Mark Byron

The HEAV Act- Part I - A Modest Proposal

Here's a little political thought experiment that will likely make me lose any conservative street cred that I have, if my last post didn't do it already.

The next Republican president puts forward a proposal to give every K-12 student a $2000 voucher to go to whatever school the student wants to go to on the condition that the school district that the student is in matches the voucher. If the kid goes to public schools, the system gets two grand from Uncle Sam, no strings attached. As part of the deal, No Child Left Behind and most other federal school regulations are scrapped. Special Ed and other high-degree-of-difficulty students will get higher voucher amounts to account for the lower teacher-student ratios in such programs.

That will put school districts $2K ahead for the kids they currently have and $2K in the hole for kids in private schools. $4k won't get you into BlueNose Academy, but it will get you into the local Catholic or evangelical school with a bit out of pocket.

Using my local schools as a guide, Blessed Sacrament charges $5000 for non-parisioners and Calvary Baptist charges $4600 for kids of non-members. The $4K voucher will cover the lion share of that, and many schools charging more than that might wind up "eating the co-pay" if they can make up the difference in donations.

After the NEA is done throwing a conniption fit, Senate Democrats make a counter-offer. We'll go with your voucher plan for K-12 if you make the Ryan-Wyden plan open to all citizens rather than just those on Medicare. Here's a write-up on the plan from last month

Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden and House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan on Thursday [12/15/11] plan to introduce a new Medicare reform plan that would allow seniors to choose between traditional Medicare and new private insurance programs.

The plan has some key differences from the Ryan blueprint that Republicans had rallied around earlier this year — and which Democrats had been united in pummelling in Congress and on the campaign trail as the beginning of the end of Medicare.

Dirty Harry and friends will push Obamacare under the bus if we make everyone eligible for Medicare and give them the option of taking a voucher for the average cost of coverage to an insurance company. If they already have a labor contract with qualifying coverage at work, they can cash in the voucher and keep their coverage. New labor contracts will see the voucher go to the employer if the employee wants the company health insurance.

The downside is that will cost money; the reason they needed the individual mandate is that didn't require shelling out cash for most folks and stuck the tab with businesses and the self-employed. We'll have the Cain Memorial VAT tax, a 9% tax on all purchases, with credit for VAT tax paid for supplies. The CBO has yet to score this bill, but they estimate that 9% should cover the cost of providing health care to all pre-seniors.

After Rand Paul gets done with some colorful verbiage and a 13-hour one-man filibuster, the Senate takes up consideration of the Health and Education Voucher Act

Assuming there isn't any killer details in the HEAV Act, would that be something that would make sense?

Just For Fun, He Says "Get a Job... and a Bath."

This Bruce Hornsby earwig was presented by Newt dissing the Occupiers-

The movement "starts with the premise that we all owe them everything," said Gingrich. And the movement's sense of entitlement is a "symptom how much the left has collapsed as a moral system in this country, and why you need to reassert something as simple as saying, 'Go get a job right after you take a bath,'" the former speaker of the House concluded.

With unemployment up around 9% and underemployment close to twice that, that's easier said than done; I'm in the latter category, holding down a nice part time job but wanting more. It's a nice line that goes over well in a Republican primary, but it sounds a bit too much like Hornsby's silk-suited one-percenter from The Way it Is, taunting the folks at the unemployment office.

However, Newt has a very good point slightly overplayed. A lot of college grads have the assumption that a good job is waiting for them once they graduate; the archetypal Occupier is the guy who can't find work with his master's degree in puppetry. Many less comic people with more marketable degrees are still on the outside looking in; everybody in the education system gave them the assumption that they had a career automatically waiting for them when they graduated, and the harsh reality doesn't match, making them bitter since their entitlement wasn't cashed in.

Part of that is the more disorganized US economy. In a more European system, more structured economies will feed college grads into standardized positions, but that structure doesn't help create a dynamic economy, disenfranchising folks who can't get a foot in the door.

In a US system, an over-emphasis on education as a door-opener creates a bit of systematic unemployment as people with liberal arts degrees and some specialist degrees chasing a declining number of jobs looking for their skills, with elementary ed degree folks working at a day-care center and Master of Library Arts grads clerking at Barnes and Noble... or PhD's in finance tutoring part time on-line.

Glenn Reynolds has been blogging on a pending higher ed bubble as of late; many of the Occupiers bought into the bubble and are grousing about their busted can of Jooky.

We're Gonna Need a Bigger East

Boise and Colorado Springs are in the East? Boise is closer to the Far East than the Big East, but in the ongoing game of musical conference chairs, the Big East is looking to reel in Boise State, Air Force and Navy as football-only schools and snag Central Florida as an all-sport school. If they can stem any further bleeding, that would put them at 12 football schools and open up a championship game.

Talk about big tents.

Hopaway Bride

TCU looks like it is changing its mind and is going to go to the Big 12 rather than the Big East. The Big East didn't make much sense other than as a way to get into an AQ conference; the Big 12 is in their back yard and TCU makes a good swap-out for A&M in a reconstituted South division. The Big East will get a $5M exit fee for a team that never played a game in it; there's a one-liner there, but I can't quite make it work.

The next problem is filling in the Big 12 North, which is down to four and may be down to three if Missouri jumps ship for the SEC. Louisville, West Virginia and BYU might be possibilities, as might Memphis and Cincinnati.

There might not be much left of the Big East once the dust settles. Sending Louisville, WV and Cincy to the Big 12 and UConn and Rutgers to the ACC would polish off all but South Florida from the Big East's football schools.

This looks like someone is playing a Sim NCAA game with real life.

Coed Nekkid Musical Chairs

Here is where things seem to be ending up once the balls stop bouncing in the college sports game. It looks like five major conferences will emerge, the ACC, Big 10, SEC, PAC-16 and what I'm christening the Fly-Over Conference scopping up the Big12 and Big East refugees.

PAC 16
Inland	Coastal
Texas	USC
Texas Tech	UCLA
Oklahoma	Standford
Oklahoma State	Cal
Arizona	Oregon
Arizona State	Oregon State
Utah	Washington
Colorado	Washington State

That makes a nice neat break, with the old PAC8 getting back together again.

ACC
North	South
BC	UNC
Uconn	NC State
Syracuse	Duke
Pittsburgh	Wake Forest
Rutgers	Clemson
Maryland	Georgia Tech
Virginia	Florida State
Virginia Tech	Miami

Once again, if the rumors of Rutgers and UConn are true, you get a nice north-south break, rather than the awkward one we have at present.

SEC
West	East
Texas A&M	Florida
LSU	Georgia
Arkansas	South Carolina
Missouri	Alabama
Mississippi St.	Auburn
Ole Miss	Tennessee
Kentucky	Vanderbilt

My friends in Lexington won't like getting UK sent west, but the other alternatives would either send Vandy west or break up the Alabama-Auburn Iron Bowl. This seems to be the most stable package for the SEC. One could see the Oklahoma schools coming in, but the inertia seems to have them pointing west.

Big Ten
North (Legends)	South (Leaders)
Michigan	Penn State
Michigan State	Ohio State
Nebraska	Indiana
Northwestern	Purdue
Minnesota	Illinois
Iowa	Wisconsin

There isn't anyone left in the region that would be a good fit. Notre Dame might work here, but you'd need a dance partner, which is in short supply among the available free agents. Missouri would be a good option; Iowa State would make sense geographically but not economically, as it doesn't add many eyeballs. However, if Mizzou heads to the SEC, the Big 10 seems set, with the exception of changing those funky division names.

Fly-Overs
West	East
Baylor	South Florida
Kansas	Cincinnati
Kansas St	Louisville
TCU	West Virgina
Iowa State	Notre Dame
BYU	Memphis

This is very flexible. I see 12 teams, for it gets you to a playoff. You could do this with nine teams, leaving Notre Dame, BYU and Memphis out; Memphis is a C-USA school, but would round out this conference rather well.

The Big East would get taken down to a smaller, basketball-centric core, shorn of its football schools, but the core of mainly Catholic big-city Rust Belt schools makes more sense.

I'm not sure how coherent 16-team conferences are. You'd likely play teams in the other division once every four years in football, if you go with a nine-game, round robin with in the division format. The WAC tried that back in the 90s and had the original ganstas go off and form the MWC. It makes more sense from a TV contract basis than it does from an academic basis.

Trip Two in the Books

I'm back in my comfy chair in the den after a second South U weekend, this one in Savannah. They have a nice main campus which reminds me a bit of Warner U (nee Warner Southern) and a bit of Florida Southern's Frank Lloyd Wright layout.

Of course, I had to fly through Atlanta and have a 5.5 hour layover; my scheduled flight got postponed than canceled, creating a mass exodus over to the ticket counter of Savannah-bound folks scrambling for alternatives.

I was this close to staying in Atlanta and doing the class from there (we do a teleconference with Atlanta, Columbia and Savannah and the first Saturday was in Atlanta), but the Delta ticket gal pulled a rabbit out of a hat and got me a ticket on the 8:30 flight... first class, no less. A guy who I was talking to got a similar bump-up, to seat 1D; I invoked the old Bob Eucker ad "Looks like I'm in the front rooooow." and he harmonized on "front rooooow".

We almost didn't get out of Atlanta, as the nasty stormfront that was item two on the BBC site just now was just about to hit. We were seeing those nasty red and orange shades on the radar heading our way and things were getting very dark (cue the "does that have a Hemi in it?" guy-"That caint be good"); we took off in the rain, but not yet thundery enough to shut things down. One of my Atlanta students, who was 15 minutes late, mentioned that a lot of power lines were down there once the storm did hit later Friday and early Saturday.

Disraeli said that there were three types of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics (I was teaching the latter yesterday). Disraeli never had to fly through Hartsfield, or he'd have a fourth- Atlanta airport schedules... at least in the afternoon and evening where weather and mechanical delays can create a game of musical gates. My morning flight back to Flint went just fine and on time other than returning to a sleety, windy mess.

Class proper went very well, better than any of the Saturday double-headers I had at Warner U. So, things are looking up.

One and Underdone?

Michael Wilbon's waxing about basketball's good ol' days when players had to stay in school longer and gets Jay Bilas in for backup-

"Now, it doesn't mean we're not going to have a great tournament; I think it could be an even better tournament than we normally have because it'll be volatile and it'll be fun to watch. The competition still is going to be great. But the quality of play is not what it has been. We've still got outstanding players; we don't have the tremendous superstars that are older that we used to have."

Bilas continued, "This is something the basketball community, the NBA included, is going to have to put its arms around because it's not just hurting the college game; it's hurting the NBA, too ... and the NBA product could be even better than it is, and right now I think it's outstanding."

As one who caught the UK bug while living in Lexington, it would have been nice to see the cadre that Calipari brought in last season get a second shot at the title after laying an egg in the regionals. However, John Wall is learning more basketball playing an 82 game NBA season with Washington than he would have playing a 30ish-game season at Kentucky. Likewise, Demarcus Cousins is getting a better basketball education at Sacremento.

Would the NBA be better if those two were forced to spend a second year (or more) playing college ball? If that were the case, why were teams hot to draft them back in June? If the NBA were better without them, the team formerly known as the Bullets would have sent Wall to the D-League like Houston did with Wall's UK running mate Patrick Paterson for a time earlier in the year.

If you made the current one-and-done rule requiring players to be a year out of high school before going to the NBA a three-and-done like the NFL does, you would have a crop of sophmores and juniors playing college ball. Brandon Knight would be coming off the bench for UK (or play for another school in the market for a starting point gaurd since Wall and Eric Bledsoe would be hogging the starting backcourt spots for two more years) and create a deeper UK team.

However, would the NBA be better with four guys off of D-league rosters than the four UK underclassmen who went pro this year? I think not.

It is nice to see players develop in college, to mature in their game and to see them develop a legacy at the school other than one fleeting season of promise like the UK bunch did last year. However, keeping folks who are ready for the next level in an extended period of indentured servitude (yes, tuition and room and board at a good school is nothing to sneeze at, but it's a fraction of the millions they make at the next level) doesn't help the game that much.

Bilas makes his living covering college basketball, so he has a vested interest in seeing that brand strengthened. Seeing folks like Grant Hill or Kalin Lucas stay for four years is better for fans of their schools than the one-and-dones that litter the modern landscape, but college is supposed to be preparing folks for life.

If one of my undergrad finance students had a million dollar offer from an investment banking firm, I'm not going to tell him to stay in school and finish his BBA; he can do that part-time while making the bongo bucks. That won't happen too often, but old-school folks would like to do just that with basketball stars.

Does the one-and-dones level the playing field? Yes, the more mature teams from mid-pack power conference schools and mid-majors can use age and treachery against youth and inexperience, so we see more parity in college ball and more teams with barely-above .500 records make the field, even adjusting for the extra three teams in this year's field.

However, that is just a side-effect of a somewhat free market in basketball talent. Shumpeter's creative destruction winds up doing a number on college dynasties, since if a team is good enough to win a title, it usually has an underclassman or two who will move on to the next level; the Florida team of a few years back who came back for a second title rather than go pro is the exception to the rule.

Southern Exposure

I'm going to be back in the teaching business at the end of the month; I'm working for South University, which is very reminiscent of Sullivan U as a for-profit southern business-centric college that grew from being a junior college into a full-function university. Both South and Sullivan have open up pharmacy schools in the late '00s. Interesting, South is named after a Mr. South who bought the school decades ago, not unlike the Sullivan family who still runs their namesake school.

The classes I'll be teaching are in their Accelerated MBA program, which meet for two all-day sessions on Saturdays while doing the rest on-line; it's a bit like the hybrid EMBA program at Sullivan where they met once a month in person and did the rest on-line, except with twice the face time and doing a class a month rather than three classes a quarter. I'll be teaching an introductory accounting-stats-finance class in April and a quant-methods class in May; more may well be coming if things work right.

I'll still be in Michigan; they're flying me into Atlanta for the Saturday classes. I've been through Atlanta any number of times, especially when we were living in Florida; we either drove through town or flew through Hartsfield, but I've never been to Atlanta. Not that I'll see too much, putting in a 10-hour day in the classroom and flying back to Midland on Sunday.

Dr. Byron is back in the saddle; I've tweaked the course syllabus and am working on an accounting 101 podcast, so I'm getting my professor sea legs back after a five-quarter absence.

Visiting Professor = I Just Lost My Seat

Here's to two new members of academe, Russ Feingold and Arlen Specter. Feingold will be teaching at Marquette's law school and Snarlin' Arlen is heading to the Penn.

The WSJ was making Marquette out to be some conservative bastion, being Catholic and Joe McCarthy's alma mater. That's a cheap and innaccurate shot, given that the left-leaning Jesuits at Marquette would be more likely to have been a target of Tailgunner Joe than a supporter were they in the public eye 60 years ago. Feingold will fit right in all too well.

One interesting thought is that Feingold might wind up heading right back to Washington. Wisconsin's other Senate seat is up next year, and Herb Kohl is of an age where retirement is a real option; Kohl turns 76 next month and might opt to call it a career, especially if he can turn things over to a rather good, albeit liberal, legistator.

Wave elections wind up carrying some decent pols out to sea, and Feingold was one of those this go-round; if there is a more liberal-friendly political climate next year, he might get the Cheeseheads to send him back to Washington.

 

Leaders Have People Following Them

I've been under the weather the past week and have yet to comment on the Leaders and Legends naming faux pas of the Big Ten. It may well wind up going the way of New Coke if commish Jim Delany's reaction is legit-

"I think we have enough experience with names, and expansion and development of divisions, to know that you never, rarely, get 90 percent approval rating," Delany said during the interview. "But to get a 90 percent non-approval rating was, you know, really surprising."

One of the problems with the balanced Big Ten split is that there isn't an easy geographic monicker to tag them. The ACC has a simular problem, where their divisions don't have geographic sense; they went with Atlantic and Coastal divisions via cannibalizing the conference name.

It's likely better to go with North for Legends and South for Leaders. It's hard to be a Leader when no one is following you.

Indian Giver

Harvard's already noted for their huge endowment, but they got a huge $50 million donation from Tata Motors to build a new business school building in Boston proper. Tata's current chair, Ratan Tata, is a Harvard grad.

That's going to buy more than $50m in goodwill, as they will have a friendly ear with one of the most influential business-schools in the world. Harvard Business Review case-studies are staples in business schools around the country and to have them flowing out of an Indian car company that is on the rise will give Tata some cache as they expand into the US market in the years to come.

If it were Toyota making the donation, a lot of folks would get reflexively protectionist. However, we don't have much in the way of anti-Indian sentiment other than occasional frustration at Bangalore call-center workers.

P.S.-I like the current ad with the Russian stall-artist-"You're tenacious like bull... I like... please hold."

Grad School Shuffle

Here's an interesting college football story, where former Oregon QB Jeremiah Masoli is getting a chance to play for Ole Miss this fall. Masoli got kicked off the Duck roster after multiple run ins with the law, but as a fifth-year senior who had already graduated, he took advantage of an NCAA rule that lets graduates with eligibility left to transfer without sitting out a year if their new school has a grad program that the old school didn't. Greg Paulus used that rule last year to play QB for Syracuse after playing basketball at Duke for four years.

If the NCAA were really pro-academics, they might want to change the rule to allow grads to transfer even if their schools had the program in question, especially if that was their undergrad major. Since your upper-division classes in a discipline are taught by the same professors that will be teaching the grad classes, you're going to be getting the same take on a field two or three times over. Having a new set of instructors at a difference school will give you a broader range of knowledge and insights.

However, that might lead to some volatility at the mid-major level. You could see a good QB graduate early as a third-year sophomore (easy to do if you go summers and/or CLEP/AP out of some classes; Patrick Patterson graduated from UK in three years, as did, if memory serves, Bernie Kosar) and transfer up to a better school for two more years.

The Old Gray BA, He Ain't What He Use to Be

Interesting but scary piece on unemployment, age and education. You're going to see fewer people with college degrees unemployed, but more of them are in the ranks of the long-term unemployed, especially those who are 45 and over. I recall a churchmate in Indy who was an unemployed computer programmer who was easily AARP-eligible; he had been unemployed for over two years.

I currently resemble that, for I have been underemployed for eight months after losing my teaching job in November; I've been freelance writing and online-tutoring part time, but regular work has been non-existant. Being both over-credentialed and under-experienced makes me a tough fit in a resume-driven job market.

It's somewhat encouraging to see that it isn't just me, but that a lot of folks in my boat are struggling.

May 4th +40

It will be interesting to see if this gets any press tomorrow, but they'll be marking the 40th anniversary of the Kent State shootings tomorrow. It's hard to think that they were only celebrating the 20th when I was getting ready to start grad school there two decades ago in 1990. Tempus doth fugit.

Spring is in the Air, and the Campus Natives are Restless

There is an annual ritual on campus in the spring (or late winter, if you want to go equinoxal on me)-

(1) colleges look at the budget for next year and see a gap between income and outgo

(2) colleges raise tuition and/or cut spending, usually the former, since the students don't get a vote and aren't colleagues

(3) the usual suspect students raise holy hell.

It's a bit more in the news this year, but this is stuff that goes on every March and April since I can remember. Cutting faculty slots means that the faculty are raising cane as well as the students, but this is an evergreen news story at this time of year just as some liberal critique of Christianity during later Lent.

Next

I try to be as transparent as possible,  but this one is hard; I got fired on Wednesday from my college teaching job, effective immediately. At least I don't have to deal with the long goodbye of my Warner gig, where my contract wasn't renewed and I was a lame duck from March through May.

In the long term, it seems to be for the best. I have struggled with depression and anxiety most of my life, and it makes it hard for me to be "on" in the classroom for long stretches and hard to focus on grading papers.

It's been a stretch for me to hold the 6-9:40 classes that an adult-ed night schedule calls for; stress-induced asthma sometimes kicked in to cut things short and panic attacks without breathing problems hit at other times. Many nights, I had to resort to pointing students to a previously recorded podcast because I wasn't up to teaching that night.

The three weeks out with bronchitis was the last straw for the powers that be; I wasn't delivering the goods I was being hired to do, as much as I was trying to.

I still have my on-line finance tutoring gig; right now, it's one night a week for this term, but I'll be up to 20-hours a week in a 9PM-1AM slot starting in January.  That's not enough to keep all the bills paid, but it will at least bring in enough cash to pay the basics.

I don't think I'm cut out to be a classroom teacher. I have the intellect for it and the caring, but not the persona. That's hard to accept, especially when I went on to get a doctorate to do just that.

Now, that PhD tends to hang like an albatross on my resume. "Why do I want to hire a PhD for [insert entry-level business job]?" is the question my resume gets when it shows up; I have talent, but I don't fit the mold. Somehow, I have to get someone to look past that and give me a chance, and I have to have the courage and confidence to try to find that person.

Yes, God is in control, but barring a word of knowledge, I have to jump through the normal job-hoops.

Any practical suggestions? Even better, any job leads that you could vouch for personally where you might be able to get my foot in the door for an interview. I'm in Lexington, KY but could relocate for the right position.

I'm good with spreadsheets, can program in Visual Basic and a little C++ and have business schooling up the wazoo (PhD and MBA in Finance and BBA in Accounting along with a BS in Political Science) and have worked as an accountant for three years, albeit in a hospital finance setting that falls through the standard AR/AP/Payroll/GL slots that accounting positions generally look for.

I have a lot of people in the Peanut Gallery who care deeply about me and I take comfort in that. I'll need to take more comfort in that as the give-and-take on current events I got from my students and colleagues at work is now gone.

Those Who Can't Teach, Research Teaching

It's a good thing my blood pressure was low when I went to the doctor yesterday, for this article started to raise it. I'm not a Tea Partier, but this is Exhibit A in why the Department of Education could be best made to disappear; here's some planned statements from department boss Arne Duncan-

"Schools of education have been renowned for being cash cows for universities," Duncan will say, according to his released remarks. "The large enrollment in education schools and their relatively low overhead have made them profit centers."

Duncan will say that universities divert the profits from education schools to other departments while doing little to invest in educational research and clinical training.

Most teacher colleges are in second-tier colleges that focus on teaching students rather than on research. It is true that you don't need a lot of extra equipment to teach education classes, but the same holds true for business and social science classes; when I was teaching at Warner U, their adult-ed business programs were major cash cows, supporting their traditional bible-college day students.

If we follow Duncan's logic, he wants college education to be more expensive. If the school of education has to plow any "profits" back into research, that will mean that tuition across the board will need to be raised or unprofitable departments cut in order to make room for the new education research.

OK, everyone at Central State U pays extra tuition and the Physics and Anatomy programs get downsized to pay for more education research. Remember to thank Arne for the increase in your student loan.

Duncan has been surrounded by researchers for years, both as Chicago school superintendent and now as Ed Secretary; his cohort is going to be research buffs who got to school district HQ or Washington primarily as education research experts rather than day-to-day teachers. That crowd will be biased towards more research, since that's the air they breathe.

1984 and Other Ancient Times

Here's a cute bit from Mickey Kaus where his memory is on the Fritz-

P.S.:Have Democrats forgotten how to talk about the welfare state? It seemed to me even Walter Mondale** talked about medical security effectively, back when Charles Krauthammer was writing speeches for him. (Mondale had a proven staple anecdote about what it meant to his mother to get her Medicare card). ... Bring back Mondale! There's another thing I thought I'd never say. ... 

** DeLong: Explain to the juiceboxers who this person was. Thanks

That's interesting on two levels; Krauthammer, who has grown up to become a conservative curmudgeon, albeit one with a status-quoian moderate streak, once worked for Mondale.

However, it's the juiceboxers line that interested me. I'm proctoring a quiz for my MGT 304 class this morning, and I have a trio (only three, great student-teacher ratio) of said juiceboxers, students in their 20s who were on Big Wheels or worse when Mondale ran for president in 1984. Even a 30-year-old of today would have been in kindergarten when Mondale was invoking Clara Peller's "Where's the beef?" in critiquing Gary Hart.

That means that anything in the 80s is ancient history. In finance class, you have to explain the rise of the junk bond, the stagflation of the late 70s-early 80s, the S&L crisis of the late 80s along with the Reagan tax cuts of 1981 and the tax overhaul of 1986 (whose savaging of real estate tax breaks helped cause said S&L crisis when commercial real estate went in the tank and took folks who lent to them down with them).

In the tech realm, you have to explain the IBM compatible/clone to them, since they grew up in a tech world where Dell has always been a mainstream brand; they're all IT majors, but their history is a bit weak. The old joke was that "no one ever got fired for buying IBM." Now, your modern IT folks could say the same about Dell.

I remember taking the equivilent of this MGT 304 class in 1988; at the time, I was taken aback when the textbook had to take a paragraph to explain Watergate. I was 26 at the time and lived through the era as a news-savvy middle-schooler, son of a social-studies teacher. However, a 20-year-old junior in 1988 was only 6 when Nixon was waiving goodbye while stepping onto Marine One for the last time.

Now, the health care debate of 1993 is equivalent ancient history for a traditional college student of today. Tempus doth fugit.

 

The Freshman Five

That sounds like one of those vocal groups of the pre-rock era, like adding one to the Four Freshmen; however, that's a more scentifically valid statement of college student weight gain.

I spent my freshman year going to my local community college, so I didn't get the "Freshman 15" (extra pounds of weight from all-you-can-eat cafeteria food) until I was a sophmore. They ran a study on Auburn U students and found that it was more like a five pound game.

One difference that a lot of modern dorms do is that they go away from a one-price, all-you-can-eat model for the cafeteria and go to an a-la-carte model where you pay for what you eat and have a quarterly/semester alotment of cafeteria credit as part of the dorm charge.

That's the model that Michigan State's Owen Hall used when I lived there in 1989-90, but that was the grad dorm; the undergrad dorms were still on the eat-utill-you-*&#( model at the time. Kent State had that model in most of it's dorms during my early-90s stay there and made cafeteria credit tradable; you'd often see a bear market on cafeteria credit at the end of a term as students who didn't use the cafeteria much would unload unused credits at 10-20 cents on the dollar.

However, if you give young people (or old people for that matter) unlimited food, they'll have the tendency to eat until stuffed, especially when you have unlimited desert, unlimited favorites and no mom and dad to reign you in. Also, for guys, eating a lot is often seen as a badge of honor, like the various eating contests that spring up; "all you can eat" is taken not as an invitation, but a challange.

We're All Just Numbers, After All

I'm grading one of my finance exams, and one of the questions revolved around the mythical Wauchula Tech who had a beta of 1.50. In financese, beta measures the sensitivity to the market with the normal stock having a beta of 1; a 1.5 would indicate a stock that's over-sensitive to the economy, or a cyclical stock in finance-speak.

With that background, here's the question and the LOL answer.

2008 is expected to be a down year on the stock market. Would Wauchula Tech be a good choice for your portfolio this year if the forecast is correct?

... it would depend on whether or not we go into a regression.

With all the election polling we have going, there's a good chance that we'll go into a regression analysis sooner or later. However, it would be a recession that we'd be more concerned with in this context.

Podcast People

For what it's worth, here's part of my work of the day, a new MP3 of the introduction of my ECO 510 lecture podcast, an LOL spiel from "Barry White." 

I have the whole lecture in MP3 form, but that's a 53-meg bandwidth-eater. Barry might do Your Demand Equals My Supply on his new Calculus of Love album, but my bandwidth supply is limited. I'll e-mail it to you if you're really interested. I can spare a few half-meg uploads.

Your Demand Equals My Supply

I'm fighting off a sinus infection with a bit of bronchitis, so my plan to do a podcast lecture for my online classes were on hold, except to have "Barry White" do a promo for the Byron Broadcasting Network. When I have some congestion, my voice drops an octave or two into a fine basso profundo.

So, I have "Barry" do the intro to the podcast, promising to have samples of his new ECO 510-inspired album The Calculus of Love later in the show. Songs include Your Demand Equals My Supply, I'm a Monopsonist for Your Love and Can't Get Enough of Calculus, Baby.

Once I get my throat cleared enough to speak straight, we'll get they guy who Barry calls the "white chocolate loveball from the land of the Chippewa" back to work.

Once I get it into MP3 form, I might just post it here.

Advanced Blogging

A new town to register a blog entry from; Frankfort. I'm off for a faculty "advance" today and am blogging from the Capital Plaza inn ballroom post-breakfast but pre-collaborative learning seminars.

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Things aren't going well in Pakistan, as they've resorted to putting former PM Bhutto under house arrest. That sounds more like Burma, where their main opposition leader is under house arrest more often than not, than an erstwhile US ally.

For some reason, I see the name Bhutto and have word-association flashback to Animal House's Bluto. My visual pun has John Belushi popping out from under that veil and hollering "FOOD FIGHT!" before throwing a big blob of mashed potatoes at Musharraf.

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Date rape drug kiddy toys. China's not been having a good year with the quality of their exports.

Columbia Day, Part i-Faith and Science

Before you light up the comment section, let me take care of the proper pejoratives for Iranian president Ahmadinejad. He's a representative of a rather backward and intolerant form of Islam that needs to be restrained in the long run; in addition, they have a jihadi ethic that has caused us problems in Lebanon and elsewhere. We need to be giving his government the eagle eye and keep them from causing any further mischief.

That being said, there are also some redeeming values in the guy, especially coming from a Christian perspective. If we can contain that desire for the lesser jihad, many Muslims can be an ally on a number of issues, including the intersection of science and faith.

I was thumbing through Ahmadinejad's Columbia speech last night; the core of it, if Christianized a bit, could have been given by Pope Benedict, and that's not a slam on the Pope. Ahmadinejad understands that reality transcends the physical. Here's an interesting passage that strikes a positive cord on the Christian side of the aisle.

In our culture, the word science has been defined as illumination. In fact, the science means brightness and the real science is a science which rescues the human being from ignorance, to his own benefit. In one of the widely accepted definitions of science, it is stated that it is the light which sheds to the hearts of those who have been selected by the almighty.

Therefore, according to this definition, science is a divine gift and the heart is where it resides. If we accept that science means illumination, then its scope supersedes the experimental sciences and it includes every hidden and disclosed reality.

One of the main harms inflicted against science is to limit it to experimental and physical sciences. This harm occurs even though it extends far beyond this scope. Realities of the world are not limited to physical realities and the materials, just a shadow of supreme reality. And physical creation is just one of the stories of the creation of the world.

Human being is just an example of the creation that is a combination of a material and the spirit. And another important point is the relationship of science and purity of spirit, life, behavior and ethics of the human being. In the teachings of the divine prophets, one reality shall always be attached to science; the reality of purity of spirit and good behavior. Knowledge and wisdom is pure and clear reality.

It is -- science is a light. It is a discovery of reality. And only a pure scholar and researcher, free from wrong ideologies, superstitions, selfishness and material trappings can discover -- discover the reality.

That's a tad Gnostic, but it underscores the idea that modern science has blinders on if it discounts a spiritual dimension to reality. If you exclude the supernatural from the discussion, you're excluding a big chunk of reality; a hard-to-quantify and hard-to-experiment-upon chunk, but a chunk nonetheless.

Muslim countries haven't been on the cutting edge of science and engineering as of late, but their early history had them pushing along science while Europe was in the Dark Ages; one reason we can joke about "the dreaded terror group al Gebra and their weapons of math instruction" is that we get the word algebra from Arabic. Since they see a god of order and rationality, they expect to see an orderly and rational universe, as we do; that gives them a heads-up from cultures who don't have a rational God in the mix.

We still may have to parking-lot a nuclear facility or two in Iran down the line, but there may be more common ground with the Muslim world that some would think. That common ground doesn't include wiping Israel off the map or quietly becoming good dhimmis in the Caliphate, but there are grounds for cooperation if we can put the geopolitical differences behind us.

Easier said than done.

 

Down on the Telecommuter Farm

I'm in the process of grading my International Business exam, and found myself reflecting on one of the questions I posed my students on people migrating in from rural areas to work in factories in developing countries.

The problem with that is people bring a agricultural mind-set, which is task-oriented rather than time-oriented. It doesn't matter if you milk the cows at 6:45AM sharp or start plowing the back-forty at 9:00 sharp; you milk the cows early, then start in on the fields, go into town for stuff, talk with friends for a bit, then come back and do more chores. Exactly when everything gets done is a minor issue, as long as they get done.

That attitude doesn't quite mesh with a factory mindset, where you're supposed to be there on time, take breaks on time and leave on time. People often have a hard time adjusting to a time-based paradigm.

What struck me is that many modern knowledge-workers are in a similar task-oriented framework. Other than my class-times in the evening and making sure I'm in the Sullivan building by 3PM for office hours, I'm in a task-oriented framework.

Here's today for example. Get up, have breakfast, take over the world a couple times in Risk on my laptop in the den, do half the essays on my FIN 510 final, chat with Eileen, do the other half, shower, get dressed, grab lunch at Culvers, go on to campus, check E-mail, check the news, grade some FIN 510 homework, grade some BUS 424 final essays, wander over and do that Appy State post, do some more 424 essays, get inspired to do this post, go back (hopefully) and finish off the last page of the 424 exam and post the grades for 424 in time to go up and here my 510 folks present their stock portfolios tonight at 6.

A lot of intelligentsia-folks are in a similar task-based framework, especially if their telecommuters. As long as the work gets done, they're not punching much of a time clock. There may be deadlines for getting the job done, but when it's done is up to them.

Back home on the cybernetic farm, y'all. Just need to go out to the back 40 and slop the Statement Analysis finals.

As long as I got here by 3PM, exactly when I do all that is up to me.

I'll Trade You Four Nickles for Your Paradigms

I think this is a first; this blog has been sited in an academic paper. A guy named Theophus Smith from a Dutch university has cited me in a paper titled "Deconstructing the Victim-Perpetrator Paradigm: A Heuristic."

I wish it was something profound that got cited, but it was passing along a funny cover to a birthday card that our home group leader got-

In the background is some trees, with a bobo-looking tourist (close-cropped graying beard, red shirt, khaki shorts and camera) hanging by the back of his shirt from a pine-tree branch. In the foreground, two bears-

His name's Bradshaw. He says he understands I came from a single-parent den with inadequate role models. He senses that my dysfunctional behavior is shame-based and codependent and he urges me to let my inner cub heal....... I say we eat him.

I posted that part in late 2003 and tacked on a link to a picture of the front of the card in March of 2006. Mr. Smith somehow found his way to my site, calling the cartoon "The ‘Why Do They Eat Us?’ Consternation." As a good academic, he gave the blog credit in footnote 6-"Artist unknown. Accessed online by this author on June 14, 2007 at http://markbyron.typepad.com/main/2003/12/sometimes_you_g.html."

Sometimes you get the cite, and sometimes the cite gets you.

From Cola Wars to Faygo Armageddon

If you're interested in how I spent most of my Saturday, it's in the continuation.

I spent from about 8:45AM to 2PM cranking out an example of a company analysis paper on National Beverage, the home of Shasta and Faygo soda-pops. I didn't know the group existed until I read a piece on Faygo's 100th anniversary earlier this week and found that it's parent company was an interesting and seemingly under-appreciated stock.

It's not quite a 100 paper; maybe a 96. However, it's a good example of what I'd be looking for from my students. I've added some hyperlinks to the publicly available stuff; the Hoovers database is on a subscription basis and Sullivan U has a subscription. I'm no APA geek, but at least I think I got the citation stuff down.

It will be interesting to see how many hits I get for this post; when I talk about companies in the past, their blog section of some company pages for places like Yahoo Finance send traffic my way.

Introverted P or Extraverted P

I'm close to the end of one of the busiest weeks of my life. I took possession of our new apartment yesterday and have my new white Pontiac Vibe out in the Sullivan parking lot as I write.

I took all the stuff I wasn't going to need tonight from my extended stay to the apartment, then got through today's 2.5 hour faculty in-service in one piece, grabbed a quick Qdoba-catered lunch that was part of the in-service and went out to get Shine 2.0 (Eileen named my late, great white Buick Park Avenue Shine) and came back to campus for my office hours a tad after my scheduled 3PM start. My department chair noted that I don't have to worry about holding office hours on days that we have in-services, since for night-school faculty, the office hours are more for supervisors knowing when they can bend your ear in person that for students.

Breathe a sigh of relief; my Supervision class will be a relief to finish.

We were covering Myers-Briggs in our meeting, and the last of the four dimensions they dealt with was Judging (a.k.a J) versus Perceiving (a.k.a. P); we were about an hour and a half into the meeting at that point when somebody asked "Speaking of P, when can we get a break?"

I guess an Introverted P uses a stall while an Extroverted P uses the urinal :-)

Maybe I Should Call it "Mobile-Computing Challenged?"

Some suffixes don't work well with some words. I was talking with my Portfolio Analysis class this evening and was checking to see how many of them had laptop computers. Much of the stuff we'll be working on, especially bond duration calculation, beg for spreadsheets, since the calculations are too complex to easily do on a calculator. You can do them on desktops, but it's nice to work on problems in class without having to reconvene in a computer lab.

Two of my four students had laptops; the other two were, as I innocently put it, "laptopless."  Laughter and blushes all around; that sounds like a description of prurient activity at a "gentleman's club" (a great oxymoron, since no real gentleman would be caught dead in such a joint) rather than a state of being portable-computing deprived.

Oh, yes, speaking of portable computing, the iPhone launches Friday PM, and folks are already lined up. Obnoxiosly early adopters.

Coming Up for Air

Recommendation: try not to start teaching at a new school, moving into a new apartment and shopping for a new car at the same time.

I can start to breathe again; I've got the paperwork in process to buy the Vibe I looked at on Monday, my first class is behind me, and all the move-in and move-out details have been lined up.  Yeah! Drop back five yards and breathe a sigh of relief.

My International Business class was generally respectful, had a fair mix of talkative and non-talkative students and had only a few grumbles about holding the class until near the official end of 9:40. I had to ad-lib the first part of the lecture on globalization, as I only got the textbook about a half-hour before class; however, the prepared section on international trade seemed to flow better, as I had a PowerPoint, with handouts, ready for that one.

As per the Vibe-I only got a round-the-side-streets-near-the-mall test-drive on Monday, so I asked to get a serious drive this morning. I took the car west of Lexington out to the Bluegrass Parkway, so I could see how it did on the open road. Smooth as a baby's bottom at 70MPH. Sold.

To top it off, my Wednesday night Portfolio Management class has been officially changed to an independent study, so I don't have to hold them the whole four hours each night; I can take the professorial prerogative to go over the syllabus, tell them to read the chapters on fundamental analysis and bond pricing, and as Pastor Milton used to use as his benediction, tell them to "Be blessed and be gone." I'm not honor-bound to hold an independent study for the entire period, since there is no official period.

Tomorrow, I take possession of the new apartment and arrange for car insurance. Hopefully, I can de-tense enough to get some blogging going again.