To Maintain Enrollments Professors Are Often Pressured to Inflate Grades

(p. 198) Dedicated college professors demand that students do the difficult reading and writing necessary to become skillful in understanding the complexities of the world. But the university distributes resources like research funds and new faculty positions based in part on how many students populate classes and how positively students evaluate courses. How much do you simplify to keep up enrollment and keep resources flowing into your department?

Source:
Schwartz, Barry, and Kenneth Sharpe. Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing. New York: Riverhead Books, 2010.

“Nimble” Account of the Creative Destruction of the Music Industry

(p. C1) Stephen Witt’s nimble new book, “How Music Got Free,” is the richest explanation to date about how the arrival of the MP3 upended almost everything about how music is distributed, consumed and stored. It’s a story you may think you know, but Mr. Witt brings fresh reporting to bear, and complicates things in terrific ways.
He pushes past Napster (Sean Fanning, dorm room, lawsuits) and goes deep on the German audio engineers who, drawing on decades of research into how the ear works, spent years developing the MP3 only to almost see it nearly become the Betamax to another group’s VHS.
. . .
(p. C6) Even better, he has found the man — a manager at a CD factory in small-town North Carolina — who over eight years leaked nearly 2,000 albums before their release, including some of the best-known rap albums of all time. He smuggled most of them out behind an oversized belt buckle before ripping them and putting them online.
Mr. Witt refers to this winsome if somewhat hapless manager, Dell Glover, as “the most fearsome digital pirate of them all.”
. . .
Into these two narratives Mr. Witt inserts a third, the story of Doug Morris, who ran the Universal Music Group from 1995 to 2011. At some points you wonder if Mr. Morris has been introduced just so the author can have sick fun with him.
The German inventors and Mr. Glover operate as if they unwittingly have voodoo dolls of this man. Every time they make an advance, and prick the music industry, there’s a jump to Mr. Morris for a reaction shot, screaming in his corner office.
. . .
Mr. Witt covers a lot of terrain in “How Music Got Free” without ever becoming bogged down in one place for long. He is knowledgeable about intellectual property issues. In finding his reporting threads, he doesn’t miss the big picture: He gives us a loge seat to the entire digital music revolution.
He is especially good on the arrival of iTunes and the iPod.

For the full review, see:
DWIGHT GARNER. “Books of The Times; That Download Has a Back Story.” The New York Times (Tues., JUNE 16, 2015): C1 & C6.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date JUNE 15, 2015, and has the title “Books of The Times; Review: In ‘How Music Got Free,’ Stephen Witt Details an Industry Sea Change.”)

The book under review is:
Witt, Stephen. How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy. New York: Viking, 2015.

Computers Lack Intuition about How to Handle Novel Situations

(p. A29) It seems obvious: The best way to get rid of human error is to get rid of humans.
But that assumption, however fashionable, is itself erroneous. Our desire to liberate ourselves from ourselves is founded on a fallacy. We exaggerate the abilities of computers even as we give our own talents short shrift.
. . .
Human skill has no such constraints. Think of how Capt. Chesley B. Sullenberger III landed that Airbus A320 in the Hudson River after it hit a flock of geese and its engines lost power. Born of deep experience in the real world, such intuition lies beyond calculation. If computers had the ability to be amazed, they’d be amazed by us.
. . .
Computers break down. They have bugs. They get hacked. And when let loose in the world, they face situations that their programmers didn’t prepare them for. They work perfectly until they don’t.
. . .
We should view computers as our partners, with complementary abilities, not as our replacements.

For the full commentary, see:
NICHOLAS CARR. “Why Robots Will Always Need Us.” The New York Times (Weds., MAY 20, 2015): A29.
(Note: ellipses added.)

Army Corps of Engineers Blamed for Hurricane Katrina

(p. 13) NEW ORLEANS — Nearly 10 years on, one might assume that the case of Hurricane Katrina is closed.
That the catastrophic flooding of this city was caused not merely by a powerful storm but primarily by fatal engineering flaws in the city’s flood protection system has been proved by experts, acknowledged by the United States Army Corps of Engineers and underscored by residents here to anyone who might suggest otherwise.
But the efforts to establish responsibility with ever more precision — to ascertain just how many of those flaws were due to engineering, politics or money — have not stopped.

For the full story, see:
CAMPBELL ROBERTSON and JOHN SCHWARTZ. “Decade After Katrina, Pointing Finger Firmly at Army Corps.” The New York Times, First Section (Sun., MAY 24, 2015): 13 & 16.
(Note: the date of the online version of the story is MAY 23, 2015, and has the title “Decade After Katrina, Pointing Finger More Firmly at Army Corps.”)

Some Learn in Order to Gain Competence, Others Learn to Gain Direct Rewards

(p. 184) Think about two different tennis pros giving you tennis lessons. The first pro says things like “good shot” and “good swing” all the time, to encourage you. The second one says “good swing” only when you make a good swing. If hearing “good swing” gives you a hedonic charge, then you will prefer the first instructor to the second (more gold stars, more encouragement). But if what gives you the charge is getting better at tennis, you will prefer the second instructor to the first. That’s because the second instructor’s feedback to you is much more informative than the first one’s. You’re not after “good swing” gold stars; you’re after a better tennis game. So feedback is essential to the development of a complex skill– whether it be empathy or a strong forehand. But he-(p. 185)donic feedback, in the form of incentives, is not. It may even be counterproductive, as in the case of instructor number one.
In schools, tests provide an extremely important source of feedback– of information– to the teacher and the student– about how things are going. Tests, or something like them, often offer the best way to diagnose problems and correct them. So tests as a source of information are good and important. The problem is that in addition to providing information, tests provide outcomes that students, and their parents, and their teachers, want and like– outcomes like approval, prizes, awards, honors, special privileges, and school ratings. The hedonic character of these outcomes is what gets students and teachers to orient their work to passing the tests, and to regard what they do in the classroom as merely instrumental, as merely a means to various rewarding ends.
There are important differences between children oriented to getting A’s and children oriented to learning from their mistakes. Psychologist Carol Dweck and her associates have spent thirty years studying the incentive systems that govern the learning of children throughout the educational process. They have uncovered two fundamentally different approaches to learning in kids that can often lead to profound differences in how well kids learn. One group of kids has what Dweck has called performance goals; the other group has what she has called mastery goals. Children with performance goals are primarily interested in gaining favorable judgments of their competence. They want to do well on tests. They want social approval. They want awards. Children with mastery goals are primarily interested in increasing their competence rather than in demonstrating it. They want to encounter things that they can’t do and to learn from their failures. As Dweck puts it, performance-oriented children want to prove their ability, while mastery-oriented children want to improve their ability. Children with performance goals avoid challenges. They prefer tasks that are well within the range of their ability. Children with mastery goals seek challenges. They prefer tasks that strain the limits of their ability. Children with performance goals respond to failure by giving up. Children (p. 186) with mastery goals respond to failure by working harder. Children with performance goals take failure as a sign of their inadequacy and come to view the tasks at which they fail with a mixture of anxiety, boredom, and anger. Children with mastery goals take failure as a sign that their efforts, and not they, are inadequate, and they often come to view the tasks at which they fail with the kind of relish that comes when you encounter a worthy challenge.

Source:
Schwartz, Barry, and Kenneth Sharpe. Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing. New York: Riverhead Books, 2010.
(Note: italics in original.)

Woodrow Wilson Violated Free Speech

I viewed part of a CSPAN presentation on June 27, 2015 by Margaret MacMillan, based on her book The War that Ended Peace: The Road to 1914. (It was probably a rebroadcast.) The presentation seemed serious, well-informed, and judicious in trying to be fair and balanced to Woodrow Wilson. MacMillan is more sympathetic to Wilson than I am, but she made it quite clear that he enacted serious violations of free speech.

MacMillan’s book is:
MacMillan, Margaret. The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914. New York: Random House, 2013.

Feds Paid New York Journalist to Not Grow Crops in Oregon

(p. 11) As for the foolishness of agricultural subsidies, until recently, the federal government paid me, a New York journalist, $588 a year not to grow crops in Oregon. I rest my case.

For the full commentary, see:
Nicholas Kristof. “Our Water-Guzzling Food Factory.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., MAY 31, 2015): 11.
(Note: the date of the online version of the commentary is MAY 30, 2015.)

Drinking Water Not Harmed by Fracking

(p. A13) Fracking isn’t causing widespread damage to the nation’s drinking water, the Obama administration said in a long-awaited report released Thursday.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency–after a four-year study that is the U.S. government’s most comprehensive examination of the issue to date–concluded that hydraulic fracturing, as being carried out by industry and regulated by states, isn’t having “widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water.”

For the full story, see:
RUSSELL GOLD And AMY HARDER. “Fracking’s Harm to Water Not Widespread, EPA Says.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., June 5, 2015): A5.
(Note: the date of the online version of the story is June 4, 2015, and has the title “Fracking Has Had No ‘Widespread’ Impact on Drinking Water, EPA Finds.”)

Should Students Read to Learn, or to Get Gold Stars?

(p. 181) When a consultant tells teachers to concentrate on the bubble kids and ignore the kids who are most in need of help, something has gone wrong. And if gold stars turn reading from an adventure into a job, something has gone wrong. But what? The typical response to examples like these is not to blame incentives but to blame “dumb” incentives. The presumption is that “smart” incentives, or at least “smarter” incentives, will do the job.
This is a mistake. In many situations, for many activities, no incentives are smart enough. Teachers like Deborah Ball and Mrs. Dewey spend their day figuring out how much time to spend with each student and how to tailor what they teach to each student’s particular strengths and weaknesses. They are continually balancing conflicting aims– to treat all students equally, to give the struggling students more time, to energize and inspire the gifted students. Along comes the incentive to bring up the school’s test scores, and all the nuance and subtlety of Mrs. Dewey’s moment-by-moment decisions go out the window. And what “smarter” incentive is going to replace judgment in making sensitive choices in a complex and changing context like a classroom?
Or what, exactly, would you incentivize to encourage hospital custodian Luke to seek the kind and empathetic response to the distraught father who wanted his son’s room cleaned? Incentives are always based on meeting some specific, measurable criterion: read more books; raise more test scores; wash more floors. Left to his own devices, Luke asks himself, “What can I do to be caring?” and because he has moral skill, he comes up with a good answer. With “caring” incentivized, Luke (p. 182) might ask, “What do I have to do to get a raise or a bonus?” “Reclean the room” might be a right answer. “Look sympathetic” might be a right answer. “Be caring” surely is not. Aristotle thought that good
people do the right thing because it is the right thing. Doing the right thing because it’s the right thing unleashes the nuance, flexibility, and improvisation that moral challenges demand and moral skill enables. Doing the right thing for pay shuts down the nuance and flexibility.

Source:
Schwartz, Barry, and Kenneth Sharpe. Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing. New York: Riverhead Books, 2010.
(Note: italics in original.)

Conflict-of-Interest Politics Reduces Medical Collaboration with Industry and Slows Down Cures

(p. A15) The reality of modern medicine, Dr. Stossel argues, is that private industry is the engine of innovation, with productivity and new advances dependent on relationships between commercial interests and academic and research medicine. Companies, not universities or research with federal funding, run 85% of the medical-products pipeline. “We all inevitably have conflicts all the time. You only stop having conflicts when you’re dead. The only conflict-free situation is the grave,” he says.
The pursuit of the illusion “to be pure, to be priestly, to be supposedly uncorrupted by the profit motive,” Dr. Stossel says, often has the effect of banishing or else discounting the expertise of the people who know the most but whose integrity and objectivity are allegedly compromised by industry ties. What ought to matter more, he adds, is simply “Results. Competence. LeBron James–it’s putting the ball in the basket.”
. . .
Zero-tolerance conflict-of-interest editorial policies, Dr. Stossel says, suppress and distort debate by withholding positions of authority. “If you have an industry connection, if you really understand the topic, you can’t say anything,” he notes. “If you’re an editor, and you have an ideological predilection, you have all this power and you can say anything you want.”
Dr. Stossel is equally scorching about the drug and device companies and their trade organizations, which he says drift around like Rodney Dangerfield, complaining they don’t get no respect. They prefer not to be confrontational, they rarely fight back against the conflict-of-interest scolds. “They’re laying responsibility by default to the patients, the people who actually have a first-hand connection to whatever the disease is: ‘Goddammit, I want a cure.’ ”
Which is the larger point: The to-and-fro between publications not meant for lay readers can seem arcane, but the product of conflict-of-interest politics is fewer cures and new therapies. The predisposition against selling out to industry is pervasive, while reputations can be ruined overnight when researchers find themselves in a page-one exposé or hauled before Congress, even if there is no evidence of misconduct or bias.
Better, then, to conform in the cloisters than risk offending the conflict-of-interest orthodoxy–or translating some basic-research insight into a new treatment for patients. Dr. Rosenbaum reports: “The result is a stifling of honest discourse and potential discouragement of productive collaborations. . . . More strikingly, some of the young, talented physician-investigators I spoke with expressed worry about how any industry relationship would affect their careers.”
. . .
‘Pharmaphobia”–part polemic, part analytic investigation, a history of medicine and a memoir–deserves a wide readership. . . . “I’d rather get a conversation started with people who are smarter than I am about how complicated and granular and nuanced and unpredictable discovery is. Let’s not slow it down.”

For the full interview, see:
JOSEPH RAGO. “The Weekend Interview with Tom Stossel; A Cure for ‘Conflict of Interest’ Mania; A crusading physician says medical progress is hampered by a holier-than-thou ‘moralistic bullying.’.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., June 27, 2015): A15.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the interview has the date June 26, 2015, and has the title “A Cure for ‘Conflict of Interest’ Mania; A crusading physician says medical progress is hampered by a holier-than-thou ‘moralistic bullying.’.”)

The book mentioned in the interview, is:
Stossel, Thomas P. Pharmaphobia: How the Conflict of Interest Myth Undermines American Medical Innovation. Lanham, MS: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2015.

Environment Experts Admit Obama Policies Are Expensive, Ineffective and May Make Environment Worse

(p. B1) Is the American approach to combating climate change going off the rails?
Last year, President Obama set a goal of reducing carbon emissions by as much as 28 percent from 2005 levels by 2025, only 10 years from now.
Now, environmental experts are suggesting that some parts of the strategy are, at best, a waste of money and time. At worst, they are setting the United States in the wrong direction entirely.
That is the view of some of the world’s top environmental organizations, including Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and the Sierra Club. On Tuesday, they argued in a letter to the White House that allowing the burning of biomass to help reduce consumption of fossil fuels in the nation’s power plants, as proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency, would violate the Clean Air Act.
It’s also the view of economists from the University of Chicago and the University of California, Berkeley, who on Tuesday released the disappointing results of a field test of the federal Weatherization Assistance Program, the government’s largest effort to improve residential energy efficiency.
It turns out that burning biomass — wood, mainly — for power produces 50 percent more CO2 than burning coal. And even if new forest growth were to eventually suck all of it out of the atmosphere, it would take decades — perhaps more than a century — to make up the difference and break even with coal.
One study commissioned by the state of Massachusetts concluded that the climate impacts of burning wood were worse than those for coal for 45 years, and (p. B8) worse than for natural gas for about 90 years. Humans do not have that kind of time.
The energy efficiency push has a different problem: It is much too expensive. The weatherization improvements cost more than twice as much as households’ energy savings. Even after including the broad social benefits from less pollution, it was still a bad deal. Indeed, the program spent $329 per ton of CO2 it kept out of the air, some eight times as much as the administration’s estimate of the social cost of damages caused by carbon.
These are not small setbacks. Most of the scenarios that keep the rise in global temperatures under a 2 degree Celsius ceiling, the point at which scientists fear the risk of climate upheaval rises significantly, rely heavily on bioenergy, including biomass for power generation and other biofuels, which face similar problems.

For the full commentary, see:
Eduardo Porter. “ECONOMIC SCENE; Climate Change Calls for Science, Not Hope.” The New York Times (Sun., JUNE 24, 2015): B1 & B8.
(Note: the date of the online version of the commentary is JUNE 23, 2015, and has the title “ECONOMIC SCENE; Climate Change Calls for Science, Not Hope.”)

The letter to the Obama administration from many environmental organizations, including Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and the Sierra Club, is:
http://www.pfpi.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Groups-bioenergy-letter-to-OMB-6-23-15.pdf

The research mentioned above by economists from Berkeley and the University of Chicago, is:
Fowlie, Meredith, Michael Greenstone, and Catherine Wolfram. “Do Energy Efficiency Investments Deliver? Evidence from the Weatherization Assistance Program.” Working Paper, The Becker-Friedman Institute for Research in Economics, The University of Chicago, June 2015.

The research mentioned above that was commissioned by the state of Massachusetts, is:
Walker, Thomas , Dr. Peter Cardellichio, Andrea Colnes, Dr. John Gunn, Brian Kittler, Bob Perschel, Christopher Recchia, and Dr. David Saah. “Biomass Sustainability and Carbon Policy Study, Executive Summary.” Manomet, MA: Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences, June 2010.