An increase in administrative salaries does not necessarily mean universities are spending more money of administration. In fact ballooning administrative headcounts may be an attempt to spend less on administration.
Since WW2, the salaries of professors have risen faster than inflation. There was a time when admission decisions were made by a faculty committee. That would be prohibitively expensive today when a full professor makes about $160,000/yr. So you hire administrators to do most of that work at about half the salary, which increases administrative head count while reducing actual spending on administration.
Another area that's been shifted from faculty to administrators more recently is academic advising. When I went to engineering school in the 70s, this was done by professors and was a significant part of their work load. My son is in engineering school today and it's done by administrators instead. My daughter graduated from a liberal arts school and although she had an advisor on paper she didn't know his name until I nagged her into finding out. It turned out they still used faculty, and in two years my daughter was unable to secure a face to face meeting. That's a case of false economy; academic advising is critical for students who plan to apply for graduate or professional school, and studies show it has a significant positive impact on graduate rates.
Non-instructional spending is not necessarily "waste".
At state institutions, except in a handful of exceptions tuition increases are entirely accounted for by cuts in public funding (which have happened in 47/50 states since 2000) and inflation. Cost increases at private institutions are driven by professorial salaries and competition for school ranking -- a kind of tragedy in the commons in which each institution's financial welfare is pursued at the cost to higher education as a whole.
It doesn't matter what you believe or personally accept. What matter is how you back up your public claims.
I don't think denialists are skeptics, any more than vaxx truthers are skeptics. They are believers in an alternative hypothesis. But belief per se doesn't make you a denialist. Denialism absolutely *is* a political position, one that demands that a certain belief be given the same treatment as an alternative belief, regardless of what the preponderance of evidence says.
If you actually look at how historically the heliocentric hypothesis became consensus (although now we think in terms of frames of references), it absolutely bore a higher standard of proof.
Cherry-picking scientific opinions favorable to your own is what science denialism *is*. The denialism in science denialism isn't a denial of truth; it's a denial of burden of proof. Science isn't about truth, it's about evidence. It doesn't care what you believe, it cares how you back up your claims.
A fundamentalist biologists who don't believe in evolution, or Earth Scientists who believe in a Young Earth aren't automatically bad scientists, as long as they don't make unsubstantiated claims. In fact more conventional scientists aren't in much of a different position; every scientist has *some* heterodox positions, otherwise there'd be no point. Every scientist wants to be the one that shakes things up, but they know other scientists are watching them. That's why scientists sound so equivocal; a good scientist knows others are watching, eager to pounce on any overstep.
Arp continued to publish papers supporting his views long after they'd become wildly heterodox. His last refereed paper was the year before he died, and his last invited chapter contribution was the same year he died. You're welcome to agree with him, if you like; that doesn't make you a science denier. Treating that view as equally well established does.
Same goes for anthropogenic climate change. Believing in global cooling, steady state climate (even through divine intervention), or warming mostly driven through natural climate cycles doesn't make you a science denier. Demanding that those views be treated as equally well-established as AGW does.
People don't want what they think they want. They think they want a leader who will do the right vs. the expedient thing. But they'll punish leaders who actually do this. Bush was one of those old-school people who thought debt was a real problem for a country. Raising taxes after promising not to was political suicide, but whether or not it was the right thing to do, he thought it was.
Detailed economic data on China as a whole is hard to come by, but the median wage in Shenzen and Shanghai is comparable to that of Croatia, about $1000/month. A college graduate in China can expect to make ab out 4000 yuan/month, about $574.
China's immense economic power comes from sheer scale. On a per capita GDP basis China is considerably poorer than Croatia; it's poorer than Gabon. Those recent college graduates may only be slightly better off than their compatriots, but there's a lot of them. In fact one in five college students in the world is in China.
This is similar to India; India's median and per capita income is 30x lower than the US, but about 2% of the population would be middle class by US standards. That's 27 million people, more than the entire population of Australia.
These are countries with immense power and immense problems to match.
There's no logical contradiction here. Nobody is saying that 40% of plants being unprofitable is a *sustainable* situation; in business you are sometimes stuck covering losses for a time; it'd be a hell of a lot easier if that never happened.
The plant owners may be regulated utilities that can't pass their increased costs from individual plants onto consumers until the next rate setting. Even then they may not be able to make the unprofitable plants profitable; they just have to cover the losses with surpluses from other plants until they can get their shiny new natural gas plants online.
Or they may have a contract to supply baseload power to a different company. You can bet that the very day the contract runs out they'll shut down the money-losing plant, but for now you're stuck.
Finally, there is a sense in which you can be "unprofitable" even when your operating revenues exceed your operating costs. Suppose you have your money in a savings bank that pays you a 2% interest rate, but the bank across the street pays 3% and is just as safe, it's like throwing that additional 1% interest money away. Economists call the difference between what your investment earns and what you should be earning with that money "opportunity costs". An investment that doesn't make at least a "normal profit" is called "unprofitable" by economists, even when it more than covers its own operating costs.
And not just any "private companies"; usual suspect, too big to fail, politically connected defense contractors who routinely get paid "performance bonuses" for projects that are behind schedule and over budget.
The big advantage of representative democracy isn't that it consistently elects good governments. It's that it eventually gets rid of unusually bad ones. The main problem with this is cynicism and apathy -- people getting so used to bad government that they can't even entertain the thought of one being a little bit better.
Not even remotely true. First of all, the UMass system operates four university campuses in total so there are three other campuses:
* UMass Lowell is an engineering powerhouse. They offer highly regarded (and lucrative) degrees in plastic engineering and are one of the 25 colleges in the US that operate their own nuclear reactor.
* UMass Dartmouth is a residential university that operates a law school and grants advanced degrees in education, physical sciences, nursing, and a variety of engineering disciplines.
* UMass Boston is a commuter school, but it offers over twenty PhD programs. It's particularly known for business, health, social sciences and environmental sciences.
None of these universities are on a level with, say Cornell, but they are all bona fide research universities with graduate programs and faculty performing research. Each one of them draws students mainly from the upper half their high school graduating class. The focus is on providing high quality, no frills higher education at a reasonable price; you won't find lavish dorms or athletic facilities, but you will find labs and research programs and a majority full-time faculty mostly with terminal degrees.
In any case you shouldn't disparage community colleges. They do important work.
Low sellers in the short term; with low gasoline prices people are favoring larger cars, trucks and SUVs. Light truck sales respond pretty dramatically to fluctuations in gasoline. It's like a see-saw: gasoline prices go up, SUV sales go down; gasoline prices go down, SUV sales go up.
GM is highly dependent on sales in China, which imports 13 billion dollars of cars from the US. GM also operates plants and joint ventures in China too. So to the degree that sanctions inflict economic pain on China, US companies and their workers will suffer along with the Chinese. This can affect even workers who are working on products sold in the US. As a company's resources contract, they direct those resources away from projects that are less profitable in the short term.
Now you could argue that we'd have been better off never getting into a trade relationship with China. That would be non-orthodox from an economic point of view, but you could make the case. But even if that were true, that doesn't mean you're better off disrupting that relationship. In business what you can accomplish from where you are is what matters, not where you could have been if things had been different.
I know this. That is all about exploiting the human preference for the familiar. I'm talking about things like manipulating anxieties, which commercial do all the time.
I recommended bzr (now breezy) based on its beginner-friendly interface. But if you are working alone, the subset of git you need to master is pretty small.
This really applies more to Congress, where favors get anonymously slipped into bills at the last minute. But even in city laws, the bills are drafted by the city council and, for larger cities, edited by staff.
I've seen kinescopes of George Burns and Gracie Allen doing this; Carnation sponsored their show and they had this character who would could turn any conversation to canned evaporated milk. That was a little ahead of its time; this was in the era of tap-dancing cigarette boxes; commercial interludes were done by the people in the show because they weren't set up to cut to different video sources.
But I'm not talking about milking the blatant obviousness of the pitch for laughs. I'm thinking about something less on-the-nose; something you wouldn't necessarily notice.
I just don't think that a "symbiosis with artificial intelligence" is likely to be the path. AI is basically just a bunch of ways of getting computers to do things that humans already do, albeit sometimes with more data than a human could possibly be trained on. I don't see that these methods mesh with the brain as they are based either on (a) pure philosophical speculation on how the mind works, (b) statistical algorithms that don't have a clear use-case for interfacing directly to our brains or (c) models of extremely simple neural circuits that wouldn't enhance any but the most damaged brains.
I think the low hanging fruit are (a) executive function, (b) memory and (c) mood regulation. Would you like to be a little more disciplined? Be able to concentrate on things even if they're boring. Follow through on things that you intended to do? Get an executive function upgrade. Who wouldn't like to have a better memory? Maybe you could flick a switch to enhance your memory of the document you're reading? Trigger the brain circuits that fix traumatic events clearly in your memory. We also know that the brain grows and adapts, and if it is possible to enhance your working memory (a key element of intelligence) by practice, as some believe, then it should be possible to trigger that brain adaption without all the effort. Depressed, or suffering from PTSD? Eliminate the symptoms.
The thing is, the ability to do any of these obviously good things also carries horrific possibilities.
It's no different from the way most non-trivial software projects are managed. A source control system automatically keeps track of every change made and who made them; you can get a complete audit trail of changes and recreate any old versions at will. In practice the process is very simple, all the complicated clerical tracking is done by the software.
Personally I think many other kinds of work would benefit from using source control software. I have writer friends who complain about keeping track of old versions of manuscripts, and I keep telling them they should use a source control system. That way they could recall old versions that they decided might be better, keep notes on why they made certain changes, try out alternative endings, and keep all that mess organized, even merging different versions of a manuscript. The thing is, what a source control system does sounds so *magical* to them they just assume it's got to be incredibly complicated to use. It's not. All the complicated stuff is done under the covers for you.
Now if you're setting up a system that's going to authenticate changes submitted by some person (as in the idea that we'll know who slipped something into a bill as a favor), that takes a bit more administrative expertise than running a local git repository. But it's not rocket science by any means.
Every time somebody inserts something into a law, it should be committed with a digital certificate so we know exactly who is giving out the candy to whom.
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An increase in administrative salaries does not necessarily mean universities are spending more money of administration. In fact ballooning administrative headcounts may be an attempt to spend less on administration.
Since WW2, the salaries of professors have risen faster than inflation. There was a time when admission decisions were made by a faculty committee. That would be prohibitively expensive today when a full professor makes about $160,000/yr. So you hire administrators to do most of that work at about half the salary, which increases administrative head count while reducing actual spending on administration.
Another area that's been shifted from faculty to administrators more recently is academic advising. When I went to engineering school in the 70s, this was done by professors and was a significant part of their work load. My son is in engineering school today and it's done by administrators instead. My daughter graduated from a liberal arts school and although she had an advisor on paper she didn't know his name until I nagged her into finding out. It turned out they still used faculty, and in two years my daughter was unable to secure a face to face meeting. That's a case of false economy; academic advising is critical for students who plan to apply for graduate or professional school, and studies show it has a significant positive impact on graduate rates.
Non-instructional spending is not necessarily "waste".
At state institutions, except in a handful of exceptions tuition increases are entirely accounted for by cuts in public funding (which have happened in 47/50 states since 2000) and inflation. Cost increases at private institutions are driven by professorial salaries and competition for school ranking -- a kind of tragedy in the commons in which each institution's financial welfare is pursued at the cost to higher education as a whole.
our ability to understand what's going on will become ever more biased towards snap judgments.
It doesn't matter what you believe or personally accept. What matter is how you back up your public claims.
I don't think denialists are skeptics, any more than vaxx truthers are skeptics. They are believers in an alternative hypothesis. But belief per se doesn't make you a denialist. Denialism absolutely *is* a political position, one that demands that a certain belief be given the same treatment as an alternative belief, regardless of what the preponderance of evidence says.
If you actually look at how historically the heliocentric hypothesis became consensus (although now we think in terms of frames of references), it absolutely bore a higher standard of proof.
That word doesn't mean what you think it does.
Cherry-picking scientific opinions favorable to your own is what science denialism *is*. The denialism in science denialism isn't a denial of truth; it's a denial of burden of proof. Science isn't about truth, it's about evidence. It doesn't care what you believe, it cares how you back up your claims.
A fundamentalist biologists who don't believe in evolution, or Earth Scientists who believe in a Young Earth aren't automatically bad scientists, as long as they don't make unsubstantiated claims. In fact more conventional scientists aren't in much of a different position; every scientist has *some* heterodox positions, otherwise there'd be no point. Every scientist wants to be the one that shakes things up, but they know other scientists are watching them. That's why scientists sound so equivocal; a good scientist knows others are watching, eager to pounce on any overstep.
Arp continued to publish papers supporting his views long after they'd become wildly heterodox. His last refereed paper was the year before he died, and his last invited chapter contribution was the same year he died. You're welcome to agree with him, if you like; that doesn't make you a science denier. Treating that view as equally well established does.
Same goes for anthropogenic climate change. Believing in global cooling, steady state climate (even through divine intervention), or warming mostly driven through natural climate cycles doesn't make you a science denier. Demanding that those views be treated as equally well-established as AGW does.
Yes it should.
People don't want what they think they want. They think they want a leader who will do the right vs. the expedient thing. But they'll punish leaders who actually do this. Bush was one of those old-school people who thought debt was a real problem for a country. Raising taxes after promising not to was political suicide, but whether or not it was the right thing to do, he thought it was.
Detailed economic data on China as a whole is hard to come by, but the median wage in Shenzen and Shanghai is comparable to that of Croatia, about $1000/month. A college graduate in China can expect to make ab out 4000 yuan/month, about $574.
China's immense economic power comes from sheer scale. On a per capita GDP basis China is considerably poorer than Croatia; it's poorer than Gabon. Those recent college graduates may only be slightly better off than their compatriots, but there's a lot of them. In fact one in five college students in the world is in China.
This is similar to India; India's median and per capita income is 30x lower than the US, but about 2% of the population would be middle class by US standards. That's 27 million people, more than the entire population of Australia.
These are countries with immense power and immense problems to match.
Bob Dole is still alive -- the last Presidential candidate of the Greatest Generation and the last nominee to run as a genuine conservative.
There's no logical contradiction here. Nobody is saying that 40% of plants being unprofitable is a *sustainable* situation; in business you are sometimes stuck covering losses for a time; it'd be a hell of a lot easier if that never happened.
The plant owners may be regulated utilities that can't pass their increased costs from individual plants onto consumers until the next rate setting. Even then they may not be able to make the unprofitable plants profitable; they just have to cover the losses with surpluses from other plants until they can get their shiny new natural gas plants online.
Or they may have a contract to supply baseload power to a different company. You can bet that the very day the contract runs out they'll shut down the money-losing plant, but for now you're stuck.
Finally, there is a sense in which you can be "unprofitable" even when your operating revenues exceed your operating costs. Suppose you have your money in a savings bank that pays you a 2% interest rate, but the bank across the street pays 3% and is just as safe, it's like throwing that additional 1% interest money away. Economists call the difference between what your investment earns and what you should be earning with that money "opportunity costs". An investment that doesn't make at least a "normal profit" is called "unprofitable" by economists, even when it more than covers its own operating costs.
And not just any "private companies"; usual suspect, too big to fail, politically connected defense contractors who routinely get paid "performance bonuses" for projects that are behind schedule and over budget.
People have heard of UMass because they can afford to send their kids there.
The big advantage of representative democracy isn't that it consistently elects good governments. It's that it eventually gets rid of unusually bad ones. The main problem with this is cynicism and apathy -- people getting so used to bad government that they can't even entertain the thought of one being a little bit better.
Not even remotely true. First of all, the UMass system operates four university campuses in total so there are three other campuses:
* UMass Lowell is an engineering powerhouse. They offer highly regarded (and lucrative) degrees in plastic engineering and are one of the 25 colleges in the US that operate their own nuclear reactor.
* UMass Dartmouth is a residential university that operates a law school and grants advanced degrees in education, physical sciences, nursing, and a variety of engineering disciplines.
* UMass Boston is a commuter school, but it offers over twenty PhD programs. It's particularly known for business, health, social sciences and environmental sciences.
None of these universities are on a level with, say Cornell, but they are all bona fide research universities with graduate programs and faculty performing research. Each one of them draws students mainly from the upper half their high school graduating class. The focus is on providing high quality, no frills higher education at a reasonable price; you won't find lavish dorms or athletic facilities, but you will find labs and research programs and a majority full-time faculty mostly with terminal degrees.
In any case you shouldn't disparage community colleges. They do important work.
Low sellers in the short term; with low gasoline prices people are favoring larger cars, trucks and SUVs. Light truck sales respond pretty dramatically to fluctuations in gasoline. It's like a see-saw: gasoline prices go up, SUV sales go down; gasoline prices go down, SUV sales go up.
GM is highly dependent on sales in China, which imports 13 billion dollars of cars from the US. GM also operates plants and joint ventures in China too. So to the degree that sanctions inflict economic pain on China, US companies and their workers will suffer along with the Chinese. This can affect even workers who are working on products sold in the US. As a company's resources contract, they direct those resources away from projects that are less profitable in the short term.
Now you could argue that we'd have been better off never getting into a trade relationship with China. That would be non-orthodox from an economic point of view, but you could make the case. But even if that were true, that doesn't mean you're better off disrupting that relationship. In business what you can accomplish from where you are is what matters, not where you could have been if things had been different.
I know this. That is all about exploiting the human preference for the familiar. I'm talking about things like manipulating anxieties, which commercial do all the time.
I recommended bzr (now breezy) based on its beginner-friendly interface. But if you are working alone, the subset of git you need to master is pretty small.
This really applies more to Congress, where favors get anonymously slipped into bills at the last minute. But even in city laws, the bills are drafted by the city council and, for larger cities, edited by staff.
I've seen kinescopes of George Burns and Gracie Allen doing this; Carnation sponsored their show and they had this character who would could turn any conversation to canned evaporated milk. That was a little ahead of its time; this was in the era of tap-dancing cigarette boxes; commercial interludes were done by the people in the show because they weren't set up to cut to different video sources.
But I'm not talking about milking the blatant obviousness of the pitch for laughs. I'm thinking about something less on-the-nose; something you wouldn't necessarily notice.
They should be generating scenes around the advertisers who buy time on the show.
I just don't think that a "symbiosis with artificial intelligence" is likely to be the path. AI is basically just a bunch of ways of getting computers to do things that humans already do, albeit sometimes with more data than a human could possibly be trained on. I don't see that these methods mesh with the brain as they are based either on (a) pure philosophical speculation on how the mind works, (b) statistical algorithms that don't have a clear use-case for interfacing directly to our brains or (c) models of extremely simple neural circuits that wouldn't enhance any but the most damaged brains.
I think the low hanging fruit are (a) executive function, (b) memory and (c) mood regulation. Would you like to be a little more disciplined? Be able to concentrate on things even if they're boring. Follow through on things that you intended to do? Get an executive function upgrade. Who wouldn't like to have a better memory? Maybe you could flick a switch to enhance your memory of the document you're reading? Trigger the brain circuits that fix traumatic events clearly in your memory. We also know that the brain grows and adapts, and if it is possible to enhance your working memory (a key element of intelligence) by practice, as some believe, then it should be possible to trigger that brain adaption without all the effort. Depressed, or suffering from PTSD? Eliminate the symptoms.
The thing is, the ability to do any of these obviously good things also carries horrific possibilities.
It's not the same as "track changes", which has basically a linear concept of change.
It's no different from the way most non-trivial software projects are managed. A source control system automatically keeps track of every change made and who made them; you can get a complete audit trail of changes and recreate any old versions at will. In practice the process is very simple, all the complicated clerical tracking is done by the software.
Personally I think many other kinds of work would benefit from using source control software. I have writer friends who complain about keeping track of old versions of manuscripts, and I keep telling them they should use a source control system. That way they could recall old versions that they decided might be better, keep notes on why they made certain changes, try out alternative endings, and keep all that mess organized, even merging different versions of a manuscript. The thing is, what a source control system does sounds so *magical* to them they just assume it's got to be incredibly complicated to use. It's not. All the complicated stuff is done under the covers for you.
Now if you're setting up a system that's going to authenticate changes submitted by some person (as in the idea that we'll know who slipped something into a bill as a favor), that takes a bit more administrative expertise than running a local git repository. But it's not rocket science by any means.
Every time somebody inserts something into a law, it should be committed with a digital certificate so we know exactly who is giving out the candy to whom.