A new study finds that:

We find that teaching a wider variety of courses and devoting more time to teaching results in a significant wage penalty, even when research productivity is carefully controlled.

I might add that, if you were to look at salaries among the past several hires in my department, higher research productivity also results in a significant wage penalty.  There’s an additional wage penalty for actually doing your assigned service tasks.  Come to think of it, there’s a wage penalty just for being useful.

There are things I could say about why that is, but there are certain things that even I won’t say online.  However, those who know which school I’m at can go to this database and  see if they notice any anomalies among the associate professors in my department.  The correlation between pay and productivity (in teaching, research, and scholarship) is a perfect -1.  (Note that I referred to Associate Professors rather than Assistant Professors, even though I’m just an Assistant Professor, because the Associate Professors each got raises upon promotion, and those raises were supposedly based on some sort of evaluation of the merits of their work.  Thus, their pay allegedly reflects what the institution thinks about them and their work at the school, whereas my pay reflects when I was hired.)

Emergency Mathematical Hologram advances the evil, uncivilized, unenlightened view that colleges, even those that “only” provide the first 2 years of a 4-year college program, should not have to teach students how to add fractions.  I propose immediate deportation to Siberia for this heathen.

What warms my heart is that this evil, unenlightened, politically incorrect heathen is even younger than me.  It lets me know that my similarly wicked views are not merely the product of age-related neurological degeneration.

I’ve encountered some people who were unimpressed by Obama finally announcing his support for gay marriage.  Me, I think it says something positive about how far we’ve gone that giving a speech in favor of gay marriage is considered an unimpressive, tepid, and not-courageous thing for a general election candidate to do in an election year.  The haters might yet win some battles, but it’s pretty clear which way the issue will go in the end.  (To be clear, this is a defense of our culture, not the guy who gave the speech.)

Also, I echo Dave Weigel:

I was thinking about the phenomenon of desperate adjuncts living on food stamps in the US.  This is a direct consequence of having too many PhDs chasing too few jobs.  You might argue that this wouldn’t be a problem if faculty salaries were higher, and I certainly wouldn’t object to raising the pay for adjuncts.  However, the fact that jobs get 3-digit numbers of applicants suggests that there are also just too many people relative to the amount of work that needs doing.  At least in the US.  Also, the problem is particularly acute in humanities and social science, which is where I want to focus my attention in this blog post.  I’m not saying that there isn’t PhD over-production in natural sciences and engineering, and I realize that some humanities and social science specialties are very employable outside the academy (e.g. economics, certain areas of psychology), but overall it’s clear that your non-academic employment odds are better with a PhD in physics than with a PhD in history.

Does Europe have this problem?  On the one hand, my understanding is that most European higher education systems are sufficiently different from ours that there might be even less demand for humanities and social science instructors (part-time, full-time, or otherwise): They tend not to have as many general education classes in their curricula (i.e. if you aren’t a humanities or social science student you probably aren’t taking many humanities or social science classes).  Also, I understand that their educational systems have more tracking than ours, so there won’t be as many students attempting college.  (Please correct me if I’m wrong on this.  The Europeans whom I interact with most frequently are largely academics, i.e. people who were on the academic fast track.)

So, what’s the deal with European PhDs in humanities and social science?

Really, it is.

This is why we’re bidding on a condo.  The combo of mortgage, interest, HOA fees, insurance, and taxes will just about match the rent we’re playing on an apartment that isn’t even as nice.  And all of this is before we take the mortgage interest deduction.  Also, it’s biking distance from my job, making this even more financially prudent.  Why should I give money to loathsome, corrupt, backward states like Saudi Arabia, Iran, Russia, Venezuela, or Texas?  Bonus:  It’s a short sale, so banksters will lose money!

I don’t know if we’ve found the bottom of the market, but we’ve found a fairly low point with low interest rates.  Doing this makes good financial sense.

Most importantly from a UO perspective, we’ll be able to buy a dog!

Hat tip to Kevin Drum.

I echo just about everything that the Dean Dad says here.

For those about to accept graduate school offers, especially in non-STEM fields:  Don’t!

The good Professor Yoo is immune from legal consequences for his role in torture. So be it.  And, given that he is tenured, I certainly wouldn’t want Berkeley to try to terminate his employment.

However, where does it say that the Chancellor of the University lacks the inherent power to be flexible in teaching assignments?  I propose that John Yoo be assigned to grade freshman lab reports.  Moreover, where is it written that the university is obligated to pay him in cash?  I propose that he be paid in freshman dining hall coupons with a cash value equal to his salary.  Alternately, he can be paid in Ramen.  Prof. Yoo himself, in some of his most renowned scholarly writings, explained that it’s only torture if it inflicts suffering comparable to a fatal injury.  And years of observations on college campuses have shown that a person can easily survive for 4+ years on the all-Ramen diet without suffering fatal injury.  Unless we say that majoring in Recreation and Leisure Studies counts as a form of brain death.  Anyway, to avoid the risk of brain death, we will specifically not transfer him to Chico State.  Nor will we transfer him to UC Riverside.**

Furthermore, I think we can all agree that the University is within its rights to exercise some discretionary powers over office assignments.  Put him in an office near where the pre-meds study, and assign him to teach their freshman lab classes.  He’ll never know a moment of peace.  However, I want to emphasize that even if they do keep him awake for 48 consecutive hours, it still isn’t torture.  Finally, while he is of course entitled to all of the privileges of a faculty member, the University Administration must have the inherent power to flexibly construe those privileges.  He should only be allowed to use the athletic facilities adjacent to the cheerleaders’ practice field*.  Or transfer him to UC Davis and let him exercise next to wherever the College of Veterinary Medicine keeps the cows and horses.

*This might sound lecherous, but trust me, it isn’t.  In grad school I lived in an apartment down-wind from the field used by cheerleader camps every summer.  The screeching noise is so damaging to the ears that even the Honorable Judge Jay Bybee would consider it torture.  However, I think that we can all agree that the Executive of the University has the inherent power to over-ride the judicial rulings of Judge Bybee, and furthermore has the inherent power to bar Prof. Yoo from wearing earplugs.

**I keed!  I keed!  I know some people doing great, decidedly-not-brain-dead work at UC Riverse.  And I certainly wouldn’t want them to have to put up with John Yoo.

Via Schneier, I came across this article chronicling FBI efforts to monitor and infiltrate domestic extremist groups.  The most fascinating part is near the end, when somebody is finally arrested:

He and other CMA members discussed plans to bomb the FBI office in Birmingham as well as a plot to raid the Browns Ferry nuclear power plant in Alabama. Posey believed the plant had an armory stocked with the high-powered weapons he coveted.

The FBI had heard about the raid idea in 1990, but it went nowhere. After Waco, it was back on the table. In the months after the end of the siege, Posey allegedly began crafting a plan to bribe or overwhelm the plant’s security guards and break in using a five-man team.

With the plot apparently moving toward fruition, the FBI finally arrested Posey and several other CMA members, just days after the Soldier of Fortune convention. But after years of infiltration — including multiple informants and undercover operations by both the FBI and the Army — the only charges brought against Posey stemmed from the theft of the night-vision goggles.

The article describes a culture in which a lot of people buy and sell weapons from each other and talk big, but plans that move toward fruition are vanishingly rare.  For that, we should all be grateful.  Mind you, I’m glad that arms dealers go to jail for stealing military hardware, but I’m also glad that most of them are just big talkers when it comes to what they’d actually do with the hardware.

One thought comes to mind: I kind of wish that we had “movie plot cops.”  You know, the sorts of undercover agents who are so hyper-competent that they can let the evil plan go to the final seconds of the timetable and then halt the villain just before he can hit the button on the detonator.  Besides my moral interest in giving people every possible chance to change their mind and not do evil, the last thing you want is to purge the underground of big talkers.  It’s far better if the underground is populated by people who talk big but never actually finish what they start.  (Insert faculty meeting joke here.)  We routinely hear about countless “senior Al Qaeda leaders”, but it’s never actually clear what they do.  I’m kind of happy to live in a world in which Al Qaeda holds meetings but rarely does anything.  It’s far better than the world in which they get shit done.

Not being a particle physicist, I can’t say definitively that this wouldn’t work, but I’m skeptical as all hell.  Two reasons:

1) Detecting neutrinos is hard.  The infamous search for superluminal neutrinos worked over a distance of a few hundred km, and they got a small number of events over a long time frame.  So I’m dubious on the ability to quickly produce enough neutrinos for a detector on the other side of the globe to immediately register a statistically-significant signal.

It might be that I under-estimate the capabilities, but that’s my hunch.

2) In order to get an advantage of tens of milliseconds, you need a source that can receive the “go” signal and immediately fire off enough neutrinos in a small fraction of that time.  The fiber between the trader and the reactor is not my concern.  It’s more that I don’t know whether the machine can be maintained in a state of readiness such that it can respond in a fraction of a millisecond, and, related to concern 1, produce a sufficient number of neutrinos in a fraction of a millisecond.  I know that high-precision timing of neutrino production and detection was done for the OPERA experiment, but I don’t know if they did their timing off of the “go” signal that started the reactor or off of a signal indicating that the reactor had fired.

I suspect that problem 2 is solvable, but I would not assume that it will be easy to go from a research technology to a technology that has to work in the field on a time-sensitive schedule.

1) Is there a liquid in the outer core of the earth?  If so, do you know what sort of liquid it is?

2) True or false: The expansion of the universe, and the associated red shifts of distant galaxies, is due to the expansion of space itself.

These questions are motivated by things said by an actual cow-orker in the past few months, in public.  And these are just the ones that I’m not sworn to secrecy on.  If you knew what I know, you’d support the ACADEMIC* Act too.

*Accelerating Course Advancements and Demonstrating Effective Methods of Intellectual Contribution, a bizarrely-named bill that enables the conversion of deadwood into Soylent Green when deemed necessary by the Decider.  It was passed 99-1 by the Senate after a major scandal.

As a child, I loved Charlie Brown.  Come to think of it, I still love the musical “You’re a good man, Charlie Brown.”  Consequently, my grandfather gave me a nickname based on Charlie Brown:  Charlie Brownguinea.  He still uses it.  Since my grandfather likes to be silly and sometimes makes up words, I just assumed that the “guinea” attached to the end of “Brown” was a silly nonsense word.

It is only very recently that I figured out that my dark-skinned Italian grandfather, who grew up in a community of immigrants in the 1920’s (and, for the record, is still very much alive, giving me hope for my genetic fate), is probably making affectionate use of a slur that somebody used against him.  I would ask him about this, except his hearing is almost gone.  His memory is great, but his hearing is kaput, and he’s too old to understand email.  So mostly we just listen to him tell stories, and if we have a question we yell at the top of our lungs.

I was unaware that the Coptic Christian Church has a ban on its followers traveling to Israel.  I’m opposed to travel bans as a solution to political problems, because I think that people visiting and mingling with each other is the best way to find solutions.  Still, since a sizable portion of the US population approaches the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the lens of religion (whether a religious belief in a property deed awarded atop Mt. Sinai or a dislike for Muslims), it is interesting to learn that the leaders of a major Arab Christian denomination are also not big fans of Israeli policy.  For those American Christians who side with Israel for religious reasons, have they given any thought to the Palestinian Christians and how they feel about things?

For that matter, given that George Bush claims to have gotten a divine go-ahead for the invasion of Iraq, have hawkish Christians given any thought to how things worked out even worse for Iraqi Christians?

The Economist surveys commentary from the right and its detractors, and sums up with this insightful bit:

Good luck with that, Mr Norquist. Voters shy from hard choices. Lexington’s bet is that Americans will never give the Republicans a clean mandate to drown the sort of state they have now. Like voters everywhere, they want many impossible things before breakfast, including low taxes and all the things that high taxes pay for. They will expect their leaders to muddle through.

Pretty much.  Norquist can succeed in replacing tax-and-spend with borrow-and-spend for a while, but at some point taxes will go up.  In fact, ostensibly “small government” proposals like use of contractors just increase the odds of that.  It’s one thing to have a program whose political base of support is composed of beneficiaries.  It’s quite another to have a program whose base also includes the business leaders that get the contracts to run it.  When things have gone as far as they can go and a hard decision can truly be deferred no longer, the contractors will get paid.  That is as sure as tomorrow’s sunrise.  Consider this exchange from The Rock:

Captain Darrow: Excuse me, general… but what about the fucking money?
General Hummel: There is no fucking money. The mission’s over.
Captain Frye: Bullshit it’s over!
Major Tom Baxter: You’re talking to a General, soldier! Maintain discipline.
Captain Darrow: I’m not a soldier, Major. The day we took hostages, we became mercenaries. And mercenaries get paid. I want my FUCKING money!

Indeed.  Unless you plan to send Nicholas Cage and Sean Connery after every angry contractor out there, taxes will go up to keep contracted programs going.

(To be clear, I’m not just talking about military contractors.  I’m saying that when you replace the public sector, with its mix of people who seem to actually believe in service and people who just want something secure and not too demanding, with businessmen looking at the bottom line, you aren’t exactly creating an environment that’s more hospitable to budget cuts.)

As grading season approaches, academic bloggers start weighing in on grading policy.  Personally, I think we have too many grades.  I don’t know that I can establish a clear distinction between the B+ student and the B student.  I think we could get by just fine with fewer grades.  However, I would not advocate a pass-fail system, because I think it’s important to at least have some amount of distinctions.  So, what would I recommend?

First, I would recommend a “marginal” grade somewhere between failing and whatever your required average is.  We can call this a D, or a C in this inflated era, or a B at the Ivies, or whatever.  The important thing is that you should require an average higher than this marginal level.  It’s not so much because I want an absolute standard higher than “marginal.”  Absolute standards can be eroded by either soft-heartedness or caprice.  Rather, it’s because it lowers the stakes for each decision.  If I know that everybody needs a C (or whatever) in each class in order to count it toward graduation, I face pressure to give a C (or whatever).  If, however, they need a C average (or whatever) but at least a D (or whatever) in each class, then I have an intermediate option.  I can give them something below a C and they don’t have to repeat the class, but the pressure is now on them to do better in something else.  I’ve given them something that they must compensate for if they want to graduate, but I have not put my thumb on the scale and said “You absolutely cannot graduate until you redo this.”  They can either retake the class to get a C (or whatever), or they can get a B (or whatever) in some other class to average out that D.

So, we need at least 3 slots.  At that point, you could have a rule like “At least a marginal [or whatever] grade in each class, but at least X% of the grades must be above marginal.”  You don’t absolutely need a 4th grade.  However, I think it’s worth distinguishing “fine” from “really good.”  In fact, given the pressures to inflate, it’s practically essential.  So, we can have 4-5 slots.  And, really, that just takes us to a world without all the pluses and minuses.  Which is probably good enough.  We don’t need 12 different categories of grades (A, A-, B+, B, B-, C+, C, C-, D+, D, D-, F).

I hate royalty.  Were it up to me, Prescott Bush would have had a vasectomy, Hillary Clinton would be practicing law, and the entire Kennedy clan would have been entombed with JFK, Egyptian-style.  In fact, I would have disqualified Arnold Schwarzenegger from the ballot just on the basis of his marriage to a Kennedy, I would have forced the son of Pat Brown to return to the path to the priesthood, and the son of a former Michigan Governor never would have made it onto a primary ballot in my world.  Hereditary government is something that should only be practiced in Saudi Arabia and North Korea.  So I’m pissed off to find out that the son of an Assemblyman is running in my district.  Basically, my vote is already decided.  I don’t care if they discover his opponent in bed with a dead girl and a live boy.

Perhaps I’m being too pessimistic about asteroid mining, but I have serious doubts about the feasibility of extracting enough platinum or whatever from an asteroid to justify the expense.  Then again, maybe I’m wrong, and this will actually work.  However, a few points to ponder:

1) Forget about property rights for mining, what about the externality issue of space junk?  I am assuming that asteroid mining will generate substantial debris.  If this is done in earth orbit, doesn’t that just exacerbate current space junk problems?

2) Worries about people using asteroids as weapons are far-fetched.  If anything, a society that can actually tow asteroids around the solar system is a society that can probably repel an earth-killing asteroid.  So, on that front, I see huge upsides.

3) The prophecies continue to come true.  First we had an anarchist computer geek (complete with prematurely silver hair for extra coolness) challenge the mightiest power on earth.  Then his capture was avenged by a hacker collective.  Now we have beeeeeellionaires plotting to mine asteroids.  Events are unfolding as promised in movies and cyberpunk novels.

About 10 years ago I learned about the Implicit Association Test.  I went online and took it.  I was not blinded to the purpose of the study, so I was nervous about screwing up on questions that might show prejudice, and I was extra careful on those questions.  Of course, taking longer on those questions also results in a finding of bias.  And the test found bias.

I’m going to scoff at the test a bit, but I want to make it clear that I don’t claim to be free of bias, and I certainly don’t claim that my younger and even more insufferable self was free of bias.  I am aware of some of my biases, and I am also, on some level, aware that I probably have even more than I realize.  “Known unknowns”, to quote a famous war criminal.  I know that I have deep flaws, and my only question here is whether this test is a meaningful way to learn something valuable about those flaws.  OK, disclaimers done.

Here’s my question: When the IAT was first studied, were the test subjects blinded to the true purpose of the test?  I realize that any idiot out there can claim to be smarter than social scientists, but when I read about psychology experiments, I find that the participants are often blind to the actual purpose of the study.  They’ll tell people to take a few hard tests of spatial reasoning, and between test sessions leave them in a room with a cookie jar and tell them to just have one.  What they’re really testing is whether a stressful activity makes you more likely or less likely to succumb to temptation.  Or they’ll tell you that you’re in a study of dating habits, but they make you wait forever to talk the researcher, and while you’re waiting you interact with an actor in the waiting room, and they have an IR camera measure body temperature to see how you react to the stress of a long wait while interacting with a certain personality type.  Obviously I’m getting details wrong, but that’s what I often see: Tests in which the subjects don’t know the hypothesis being tested.  Obviously not all tests are that way, nor can all tests be that way, but it’s pretty obvious that if you give the experimental subjects information about how the outcome of the test might reveal something shameful, you’ve just influenced them to be more stressed in certain parts of the test.  If people were told that the real point of the study is to measure self-discipline in the presence of a cookie jar, they’d skew the results.

So, I took this test, knowing that if I screwed up I’d learn something shameful, so I was nervous and took more time, and sure enough I got a shameful score because taking more time on certain questions counts against you.  Obviously my anecdote is hardly sufficient evidence that a peer-reviewed study is meaningless, but I do think it’s sufficient motivation to ask if the blinding issue has been addressed in the literature.  e.g. Have people been asked to take the IAT under the pretense that it’s a study of how the ability to recognize words correlates with the ability to recognize pictures, or something like that?

I bring this up because I often see people on the internet doing at least as much amateur psychology as I’m doing right now, citing IAT studies and urging everybody to go to a website and take this short diagnostic to learn about their flaws.  It all seems a bit too easy.  No introspection, no consideration of somebody else’s story, just click on a few words and pictures and then you get to feel simultaneously guilty but also glad to have your consciousness raised.  (As a bonus, you get to tell others to take it so they’ll realize how unenlightened they have been.)  It’s the cheap road to greater awareness, you know?  The times when I’ve had my awareness raised have come from actual interactions with people and consideration of their experiences, not from a short test.  Also, I don’t know that this Internet Psychoanalysis (”Take the IAT and you’ll realize I’m right!”) is any more scientific than the methodological points I’m raising here.

Anyway, I’ll shut up now, and defer to those who know more about the validity studies.

In the midst of a discussion of how to make wars harder to start and sustain, Jason Kuznick makes an interesting suggestion: Hold a vote before we can have a war.  Now, there’s a number of predictable directions that this could go:

Weasel direction #1: How do we distinguish a war from a kinetic military action?  I’ll graciously punt that one to the esteemed Senior Lecturer in Constitutional Law from the University of Chicago.

Weasel direction #2: What if there’s a surprise attack and there’s no time to hold a vote?  My response is that America hasn’t fought a truly non-elective war in a long time, so this is something of a distraction from the issues we actually face.  I feel quite strongly that it would be better if that were the issue that we actually face, but raising it as a counter-argument against making war hard in the present context is a weasel move.

Philosophical horse-flogging: Democracy is teh suck!  Sure, but I have yet to see a practical argument in favor of any of the alternatives.  I have great sympathy for anarchy, but we live in a world with some sort of -archy and some sort of -ocracy, and in that context I have yet to see a strong argument for the alternatives.

Anyway, moving past those, I have my own philosophical question: If the citizenry votes, by plebiscite, to start a war, does that make civilians into morally justifiable targets?  If we agree that the Presidential Palace of the Dictator of Emmanualgoldsteinstan is a legitimate target, because the Dictator of Emmanuelgoldsteinstan initiated aggression, what of the homes of the initiators of aggression in a country that starts a war via plebiscite?

I suppose the best answer is that targets are not legitimized by their past sins, but by their active, ongoing participation in the war.  The barracks where active or soon-to-be-active soldiers are sleeping are legitimate targets because attacking them prevents them from doing harm.  The hospital for wounded soldiers is not a legitimate target because, whatever they might have done previously, they are not now fighting and they won’t be fighting anytime soon.  So, the plebiscite is done, and now the voters have no direct role in the continuing hostilities, they are not legitimate targets.

Still, I think there are interesting philosophical questions to ask about the moral responsibility born by the citizenry if wars were authorized by plebiscite.

1) Forget the new sheriff in town, there’s a new gang in town.

2) I understand why some people consider street protest ineffective these days, but before we go off on how unseemly it is, recall that the revered Founders themselves enshrined the right to assemble to petition for a redress of grievances.  Indeed, unlike freedom of speech and freedom of the press (which are often exercised via technologies that were unimaginable back then, posing all sorts of privacy and intellectual property questions that could not have been contemplated by the Framers), protests still consist of real, physical people showing up–in meatspace!–and yelling and waving signs until men with guns show up and tell them that their exercise of their rights is most displeasing to the powers that be.  And then it gets ugly.

This is an ancient pattern.  I’m not claiming that every act of a protestor is protected under the First Amendment, I’m just saying that it’s nothing new, and yet that amendment was written down by people who knew this.  Clearly the revered demigods of the American Founding thought that there was a baby in that bathwater, and we shouldn’t just abandon it because it’s unseemly and involves radical malcontents.

Come to think of it, the right to a jury trial in an open and adversarial forum was also written down by people who were facing the existential threat of a massive global empire patrolling the seas and holding territory on their northern border.

3) Related to the whole “Why do conservatives think it’s un-American for radical malcontents to wave signs?”, why do so many Christians fail to notice that Jesus preached charity and hung out with marginalized people?  This is hardly a novel observation on my part, but the pattern is a stubborn one.

4) I had some scary symptoms and went to the doctor recently.  I’m fine, nothing to worry about.  However, it is incredible to think that we live in an era in which you can literally wave a wand over a person’s chest and get an image of the beating heart, complete with information on how the blood is flowing.  It’s as fantastical as anything at Hogwarts, and yet it’s real!

The TSA is quite proud of itself.  They stopped somebody from smuggling a can of soup onto a plane! They’d better be careful not to strain a muscle while patting themselves on the back.  On the bright side, if they do strain a muscle, they won’t need to go to the hospital to get a scan done.

Best part?  They quote the Soup Nazi in their own post.  I realize that it is unfair for me to criticize people who do intrusive and idiotic things, as long as they are merely doing it for a small amount of money.  However, the Nazi reference was made by them, not by me.  I’ll just add that you’d have to be a real Nazi to disregard your Bubby and take away somebody’s chicken soup.  That stuff can cure any disease, and there’s a nasty virus going around right now (says the aching, exhausted blogger).