Steroids, Bleacher Ticket Prices, and Economic Rationality

"I think it has to be spoken very loud and clear on the stance, and baseball needs to stand as they have. I'm very, very satisfied with the testing program they have in place now. For a guy who's tested positive today under what happens now, like Manny Ramirez, it almost takes an idiot to participate in that. For the society, for the up-and-coming players and youth out there, I don't think those guys should be recognized at all."
Ryne Sandberg

When I was a grad student at Northwestern in the late 1970s, I went to Wrigley Field a couple of times for day games (they didn't have lights then). Taking the el, and sitting in the bleachers, it was an inexpensive form of entertainment. (I think bleacher seats cost $2.50 or $3 then and during the week they were in ample supply.) Baseball had free agency but most people didn't have cable TV (I certainly didn't) and player salaries were much more modest than than are today.

Compared to then, current ticket prices and player salaries are both astronomical. And, of course, the superstars make a ton of money. The argument for a player to take steroids to improve performance (or recovery time from injury) couldn't be plainer. The upside of improved performance is vastly higher compensation--- as long as you don't get caught cheating. Let a player do a cost-benefit analysis on the risk reward trade off and it might still come down on the side of taking the steroids.

I wonder if those who are Democrats in their politics are nonetheless Republicans in their baseball fandom. Given the furor of the Mark Sanford affair, and the recognition that the Republicans have been shooting themselves in the foot with their holier than thou approach might not baseball be in a similar boat?

From where I sit, rising income inequality is a substantial factor in why so many big league ballplayers have gone down this route. If player salaries were more modest overall, fewer would risk tempation. As it is, some players literally could not afford to go without.

And if ticket prices were more modest, going to a ballgame would be something a moderate income family could afford.

Should we have students make these?

I'm teaching an honors class in the fall and some of the students are taking it for Composition II credit, meaning they have to do additional writing projects and those projects are supposed to require instructor critique and student revision.

I have a couple of more traditional ideas for this, but I'm wondering if one of these projects shouldn't be to make a movie like the one below. For viewing this properly captions need to be enabled. That should be the default.

The idea from the (student) creator's point of view is first, to use text in a Spartan way to communicate only the very important points and leave other derivative points unsaid. Next, is to use images as a way to illustrate the points and try to connect with the reader/viewer in a way that is meaningful to them. When I made the demo, I found the image selection process a challenge. Particularly for science or engineering students who probably aren't asked to do this sort of thing otherwise, I wonder if the exercise of selecting an appropriate and compelling image to match the idea is a good one, and whether the students will start to think of their job in writing a little differently as a consequence. The third idea, in the music choice, is to have a recurrent theme through the entire piece. The song is something the audience should readily identify with and therefore it should be used to create a context for the story.

One other point where the exercise may prove of value is in noting the length of the movie, two minutes and ten seconds, and compare that with the time it takes to produce it. It took me about one and a half days, all told, and I spread that out over a few days so I could let things simmer for a while. Students need to learn that an effective short message is a lot of work. Further, some of their ideas might have to be discarded in the process, but that is ok because it improves the overall quality.

If I were to do this, I'd also have the students submit the "raw ingredients" that went into making the movie: the audio file, a document with the sources for the images, a text file for the captions with timings, and perhaps the PowerPoint that stores the images and that is used to make the screen capture.

One reason for wanting to ask for all of this is that turning the writing into a production number can be compelling if any technical blocks that are encountered can be readily addressed. The instructor (or some other helper) probably needs to provide help for the students with the technical blocks in which case pretty quick feedback is needed for that.

Another reason is that students will soon be very conscious of the "appearance" of what they make. For example, do the captions match the slides they are supposed to be about? When the appearance can clearly be improved, do the students feel impelled to do that? I don't know whether it would occur to the students immediately once they've asked this, but for me I'd then ask if the writing can be improved as well. Can it be said better? That the text is short means editing is not laborious.

One other compelling bit about this approach is that the captions can be translated into many other languages, so the potential audience for the video is quite large. (It is a separate matter whether the connections that the images and music are supposed to provide cut across cultures.) To choose a different language for the captions, mouse over the upward pointing arrow at the far right of the playbar. Then with CC on, mouse over the leftward pointing arrow and select Translate. The starting language should be English, if that's the language the captions were initially authored in. The resulting language can then be selected.

I'm quite upbeat about this last bit of functionality, perfect for the global world in which we live.

Students probably need to learn a bit about Copyright and Fair Use as preparation for making these type of movies and they need to understand that citing sources is a protection from charges of plagiarism, but that is unrelated to matters of copyright. I wonder how many instructors teach their students about that.

Long lags and contrary forecasts

After reading Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline, I've been taken with the idea of causality with long lags. The question is whether you can see the relationship between cause and effect in prospect. Note that this is hard enough in retrospect and because of the lags many people miss the root cause of things. So, stirred by the recent events in Iran, as so many others have been, I'm going to take it as an affirmation of a prediction made by Stanley Fish last September - George Bush: The Comeback Kid.

I should note that I'm neither a fan of Bush nor of Fish. I voted for Bush neither in 2000 nor in 2004 and I've stopped reading Fish's blog, because most of the columns I found frustrating, too much argument for arguments sake. But this particular prediction resonates with me just now, so I want to give it its due.

The reasons seem to be clear enough. First, if you look at the heroes in Iran, one of them surely is the new social networking technology, notably Facebook and Twitter. When did those come to the fore? Under W., that's when. Second, look at what the war in Iraq did for the mindset in the rest of the region. It showed an alternative to the status quo is possible. The elections in Lebanon are a prime example. The war in Iraq may have done many other bad things, and certainly it was started under false pretenses, but it did plant this notion of an alternative to the status quo. Those are biggies. The rest is just connecting the dots.

If the Moussavi followers do indeed prevail, seemingly against all odds but now apparently a distinct possibility since the protests continue unabated, Bush's redemption will be secure. Amazing.

Quickie talking head/screen movies in YouTube

The demo below was made with Jing Pro. It allows publication directly to YouTube and either because the video is so short or because it is in mpeg-4 format, it seems to appear almost immediately without much processing. The image quality is quite sharp. That is a real plus. And the caption file is linked, so you can see what that looks like. Perhaps in a few places the caption is too long. Nonetheless, I think this is usable and not too bad.

The big tip for making the video is to select a capture region that is proportional to 16x9 and not too much bigger than the region you want to display. Doing this will "fill" the YouTube video box and leave no black border and then what you see shouldn't look too small. (If you know people will go to full screen when they watch the video you can capture a bigger area, but there is no way to know that in advance.) In this case I captured a region that was 720x405. I believe that getting exactly the right aspect ratio contributes to the sharpness of the image.

Because the video itself is so short, I produced a transcript directly without trying to use a transcription program first. You play a few seconds of the video and pause, then type what you heard and back again. I keep the movie in a window smaller than half screen, just displaying the control bar and the time. That allows another window smaller than half screen above the video window for the transcription. So even if you only have one normal sized monitor, this is pretty easy to do.

Once the transcript is done, then you have to go in to insert the timings. I have this awkward habit of pausing in mid sentence but then going ganbusters at the end of one sentence and onto the next. So note that the timings allow fractions of seconds. In what I made I only went down to a half second, but the thing allows much finer gradation if you want to put in that effort. In what I've got, the text is on the screen for about 4 seconds, depending on where I pause and how much text is on the screen.

I'm pretty impressed with what can be done now. If students were making these things, they'd catch onto the technology pretty quick and then could focus their attention on the substance of the message.

Uncompromising about change

Last night I watched the PBS documentary about Neil Young on its American Masters Series. The faces of the old rockers are haunting. I didn't know this look for Steven Stills. The music is wonderful, but also haunting. Young's speaking voice is normal. I'm not sure whether I had heard it before. He explains his singing voice as emerging from a spontaneous experience where he was screaming in words made up at the moment. His band had been instrumental only till then. The singing was a kind of coming out. He had it in him all along. It needed to be unleashed.

Young's song lyrics represent personal reaction to events, sometimes anger and disgust, but not with a political agenda tied to them. The film makes pretty clear that Young was not driven by politics, at least not during the Viet Nam War period. Instead, he was driven by the music.

The recurring theme is in the movies was that Young wanted and needed to be in groups so he could play off the music of others. The synthesis created artistic benefit. But after a fashion, when the album was done and the touring to promote it over, Young wanted to do something else. Rather than recreate what had already been done, inevitably for the "Return Of" to be poorly received because it wouldn't have the novelty to excite, Young would move on to the next venture. It was hard on friendships formed during the making of the music. But it was true to the need for creativity.

Ultimately the friends grew to understand this loyalty to make new music, to fine one's soul in the act of doing something new. And Young didn't abandon the entirely. His departure would be temporary. Ultimately he would return to the group to make new music and to rekindle friendships developed earlier.

Some of these same themes are in the documentary about Bob Dylan, No Direction Home. The artist forces a new direction for the music even when the fans clamor for nostalgia. Apparently Dylan also inspired young about singing, with the distinctive singing voice and the knowledge that, "I'm no opera star."

Young and his contemporaries didn't go to college. By the time they were college age they were on the road, making music. Life on the road itself must encourage a sense of transience, but in this case there was also a different sort of infection. Young crossed paths with many of the great rockers. Each left a little mark, something to take away and integrate in to Young's own style.

Personally, I'm not able to appreciate the distinctive changes in what Young went through, especially within the 1970s, where much of his music is familiar. (Some of the later stuff shown in the film I hadn't heard before.) His falsetto singing voiced remains unchanged as does the rhythmic phrasing of the lyrics. It may be that the backup instrumentals are radically different, but I don't hear it that way. I admit to being without nuance in listening to this. I was never a giant Neil Young fan. It is the character that was more of interest to me in watching the film, what the driver was, where the loyalty lies. The answer to that is clear; the passion was for the new, for taking the next direction.

It is worth thinking about this for Learning Technology, all the more so given by the ripple created earlier in the week from the Chronicle's piece about Jim Groom presenting at CUNY about blogs as an alternative to the LMS. The learning technologist may share with the rocker the desire to push for new directions, to avoid nostalgia for what should come next. And to some extent instructors may be like adoring fans, though I wouldn't push that analogy very far.

Times do change. The mantra now is the learner as the creator. The drive for change should come out of the collective will to create. Where that will lead is hazy for me. Most learners are not nearly so singular in their purpose. Mainly, they want to ride the next wave that presents itself. Therein lies the dilemma. We still need the few who make the new music. Maybe, however, they need to come from outside us.

Dimdim and Skype 4.1 Beta

Yesterday in the late afternoon we tested the most recent versions of Dimdim (free version) and Skype (4.1 beta). Each product is making progress. Dimdim is more of a full Web conferencing product, though it seems to me it gives all the control to the meeting owner and very little to the attendees in the session. Further, it had problems with IE (worked fine with Firefox). Audio quality was good but we were all in the office so had a very good network connection.

Skye has screen sharing in its most recent beta version. It is a little confusing because the menu item for screen sharing shows up only when you have a contact selected, but it functions very well when you do youse it. Image is sharp and it can be set to full screen. Right now the downside is that you can only do screen sharing with one other person. So it is still not a tool for small group work. If they do get it to function in a multi-party call, watch out.

Screen sharing in Skype does not allow the user to pass control to others in the call. In that sense regular Web conferencing is more feature rich. But Skype has a huge market base and the product is designed to do what it does very well, which I believe is more important than having additional features.

I can't predict where this market is going and if "free versions" will prevail. But I do like that there seem to be multiple viable players in this area. That's a definite plus.

Next Chapter of My Book Now Available.

A draft of Chapter 8 on Assessment is now available. It makes what is perhaps an extremely conservative argument. Most assessment should be oral. Assessment should happen within the process of learning. Instructors should have conversations with students.

That's the punchline. Some readers might see the chapter as a shaggy dog story, because it takes a while to get to the punchline. I prefer to think that we learn the validity of a point by seeing the same point made in some other field. So I take some time drawing out parallels from elsewhere.

Galen's Paper Presentation

Instead of using ooVoo for the final presentation, Galen and I did a session in Adobe Connect where he uploaded his PowerPoint and we both did voice over. He lead the discussion and I asked questions.

Here are my take aways from the overall experience. First, technology was not the impediment. It may not have worked perfectly all the time but it was good enough for us to conduct our business. Second, this is my initial experience with MBA students and probably there needed to be more structure to what we did than I had originally envisioned. I did not read the pieces that Galen used for his paper so I only reacted to the general ideas. If we had discussed more about pieces I already knew, I may have been able to push him more in his thinking. As it was, I didn't feel there was sufficient depth or subtlety to our conversations, but I was somewhat at a loss on how to get us there. Third, these courses are only 7 weeks. We could have benefited by going a few more weeks. The paper would have been more mature and well thought through. I know Galen strained a little to get the paper done on time but he could have strained more intellectually, but he had to do the background work first to get to that point.

So if I were to do this again some time in the future, I'd start a little earlier. Otherwise our process was good.

Is Copyright Necessary for Peer Review?

I'm placing this particular piece in the Public Domain. In the process of trying to understand the difference between using Creative Commons Licenses and placing a work in the Public Domain, I discovered that the Creative Commons Web site actually has the same sort of forms that generate embed code for their licenses also available for Public Domain work.

This work is in the Public Domain.

This is a good place to start with the argument. While Creative Commons licenses are now a commonplace on the Web (I've got one at the bottom of this blog) you don't see the above type of label very often. Does that fact represent an author preference? The license I do use for the site (1) asks that people who link to or quote posts that are here give attribution and (2) doesn't allow commercial publishers to include my stuff in their content. The first is really just common courtesy. I've got no way of enforcing it at all. Short of running TurnItIn or other anti-plagiarism software on my own site (I'm not going to do that I'm just mentioning it as illustration) there is no way for me to detect violations let alone to enforce this stipulation. The second is there as a tilting at windmills approach to the notion that I want "control" of my work, though truthfully my notion of control is fuzzy as is why I want it. Over the years I've had exactly one request from a commercial venture to refer to a particular post. Initially I said no, then I relented. I doubt that generated any revenue for the commercial publisher and maybe it got a few more eyeballs for my post.

I suppose there is a third reason, probably not applicable for me but that might justify why others might want to keep control of their work. It may be at some time in the future, a potential publisher emerges and that publisher wants copyright of the work transferred to it. You can't very well transfer copyright if you no longer hold it. I don't believe it is possible to "take back" placing a work in the public domain, in which case doing so would preclude this external publishing alternative that might emerge in the future. I'm belaboring the point to note that the incentive vanishes if the external publisher willingly accepts works in the public domain.

A couple of years ago, inspired by a piece in Harpers by Jonathan Lethem about the intellectual commons and dismayed by the timidity of an ACRL report from that time, I wrote a long blog post, Ly Berry 2.0, with my vision of the issues, in which I argued that Lethem's conception should be expanded to included current scholarly communication.

The third area of focus is Copyright Law itself. Copyright Law doesn’t serve well the communication of  scholarly information. Government publications are in the public domain de jure. Scholarly work, part of the contributions to the Intellectual Commons that Lethem describes, should be in the public domain as well. It is quite clear who would stand to lose by changing the law in this way, especially if the law applied retrospectively. So there are economic and therefore political reasons to sustain the status quo. And given the effort more broadly by MPAA, RIAA and others on copyright to expand the influence of Copyright, one should be under no delusion that it would be easy to make such a change. But by concentrating narrowly on scholarly work and not trying to apply the change in the Law to a more encompassing notion of the intellectual commons – for example, authors of great fiction clearly enhance our culture and intellectual life, but those authors do make their livelihoods based on the sale of their works – one should be able to maintain the high ground in the argument.

More recently, via this post on ACRLog I found this document, a consequence of a Roundtable Discussion from last fall with various luminaries in the scholarly communication business. The document is better than the earlier ACRL report I had critiqued; it correctly identifies the issues plaguing scholarly publication today, but I fear nonetheless that it is too tepid in its recommendations and that a more radical solution is necessary.

Primary Recommendation: Campuses should initiate discussions involving administration and faculty about modifying current practices and/or its intellectual property policies such that the university retains a set of rights sufficient to ensure that broad dissemination of the research and scholarly work produced by its faculty occurs.

There are also a variety of subsidiary recommendations in the document, mostly of the policy type. As I said, this is not sufficient. It is necessary to develop actual low cost alternatives to commercial publishing and to encourage and promote these alternatives so they eventually become the dominant form. It is also necessary to re-direct funds within the university (as I'll explain) to sustain the new approaches. Further, different approaches to long term preservation need to be identified. Below is my attempt to sketch what these approaches might look like.

* * * * *

So now I'm Mr. Rourke. Welcome to Fantasy Island. I will you give you a tour of our new low-cost scholarly publication approach. Our predominant model is via society membership, which is for fee. Scholarly memberships are via individuals, faculty as well as students, by departments, and by entire institutions too. Societies support many journals, the vast majority in electronic format only. Some individual journals have instituted author fees to supplement membership fees, partly to regulate the flow of submissions and partly to cover opearting costs. In addition to online publishing, societies promote face-to-face conferences where they encourage video recording and Webinars, enbabling remote participation in heretofore local workshops, creating archives of these activities, and issuing notifications of recent and upcoming events. Journal publishing is sustained via an editorial board comprised of an editor in chief and various associate editors, as well as a copy editing staff for work that has been accepted for publication. The editorial board members are faculty from member departments who receive some remuneration from the membership fees, enough to buy out some of their teaching time so they can devote their energies to the editing function. The copy editors are professional staff overseen by the editor in chief. In some cases referees are also paid, not as compensation, but to signify the importance of timeliness and quality of the review.

Absent any limitation on pages or the number of articles to appear per year imposed by print costs, the scholarly society as a whole sets policy on the total flow of scholarship to be published per year. Societies have found it advantageous to run several "journals" differentiated as follows - a top-of-the-line general interest journal, a smattering of high level field journals, and a somewhat larger set of tertiary field journals. Societies also embrace the publishing of monographs as eBooks. As with journal articles, the flow of monographs per year is regulated by the society, to reflect the needs of the field. Most disciplines have two or even three societies, reflecting differences in orientation about the subject matter and to avoid dominance by narrow elites within the field.

Each society maintains a Web site with all current publications and scholarly activity as well an archive of past work. Some society Web sites are hosted at particular Academic Institutions. Others stand outside any university environment. In the interest of preservation and redundancy, societies encourage mirror sites. Since all works members of societies produce are within the public domain, an individual, department, or institution can serve as a mirror if they are so willing.

An additional service that societies provide is periodic review of member departments and member institutions. Review happens via site visits by committees of scholars from other institutions selected for the purpose. Review covers both scholarship and instruction. Review serves to certify a well functioning department and to provide recommendations for the department and the institution to follow when the department has issues that require remedy. Review is covered via membership fee. Societies also rank member departments to provide guidance for students, faculty, the institution, and the public.

Universities, as distinct from societies, have responsibility for hosting work in its formative stage as well as finished work that doesn't otherwise get published. Universities also have reponsibility to initiate new periodicals for indisciplinary work that doesn't yet have society sponsorship and in general to support work that doesn't have a home in established fields.

* * * * *

The little sketch above is meant to argue that there needs to be a system of quality assurance. Commercial publishing of scholarly work, for all its faults and expense, provides one such system. If commercial publishing is to vanish, there needs to be some other system to take its place. Commercial publishing is mostly sustained by the acquisition budgets of University Libraries, and secondarily by individual subscription. In my fantasy island alternative, the scholarly societies are sustained by membership fees. Those would be paid by academic departments or the institution itself, not by the Library. It would require internal reallocation on the campuses to work. In turn, Libraries could generate a lot more interest in the entire issue if they started to advocate for this sort of internal reallocation as a long term proposition. Otherwise, it seems a "Library matter" in which case why should the rest of us bother?

The other rather large question, for which I have no answer at this time, is that even if we all can agree on what the fantasy island vision looks like, how do we get from here to there? With the current system a reality and the fantasy island version only a promise of one, it would seem to require a fair amount of coordination within a discipline to make the switch. Individually, especially for junior faculty who are looking for tenure, it makes sense to maintain in the old system. So we need a model of the requisite coordination. There isn't one now.

Perhaps there is grant funding from the Obama administration available for doing these things. If it worked, it would lower the cost of higher education. In the meantime, let's move past policy and develop some alternative models.

Galen headed down the home stretch

This is our penultimate video. The last one we'll do will use Adobe Connect. In this one we talk about what Galen need's to do to finish his paper.

For Sale Sign on the Fourth Estate

In his column today Frank Rich argues that we need professional journalists who do their work as a career, not a hobby, and therefore they need to get paid. It can't be the government who pays them for obvious reasons. So even as newspapers are failing left and right there surely is a need to find some new commercial entity that hires journalists and publishes the work. The question that nobody has an answer to, Clay Shirky included, is what that commercial entity will look like.

I'm not going to offer up an answer, because I don't have one. But I will make a comment as a would be consumer of whatever comes next. News mostly isn't. It ends up being mostly blather. Investigative journalism requires analysis, to put the pieces together. We might be better off regarding the quality of written (I deleted the word "print" that I put down first) journalism, if there were less frequent publication, say weekly, even monthly. The point Rich makes about requiring a counter force to authority, whether in government or big business, doesn't seem to also require that each news outlet find its worth to be had in "scooping rivals," especially in the bulk of the stories that turn out to provide no counter force whatsoever. The scooping function may have arisen out of commercial necessity but it now has a life of its own and has lead to a soundbite approach, at the cost of skepticism and depth of coverage.

As with all crises, this is an opportunity for some auto correction. One can only hope that in the experimentation and flailing to find something that works, the press can restore their raison d'etre.

Latest book chapter

A draft of Personality and Guessing is now available. I'm not altogether satisfied with it but compared to where I was a week or two ago (totally stuck) I've made miles of progress.

Galen Conclusion

This is a critique of the Galen's draft, which focuses on lessons learned.

Galen 2

This is a critique of the middle part of Galen's first draft, which focuses on Google's model.

Critique of Galen's First Draft

This part of the critique covers the overview and the first page.

Thank You Anthony Downs

I read an Economic Theory of Democracy while still an undergrad. It might be a good idea for the Republican Leadership to read it now. It looks like Senator Specter's move caught most people unawares, though in hindsight it seems the obvious thing. Perhaps the moniker "middle of the road" will regain respectability.

Another chat with Galen

This conversation covers Galen's redirecting his efforts to writing the paper that is his main course obligation.

2nd Meeting with Galen

Below is the chat from last Thursday. Last week's posts plus this chat mark a cusp in the work. Now Galen has to begin a synthesis so he can produce his paper. Let's see if the approach rises to occasion and if his postings and our conversation this coming week change as a consequence.

Back to writing my book

After going on a hiatus for a couple of months, mostly because of work related obligations, I've been back to writing my book for the last week or so. There is now a version of Chapter 6,
Guessing and Verification, posted on the book site. If you get a chance to read it, I'd appreciate getting your opinion of it.

First Session with Galen

Galen Rafferty is a student in our Professional MBA Program here. He is also a staff member for the CIC, which is how I got to know him. He is almost ready to graduate but needed one more course. So he and I agreed that I would mentor him through an independent study course that focuses on a work related interest but that is suitable for his program of study. Galen has a blog to record his current thinking and he will be producing a paper for this course. My role is more as a cheer leader and outside ear than as an expert in Galen's project - I'm not, though I've got some relevant experience from work so I can chime in now and then based on that.

We've decided to do live sessions in ooVoo so the sessions can be recorded and I can then use those for my work. I don't think we've yet nailed it as to how to hold these online sessions, but this sort of mentoring I'd expect to become a more regular part of people's professional development. So I want to showcase it here. The content might be of interest in its own right. I'm showing it for the style of interaction. Enjoy!