The father of the "Green Revolution" died

MSNBC:

Agricultural scientist Norman Borlaug, the father of the "green revolution" who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in combating world hunger and saving hundreds of millions of lives, died Saturday in Texas, a Texas A&M University spokeswoman said. He was 95.

From his Nobel Lecture, which was in 1970:

For the underprivileged billions in the forgotten world, hunger has been a constant companion, and starvation has all too often lurked in the nearby shadows. To millions of these unfortunates, who have long lived in despair, the green revolution seems like a miracle that has generated new hope for the future. ....

... Some critics have said that the green revolution has created more problems than it has solved. This I cannot accept, for I believe it is far better for mankind to be struggling with new problems caused by abundance rather than with the old problem of famine. Certainly, loyalty to the status quo in food production - when being pressured by population growth - cannot break the chains that have bound the peasant to poverty and hunger. One must ask: Is it just to criticize the green revolution, with its recognized accomplishments, for failure to correct all the social-economic ills of the world that have accumulated from the days of Adam and Eve up to the present? Change we must, or we will perish as a species, just as did the dinosaurs in the late Cretaceous.

The green revolution is a change in the right direction, but it has not transformed the world into Utopia. None are more keenly aware of its limitations than those who started it and fought for its success. But there has been solid accomplishment, as I have already shown by concrete examples. I have also tried to indicate the various opportunities for capitalizing more fully on the new materials that were produced and the new methods that were devised. And, above all, I cannot emphasize too strongly the fact that further progress depends on intelligent, integrated, and persistent effort by government leaders, statesmen, tradesmen, scientists, educators, and communication agencies, including the press, radio, and television.

Thank you, Dr. Borlaug.

"Hard" times for the porn industry :-)

It used to be a "chest" thumping claim that there was no recession in the porn industry. That it was nothing but "growth" year to year. Not anymore. This time, even the porn industry is "shrinking" and is "busted"; quote of the day:

Pornography in general has become “like potato chips, everywhere and cheap, to be consumed and tossed,” says Ms Hartley. It’s not the same as in the golden age when she joined. “The industry will shrink and stay shrunken,” she reckons.

Real news, versus the Onion News Network

My students, and readers of this blog (ed: really? there are readers?) know how much I am a fan of The Onion. But, some times, real news items are so outlandish that they confirm that it is only a very fine line between the Onion's satire and the real world itself. Here is one such example, which one would think that The Onion made it up, but, alas, is a real world news:

A teenage girl agreed to have under-age sex because she wanted to lose her virginity before the Large Hadron Collider caused the end of the world, it has been reported.

I would laugh this off, but for the fact that this is a report in the Telegraph, and it is not an April 1st issue either. How unfortunate that scientific illiteracy results in horrible outcomes!

The Telegraph further notes that:

[Police] in Brisbane, Australia believe that the teenage girl was so scared by the doomsday speculation that she agreed to have under-age sex with a boy in their school lavatories.

Her fears came to light after their sex acts were filmed by another boy at the school, with the footage circulated among pupils via their mobile phones.

Police have launched an investigation under child pornography laws, although The Courier-Mail newspaper reported that they did not expect to bring any charges.

Oh boy!

BTW, if you are curious about the status of the Large Hadron Collider, which came to a halt after a great deal of hype about what the scientific knowledge that it would add:

Unfortunately on 19th September a serious fault developed damaging a number of superconducting magnets. The repair will required a long technical intervention which overlaps with the planned winter shutdown. The LHC beam will, therefore, not see beam again before September 2009.

Given that we are already almost at mid-September, ..... I wonder whether the re-start will not be for a while?

More on the monetary worth of college

Adding my growing list!

Via Richard Florida

My only hassle with this chart is how it refers to "college costs" when it is strictly about private colleges.

My hypothesis is that the gap exists, and is widening, for graduates of public universities also. But, the gap will not be this wide.

Advice to college freshmen, and returning students too

Daniel Drezner:

1. Turn off your cell phone before entering class. You are 21 or under, so think about the following question: is there any call so important that the pain of missing it exceeds the pain of the death stare that will emanate from our instructor when your Ringtone goes off?
2. For that matter, shut down your wifi as well. Think you can check Facebook, e-mail, Twitter, and still absorb the class lecture? You can't. Don't even try, because the moment you drift away, it will be next to impossible to re-engage with the class session. For those students resistant to this idea, here's a pragmatic piece of advice -- try shutting the wifi down for the first 20 minutes of the class session. If the class still puts you into a stupor, surf away!
3. Read your f#%$ing syllabi. There are things that will annoy your professors more than asking questions that are clearly answered in your course syllabus..... things like waterboarding.
4. Yes, you can use Wikipedia as a research tool; no, you can't footnote it. Sure, Wikipedia is one obvious route towards researching a paper. The key, however, is not to stop at Wikipedia, but to follow the footnotes. Citing a Wikipedia entry is lame; citing a research article referenced by the entry is significantly less lame.
   

Solving the 11-trillion dollar debt problem

God Bless Octavia!

U.S. Government Wipes Out National Debt

Why a Master's degree for 5th grade teaching?

I have always found it difficult to understand why elementary school teachers with graduate degrees are paid more--degrees whether in the subject area or in the art of teaching. My instinct has been that this unnecessary credential ends up adding cost to the system, inflates educational qualifications by setting precedents, while not delivering additional benefits to student learning. But, this has been only my conjecture and, hence, never voiced my thoughts on it. Until now.

I was reading a post somewhere that referred to a comment from Matt Yglesias about compensation for teachers. Yglesias is not any ideological nutcase, and the Center for American Progress, while certainly to the left of the political center, is more like Clinton's New Democrats. So, later when I had some time, I followed up on what the CAP had to say on teachers and degrees, and it is pretty darn interesting:

Teacher salaries increase each year with longevity and graduate credits, making them destined to escalate, and yet they have little link to student achievement.

Decoupling salary from experience is a tall order, but forward progress on school reform requires school districts to revamp their spending habits somehow. One habit related to experienced-based salary is the practice of paying a teacher with a master’s degree more than an otherwise identical teacher with only a bachelor’s degree. The long-cherished “master’s bump” makes little sense from a strategic point of view.

On average, master’s degrees in education bear no relation to student achievement. Master’s degrees in math and science have been linked to improved student achievement in those subjects, but 90 percent of teachers’ master’s degrees are in education programs—a notoriously unfocused and process-dominated course of study. Because of the financial rewards associated with getting this degree, the education master’s experienced the highest growth rate of all master’s degrees between 1997 and 2007.

Now, I have data to work with, and my instinct-based hypothesis has some backing. (Note: the university I work for has a pretty busy master's in teaching program. My comments do not imply in any way that they are directed at that program. I have walked around with this hypothesis ever since I started thinking about public policy issues, back when I was in Southern California.)

So, how much is the cost escalation because of the additional compensation for graduate degree holders?

A 2007 study estimated that 2.1 percent of all current expenditures can be attributed to teacher compensation related to master’s degrees. Seen another way, the master’s bump costs the average school district $174 per pupil.
... A Nebraska lawmaker, for example, should probably be aware that, on a yearly basis, roughly $81 million dollars—$279 per pupil—are tied up in master’s degrees and thus unavailable for other purposes. During this time of fiscal stringency, it should raise eyebrows when a state automatically allocates over 3 percent of the average per pupil expenditure in a manner that is not even suspected of promoting higher levels of student achievement.

Hmmm .... here in Oregon, according to this study, the extra cost as a result of this master's bump is $109,520,560. That is, $109 million? Wow!!!

Global warming. Trade. Economic savings?

The NY Times:

Two German ships are poised to complete that transit for the first time, aided by the retreat of Arctic ice that scientists have linked to global warming.

Good news, or bad news?

[The] Russians hope that the transit of the German ships will inaugurate the passage as a reliable shipping route, and that the combination of the melting ice and the economic benefits of the shortcut — it is thousands of miles shorter than various southerly routes — will eventually make the Arctic passage a summer competitor with the Suez Canal.

And where is this headed?

Though the window for sailing the route north of Russia is only a few weeks a year, it trims days to weeks off trips and saves fuel. For example, the voyage from Yokohama, Japan, to Rotterdam via the Northeast Passage is about 4,450 miles shorter than the currently preferred route through the Suez Canal, according to the Russian Ministry of Transport.

Neils Stolberg, the president of the Beluga Group, said this week that the Arctic transit was not an experiment but the beginning of opening the route to outside traffic. He said his company already had new contracts for taking 1,000 tons of goods from Asia to Siberia next summer.

The public option swow(e) job

Here is Robert Reich:

So will Snowe play ball? It depends. Her idea (evidently encouraged by Rahm Emanuel, the President's chief of staff) is to hold off on any public option. Give the private insurance companies a period of time -- say, five years -- within which to make changes that extend coverage to more people and also drive down long-term costs. If those goals for coverage and cost aren't met by end of the five-year grace period, kaboom: the public option is triggered -- which will force such changes on the insurance companies.

The beauty of Snowe's proposal is that it seems to offer Blue Dogs a way out and liberal Democrats a way in. Nobody has to vote for or against a public option. The public option just happens automatically if its purposes -- wider coverage and lower costs -- aren't achieved. And the trigger idea seems so, well, centrist.

The problem is twofold. First, it's impossible to design airtight goals for coverage and cost reductions that won't be picked over by five thousand lobbyists and as many lawyers and litigators even if, at the end of the grace period, it's apparent to everyone else that the goals aren't met. Washington is a vast cesspool of well-paid specialists who know how to stop anything resembling a "trigger." Believe me, they will.

Second, any controversial proposal with some powerful support behind it that gets delayed -- for five years or three years or whenever -- is politically dead. Supporters lose interest. Public attention wanders. The media are on to other issues. Right now the public option is very much alive because so many Democrats care deeply about it, with good reason. But put it off for years, and assign it to the lawyers and lobbyists I just mentioned, and you can kiss it goodbye for ever.

If the idea is to have a public option waiting in the wings in case private insurers blow it, why wait for it at all? If it gets lower costs and wider coverage, it should be included right from the start.

What worries me isn't just that the mainstream media are calling Snowe's trigger "centrist," but that the White House might see it as an easy out. "I continue to believe that a public option within that basket of insurance choices would help improve quality and bring down costs," the President said Monday. Fine. But he hasn't yet said the public option is essential. He hasn't threatened to veto a bill lacking it.

If you are late to the party, and are wondering what "public option" means, no problems. Click here for details.

IKEA Heights. Cool. Funny. The future of TV?

HT

One party democracy. Send in the clowns.

I have mentioned this before, and I will repeat it forever: Thomas Friedman writes good columns when he stays away from metaphors. The latest NY Times column is an example of a good column; excerpt:

Our one-party democracy is worse. The fact is, on both the energy/climate legislation and health care legislation, only the Democrats are really playing. With a few notable exceptions, the Republican Party is standing, arms folded and saying “no.” Many of them just want President Obama to fail. Such a waste. Mr. Obama is not a socialist; he’s a centrist. But if he’s forced to depend entirely on his own party to pass legislation, he will be whipsawed by its different factions.

The Republicans are being utterly irresponsible. I mean, aren't representatives supposed to act on behalf of their constituents, and not merely react all the time?
Send in the clowns.

Limbaugh and Beck cross the Rubicon :-(

David Shenk:

Glenn Beck has said that Obama has "a deep seated hatred for white people," and that the U.S. "is going to come out a fascist state."

Rush Limbaugh has said, "It's the most dangerous time in my life for freedom and liberty in this country...This is statism, totalitarianism versus freedom."

...

These are not political statements. These are statements of fear and hatred.

Among others, Joe Klein is terrified:

The intensity of this [is] getting pretty scary...and dangerous? We are heading toward a cliff and the usual brakes of civil discourse are not working. Indeed, the Republicans have the pedal to the metal...I'm usually not one to panic or be overly worried about the state of our country...but I have a sinking feeling about where we're headed now. I hope I'm wrong.

We need to find a way out of this.

I do not watch Faux News, and nor do I listen to Limbaugh radio. So, I had no idea about such horrible statements. How awful! :-(

Healthcare and Higher Education .... continued

This topic is rapidly gaining attention at different places. I hope my academic colleagues are following the discussions and commentaries.
The latest one is from David Leonhardt of the NY Times--he includes public universities in "a list of organizations whose failures had done the most damage to the American economy in recent years."

That ought to hurt somewhere! I teach at a public university--a regional one, like the regionals that Leonhardt refers to. What are our graduation rates?
The following is the "Percentage of first-time, full-time freshmen entering and graduating from the same institution within six years."

• 2000-2001: 39.5%
• 2001-2002: 41.1%
• 2002-2003: 41.6%
• 2003-2004: 42.9%
• 2004-2005: 44.4%
• 2005-2006: 43.5%
• 2006-2007: 45.5%
• 2007-2008: 39.5%

These numbers are not unlike the ones Leonhardt cites: "Eastern Michigan (39 percent) or Western Michigan (54 percent)."

Leonhardt goes on to write:

Students see no need to graduate in four years. Doing so, as one told the book’s authors, is “like leaving the party at 10:30 p.m.” Graduation delayed often becomes graduation denied. Administrators then make excuses for their graduation rates. And policy makers hand out money based on how many students a college enrolls rather than on what it does with those students.

There is a real parallel here to health care. We pay doctors and hospitals for more care instead of better care, and what do we get? More care, even if in many cases it doesn’t make us healthier.

In education, the incentives can be truly perverse. Because large lecture classes are cheaper for a college than seminars, freshmen are cheaper than upperclassmen. So a college that allows many of its underclassmen to drop out may be helping its bottom line.

The blogger at the Economist disagrees, and contends that low completion rates and delayed graduation result from inadequate preparation at K-12:

America has a serious and growing problem in its primary and secondary education systems, and lacklustre college graduation rates are a symptom of that problem. Fix the former and the latter will largely take care of itself.

Everybody ought to be blamed here. Including me.

BTW, how does my university explain the phenomenal drop in graduation rates from what seemed to be an upward movement in the chart and back to 2000-2001 conditions?

The decline in 2007-08 graduation rates are a result of the challenging campus climate of several years ago. WOU engaged in a difficult 2005-07 collective bargaining process and experienced serious financial difficulty resulting in changes in senior administration. The uncertainty caused by these events resulted in many students choosing to leave WOU. This exodus was first evident in the 2003-04 drop in freshman retention rates and continued for several years. Fall 2006 and fall 2007 retention rates have substantially improved and will likely lead to increased graduation rates following several depressed years. The effect of campus climate and uncertainty on student persistence is evident and worthy of special consideration as the system discusses efficiencies during the current financial crisis.

Hmmm .... nice try :-) I wonder if the union folks, who are currently in the next round of contract negotiations, actually read this report! If perchance they did, well, it is not like improving student graduation rates is the highest priority for them either. Neither tweedledum nor tweedledee will make this an issue :-(

Election nightmares from Afghanistan and Iran

When I wrote in an opinion piece back in May that elections in Iran and Afghanistan will have implications for the rest of the world, my sense was that both the elections will be close, and the result would be internal polarization leading to unrest, which would then spill outside the borders. And, almost everything there blows up.

While the polarization and riots and a police state have already happened in Iran, I am still surprised at the stupidly orchestrated electoral fraud. I mean, can't they at least copy the American model on that? haha!

Now, all kidding aside, the Afghan situation worries me. Because, at least in Iran the US could be a spectator hoping that the Ayatollah's beard would be yanked off by angry protesters. But, Afghanistan is a different story--we are deeply entrenched in Afghanistan. Whatever happens there, we will always be considered an accomplice, if not the main agent. As the blog Abu Muqawama puts it (HT), ""another Iran" -- only with our fingerprints all over it." Ouch!

Healthcare Q/A with Obama: the musical

Creativity unleashed on the web. Awesome. Thankfully, there is no way we can return to the dark ages, I mean, pre-www :-) HT

Jobs, earnings, and the liberal arts

Best Undergrad College Degrees By Salary

Methodology Annual pay for Bachelors graduates without higher degrees. Typical starting graduates have 2 years of experience; mid-career have 15 years. See full methodology for more.

Do GenXers dream of tenure?

Academics, who for the most part have supported healthcare reform for the wrong reasons, might be in for trouble if many of their arguments are used against academe. I have blogged about this before, and it turns out that I might be on the correct track after all .... Here is how the first paragraph in an opinion piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education starts:

Is higher education in the same position as health care—ripe for reform by the federal government? Both sectors certainly face similar challenges to the established protocol: higher costs, diminished resources, uneven access, inconsistent quality, inadequate means of defining and evaluating results, greater demands, and expensive technology.

We must voluntarily initiate substantial changes.

Just as a we are way ahead of the rest of the world with respect to innovative medical and surgical techniques, our higher education system is way ahead of most of the rest of the world--here is one small little comparison. There are lots and lots of changes we could and need to implement. But, as much as we look for easy targets in healthcare reform, we offer an easy target when it comes to critiques of academe. And you know what that easy target is (and this is NOT my number one issue though): tenure.

The opinion in the Chronicle continues:

One central piece of the puzzle concerns the tenure system, hatched in another era by a generation of mostly white males with stay-at-home wives, who came of age in the 1930s and 40s. Like the work rules of newspaper guilds and auto workers, the tenure system does not fit contemporary economic realities, nor does it accommodate those Generation Xers and Millennials who work within the system under very different, and increasingly complex, conditions.

As a member of the first year cohort of GenXers--yes, I am that young, dammit!--I can easily see that my professional differences have a generational characteristic as well. I agree with the author here:

To cite just a few differences: Generation X prefers collaboration to competition; openness to secrecy; community to autonomy; flexibility to uniformity; diversity to homogeneity; interdisciplinary structures to disciplinary silos; and family-work life balance to 24/7 careers.

When, if ever, will the next generation of scholars have a chance to reconsider, and perhaps rewrite, the rules? Will the canon simply pass unquestioned and unexamined from one generation to the next, even as adherence to dogma reduces the tenured ranks? Will academe adapt to new members, or like some organized religions, will orthodoxy persist even as congregants leave?

In a Harvard Magazine article published in 2002, Richard P. Chait, a research professor of higher education at Harvard, and I proposed a "constitutional convention" at which a representative sample of faculty members, selected to mirror the diversity the academy presumably desires, would convene to rethink tenure policy. We asked, "Would the document that emerges essentially paraphrase or materially depart from the 1940 AAUP Statement of Principles on Tenure and Academic Freedom?" Based on what I have since heard from hundreds of junior faculty members over the past 15 years, with ever more desperation, I think the rules would be different.

Yes, they would be different. Indeed! The author's conclusion is the same as the one that I have been talking, writing, blogging about for a while:

Academe cannot continue with business as usual. In fact, inertia has produced, almost indiscernibly, a new status quo where tenured and tenure-track faculty members are an endangered species.

Religion 24x7 in India

Every time I visit India, I am more amazed than ever at the explicit presence of religion in the public sphere. From autorickshaws, where drivers have their own gods as they insanely weave through the traffic, to government offices where practically everybody displays some religious symbol or the other, it is simply impossible to take a breather from god. Even the beach is littered with remnants of religious rites; in fact, families create some makeshift prayer thing right there on the sands. It also seems like people are more religious than before. I had never seen so many women wearing purdahs when I lived in India. Nor did I see the kind of crazy crowds at each and every temple.

So, it does not surprise me any bit to read in the Hindu that:

A national survey conducted by the Centre for Developing Societies, New Delhi, testifies to the growing influence of religion in Indian society. According to this survey, four out of 10 people are very religious and five out of 10 are religious. That is to say that 90 per cent of the respondents claimed to be religious — performing rituals, visiting places of worship and undertaking pilgrimages. Among them, 30 per cent claimed to have become more religious during the last five years. An increase in the number of religious institutions is also an indication of the greater hold of religion on society. Enlightenment and modernity in India have not led to the decline of the influence of religiosity. If anything, it has only increased.

About 30 percent becoming more religious over the last five years!

Such an ever present religion means that India's politics is far from secular. And then when you throw in the caste issues, well, .... The opinion piece itself meanders, which might be because it is an excerpt from a longer lecture. In any case, the conclusion is right on:

the use of religion for political ends has substantially increased during the last few decades. Such a development has serious implications for a secular state and society. Retrieving the secular character of the public sphere is therefore imperative; otherwise its religious character is likely to impinge upon the functions of the state.

One might wonder how this affects the functions of the state. Here is an example--a news item from the same issue of the Hindu. The rabidly open anti-Muslim rhetoric of the chief minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi, who oversaw the worst communal violence when, as Robert Kaplan writes, "More than 400 women were raped; 2,000 people, overwhelmingly Muslim, murdered; and 200,000 more made homeless throughout the state." All in a matter of hours :-(

An excerpt from the news item, which is about a judge's verdict:

In his 243-page, hand-written report, Mr. Tamang has named the then "encounter specialist" of the Gujarat police, D.G. Vanzara, among others, accused in the "cold-blooded murder" of the teenaged girl and the three others.

Mr. Vanzara and several other policemen are already in jail in connection with the killing of Sohrabuddin Sheikh, which the government confessed before the Supreme Court was a case of "fake encounter."...

Claiming that Ishrat and the three others were killed by the police officers for their personal interest - to get promotions and appreciation from the Chief Minister - Mr. Tamang appended a list of top police officers, running to about two pages, whom he held responsible for the fake encounter.

These political rogues will, of course, be the first in line to pay homage to Gandhi, whose birth anniversary is round the corner. Yep, it was in the state of Gujarat that Gandhi was born!