Link roundup

Some of these links are getting decidedly stale; time to clear them out.

Which are more effective, taxes on junk or subsidies on healthy food?

How would you like to spend half your waking life fetching water? (Via Elizabeth Royte.)

How much land would it take if we all lived as densely as NYC?

High-fructose corn syrup is part of the axis of evil.

Adorable houses, but ignore the twee captions.

The challenges of "data-driven" decision-making.

Horrifying maternity leave story.

Everyone's already linked to this, but ... is TV programming as we know it doomed? "The most watched minute of video made in the last five years shows baby Charlie biting his brother’s finger. (Twice!) That minute has been watched by more people than the viewership of American Idol, Dancing With The Stars, and the Superbowl combined. (174 million views and counting.)"

I don't own a television. It's not because I don't watch any TV, but because I rarely care to watch it when it's programmed to be on*. I don't just mean I want to Tivo things. I mean I didn't start watching Battlestar Galactica (from the beginning) until the final season. It's not just me - how many people were introduced to Entourage by DVDs their friends insisted they borrow? But media companies still judge television shows by Neilson ratings, as any frustrated fan of Joss Whedon knows.

I don't think that the rise of services like YouTube means that products requiring a cast of thousands will disappear. It means they'll have to be delivered differently, though.

* Also, the cost. Paying a bundle for a bundle of stations you don't care about is so old-school.

Linkdump

Sorry for the radio silence; I've been out of town collecting data.

The "THERE ARE NO MENS, WHAT WILL WE DO" panic.

There are tribal colleges in Canada and the U.S., but universities, not so much - and now there is one fewer.

One response to the Dodge Super Bowl commercial.

I love chicken-crossing-the-road jokes. And here are more.

I've been disheartened by how much of the commentary around the Amy Bishop case has suggested that tenure, or race, or something, drove her to kill her colleagues. No. Being unhinged is what leads someone to do that kind of thing; triggers aren't causes. Here is a good take on it.

White supremacists more tolerant of homosexuality than you might think; also, funny picture.

Link potpourri

For everyone freaking out about the name of the latest Apple product. Really, people? Menstrual products were the only thing you thought of when you heard the name?

"Humilitiation (the game) and J.D. Salinger." That is, elitist pride that comes with not having read a classic.

One of those "duh" papers that it's good someone actually did: Students who get FAFSA help are more likely to attend college. (Seriously, have you filled one out lately? Not easy.)

On the off chance you're interested, here's info on the quantitative seminar our department runs.

This novella is one of the most brutal stories I've ever read. It's also amazing and brilliant. You should read it.

Links

A provocative post about how changing the value of response sets in a survey results in different results. The gist is that if you are offered five choices, you assume the middle one is "average" and shape your response to that.

You've probably seen claims that the oldest entities around are nonprofits - colleges and churches. Here's a look at the oldest for-profit corporations, which are no spring chickens.

The tagline says it all: "How school lunch programs manage to promote obesity and hunger at the same time."

A rousing call for org theorists to study education.

Links

Canadian science fiction writer brutally arrested by US border guards. Now, at this point some of it is one person's word against another (the arrest itself is not under dispute). So, you know, maybe I should have an open mind that Watts just drove up and slugged the guard and was quite sensibly arrested. However, I'm tired of hearing people say something to the effect of, "Well, maybe he wasn't subservient enough." You know what? Being super-polite is a good idea, but you can't legally be arrested for failing to do so. Or even for being outright surly. Freedom of speech, people.

The least successful holiday specials of all time.

When you refer to famous academics, do you say the full name of a woman but just the last name of a man?

This is an interesting article for those of us who like books, but the very best part is the comment by KW following the article.

A turducken for the vegetarians in the house.

"Um, no, I'm not goofing off. This Sandman comic is actually a research project, yeah."

This law goes into effect immediately.

Merry Christmas!

Link roundup

That hike I did in Bellingham? Changes are afoot.

Nice analysis of U of California tuition raises.

Board members behaving badly.

Do famous articles say what you think they say?

Faculty humor.

Funny video. At least for those of you who enjoy font humor. (Via John Scalzi.)

More links

Yes, I realize that as of late this blog has become a rather quiet, almost formulaic place: Linkdumps, hiking reports, and job announcements, the first two once a week and the last as needed.

How to trap a dork..

Data is hard.

From the "Needs more brass goggles!" department.

Physics! With puppets!

Potpourri

When people hear I have dialup, they often looked shocked. Well, at least for me it is a financial choice. Some urban areas have been “redlined” by Internet service providers that don’t see a financial payoff to wiring poorer communities.

Great tweets of science.

How far can you get from a McDonald's? (Via Houck.)

How to introduce yourself in graduate school.

An interview with the guy who rescued the WPA NPS posters and is creating more. (Via Historiann.)

Remember a while ago I linked to a story about an author whose book about a black character ended up with a cover of a white girl? The publisher has replaced the cover.

Links

"A realistic plan and time line for a survival homestead."

Kind of cool, but wow - who among us has the skills needed to live this far off the grid? What I find depressing about this site is that each homestead is expected to be an entirely self-sustaining unit - a natural assumption, I suppose, for survivalists, but contrary to any human culture. This isn't just growing your own food and building your own house; if you want honey, you have to have your own bees, and I'm not sure where they expect to get clothes from once the world's stock of used clothing is gone, because then you have to have cotton or sheep, and spin and weave ... I'm getting tired just thinking about it. Frankly, even in primitive societies without division of labor, there is some specialization. One beekeeper for a few homesteads should suffice - I'm willing, by the way, to let you be the beekeeper. (The comments on this article quickly go into wackiness, so I can't really recommend reading that far.)

You may have seen one of a couple of articles lately on Braddock, Pennsylvania, a Rust Belt down that was on a death spiral until a new mayor came in with his own vision for renewal. The town still has a long way to go, mind you. website shows off photography in all its glorious squalor and decay.

Really cool houses built (almost?) entirely out of recycled materials. Be sure to check out the slideshow.

Links

This will have a negative impact on the affection you feel for To Kill a Mockingbird.

How UT Austin hired more senior women professors. The trouble I have with this article is that it takes an institutional viewpoint - how college X can have more female faculty, even if it means hiring them from Y and Z.. Overall, the system is not improved, because it's a zero-sum game when it comes to hiring people who are already tenured. UT may now find it easier to hire female junior faculty; the places they hired from will find it harder. (At the very end it addresses finding senior hires at national laboratories and the like, which would make it not a zero-sum game. But this only is possible in a very small number of disciplines. In the humanities, for example, almost the only place to get senior scholars is from other colleges.)

How to feel guilty about what you eat.

Economists find that increased competitive pressure to get into elite colleges leads to more gaming the system, not harder work.

Finally, some humor: student bloopers.

Links

These have been accumulating at an alarming rate.

What Americans really ate in the 1950s.

You might think that "how to ride the bus" is obvious and does not need to be a training video. But I was actually surprised by how much content was left out. Does the bus automatically stop at each stop, or do you have to pull a bell? If you're using a company ID of some kind, do you just show the driver? Swipe it somewhere? Etc.

Nifty article on park symbols - based on the generic man and woman seen on restroom doors and pedestrian crossing signs.

Review articles purporting to show the benefits of hormone replacement were surreptitiously paid for by drug companies.

The fall and rise of the good cocktail. Look, I appreciate quality drinks. (Ever order a drink at The Spaghetti Factory? Their concoctions are even worse than their food.) I applaud rescuing obscure liquors and taking a gastronomic approach. And yet ... at the end, this plea for fine drinks wants you believe that the pleasure of a cocktail is more than just taste buds and inebriation, and that's just self-delusion. I've seen similar paeans to the British Pub and to good wine, and they all go on about how this particular form of alcohol is not just the slightly elevated sensation that the alcohol provides but is actually a more sophisticated sort of pleasure. I'm not opposed to moderate drinking, as I do it myself, but the "pleasure" that alcohol provides is not some mystical secret that inheres in a particular kind of drink. It's a drug. Period.

I had one more link, but my commentary got so long I think I'd best save it for a full post.

Links for your reading pleasure

How language shapes the way we think.

The annual Bulwer-Lytton "worst opening sentence" results are in. My favorite: "Towards the dragon's lair the fellowship marched -- a noble human prince, a fair elf, a surly dwarf, and a disheveled copyright attorney who was frantically trying to find a way to differentiate this story from 'Lord of the Rings.'"

A study has found that "those with broad family ties to their alma mater tend to be the most generous to it." The authors of this study have done some good work mining a set of data from an unnamed elite university - this is just one of a series - but it's a sign of where the study of fundraising stands that a single-site quantitative study can get this much press. This isn't a slam on the authors at all; it was a big coup to get their hands on the data, and they do good analysis. It just goes to show how little really little solid work we have in this field, though, that it is newsworthy.

Links

The best statement I've seen of why "going green" (whether it's "you can save the planet just by switching lightbulbs" or living so greenly that other people despair) as individuals just isn't enough.

Searching for a job: "'Listen,' she said, 'I've never seen anyone in your stage of graduate school who has felt good — physically or mentally. I'm just not sure it's possible for you to be wrapping up your diss, looking for a job, teaching, and feeling calm and healthy.'"

"The postindustrial world is not in fact populated — as gurus like Richard Florida, who has popularized the idea of the 'creative class,' would have it — by 'bizarre mavericks operating at the bohemian fringe.' The truth about most white-collar office work, Crawford argues, is captured better by 'Dilbert' and 'The Office': dull routine more alienating than the machine production denounced by Marx." (Review of a new book.)

Construction is one area where a lot goes to waste. Here's one case where the transaction costs of sharing information were low enough that everyone won.

Tweet: "Women Thru-hikers Increasing on the Appalachian Trail." Really? I'm sure there are some pregnant women on the trail, but enough for a headline? Oh, wait, you mean the number of women is increasing. I know 140 characters is limiting, but the character limit isn't always the problem. "More women thru-hikers on the Appalachian Trail," for example, would have actually been shorter.

Short bits

-A quote from Ernest Boyer: "During our research for College, we studied several view books ... Based on the pictures in these books, I observed that about 60 percent of all classes are held outside, underneath a tree, and by a gently flowing stream. It's an absolutely bucolic setting. In fact, I observed that almost every campus is either by a river, by a stream, or not quite so far from the shore. One recruiter told us that, 'water is very big in higher education this year.'"

-As I mentioned the other day, what is wrong with my ankle is apparently my hip. That is, I'm not using my hip to stabilize myself properly, and the tension is getting down to my ankle, which the therapist called "the weakest link." Since I can't vote my ankle off the island, the alternative is to strengthen the hip. I'm paying a lot more attention to it, and this morning in yoga I noticed that I finally figured out I've been doing something wrong in warrior all these years - using my ankle instead of my hip.

-I'm leaving tomorrow for San Diego and AERA. Updates here and on Twitter (#AERA).

Links

The news biz has not really lost its readers; it just lost its ability to monetize them.

A personal take on changes in print media.

Money does funny things to the brain.

Dribs & drabs

Today is Lincoln's and Darwin's birthday, so how do you celebrate? Apparently, for one guy the logical thing to do was dress up as Ben Franklin and fly a kite on the Peabody lawn. I'm sorry I missed seeing this.

Crappy thing to happen to crappy research. Uh, sorry, couldn't resist.

Bring back the CCC!

Stereotype threat is everywhere! A couple of weeks ago I saw a presentation by the guy who recently did a study on Barack Obama and stereotype threat. Now, here's a novel application: athletes.

Does the name LoJack sound like something out of a William Gibson novel to anyone else?

One last thing - jerk elk gets comeuppance.

Some shorts

• I can't be bothered to find the links at the moment, but job ads for faculty positions are down 15% in history and 21% at the MLA, and rough estimates are that actual hiring is down 40%, due to freezes after ads are posted.
  
• "The failing economy has taken its toll on academia like it has everywhere else. Here are just a few of the (potential) consequences of the crisis."
  
• The Turnip Truck stopped selling Theo's Chocolate, which is my favorite. Much sadness.
  
• Make this page more bacony. Via Made of Meat.
  
• My 2009 goals are to through-hike Indiana's Knobstone Trail, complete my Cumberland Trail 50-mile patch requirements, and hike in at least two new states. My sister and I will be visiting Isle Royale in the summer, so Michigan will be one of them.

Society today

• Confession ... I saw this article when I woke up in the morning and checked my email while lying in bed, using my iPhone. You'll see why this is relevant if you follow the link.
  
  
• The great intergenerational transfer of wealth has been a big idea in philanthropy for the last decade, although I've always been something of a skeptic. The idea is that the generation now close to death (to put it rather bluntly) has a lot of money to pass down, and hopefully a lot of it will go to charity. How much is a lot? $41 trillion. My skepticism arises from wondering (first) to what extent people will pass down their money, rather than spending it in their lifetimes, and (second) whether they'll do much for charity as opposed to giving it to their heirs. (This could be in the form of living gifts rather than bequests.) Third, I'm just a pessimist about the future.
  
  But now it occurs to me that in the current economic crisis, my third reason for skepticism was much more on target than I thought it was - our inability to predict most things is starkly visible to all of us now. With the economy in the toilet, how much of that $41 trillion still exists?

Edification

Good post about taking too long to finish the PhD. There's a lot in there, but I point you to it for the financial analysis of stretching out the PhD.

Two articles I read in a row worked together nicely. The premise of this article is that the internet allows for extreme participatory democracy, where a million battles are raged over tiny causes that everyone else ignores, where the combatants are polarized rather than engaged. The second article focuses on the early days of the American newspaper, which in some ways is similar to internet democracy. Newspapers had no ambitions of objectivity, and everyone was allowed to participate. Yet according to this piece, this was a good thing. So why is internet democracy so different?

My first stab at an explanation is the sheer scale of the enterprise. The number of participants in a local debate in 1775 was much lower than the number of potential participants in anything on the internet today. (And even national debates were fought in the local presses then.) Add to that the sheer difficulty of "posting" back then; even those folks who could easily toss off a vituperative missive had to get it printed to share it, and according to the second article it took 16 hours just to typeset a weekly paper. This means that saying anything required more investment.

But I wonder to what degree the commentators of 1775 were really more intent on converting minds and hearts than are the commentators of 2009 - and to what extent today's commentators are simply bad at it rather than uninterested.

Links about education, food, and loneliness

"Blue-skies research driven by curiosity can have a far greater social and economic impact than research carried out with a specific commercial application in mind."

Not lonely in the big city.

Pretty art. Man, I'm hungry.

Could you get into a grammar school? (This is the British kind. For Americans, it means "elementary school." Across the Atlantic, it means "private classical high school.")
 
Tenure or unions: Pick one.

Qualitative research pays less

See the post here. (Note that this is extrapolated from assumptions, not based on something like a salary survey.)

Linkdump

The peculiar story of a man trapped in a elevator, who subsequently couldn't get over it. Also includes the history of the elevator, which is in some ways more interesting.

The prose here harkens back to a day when writing was embellished like Victorian houses. Example: "To enjoy them in their fullest beauty, we should walk under the trees when the sun is shining brightly through them, and we can then see each pellucid sunshade to be fringed with a row of most delicate silky hairs--hairs that protect it from undue moisture or the radiating cold of the late frost." Nice, although at times a bit purple, information on trees.

Holloways: Prepare to be nostalgic for a piece of history you never knew existed.

Music

The new Nick Cave album is pretty awesome. The title track is catchy, but you really have to see the video. (It's also at YouTube.) Nick is strangely mesmerizing, seedy, and a little bit off, all at the same time.

Stuff on the internet

Yup, it's quiet around here ... too quiet. Sorry for the posting silence, but this week is pretty much the same as last week, except this time I'm sparing you the details. In the meanwhile, here are some links that are growing stale.

Remember memorizing multiplication tables as a kid? I still can never remember 7x8 - I have to remember 7x7 and then add another 7. I figured it was just me, but apparently I'm not unusual.

Interested in politics? Finnish salmon? Robots making Luther Bibles? Then this blog has something for you!

Hamlet, the text adventure.

Interesting article on magical thinking

Free reads!

For those of you who haven't yet enjoyed Neil Gaiman's American Gods, he has posted it for free.

If you like comics at all, you might want to check this out.

If you like Neil Gaiman and/or comics, check out the first Sandman, available online.

If you like neither Mr. Gaiman nor comics, nor do you anticipate that making their acquaintance will surprise and delight you, I have no links to suggest at this time.

A few links

Would anyone like to buy me The Bishop when it is finished?

Here is the answer to a question that has plagued many.

Another student in my program has a blog.

Curiosities

Yesterday while driving home I saw an opossum two blocks from my house. (Wish I'd had my camera!) The odd part was that it was only 4:30 and still light, and I'm pretty sure opossums are nocturnal.

Instead of opossum photos, I can only offer links:

Abusing Amazon product review to make a new artform.

Old Bell phone sounds.

The city (scroll down to RPM-1200). (Via boing-boing).

Navel-gazing

All right! All this deep talk has moved my blog up:


While we're being reflexive, my dad sent me this.

Viewing pleasure

Here are two videos for your perusal:

This is something you just have to see. Really.

This might be somewhat less goofy if I spoke Korean, but only minimally.

In other news

In research news: Today we offically finished going through dissertations for Project Snowball. We should have cracked open the champagne or something. Woot.

In sports news: Indians > Yankees.

In art news: Soviet poster blog.

In health news: "Not a morning person? These Ayurvedic rituals will turn you into an early riser and change how you face the day," said the email. Well, I guess I can't argue - if I do all these, I'm going to have to start getting up earlier.

In world news: The prof coming to CWRU whose visa was stuck has had her visa issues resolved.

In business news: Stupid office morale games.

In intellectual news: An interesting approach to morality.

Things that have caught my eye

It's art, made of food. It's not so much for eating.

I so want one of these.

A list of reasons not to like academe.

I'm glad to see someone doubt the story of the Great Intergenerational Transfer of Wealth.

A hodgepodge of things to read

Lesboprof offers job-hunting tips. (Note: She mentions conference interviews, but we don't really do those in my field.)

Summer jobs are going the way of the dodo bird - at least for the upper half of the income distribution.

The plastic bags will kill us all.

Apparently, if I dig a hole in my backyard, I won't end up in China. Instead, I'll end up in the Indian Ocean, far offshore from Western Australia. That's a scenario never considered in children's literature.

Another new way to rank grad programs.

Attention!

We interrupt your weekend to bring you this important news flash.

Better living the Turducken way

Greetings from Seattle! Well, Federal Way, if you want to get technical. Here are some links that have nothing at all to do with Seattle or vacation.

• Check your wild rice
  
• The importance of building exercise into your lifestyle
  
• How to concentrate

Four links

Trite language - funny.

English professors vs. cats.

Proof that people can't do anything for themselves anymore.

The virtues of an Owen MBA. (If you pick one link, pick this one.)

Briefs

I haven't posted much lately, in large part because I am working very long hours. Most of my work wouldn't be interesting for you to read about, unless you're really into stapling or something. So here are a few shorts that don't really deserve their own entry.

• A couple of folks around here have commented that the ticks are bad this year. (Mind you, the ticks themselves probably think things are great.) I have to agree. I never have tick problems, being one of those conservative fuddy-duddies that hikes in pants and wears lots of bug spray, but I've found a few on me this season - actually after each of the last three hikes I've done. Thankfully, they were still crawling around and not yet embedded in my flesh.
  
• Here's an article on the ethics of ethical food.
  
• My latest resolution is to eliminate (to the extent possible) my use of paper coffee cups, which aren't recyclable. Most of the time I'm not getting a fancy drink, so it can be poured into my own travel mug. I was thwarted this morning at church, where the after-service coffee is served in paper cups. My church is generally environmentally conscious, so I suppose it's a matter of too many congregants and, perhaps, not enough cupboard space. Apparently over 14 billion paper coffee cups are used and tossed each year. (This factoid can be found here, and while a biodegradable cup is a step in the right direction, not throwing something away is even better. And lots of things that are biodegradable don't, because they end up in the oxygen-starved environment of a landfill.)

Keeping up with the modern world

When dogs blog.

Terribly geeky things you will want, like a wafflemaker that makes keyboard-shaped waffles.

Are cell phones killing bees?

When I needed I new clutch, I figured it was time to learn how one worked. Here's how.

Sci-fi archive. There are a lot of interesting stories here - far more than you'd want to peruse at one go - but so far I've mostly looked at the "classics." There are a lot by big names in sci fi, and some of them are surprisingly bad. I won't name names, but writers I know and enjoy have some mediocre work here. Reading old sci fi is often an exercise in fitting your brain around yesterday's future, which sometimes works better than others. Futures where all the women are housewives and all the men smoke are one thing; futures where unfunny gender and racial stereotypes drive the plot are another. It's as painful as reading the comic strips in Parade Magazine.

Then again the short story is a very demanding art form. You have little space to convince the reader the characters are real and behave realistically. This is hard enough in stories set in our present world, and it gets harder when writers depict humans encountering something that we never have before. Frequently too the author builds a story around a gimmick and doesn't think the implications through. A story I read years ago - I don't remember the author - had the premise that all the pollution produced in a year could be shrunk down to a doughnut, which could then be neutralized by human digestion - killing the person in the process. Scientific dubiousness aside, I never bought the author's further premise that a random citizen was chosen by lottery to eat it with great ceremony (and why it was done this way was not explained). Why not pick from willing suicides, suffering cancer patients, or death-row inmates? Why not have super-secret agents send it to the slums of a third-world nation to be unknowingly eaten by a waifish street urchin? You'll encounter a lot of these types of gimmicks here. But there is also some good stuff. I had never heard of Ward Moore, and the couple of stories by him are both excellent.

Sunday reading

Good news! I went hiking today, and I remembered my boots. If hiking doesn't amuse you, perhaps these links will.

"How come the little brown tree-dwellers have come to be considered as suitable objects for staring at as if they were architectural ruins like Greek temples, or geological oddities like Monument Valley?" Voyeurismo.

College admissions in a nutshell. Don't read all these books; the review is enough to keep you plenty informed for cocktail parties - or for talking to higher ed students.

"'You think this is odd, you shoulda been here last month,' Sal tells me. 'We had a Mad Max party and a Priscilla Queen of the Desert party at the same time'". Finding the "real" Outback.

Now this is how I like to have a good time. "During the hill walk, rectal temperatures were measured continuously." Alright, the article isn't that interesting; I just wanted to put that quote out there.

Something different

nfctd.com