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"Don't Be Evil"? Silicon Valley seems to be thinking a lot more about the unthinkable, or at least the distasteful.The New York Times Digital Domain feature notes with tongue only partly in cheek that Apple has just applied for a patent on a system that would let consumers use electronic devices free in return for exposure to a stream of advertisements that would compel responses before the machines would resume functioning.
Would anyone have guessed that Apple, so widely revered, would seek patent protection of a gimmick not unlike one used to sell vacation timeshares? (Agree to attend the sales seminar and get a free weekend getaway!) Or could anyone have predicted that the Apple of 2009, a company with premium products, would file a patent application that could make it a latter-day descendant of Free PC and ZapMe, companies that in 1999 gave away PCs engineered to always display on-screen ads?And there's a parallel move, disclosed in 2008 by The Times (London):
The Times has seen a patent application filed by [Microsoft] for a computer system that links workers to their computers via wireless sensors that measure their metabolism. The system would allow managers to monitor employees' performance by measuring their heart rate, body temperature, movement, facial expression and blood pressure. Unions said they fear that employees could be dismissed on the basis of a computer's assessment of their physiological state.
The obstacle to both applications is clearly not the "understaffed and underfunded" Patent Office.
Both ideas may be non-starters, at least as presented by the respective newspapers. The kinds of businesses that would be interested in buying the Microsoft system are already causing considerable physiological and mental distress to their employees. As long as the profits are rolling in, they don't need to pay Microsoft to tell them so. And Apple's mooted satanic pop-ups have their own structural flaw. Consumers seeking free equipment for agreeing to watch advertising have all shown that they hate paying money for anything. Not the best prospects for marketers except con artists, and why should they pay when broadcasting spam is virtually free?
Of course, the applications could be staking out less offensive innovations in deliberately grandiose general language for maximum legal protection. Or they could be intended to thwart expected moves by competitors.
In fact, maybe both documents are really disinformation, designed to lure journalists (and bloggers) into speculation that obscures the companies' real intentions, like those World War II "invasion plans" designed to be discovered by the Wehrmacht.
But who knows whether Microsoft against Apple might some day turn into Big Brother versus Big Bother.
(Photo: Lars Plougmann/Flickr)
Names can be prophetic. Consider this account of a German privacy case by my friend John Schwartz, about a lawyer suing Wikipedia to enforce globally a German law limiting the naming even of convicted criminals after their release:
But it's still worth remembering a point made by the Wall Street Journal's "Numbers Guy," Carl Bialik, quoting one statistician on the alleged predictive power of names:
An injunction-seeking attorney named Mr. Stopp? Of the firm of Stopp & Stopp? Psychological researchers have found a statistically significant influence of names in choices of career. The phenomenon is called "implicit narcissism" or "implicit egotism." (Not that the firm concerned, or any other individuals with fitting names, are personally narcissistic or egotistic.) It worked for the poker champion Chris Moneymaker -- his real name, incidentally. A distinguished astrologer in India has made name change a formidable science, and the British have web sites to expedite the process.Mr. Stopp has already successfully pressured German publications to remove the killers' names from their online coverage. German editors of Wikipedia have scrubbed the names from the German-language version of the article about the victim, Walter Sedlmayr.
Now Mr. Stopp, in suits in German courts, is demanding that the Wikimedia Foundation, the American organization that runs Wikipedia, do the same with the English-language version of the article.
But it's still worth remembering a point made by the Wall Street Journal's "Numbers Guy," Carl Bialik, quoting one statistician on the alleged predictive power of names:
"In very large samples like the ones here, even small differences will be judged statistically significant," Prof. [Hal] Stern [of the University of California, Irvine] says. "This means that we're confident the difference is not zero. It does not mean the difference we see is important."
Why do some technological and cultural products spread like kudzu while others wither on the vine? Journalists and academics have written volumes about "stickiness," but even the sharpest manufacturers, publishers, and producers have been rejecting future hits for decades -- often ideas and styles the break normally reasonable rules. Parker Brothers actually declined Monopoly twice: as the Landlord's Game (a simulation promoting Henry George's socialist tax reform principles, with a cult following in academic economics) in the 1920s, and its ultimate pro-capitalist version, authorized for a pittance by the unworldly original patent holder, in the 1930s. (The developer of that successful revision, or rather inversion, had to market a home-made prototype to convince them.) But if the game had flopped, there would have been many plausible reasons -- too complicated, consumers were sick of monopolies, etc.
Recent tributes to the late composer Vic Mizzy show the power and unpredictability of hits. The LA Times explains how it worked:
For whatever obscure neurological or aesthetic reason, the theme song has joined the ranks of the earworms. It's infectious even across species. Parrots learn not only speech but melodies and rhythm from their human companions, and the Addams Family theme song is an avian hit on Youtube, with dozens of versions by cockatiels alone. Here's the best finger snap I found:
Creative success is usually a lot of work -- except when it isn't. And in the end, like the Mizzy's Adamses, it can also be a bit "mysterious and spooky."
Recent tributes to the late composer Vic Mizzy show the power and unpredictability of hits. The LA Times explains how it worked:
. . . [B]ecause the production company, Filmways, refused to pay for singers, Mizzy sang it himself and overdubbed it three times. The song, memorably punctuated by finger-snapping, begins with: "They're creepy and they're kooky, mysterious and spooky, they're altogether ooky: the Addams family."It's encouraging to note that budget limits helped make the song such a success.Mizzy was challenged to become a one-man band and chorus, rose to the task, and managed to include copyright ownership in his contract. Mizzy not only had the right idea, he was willing to put hours of work into the right execution.
In the 1996 book "TV's Biggest Hits: The Story of Television Themes From 'Dragnet' to 'Friends,' " author Jon Burlingame writes that Mizzy's "musical conception was so specific that he became deeply involved with the filming of the main-title sequence, which involved all seven actors snapping their fingers in carefully timed rhythm to Mizzy's music."
For Mizzy, who owned the publishing rights to "The Addams Family" theme, it was an easy payday.
"I sat down; I went 'buh-buh-buh-bump [snap-snap], buh-buh-buh-bump," he recalled in a 2008 interview on CBS' "Sunday Morning" show. "That's why I'm living in Bel-Air: Two finger snaps and you live in Bel-Air."
For whatever obscure neurological or aesthetic reason, the theme song has joined the ranks of the earworms. It's infectious even across species. Parrots learn not only speech but melodies and rhythm from their human companions, and the Addams Family theme song is an avian hit on Youtube, with dozens of versions by cockatiels alone. Here's the best finger snap I found:
Creative success is usually a lot of work -- except when it isn't. And in the end, like the Mizzy's Adamses, it can also be a bit "mysterious and spooky."
A Newark Star-Ledger report on this year's Nobel Prize for Physics shows how the twentieth century's greatest innovation in imaging was the indirect result of two research "failures." Wired has more details of the internal politics.The breakthrough of Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith, the charge-coupled device (CCD), had a curious motivation. What catalyzed it was the peculiar agenda of AT&T in the late 1960s. Managers of Bell Labs thought that a new technology called bubble memory was about to replace semiconductors and let researchers on the latter side know they they needed a great new idea fast to prove semiconductors were worth continued funding. Bubble memory turned out to be a bubble and is now only a memory, but pressure, based on an erroneous projection of the future, helped create another future. It also made it possible to capture the images of Apollo 13. Yet the videotube that used the first CCDs became a dead end itself. AT&T's Picturephone service was based on a very rational early fear of cable and television as rivals of the telephone in building new, high-speed networks, as the historian Kenneth Lipartito has confirmed in his standard account of the program.
Veterans of Bell Labs are rightly proud of the organization's record. To quote the Star-Ledger:
Bell Labs, the research and development arm of Lucent Technologies, has now produced 13 Nobel laureates and more than 31,000 patents since 1925. During the 1960s and 1970s, the lab in Murray Hill was regarded as a crucible of some of the most innovative research in the world.
"Everything we take for granted today -- digital music, digital art, lasers -- came from Bell Labs," said A. Michael Noll, emeritus professor of the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Southern California and a former Bell Labs research scientist.
But it also noted the changes and research group closings under Lucent:
Many Bell Labs scientists, past and present, say their research community has never recovered.
"The environment that was there back then, the excitement about being around creative people who were open to talking about their work, was not duplicated during its time," said Dan Stanzione, a former director of Bell Labs.
Ironically some non-profit research laboratories like Battelle and Germany's Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft have been able to support themselves at least in part through income from the innovations they helped sponsor -- like dry photocopying and the MP3 format, respectively. I have found no information on royalties received by AT&T or Lucent for the invention of Willard Boyle and George Smith at Bell Labs -- possibly because original patents had expired before the digital imaging boom. (I'd welcome information from readers in telecommunication and imaging.)
This prize for 40-year-old work raises an intriguing question. Has something been lost from American and world science by the dispersion of so many great researchers? Some of them have profited personally; at conferences I've met former technical staff members who have made fortunes in finance and entrepreneurship. Others, like the late electrical engineer and perceptual psychologist Bela Julesz, a future MacArthur Fellow whom I met while I was a science editor, flourished in academia and became mentors to a generation of students. Still others have had the best of both worlds, with high-salaried tenured teaching jobs plus lucrative industrial ties.
But is society better off with so much talent redeployed? Are great innovations more likely to arise in the newer, decentralized, and more responsive global environment? Does everything important get discovered independently anyway, regardless of what happens to one organization? I'm not so sure. In Jeremy Bernstein's Three Degrees above Zero, Bela Julesz said Bell Labs had no counterpart in Europe or elsewhere and was "an absolutely unique treasure . . . for the whole world," a "baroque organ" for the maestro who needs "to pull out every register." Maybe the old Bell Labs resembled the Hollywood studio system, where massive resources and depth of skills could be deployed to produce qualitative leaps. The Labs set a high standard for the reconfigured world of global science.
(Photo: Wiki Commons)
Was there ever really a generation gap? Recent obituaries of the retailing billionaire Donald Fisher make me wonder. Fisher apparently called his clothing and music store The Gap with reference to that unstoppable 1960s concept -- the name actually was suggested by his wife as an alternative to his original "Pants and Disks." Significantly, he was an outsider to the garment industry and retail; his real estate background prepared him for all-important skills of store location.As for that lower-case gap that inspired the stores, Fisher's career are reasons to reconsider the pop social science fixation on generational differences. First, in some ways contrasts within an age cohort may be greater than those between different age cohorts -- for example, in religious and political issues -- though the balance does change. Germans recognize a flakhelfer generation pressed into anti-aircraft and other combat service as teenagers in the later years of the Second World War, but apart from this military experience and ensuing controversies, what do Pope Benedict XVI and the novelist Günter Grass really have in common?
Second, age boundaries are fluid except when laws (like those conscripting the flakhelfer born in 1926 and 1927) create sharper breaks. Usually the balance of attitudes and values is a continuum over time, but is treated in discrete units. Compare the color spectrum. Culture and language lead children of each society to recognize a different set of colors according to psychological studies, even though humanity perceives the same wavelengths through essentially the same eyes and brains. Generational differences also can be arbitrary ways to slice what's really smooth.
Third, and the most relevant here, the culture of each "generation" is shaped by men and women somewhat older -- in the case of The Gap by a 41-year-old businessman whose 20 or so years' seniority over his customers did not impede his success. His own disappointment with the cut and fit of jeans in other stores was evidently shared by many younger people. Even the defining musical superstars of the 1960s and beyond weren't Baby Boomers themselves; John Lennon and Ringo Starr were born in 1940, Paul McCartney in 1942, George Harrison in 1943, and their legendary producer George Martin in 1926. Bob Dylan and Joan Baez were both born in 1941. The leading orator of the Berkeley student revolt, Mario Savio, was vintage 1942, his German counterpart Rudi Dutschke, 1940. Even France's Daniel Cohn-Bendit (1945) doesn't strictly qualify; most definitions of the Boomer generation cited on the Web give 1946 as its beginning, reflecting the demographic bulge that is the name's original basis.Speaking of California protest, whatever your opinion of Ronald Reagan's policies, his recalled comeback to a student spokesman while governor of the state is still the best commentary I know on generation gaps, even though I haven't been able to confirm it so far in another source; it might be applied to the "Millennials" and the Internet, too. When the student expressed doubt that his generation could be understood by people who had not grown up with space satellites, rockets, and computers, he says he retorted: "You're absolutely right. We didn't have those things when we were your age. We invented them."
Photo Credit: Flickr User Eleanore H. and LittleMissCupcakeParis
The Wall Street Journal reports a new wave of interest in the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard, a Depression-era rearrangement of typewriter keys, developed by a psychology professor and typing expert in Washington State. Many users believe Dvorak offers speed and comfort superior to the conventional QWERTY arrangement. In the 1980s, computers brought a qualified victory, as software made it possible to remap keyboards without the massive costs of converting conventional typewriters or custom-building Dvorak models. The option was even built into both Windows and Macintosh operating systems.Now the age of the smartphone is setting back the movement, as Microsoft, Apple, and other manufacturers decline to offer a Dvorak option. Having tried to enter a simple URL with a new iPod touch (similar to the iPhone in its user interface), I'm puzzled that the issue came up at all. The small touch screen makes it a challenge to press the correct letter rather than an adjacent one. The problem for Dvorak users is cognitive, not physical; shifting from one layout to another is a mental pain. Considering the trivial cost of adding a Dvorak feature, Dvorak fans are probably right to believe that the industry is dissing them, hoping that they'll give up. It's a matter of respect.
Actually, respect for the user was August Dvorak's big problem. In the history of human factors, change often comes from below. I discovered this when writing Our Own Devices. For example, the first modern ergonomic chairs, introduced in the U.S. in the 1920s, were sold by leaving a sample chair for secretaries to try. Typewriter ribbon brands were also marketed with attractive boxes that typists could reuse for storage. Dvorak, evidently influenced by the ideas of the self-taught industrial engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor, took an opposite approach. He tried to sell government agencies and corporations on the idea that his keyboard would mean 1) more output per typist, and 2) fewer typists employed. But managers weren't buying the system, probably because it required a big investment in new equipment, retraining, and temporary decline of productivity. Those typists who were aware of it must have considered it just another speedup -- higher work quotas without an increase in wages -- that industrial unionists were protesting. Even government studies supporting the keyboard (to judge from descriptions I have read) focused on raw output rather than user comfort. The real advantage of the Dvorak layout is that while the brain can reprogram itself to use QWERTY nearly as fast as Dvorak, heavy typists and people subject to overuse injuries appreciate that their fingers don't need to move nearly as much.
Ironically, manufacturers themselves made reduced effort a selling point, for example in this postwar advertisement for IBM electric typewriters in the 1950s. So was there a chance for Dvorak's invention, at least as a niche product? It's impossible to say. But decades of papers on keyboard design and productivity are mostly moot because the great age of "production typing" in affluent countries is over, thanks to cut-and-paste clipboards in operating systems, cheaper and more accurate scanners, voice recognition software -- and outsourcing of much remaining keyboarding to developing nations. Meanwhile the interface of new touch-sensitive devices needs a new, end-user-friendlier twentieth century August Dvorak.
What is hard to explain is why Apple has kept third-party Dvorak software out of its official App Store, which means users have to hack their devices, possibly voiding their warranties. As Ed Hansberry explains on an InformationWeek blog:
The iPhone comes solely with a virtual keyboard. All Windows Mobile devices with touch screens have virtual keyboards. With that, you should be able to install whatever keyboard you want assuming someone has written it. You can run such a keyboard on the iPhone, but only if it is jailbroken.[One of many sites explaining this concept is here.] I don't know why Apple would block such an app from the App Store, but you won't find one there.The crisp elegance of the iPhone/iPod Touch interface carries a price: neo-Taylorist One Best Way design -- the very mentality that dogged Professor Dvorak. The Apple motto is evidently: "Think Different, but Not Too Different."
Photo Credit: Flickr User guspim
"Annie Le Was on Fast Track, Suspect Ray Clark Cleaned Cages; Did Worlds Collide?" That's the headline of abcnews.com in the recent Yale tragedy. A prominent criminologist is quoted as saying that the accused:worked in an Ivy League school where most of his co-workers were potentially successful and had advanced degrees and were looking forward to a fulfilling and happy life, he was cleaning cages.Therefore, if the accused is guilty, "relative deprivation" might have been the motive. And of course that's literally true as a doubly conditional statement. But does even scrupulous speculation serve justice? There are three good reasons for professionals to think twice before pretrial comment in the media.
First, they haven't seen the evidence. In 1964, psychiatrists were all too willing to pronounce on Barry Goldwater's mental health and fitness for office for Fact magazine without ever having met him, leading to the historic libel trial, Goldwater v. Ginsburg.
Second, the state of expert testimony, even when presented in court, is in urgent need of reform, according to a recent report of the National Academy of Sciences. As its press release states:
Forensic evidence is often offered in criminal prosecutions and civil litigation to support conclusions about individualization -- in other words, to "match" a piece of evidence to a particular person, weapon, or other source. But with the exception of nuclear DNA analysis, the report says, no forensic method has been rigorously shown able to consistently, and with a high degree of certainty, demonstrate a connection between evidence and a specific individual or source.This report does not cover psychological profiling, But a separate article in the New Yorker on the Cameron Todd Willingham case presents strong evidence that testimony by a prosecution psychiatrist as well as erroneous arson analysis helped condemn an innocent man.
Third, repeated psychological studies of both actual trials and moot courts suggest, as one paper from 2004 puts it: "Prejudicial pretrial publicity (PTP) constitutes a serious source of juror bias." It's time for journalists and scientists alike to reconsider how they present criminal cases. Framing even a hypothetical question may unintentionally help frame a real defendant.
Historical note: The biggest Ivy League medical school murder case of all involved an upper-class but financially troubled Harvard professor who was executed for killing a wealthy fellow Brahmin doctor (and slumlord). The historian Simon Schama, who wrote a novel about the events, observed of the school janitor who was the key prosecution witness that he was "condemned to be polite to those who were keeping him in his place." While some local historians still suspect the janitor, he collected a handsome reward for his role and retired.
The "relatively deprived," it seems, could be and can be almost any one of us.
(Photo: Flickr User [puamelia])
Hats off to Daniel Brook for his series on Slate about the September 11 ringleader Mohammed Atta. It's a gem of reporting legwork and historical insight, based on a visit to Atta's thesis supervisor in Hamburg and sharp observations in the ancient city of Aleppo, where Atta was misled by his upbringing to misunderstand its heritage:
With the crumbling legacy of European imperialism and American-backed dictatorship written into its Paris-meets-Houston cityscape, Cairo is one of the world's worst advertisements for East-West relations. With that city as his tragic starting place, Atta refused to comprehend historic Aleppo, a cosmopolitan trading city where Europeans and Arabs, Christians, Jews, and Muslims lived side-by-side for centuries. He scorned diverse, mercantile Hamburg; he attacked polyglot New York. By allowing a discordant present to blot out a more hopeful past, Atta ensured further discord in the future.
Brook mentions but doesn't expand on the engineering background of the September 11 planner Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who selected the targets. As the official US report put it:
Highly educated and equally comfortable in a government office or a terrorist safehouse,KSM applied his imagination,technical aptitude,and managerial skills to hatching and planning an extraordinary array of terrorist schemes. These ideas included conventional car bombing,political assassination,aircraft bombing, hijacking, reservoir poisoning, and, ultimately, the use of aircraft as missiles guided by suicide operatives.
Generations of educators have assured us that that the study of science and engineering create international understanding across religious and ideological lines, promoting an international language that puts problem-solving ahead of dogma. And many scientists, engineers, and physicians around the world have indeed been outstanding ecumenical advocates.
But there's a dark side of technical knowledge. It's equally compatible with intolerance. Osama bin Laden, too, was educated not as a mullah but as a civil engineer. While many Iranian science professors are prominent in the resistance to the of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the brutal strongman appears to have an impressive technical background, even claiming on his blog that he had score 132 out of 400,000 engineering university applicants on a competitive examination. (Link via Wikipedia.) The world's second most wanted terrorist next to bin Laden is also no cleric but a physician, Ayman al Zawahiri. Well before September 11, 2001, the English historian Simon Sebag Montefiore noted the rise of medically trained tyrants, the Doctators, in the Spectator:
'Doctatorship' may be defined as the process by which a medical doctor, devoted to sacrificing himself to save lives, becomes a political dictator, devoted to sacrificing lives to save himself. 'Doctatorship' is a murky place where bedside manner meets state planner, where torture meets cure.
Whereas the Zawahiri and Atta families belong to the higher Egyptian intelligentsia, Ahmedinajad would be an obscure village artisan like his forebears if the passionately modernizing Shah had not promoted technical education for the masses, not only to promote growth but to weaken the hold of the religious conservatives.
The lesson is not that scientific and technical education are dangerous, but sadly that education alone has been overrated as a source of humane values.
Readers of my post on college rankings have made excellent points about the limits of all published rankings, and their comments on the original page are worth careful reading.
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."
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."
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)
Edward Tenner
