August 2009 Archives
Nick observes that subjective and qualitative features of colleges are neglected by rankings publications, which promote excessive reliance on numbers. I agree the danger exists. Yet I haven't found strong evidence of how influential rankings have been in decisions. Has the popularity of US News changed the balance of peer institutions? I'm sure the question has been studied by college admissions officers, but not sure how much has been published.
As an academic specializing in psychological testing and measurement, crimfan points to academic papers raising serious questions about the validity of rankings, and to misunderstandings of the significance of numbers, especially to problems of spurious precision. rd calls for more flexibility in letting students and their parents weigh factors on their own and develop personalized rankings, and crimfan agrees.
I would add that the problem is a special case of a paradox going back to Plato. To evaluate colleges, a student needs the skills of quantitative interpretation (of ranking statistics) and close reading (of colleges' own statements) that he or she is going to college to get. When I attended a meeting of mathematics teachers and others involved in quantitative literacy, I discovered a wide range of opinions. (If you're interested, the papers and summary comments, including mine, have been published. Of two good college math departments, one may be much more interested in quantitative skills across the curriculum, while the faculty of another may, as one speaker put it, "want to clone ourselves." So one student's dream of personal attention and mentoring in math might be a less assured beginner's disappointment.)
High school seniors and parents unhappy with conventional rankings should be aware of an alternative supported by colleges themselves, the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE). It is sponsored by colleges and universities, mainly as an internal tool for improving teaching and learning, not for comparison. USA Today has made the voluntarily released scores of colleges available on an interactive web site, While some of the leading private colleges and state universities are included, many others are not. And there's no easy way to compile a list of high-scoring institutions. One of the big problems of social science research is how much of the really interesting stuff is not released to the public -- on the open Web or in paid-subscription journals.
One way to fill the gap: read commentary in student newspapers and alumni magazines. You'll get a more rounded picture of what's going on -- as in this candid look at academic and extracurricular life at Harvard. Two related policies complicate life for undergraduates at convetionally highly ranked research universities. One is "steeples of excellence," first implemented at Stanford after the Second World War, in which some schools and departments are deliberately given more resources and others, even originally strong ones, are more modestly funded or even dropped. The other is "the well-rounded class," as opposed to the all-around student; instead of going for the very highest academic credentials, some colleges make most of their admissions decisions ultimately for signs of extracurricular gifts, often very specific, like a particular instrument in an orchestra or a crucial position on a team. So the college newspaper may, more than ever, be the competitor of the classroom -- considering Harvard tuition, a negatively-paid journalism job.In fact it's leading member of the Harvard faculty, the social psychologist Daniel Gilbert, who has pointed to our inability to predict how happy any decision is going to make us. He counsels instead relying on our "psychological immune system."
"I was Jewish, and I attended a public college," he wrote. "I had a double whammy against me."
That experience made him a champion of standardized tests when others attacked them. If there had been a medical school admissions test, he said, he could have shown the medical schools that he was the equal of students from private universities.
But as often happens, unfairness encouraged him to do what he had always excelled at, teaching and entrepreneurship. He made millions because he loved to help people learn more than he appreciated the money; as a tutor in school, he would even pay some classmates to listen to him. And equally impressively, as a businessman he was able to train tutors and thus build what became a national organization.
Getting back to the Frank Capra script, there's a new set of foes, the higher education and testing establishments, committed to the idea that studying for tests doesn't help, a dogma that Kaplan was able to vanquish, at least in the public mind. The climax is the crucial board meeting, where a intervention by the ultimate management guru saves the day, clinching the $45 million Stanley H. Kaplan Co. acquisition in 1984:
The Post was not his only suitor and Post publisher Katharine Graham was lukewarm about the purchase; but Post financial executive Dick Simmons was enthusiastic, and Post board member Warren G. Buffett said Kaplan reminded him of Rose Blumkin, an irascible, hard-toiling Russian transplant whose discount Furniture Mart was outselling every furniture store in the country when Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway bought it in 1983.
And there's the heartwarming conclusion of celebrity, philanthropy, autobiography, and vindication by yet another guru, Malcolm Gladwell of the New Yorker. Not exactly a Horatio Alger story -- Kaplan's family was middle class rather than poor, and fiercely devoted to education -- but close enough.
Now comes the surprising sequel. Stanley Kaplan embraced the competitive academic world in which he had excelled. Haven't business executives and politicians been telling us that we need to learn from the rigorous tests of Japan, China, and Korea, countries that threaten to overtake us in technology? Won't more testing (and more tutoring) yield more skills?
On the same day the Kaplan obituaries appeared, the web site Inside Higher Ed featured a paper by researchers at the University of Michigan and Harvard and released by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) showing, for example, that the number of students spending at least ten hours a week on homework has actually declined as test preparation activities have risen.
"The increased competition that currently exists for admission to a more selective college might have real benefits if it were to increase learning amongst high school students," the authors write. "However, our analysis suggests that there are reasons to be suspicious that this congenial outcome might not hold true. Moreover, the increased resources parents and students are able to use to improve their odds of admission at top colleges put low-income students at a disadvantage."
Of course most of this didn't happen under Mr. Kaplan's watch; he stepped down as CEO at approximately the beginning of the paper's main base line, 1992, when reported high-school homework hours reached an all-time peak.
The NBER paper won't settle the debate on testing; it's about much more than test prep companies. Its results on inequality of opportunity call into question the Post's obituary headline phrase "The Poor Man's Private School." But it leaves open the possibility that Stanley Kaplan's greatest historic role, for all his ideals and generosity to good causes, was not in fostering educational equity and excellence. It was in helping diversify and ultimately preserve a great national newspaper. Mr. Kaplan did indeed go to Washington.
(Photo: Kaplan Inc)
The US News college ranking issue is out again, with the usual suspects on top and the same chorus of administrators, professors, and think tanks attacking the study's methodology, on the usual grounds -- favoring research-oriented richer institutions, distorting admissions policies for artificial inflation of selectivity and test scores, and ignoring hard-to-measure outcomes of education. Of course, rankings also encourage colleges to address real issues like retention rates and overuse of adjunct faculty. Anyway, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports that a campaign to boycott the peer rating of other institutions has stalled; participation inched up last year. The methodology of some critics may be no better than the magazine's. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) rates colleges for policies like required survey courses and gives Fs to the three liberal arts colleges rated highest by US News: Williams, Amherst, and Swarthmore. Are graduates of those colleges really so ill-educated? Not those I've known. Surveys, like specialized cafeteria courses, may be boring and forgettable or electrifying, but giving them all an A is grade inflation for cultural conservatives.On the public university side, the best piece I've seen on the ratings business appeared last spring in the Michigan Daily, by the student journalist Stephen Ostrowski:
The U.S. News and World Report lists the University as the 26th-best institution of higher education in the country, wedged comfortably between the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of Southern California, respectively.
Forbes Magazine, meanwhile, listed the University at 161st, right between Lake Forest College and Wisconsin Lutheran College.
In the world of college rankings, neck-breaking double takes abound. But it's the nature of the business that discrepancies exist -- why would Forbes begin ranking schools if its list was going to match up almost exactly with U.S. News, the leading rankings publication? The flip side to that, of course, is how could a dozen different publications differentiate their ranking systems enough to make printing them worthwhile? The trick is widely varying methodologies so that the same qualities that got a university in one publication's top 20 barely warrant a ranking above 200 to another publication.
I'm biased as a former contributor to the US News rankings issue, but I think it (and the competition) should be praised for making information, however imperfect, available. Five years ago, Gregg Easterbrook deflated admissions anxiety in the Atlantic, and US News has pointed to the range of "A+ Schools for B Students." Magazines have done a lot to moderate academic neuroses. Higher education needs more, not fewer, rankings and lists.
(Photo: Flickr User Alotor)
Dan Akst wonders:
Why, given their horrific history during the 20th century, aren't Europeans more wary of the power of the state? After the horrors of WW I, the rise of European fascism, the Nazis, the Second World War, the protracted disaster of Communism etc., it would seem to me that something like paranoia would be the mildest sensible response toward government.I've often asked myself about this. For example, I studied in Germany in the late 1960s and had to register with the police like all other residents, including the Heidelberg students who had finished one of the most tumultuous years in the university's history by the time I arrived there in 1968. Yet questioning such police powers were not on even the student radicals' agenda.
Part of the answer might have been Lenin's famous remark that if German communists ever stormed the railroad stations, they would buy platform tickets first. But there's another explanation. The leftist critics of the European state have not wanted to demolish it but to retain its machinery for their own uses once they achieved power.
Another part is that while rich Europeans pay higher taxes than the US wealthy, that includes the right to use state services to the fullest, and not just in health care. No New York City private-school admissions neurosis (or $450/hour consultants), no private university tuition financing headaches. And the ineffable joy, unknown to our Interstates, of watching slower cars deferentially slink into the right-hand lane as your fast Audi overtakes them on the Autobahn at 200 km/hour (I've had a taste of this as a passenger -- with a State car and driver). You've paid your annual tax bill for that big engine and your heavy fuel tax. Enjoy!
On the other hand, most Americans didn't share Dwight Eisenhower's alarm about the Military- Industrial Complex, and the armed forces and military contracts have a much bigger role here than there. To Europeans, American aerospace giants are at least as State- subsidized as their own Airbus. Yes, we kept Western Europe under our nuclear and conventional umbrella during the Cold War. It's the "horrific history" of two wars and interwar militarism that Dan mentions that made outsourcing part of defense to the our State look like a good deal. Even Sept. 11 hardly changed this attitude; I remember arriving for a conference in Ulm on one of the first flights back, virtually silent on board, but there seemed no concern there, even though it was already known that terrorist cells in Germany were behind the attacks. Meanwhile, polls reveal that many Americans support the State's right to torture and condone maltreatment of other prisoners. "Paranoia toward the government?" Au contraire.
Republican presidents from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush talked about reducing government's role but changed little. And the American multi-tiered Federal - State - County - Local jurisdictions, with their frequent conflicts and correspondingly greater role for larger numbers of lawyers, means a greater rather than a small government presence. Wall Street in the bailout age has been clinging to the State for dear life, not to mention bonuses. (A deal's a deal, right?)
(Photos: Wikimedia Commons)
The Athenaeum Club, 1830. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
When the great and good convene to ponder the future in historic landmark buildings, there is not always happy news. A group of pharmaceutical executives and government regulators, invoking the name of one of London's most venerable clubs, seem to be ratifying the idea of an "innovation drought," according to the Financial Times.
The Athenaeum Group's proposals seem unexceptionable in themselves: more efficient regulation, more cooperation among pharmaceutical researchers to combat a discouraging trend:
. . . the number of new medicines has steadily dropped, while the cost of bringing each one to market has risen sharply to more than $1bn (£605m, €700m).Still, it concerns me to read that Thomas Lonngren, chief of the European Union's pharmaceutical regulatory agency,
. . . argues that the biggest barrier to progress is science itself. "We are going into a new era of drug development where it's getting more and more complex. It is generally accepted that we have moved from low- to high-hanging fruit. Mother Nature is saying that she has the cards."This idea is plausible, but isn't it part of the scientific outlook to question "generally accepted" views, especially in one's own industry? Only four years ago, the Australian physicians Robin Warren and Barry Marshall received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery (beginning with old-fashioned serendipity) of the bacterium Heliobacter pylori and its role in causing stomach ulcers. Is it really conceivable that there are no other mavericks with ideas that will cost less than a billion dollars to develop and test?
In a newspaper interview as late as 1902 the great physicist and technologist Lord Kelvin, an Athenaeum member, told a newspaper interviewer (link courtesy of Wikipedia):
Neither the balloon, nor the aeroplane, nor the gliding machine will be a practical success.Fortunately the Wright Brothers did not depend on Lord Kelvin for funding, and demonstrated their flyer at Kitty Hawk the following year anyway.
The social psychologist Daniel Gilbert, in his book Stumbling on Happiness, notes about this episode that "when scientists make erroneous predictions, they almost always err by predicting that the future will be too much like the present."
Too much "realism" about lagging innovation can become a self-fulfilling prophecy with the discouraging message of an ever more resistant Mother Nature. Naysayers to the contrary, there is a place for hype. And there's a lot to be said for the motto of the 1968 student protestors: "Be realistic, demand the impossible."
As Niall Ferguson defends his recent exercise in feline jollity, the outcry in some quarters recalls the European journalism of the interwar years, with which the Harvard historian of the twentieth century must be familiar. French newspaper writers could not resist gags based on the homophones Shah and chat, provoking minor diplomatic crises. In one of them, as Time Magazine reported in 1937, . . . the King of Kings was furious over "another French insult." Month ago L'Europe Nouvelle criticized the economic condition of Iran. The King of Kings demanded an apology, received one. A French columnist last week reopened the wound by rehearsing the incident under the punning headline // n'y avait pas la de quoi fouetter un Shah. This was a parody of the French phrase "There was nothing there with which to beat a cat," suggesting that the King of Kings had made a fuss about nothing. The poor pun was enough to make Reza Shah Pahlavi last week recall to Teheran his Minister to France. Mirza Abolghas-sem Nadjm "for an explanation," and withdraw his promise to lend Iranian art objects to the coming Paris International Exhibition which opens May 1.
Thanks to my brother, David Tenner, for calling my attention to the French-Iranian episode years ago.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
The Simon Wiesenthal Center has deplored comparisons of President Obama's health care plan logo with Third Reich insignia:
"It is preposterous to try and make a connection between the President's health care logo and the Nazi Party symbol, the Reichsadler," said Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
"Americans have every right to be critical of the President's health care plan but we demean ourselves and everything that America stands for when we compare either Democrats or Republicans to the Nazi Third Reich. Some of us may be too liberal and others too conservative, but none of us are Nazis," Rabbi Hier concluded.
Agreed. But behind the cynical distortion, there's the disturbing fact that strong political graphics are more closely associated with dictatorial regimes than with democracy. That doesn't mean that America has cloned European totalitarian design directly; it does suggest that both New Deal and fascist symbols drew on a common Western modernist heritage. The National Recovery Administration (NRA), with its corporatist controls on American life, was criticized by the Left as well as by many business interests. Its logo does not seem to have been influenced by the Nazis. Its designer was no activist hothead but a respected advertising man, George Coiner of N. W. Ayer & Son, celebrated even now for introducing great artists and photographers into American commercial publicity. He even designed the font.credit: Wikimedia Commons
Still, this poster, with its grasping statist talons and message of subordination to a national goal, has disturbing overtones to the post-World War Two mind, and the NRA was soon declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, and it is even now a prime target of the New Deal's conservative and libertarian critics.
I asked my friend Steven Heller, author of a recent book on art and dictatorship, Iron Fists, about the New Deal. He replied in an e-mail that it was
...certainly rooted in similar aesthetics to the fascists and nazis - strong logos, initials, posters galore. But it was our fascism, which means it was democracy at work.No place reflects this better than the main chamber of the Supreme Court itself. Cass Gilbert, the architect, considered Mussolini a great man. The historian Michael G. Kammen has described their mutual admiration society. Gilbert met personally with the Duce to assure the finest possible columns for the main chamber, according to an article in the 1976 Supreme Court Historical Society Yearbook:
Architecturally the U.S. built its early identity on Greece and on Roman monumentalism. Well, that was not dissimilar from the neo-classicism of the Fascists.
As for the marble in the Courtroom itself, Gilbert felt that only the ivory buff and goldenReturning to the Obama health plan logo, the problem isn't authoritarian classicism. It's the adaptation of campaign brand identity to a program intended to cross lines of party and ideology. The dictatorships--communist as well as fascist--did have the habit of sharing symbols among agencies. The Nazis published color illustrated books of official logos as guidelines. The party secretary Achille Starace wrote a Vademecum of Fascist Style. In the Soviet Union, the hammer and sickle collectively was such a versatile and ubiquitous theme that the Russian airline Aeroflot is still using it.
marble from the Montarrenti quarries near Siena, Italy, would be beautiful enough for this room. So intent was he upon procuring the best quality marble that in May 1933, he met with Premier Mussolini in Rome to ask his assistance in guaranteeing that the Siena quarries sent nothing inferior to the official sample marble that he had selected and specified for use in the Supreme Courtroom.
This heritage might be affecting, subliminally, the reception of the Obama health care logo. And there's another issue that has nothing to do with twentieth century tyrants. It's the staff with two coiled snakes. These (as Louis N. Magner wrote in A History of Medicine) represent not the one-serpent, wingless staff of Asclepius, the healer, but "the magic wand of Mercury, the messenger of the gods and patron of thieves and merchants."
Asclepius, credit: Nina Aldin Thune, via Wikipedia Commons; Merury, credit: Wikimedia Commons
So why not remove the disputed logo from the medical plan and recycle it for the financial ER of the Troubled Asset Relief Program?
StevenHeller interviewed the designer of the original Obama logo immediately after the election, and his blog recently reviewed some 1970s predecessors of the design, not remotely fascist but as reassuringly all-American as Ohio housing developments and California cheese. For more on design, ethics, and public life, see my conversation with Steven Heller in Print Magaine.
Top Photo Credit: Simon Wiesenthal Center release
Many newspapers now run only paid memorial announcements, but the New York Times is one of a few that still publish professionally written obituaries to die for. My most recent favorite is Margalit Fox on the violin maker Carleen Hutchins.
It gets better, but what really got to me was that the old Bell Telephone System, whatever else you could say about it, had standards that consumers took for granted. To think that before mobile phones, generations of Americans scribbled their notes on slabs of luthier-grade hardwood without knowing it.Mrs. Hutchins was known for her pragmatism. In 1957 her friend Virginia Apgar, a doctor and amateur violinmaker, began to covet a shelf made of perfect maple. The shelf was in a phone booth in the medical school of Columbia University, where Dr. Apgar taught.
One night she and Mrs. Hutchins stole into the building with some tools and a replacement shelf, stained to match. As Dr. Apgar stood guard, Mrs. Hutchins set to work.
And don't miss the Times's link to Dr. Apgar's page at the National Library of Medicine.
I think improving airline safety is a poor allocation of resources. If the airline/aviation industry focused instead on lowering costs, fewer people would drive, saving more lives. How many people a year die because it was cheaper to drive than fly?
The comparative safety of aviation over driving is based on fatalities per million passenger miles. But most of the risks of flight are on takeoff and landing. According to one air safety site, only 12 percent of fatalities occur while cruising; the rest happen on or shortly before or after takeoff or landing, respectively. See this summary from Wikipedia, emphasis added:
There are three main statistics which may be used to compare the safety of various forms of travel:
Deaths per billion journeys:
Bus: 4.3 Rail: 20 Van: 20 Car: 40 Foot: 40 Water: 90 Air: 117 Bicycle: 170 Motorcycle: 1640
Deaths per billion hours:
Bus: 11.1 Rail: 30 Air: 30.8 Water: 50 Van: 60 Car: 130 Foot: 220 Bicycle: 550 Motorcycle: 4840
Deaths per billion kilometres:
Air: 0.05 Bus: 0.4 Rail: 0.6 Van: 1.2 Water: 2.6 Car: 3.1 Bicycle: 44.6 Foot: 54.2 Motorcycle: 108.9
It is worth noting that the air industry's insurers base their calculations on the "number of deaths per journey" statistic while the industry itself generally uses the "number of deaths per kilometre" statistic in press releases.
The above is based on late 1990s statistics. I don't think the pattern has changed significantly but I'd welcome links from readers to more recent data.
Automotive risk depends on many factors, including the driver's capabilities. More frequent rail and bus service are clearly the best solution, but the defensive, sober, undistracted motorist is even safer than the statistics suggest. We need more sophisticated analyses showing when the greater cruising safety advantages of flying offsets the hazards of takeoffs and landings, including bird strikes. Coast to coast, airline travel beats jockeying with 18-wheelers over mountain passes. But for many shorter journeys, dread of driving can be as irrational as fear of flying.
by way of abcnews.com:
There is no doubt that today's airplanes are so reliable that we tend to forget that we are sitting in an aluminum tube equipped with a full tank of kerosene and traveling at just below the speed of sound.On the positive side:
There is currently less than one accident with fatal consequences for every million takeoffs and landings. Around 1960, at the beginning of the jet age, this figure was still at 11. If aviation were as unsafe today as it was in the 1970s, an airplane would fall from the sky once a week.The question is how to sustain and improve this record, especially as world air traffic continues to grow. The failure of Air France flight 442 over the Atlantic on its way from Brazil led some partisans of Boeing jets question the higher degree of automation of the Airbus, as opposed to the more modular controls of Boeing designs. The so far unresolved issue is which is likely to be more lethal in the near future, computer failure or what the strategist Herman Kahn called a "warm, human error." US Airways flight 1549, landed safely by Chesley B. Sullenberger III in the Hudson early this year after both engines were disabled by bird strikes, was also an Airbus. The sociologist Charles B. Perrow, a leading analyst of technological risk, believes we can't turn back the clock on computer control:
The feats of pilots like Chesley Sullenberger and United Airlines' Al Haynes remind us of the value of training and experience. But relying on superlative skills isn't enough. Bertolt Brecht's Galileo put it well: "Unhappy is the land that needs a hero."The computers multiply as we demand more of our systems, and the cognitive load on the humans who have to work them expands commensurately. But cognition is by nature limited. To push the envelope of travel (and so much else in our technological society), we'll have to program more and more of our brain capacities into the computer.
Usually the safety technology of the future doesn't have to come from a crash program. The military often is well in advance of the civilian market; the aviation medicine researcher John Paul Stapp was campaigning for automotive seat belts in the 1950s. The Spiegel report cites improved interfaces under developed at a German research institute.
The concerns the article describes are hopeful signs. In safety matters, pride goeth before stagnation. Worry is good for us. Ten years ago air safety appeared to be stalled, according to at least one British aviation journalist, yet in part because of such criticism, it improved a lot. And the industry's critics may be more important than regulators. Because implementation of new safety proposals needs so many rounds of discussion at the FAA, as Matthew L. Wald pointed out early this year in the New York Times, airlines often respond to public pressure without waiting for FAA mandates:
Sometimes the process is so slow that the F.A.A. persuades the airlines to solve problems outside the regulatory process. After a DC-9 operated by ValuJet crashed in the Everglades in May 1996 because of a fire in the cargo area, the F.A.A. doubted that the obvious fix -- the installation of fire detection and suppression equipment -- would pass muster with the White House because the cost might exceed the benefit. But following a public outcry, the airlines agreed to install the systems.
When cost-benefit analysis and statistical life values meet indignation, it's usually outrage that wins. And a good thing, too.
Source: Wikipedia
Who really pioneered the Cash for Clunkers concept? Why, those magnificent men with their sewing machines: the irrepressible failed actor Isaac Merritt Singer (above) and his crafty lawyer partner Edward Clark, a duo whose mutual enmity did not keep them from inventing much of modern consumer-durable marketing strategy.
Ruth Brandon in A Capitalist Romance: Singer and the Sewing Machine (1977 and sadly out of print) quotes an 1857 announcement from one of their advertisements that they invited trade-ins of not only their previous models, but of competitors' products,
...too imperfect in contrivance and workmanship ever to be used with success. These worthless Machines now stand directly in the way of the sale of good ones. Their existence causes great pecuniary loss to us. . . . We, therefore, have an extensive and direct interest in having all bad Sewing Machines finally withdrawn from the market, and our new improved ones substituted in their place.And they continued:
The old machine will be brought to our office in New York, and there be immediately broken up and destroyed.Sales grew that year by nearly 50 percent. Viva the 150-year-old heritage of Cash for Clunkers.
The Boston Globe reports that Harvard's attorneys are -- defensively, they say -- trademarking everything from the letter H (watch out, Sesame Street!) to "The World's Thinking" (watch out, world!):In fairness to Harvard, its name has probably been misused earlier and more notoriously than that of any other American school. While researching another topic I found a century-old magazine exposé of fraudulent dental clinics that included one called Harvard Dental Companies. And a bit later Al Capone's first boss, the gangster Frankie Yale, called his Coney Island bar The Harvard Inn. (Pity he passed up The Skull and Bones.)Most trademark directors at other Ivy League Schools were astounded to hear of the lengths to which Harvard goes.
Yale has only half a dozen trademarks, including the university name and its bulldog mascot leaning on the letter "Y.'' Princeton, too, has only a handful, most of them designs or Latin phrases. Columbia, which has a harder time casting a wide net on trademarks because of the
Columbia Sportswear clothing company, sticks to its name, symbolic crowns, and lion mascot.
As a Harvard alumnus, albeit non-degreed, I respectfully submit a few further trademark candidates:
"Park your car."
"Fight fiercely."
"You can't tell him much."
And my favorite:
"You leave thinking like a lawyer."
(Thanks to Howard Segal for the link!)
(Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lwr/3632216400/)
