity of interests unrelated to the field of study will help them greatly with their critical thinking and communication skills.

It is perhaps strange to frame my upcoming choices with an attending college metaphor, but it is helpful to me. One particular need I have is to be open in my social environment and not feel a need to be guarded. In college the social environment is where I learned, in some sense more than what I learned in my classes. Particularly since I've gotten involved with learning technology I've tried to emphasize an approach that stems from social environment at 509 Wyckoff Road in Ithaca. I want to do new things as I move forward. But I want to retain the feel that I had my junior and senior years in college.

Dis Interested and Dat Interested

Some folks seem in a huff about the DIY U book, both the author Anya Kamenetz and Stephen Downes, whom Kamenetz takes to task because he is a not a journalist. Kamenetz goes on to call herself an intellectual. I think she's right about Downes, but for the wrong reason, and she's wrong about being an intellectual, which makes a lot of the rest of the discussion problematic.

The canonical situation where investigative journalism clearly is necessary begins with power which is entrusted to provide a public good. Then, either through its deliberated machinations or en passant through the normal business process, power becomes aware of some damaging information. Power prefers to conceal this information to reap the benefits of the office. However, the public has a right to know, after which power must suffer the consequences. Investigative journalism is there to satisfy this public need. It doesn't always work well - we were suckered for way too long on WMD - but everyone should be able to understand the function. Insiders to power putting out information are just not credible. Think of BP's response to the disaster in the Gulf.

The problem with using this argument is not that it is wrong, but it is irrelevant. Downes is not a mouthpiece for educational power. And online learning is so distributed that looking for a concentrated power with insider information is simply misplaced.

I'm not saying there shouldn't be investigative journalism about Higher Ed. There is a basis for that in the most recent post in the Tomorrow's Professor series. The author argues that, at least within Engineering, research and teaching compete with one another rather than complement each other as is typically portrayed in those promotional videos delivered during the halftime of basketball and football games. This in itself isn't a story. One needs to push it further and argue with investigative evidence that tuition dollars are reallocated to research in a way that does not complement student learning and that this is an act of commission by high level administrators. Then one has to produce the goods to show this claim is true and not a bunch of malarkey.

It's interesting - this sort of investigative journalism doesn't seem to be happening at all, maybe because it is so hard to make the case. (My campus and university was the object of investigative journalism, but that was about an admissions scandal, which to this observer was a small potatoes issue.)

There is a different sort of journalism. I'd call it cultural anthropology for the masses. Malcolm Gladwell typifies this sort of reporting. There is no issue of concealment of information. Rather, there is some phenomenon that readers are unaware about or an explanation for the phenomenon that is unknown. This sort of journalism popularizes one or both of these. I take it that DIY U is in this category, though I've not read the book.

There is a question with this second sort of journalism whether insiders can do it too? (I'm thinking particularly of the Michael Wesch Video A Vision of Students Today. That video went viral so on the popularizing front it did a good job.) Before getting to that let me point out that there is a potential problem the other way - the so called journalist doesn't have a clue in writing the piece. When I held my Assistant CIO position and the Student Newspaper would write a piece about the Campus Learning Management System, that was always a concern. All the senior management in the IT organization got coaching from our public affairs office on how to interact with the press, just for this reason. The real problem is that you are typically talking about a complex issue that people want to investigate in a fairly short time period. So the piece ends up being superficial or missing some salient points. Indeed, that there is only one piece rather than a lengthy series is evidence that the goal is producing a published story, not muckraking. The problem isn't unique to student newspapers. It happens with the commercial press too.

This is actually an argument for insiders writing. They know what they are talking about and they are persistent. So what's the problem? Insiders may lack perspective. They also may lack objectivity. I believe the same can be said for Fox News and MSNBC. Some people might call what those stations do journalism (even if they color it yellow). I don't. I also have this rather old fashioned idea that news should be separated from editorial and only the former entails journalism. Downes makes no effort to sort his information in this way. I'm not saying he should. I'm just saying he doesn't. So I wouldn't call what he does journalism. Of course, words do have have a tendency to change their meaning over time.

There's one more point to be made. Downes writes a fair amount about himself. That is no sin. I do the same. When talking about learning everyone is a learner so not talking about their own learning would be really odd. But this has to do a number on the objectivity/subjectivity thing. The choice seems to be either to write objectively but then miss the first hand perspective entirely or give up on objectivity.

Kamenetz gives us none of this. If she simply referred to herself as a reporter, that wouldn't bother me. But she says she's an intellectual too. That irks - too self-possessed for my taste. I will not read her book.

A New Path For Me

I've been letting folks know that I'll be retiring from my current position at the end of July. Thirty days hath September and thirty years have I at the U of I. The immediate reasons for retiring are the budget problems, the incentives in the separation program, and the unfortunate reality where it seems I can be most useful now to the University by not drawing a paycheck.

I'll get to the longer term reasons in a bit. First I want to note that I view this more as a change in job status than as a move to the life of leisure. I hope to teach, consult, and write - to do fruitful things and I hope continue to have a positive influence, on learning technology and elsewhere. I also hope to do a mixture of volunteer work and for pay activity. We'll see how that sorts itself out. I'm open to possibilities as they might play out, though I'll be staying in Champaign for the foreseeable future, so alternatives that require moving are not in the cards.

I wrote about the longer term reasons in this post, which has a brief review of Crazy Heart and ties themes from that movie to the more general notion that Baby Boomers are contemplating their own mortality. By coinky dink, last night I turned on the TV around 8PM and The Visitor was just starting. It's a surprisingly good film that is partially about the same theme, using that to get to the a completely different idea, that with warmth and understanding we can make deep connections across race and religion, even if the way the the world works is completely screwed up in this regard. The U.S. immigration system is depicted in this movie in a bureaucratic, uncompromising way. It is entirely blind to whether the individual is a decent person or not.

The film seemed like a personal message to me, not the least because the main character was an academic economist, who found lack of meaning in his university work. He wasn't looking for this particular issue, just wanting to find a spark of life in an otherwise going-through-the motions existence. I don't see immigration as my issue, but perhaps somehow I can work to address some of the inequities we find in education. That would be a good theme for me.

White Space

With the World Cup monopolizing attention, one might think my title is a nod to the rest of the news, perhaps the Elena Kagan hearings and the Waspish opening up of the Ivy League schools 50 years earlier, that presaged this outcome with no Protestants on the Supreme Court. Or the irony in that we seem to be deeply into counting the religion of each Justice as we conclude that it doesn't matter for deciding the cases presented to the Court.


Actually, the title refers to something I learned last week at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival. (If you squint hard at the cap in the photo you can see the insignia there.) Among my lessons were that writing teachers like to draw a lot as a way to illustrate the dynamic in the construction of the writing and in the interplay between the writer and the reader. Another lesson was to take your printed-on-hard-copy-essay, arrange the pages on the floor, then stand on a chair so that none of the text is readable, but so that the pattern the text makes on the page emerges. One extreme is for the text to be very dense on the page. The other extremes is for - you guessed it - there to be a lot of white space.













The absence of text communicates.
















The idea is that while the writer is a guide, the reader has to do her fair share of the work. Good writing recognizes this role for the reader. The canonical example is the shower scene in Psycho. It is all the more frightening because Hitchcock left the really gory stuff to our own imaginations.












The question arises whether this requires a paper version of the essay or if it makes sense in a blog too. Would people read longer work online if there were suitable spacing to allow for the reader to give her contribution? And then, what stuff should the writer explicitly include and what should be left out, for the reader to fill in?
















I suspect this particular post will look awkward. But might others explore the idea to find a way it works well online? Once the reader is expected to scroll to read the piece there seems little cost in putting in the white space. What of the gain?

Everyone should become a personal librarian

Going through some old family photos, I found a folder of my childhood "accomplishments" and have scanned a couple of those. Below is a "report card" from summer day camp. I was 5 years old. The line of review that says I have the potential to become a "real camper" will live in Arvan family lore. Scanning means the next generation can take a look too if they so desire. I've not done much scanning before. Now I've got some desire to learn to do this reasonably well, whatever that means

Pumas, Bulldozers, and Trashy Entertainment

Apparently, male dominance has come to an end, and none too soon. It's been such a burden keeping up the pretense. I'm glad females are now taking their rightful place on the throne, though there seems to be some disagreement as to whether the new rule will be a partnership between the sexes or if the Y chromosome will abdicate, as if it hasn't done so already. Don't be fooled by the argument that it is actually all about class and race. Pushing that contention may get you brownie points with the lefties at the universities. But really, it's all about sex. It's always been about sex. You can blame just about everything on hormonal differences.

Over the years, researchers have sometimes exaggerated these differences and described the particular talents of women in crude gender stereotypes: women as more empathetic, as better consensus-seekers and better lateral thinkers; women as bringing a superior moral sensibility to bear on a cutthroat business world. In the '90s, this field of feminist business theory seemed to be forcing the point. But after the latest financial crisis, these ideas have more resonance. Researchers have started looking into the relationship between testosterone and excessive risk, and wondering if groups of men, in some basic hormonal way, spur each other to make reckless decisions. The picture emerging is a mirror image of the traditional gender map: men and markets on the side of the irrational and overemotional, and women on the side of the cool and levelheaded.

Yes, we fifty somethings are terribly emotional, even more so after having gone from alpha to omega. Of course, we've taken too much risk. We wanted to hit the big payday before we met the grim reaper – what a foolish concept. Now we're all sniveling whiners.

What is to become of us? No cougar will take us as her boy-toy. Will she simply plow us under, instead? Perish the thought. Maybe we can supply her with some other entertainment. Some gay repartee might do the trick. William Powell in The Thin Man to her Myrna Loy? Everyone loves a tippler. Or possibly the worldly philosophy of Groucho Marx, just to show it really was Margaret Dumont who pulled the strings? Or for pure silliness, what about Tommy Smothers?

Alas, we're not that funny. Looks like it's going to be mud wrestling.

Congruence of Incongruities

Of the Yiddishe Kop I am genetically disposed,
Though now we're told it's only an old wives tale,
Which makes it all the more likely I have one.

Saturday evening we rented Crazy Heart on Pay Per View. The younger son bailed on it after only a few minutes. The older one gave up a little while later. My wife fell asleep in the middle though she did wake up to see the end. Naturally, I was drawn in by it. I thought it was a great picture and surely will watch it again later this week. A fading country music star looks to find his own humanity on the way to hitting rock bottom. He is redeemed by his songwriting talent and the realization that his drinking is the root of his own evil, a narcissism that has made him quite sick and disgusted with himself.

Yesterday (Sunday) the New York Times had an odd piece on the homepage. Mickey Kaus, the blogger nee political columnist, is running for Senate in the California Democratic Primary. The seat is currently held by Barbara Boxer. Kaus' chance of winning the primary is little to none. His is a protest candidacy to raise the issues he deems important, which seemingly belong outside the Democratic Party. On immigration and unions he appears to be a Republican and those are his big issues.

Nowadays, we learn about ourselves listening to NPR, this review of Iron Man 2 a revelation. We Baby Boomers are getting older and contemplating our own mortality. The Media has figured this out and has decided there is profit in feeding us pieces that reflect ourselves and where we are in the life cycle. For the most part it is not fear of death that captures the Baby Boomer's attention. We're not yet old enough for that. Rather it is our relevance and whether what we do matters. Apparently, we feel we should matter more than we actually do, our talent and intelligence seemingly an entitlement that our work will be of consequence, yet only to find that mattering is outside our control. All that is within our grasp is our own efforts.

In the opening scene of Crazy Heart our protagonist is seen pouring a jar of liquid that might very well be urine onto the parking lot outside the bowling alley where he is to perform later that evening. The scene happens fairly quickly and might go entirely unnoticed but for a variety of later scenes in the movie where he is at least half lying down on a bed, perhaps with his guitar or a drink on his belly, and his belt is undone. Evidently, he is having bladder problems, an entirely unspoken theme of the film.

Life for the aging Boomer is full of indignities, some of the biological kind. We need to relieve this pain, either provide a distraction or find something that gives pleasure. Drink can do both, in moderation. Yet the decline feels like a full frontal assault. A moderate response is insufficient to counteract it. So we overindulge, creating a negative spiral. Once the fall is in full motion it can't stop till bottom is hit. The fall doesn't damage the talent. But it kills everything else that matters.

We're told that Kaus' blog had 40,000 readers. Apparently that wasn't enough for him. He needed to raise his visibility, in his own eyes. Mattering is a very odd concept. Mattering according to whom? What will happen to Kaus after the primary? Does he go back to being a blogger?

Why is self-expression not enough? Why do we need adoration too? Art can be found in the decline in man, much less so in his salvation.

A giant has passed

Stan had a strong influence on many of us, including me. I wrote about my relationship with Stan in the middle of this book chapter entitled, Homage to Jerry Uhl.

Stanley Smith | News-Gazette.com via kwout

Can Technology Let Us Return To The Childhood Joy Of Reading?

For learning to write criticism, Anthony Lewis makes for a very good role model, with his most recent piece in the New York review A Supreme Difference an excellent example. In that essay Lewis reviews two books, one a biography of current Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, the other a portrayal of outgoing Justice John Paul Stevens. Lewis, a liberal icon when he was a columnist for the New York Times, would seem to have a strong prior disposition against Scalia, who is noted as a strict conservative. How can Lewis render a fair verdict on Scalia, when their views on issues across the board are so distinct and everyone who reads this piece knows that to be the case? Lewis finds a way.

Lewis criticizes Scalia but also praises him for his prescience.

But Scalia remains the most interesting of the conservatives, the most provocative. He does not hesitate to be sarcastic, even contemptuous, about his colleagues when he disagrees with them. When Justice Sandra Day O'Connor disappointed him in 1989 by not providing the fifth vote to overrule the abortion decision Roe v. Wade, he wrote in dissent that her rationale "cannot be taken seriously."

When, a few months earlier, the Court upheld the post-Watergate statute allowing the appointment of independent counsels to investigate executive branch wrongdoing, Scalia was the lone dissenter. He saw the law as an infringement on the president's power to control the executive and said that it created a new branch of government, "a sort of junior-varsity Congress." His language seemed shrill, but Kenneth Starr's out-of-control impeachment investigation of President Clinton a decade later proved Scalia's doubts prophetic.

Lewis also covers Scalia strong points – his high intelligence, his charm with fellow judges outside the workings of the Court, even those with whom he disagrees vehemently, and his capability to make literary references as allusions to a high minded ethical view of the world while using that as a way to contrast with his own sense of the work of the lawyer, who must deal with the nitty-gritty and frequently ugly side of human interaction. Lewis does this for balance and fullness. The emphasis of Scalia's strong points also helps Lewis pose a puzzle. How can somebody with these strengths nevertheless remain an unrepentant ideologue, an adherent of Original Intent? Lewis implicitly argues that this adherence to ideology served to block an evolution of Scalia's views based on his experiences on the Court.

Having made these points, Lewis then continues with a critique of Scalia but only in contrast, by glowing about Stevens, a Ford appointee. (Scalia was a Reagan appointee.) Stevens is essentially non-ideological and hence inherently it has been much harder to see how Stevens would decide any one particular case. Stevens' core judicial precept seems to be a strong distrust of the concentration of power. His apparent movement to the left as he has gotten older is explained by Lewis as resistance to the power of the Court itself, and the apparent willingness of the right wing Justices (not just Scalia, indeed mainly Chief Justice Roberts) to pursue an aggressive political agenda. In Stevens, Lewis sees a Justice whose point of view has evolved and grown. Thus, while there are only two of the Justices really considered in this piece, Lewis makes the case that such evolution in view is fitting and natural. In praise of Stevens, Lewis raises his sternest criticism of Scalia.

While I'm no fan of original intent and balk at many of the conservative positions – The ruling that blocked the ban on political spending by corporations being the latest example – I wonder if Lewis is too harsh on Scalia. I have now finished all but the Diaries section of Between the Devil and the Dragon and have read the start of the Diaries as well. Hoffer was a philosopher with street smarts and lots of experiential knowledge of the ordinary man. I thought much of the book profound and would make for a great reading for anyone, but especially for college students. Yet at the start of the Diaries section Hoffer explains that he began the Diaries because he felt he was turning into a dullard and he was looking for a way to rekindle his imagination and get his juices flowing. Hoffer's idea was to write each day and thereby capture his fleeting thoughts, enabling the good ones to flourish.

This sense that as we mature we tend to become dull seems quite realistic to me, as I've been feeling the same sort of thing for quite a while. I wonder if most thoughtful minds experience a similar sensation, when caught in midstream between youth and senility. Adherence to ideology may then be a way to ensure intellectual productivity, once trust in personal creativity no longer seems warranted. If this is true then Stevens is indeed to be much admired, but then too he plays the role of exception. Further, as life expectancy continues to rise, it makes one wonder that much more about the wisdom of giving Justices unlimited terms.

What of the rest of us, who had no instinct to find ideology when we were younger and who likely would find an embrace of ideology in middle age too alien to seem a realistic possibility? Is there another alternative? For me, the "cure" seems to be an increased nostalgia and a redirection of efforts to discover again the intellectual joys of childhood, among which reading was paramount. I wonder if many of us would benefit from openly recalling our initial experiences with reading on without a parent present. Here are mine in a nutshell.

The basement was my place for reading. We had an overstuffed chair there that needed to be reupholstered. It was comfortable and sitting in it provided a sense of being securely encased. That sensation seems very important to me. This sort of reading is done away from others, not so much to keep them out but rather to keep me from entering their worlds. Snug as a bug lets the reader enter the world of the book unencumbered. My first experience this way must have been Charlotte's Web followed by Stuart Little. From there, my reading took flight. I probably did a fair amount of reading in the bedroom too. It was the natural activity before going to sleep. But I shared the bedroom with my brother. The little alcove I made for myself in the basement was mine alone.

The notion that reading is not just a solitary activity but that it is also an insulated one makes for an interesting dilemma. How, with the heightened interconnectivity in which we now live, do we create this sense of isolation? Posed this way the Nicholas Carr piece, Is Google Making Us Stupid, can be seen as an argument that we can't or that it is very hard to do, at least for those of us who are not luddites. But I think that Carr's argument is not quite right. There is technology that greatly assists with providing the requisite insulation. That technology is the earphone.

Music, particularly familiar music that now serves to comfort us rather than challenge us, provides a very good cocoon. I'm not talking about the music you occasionally hear blaring out of a car window, with the driver either oblivious to the impression he is making or, on the contrary, wanting to draw attention to himself, the raucous noise his form of self-expression. Instead I mean music of our own choice that while we might go to hear it performed live, in which case it will demand our complete attention, can also provide pleasure though listened to in a much more autonomous manner, where our focus is elsewhere, namely on our reading. It was this idea that motivated me to make a mockumentary (my first) called Kindle-iPod: Duel or Duet, a poor man's version of a Michael Wesch video. Alas, mine never came close to going viral, although it did serve to mark some earlier thinking about the ideas in this post, and in the process of making the video I learned enough that I could have students do something similar as class projects.

There is, however, a conceptual problem with the vision I articulated in that video. The duet quite likely will turn into a trio, with the various instruments not playing nice with each other. Unless you leave the smartphone behind, it has a tendency to take over, making for an unhappy trinity. This is why that on my PC at home, where I have the Kindle reader installed and iTunes too, I can't really achieve an immersive reading experience, once in a while perhaps, but not on a consistent basis. For this reason, the Kindle is most valuable to me when my Blackberry is out of sight. Not being a very disciplined sort of fellow, I let my compulsion to check email override the desire to get lost in the reading. In order to go back to childhood, I have to get past the consequences of that compulsion.

This is where I was till about 3 weeks ago, when I got my iPad. I've been testing it out and trying to get acclimated to it and I believe now I have enough experience with it to give my assessment. However, I'd like to avoid being redundant and just yesterday I read this review of the iPad by Sue Halpern. So here I'll content myself with discussing things she either glosses over or omits entirely.

Much of what I want to read these days are essays, those found mainly in the better magazines, though the Internet being what it is, interesting stuff can show up anywhere. A good bit of this is freely available stuff, and the browser therefore becomes the right tool as a reader. On that score Safari is reasonably good and especially that a quick double tap on the screen enlarges the font so even someone with bifocals like me can enjoy the reading experience. Scrolling is just as good as turning a page, maybe even better, and using your fingers to scroll is fun. It is visually appealing the way the iPad has done this where the text decelerates after the scrolling motion has been completed. I've been reading more magazine pieces online since I've gotten the iPad perhaps for this very reason.

There is the flip slide issue of this from the publisher's perspective. At the moment, though I'm not sure why, magazines that one can subscribe to on the Kindle cannot be exported to Kindle readers on other devices, such as the iPad. It is unclear to me whether that is an Amazon thing, a Publisher thing, or a mixture between the two. Some publishers will develop iPad specific apps. Currently the New York Times has a couple of those, though I would say they are wimpy. I can get the full paper through the browser, so why would I use the app? And with the fixed cost of developing such an app and the business risk that another platform (say by Google) might soon be the preferred vehicle and the development might not transfer at all to the next environment, wouldn't it be more prudent, especially for smaller publishers, to simply publish on the Web?

Once the browser is viewed as a legit candidate as a reader, the iPad starts to look quite different from the Kindle. When not downloading something from the Amazon store, I would turn off the network connectivity for the Kindle to increase the time between recharges. In contrast, the iPad is meant to be always connected. It is a network device, not just a reader. It is very slick in how it handles connectivity but as a consequence there is the very real issue of how long it will go without having to recharge it. This is the main area where the iPad is distinct from a laptop (and I believe what is driving the debate about Flash video). The iPad can go more than twice as long as a laptop between recharging. It's good for a full day of use. This is how it is most like a phone. And it is therefore intriguing whether it can be the sole portable device, with Skype perhaps in lieu of the phone.

Let me return to the question of whether the urge to check email interferes with immersion. It does, but so what? If you have the iPad with you sometimes you'll use it as a reader, other times as a phone. You'll do more reading that way, at least that's been my experience so far. So, I mostly like it a lot.

There can be a frustration with it however, especially if you think of it as a laptop substitute. One does other things with browsers than to use them as readers. The iPad version of Safari doesn't do pop-up windows. It doesn't do Java (which has gotten essentially no press while the Flash conflict has gotten a ton of press). So there are a bunch of apps that are off limits. And it doesn't do tabbed browsing either. The history function is not bad, but I'd still prefer to have several browser windows opened at once. There is also that as a voice input device (there is a decent microphone) it's non-trivial to get the audio elsewhere for re-use. I have to get it to my PC and then process it there before I can upload it for podcast. So as a production device, it is a bit clunky.

Here is one last point on the iPad as a reader. For the last year or two I've found myself at the end of the day preferring to watch TV than to read. My eyes get tired and for the most part there is less mental effort from watching the tube. So far I've watched only one TV show on the iPad. I downloaded the very first episode of 24, which was freely available in iTunes. The viewing experience was quite excellent. I downloaded it direct and it took quite a while to download. Also, I don't yet have the urge to use the iPad as a TV substitute. But that day may be coming soon. Reading may seem to be making a rebound with the big boost in demand for eReaders. But I'd be cautious on that one. Secretly many of us readers are also TV junkies. So if there is a new series that is as good as West Wing, watch out. Childhood was a great place for learning and personal growth. Yet there was also I Dream of Jeannie and Gilligan's Island. Sometimes one can be too nostalgic.

Are screen shots and voice recordings in the typical student's arsenal?

When you have a new toy you play with it. That's what I've been doing with my iPad. Yesterday I put on the Kindle software - very nice except the periodicals don't come through, only the books.

Amazon Kindle for iPad via kwout

Today I've tried Evernote. On the PC, I'd rather use Posterous, which does everything Evernote does and more. But on the iPad, getting the audio recordings out has proved a bit of a trick. Images are doable as email attachments but audio either is impossible or can be done but file size is limited or needs some special sync tool as in the case of iTalk. So Evernote seems like a cool alternative, though the voice quality is not quite as good.

Evernote Will ‘Support The Hell out of’ The iPad [iPad Apps] via kwout

Will students use these sort of apps in a rich way? It doesn't seem that they will do so of their own accord. Last fall when I had students blog it was a struggle just to get them to put in links into their posts. Yet when they did multimedia projects, they were quite expert with image use (at least most were) but in ordinary function they ignored images or only very rarely used them.

I wonder how many students know about Jing or about Audacity.