How doctors’ pay was established. It’s notable that it was not done through market forces. This means that the normal rules of the market (ie more doctors will dilute doctor pay) do not necessarily apply. The article points out on how few people are behind the decision-making process. Some people want to make it fewer.

Kevin Smith’s quest to ruin his own career.

I know this will come as a shock, but the American Lung Association might be exaggerating the claims of what pollution does to our lungs. That being said, even if pollution doesn’t cause childhood athsma, the fact that it inflames it is not insignificant.

The case against Julian Assange.

I am skeptical, but the future of cloud computing is often discussed as the future of computing itself. Less often discussed are the implications of this. Everything we do relies on the good graces of someone else. Often free services that can go away.

If I worked in the airline industry, this would be on my wall.

The Oxford Comma Cartoon. I use the Oxford Comma, though it has been brought to my attention that it sometimes makes things more misleading than leaving it off. This is why language should have been designed by engineers. Our sentences would have all sorts of parentheses and blocks and pipes, but you would know exactly what a sentence means whenever you read it.

According to Farhad Manjoo, it’s the highest-paid doctors that are the most vulnerable to automation. It actually makes some sense, though I don’t expect to see it happen any time soon. At least as far as the Truman-Himmelreich house is concerned, she is not among the most high-paid doctors and her job is not as vulnerable to outsourcing.

For David Alexander: Pornography leads to warped standards of attractiveness.

Cold Case is a bit of a guilty pleasure of mine. As far as cop shows, it’s a rather ludicrous one. It exists in a world where almost nobody ever actually lies to the cops. Almost nobody asks for an attorney, and if they do, the detectives ignore the request despite the fact that they are typically interviewing middle-to-upper class people (another thing… which we will ignore at the moment) whose lawyers would be able to make hay out of it. I guess that takes care of itself, because it also exists in a world where everyone eventually confesses, though that’s hardly unusual in TVLand.

What I enjoy about the show is less the police work, though, and more the following of the victim’s life and the life of those around them. It’s a character drama with a badge, mostly (several badges, actually).

The basic premise, as the title suggests, is that it’s about a bunch of cops picking up old and dormant unsolved cases, ranging everywhere from the 1920’s to a few years ago. One of the tells that a character didn’t do it is if they have some sort of criminal record. By and large, the one who did it is the loving husband who lost his temper, the boss, or something else like that.

Almost almost never did they actually commit much of a crime after the original crime that the team is investigating. This makes the case-closing actually depressing in some respect. Half of the time, the murder was a mistake. Technically murder, but a physical struggle where the victim fell backwards or something. In the case where the guilty one was indeed a criminal, it’s typically the case that they turned themselves around after the incident in question. So, as a matter of justice, maybe it’s a good thing that they’re being put away. But it’s still a little sad for an upstanding National Guardsman or working joe to be taken away long after it might have done society itself any good.

One time they took away a guy who killed his uppity housewife fifty years after the crime occurred. The guy had Alzheimers and barely remembered any of it anyway. Another case – one of those of a physical tussle gone awry – the guy lived his entire life mourning his dead wife until the police take him away.

It’s hard to take a whole lot of satisfaction in that.

A couple of things to file away next time someone talks about how the banks are foreclosing people out of sheer cruelty when they could actually lose less money with refinancing. If that were true, in all likelihood banks would be doing it. The problem is that refinancing simply kicks the can down the curb, as often as not, and arguably ends up worse for the borrower. At the end of the day, the problem is that somebody is sitting on a house that they cannot afford. Maybe because they bought too much house (maybe they were encouraged to by the lender), maybe because they lost their job. But you can’t make that problem just go away.

Save a life, chip a tooth, end up in court.

I wish I’d seen this video when I was in grade school. The delineation of continents drove me crazy even then.

Americans love chain stores.

The franchise novelists. How James Patterson is making a fortune simply attaching his name to novels. Tom Clancy is known for it as well. It’s a good gig, if you can get it! Generally speaking, if you see an apostrophe-s after the name, they didn’t didn’t write it. If it’s Red October, it’ll say Tom Clancy. If it’s Netforce, it’ll say Tom Clancy’s.

Most teachers would exchange job security for salary increases.

Critics of education reform hate standardized tests (though frequently cite them when they can as proof that charter schools don’t do any good). But even if you look at the metrics we’re “supposed to be” looking at, charter schools do well, according to one report.

Sweden has the most progressive tax system and some of the worst wealth inequality. This is one of the reason I am unimpressed when some wealthy dude talks about how we need to raise taxes on the wealthy. They’ve already made their money. That doesn’t mean that progressive taxation isn’t a good idea. Merely that the spokesman’s moral authority can be lost.

Is the college admissions process as we know it about to end? I’m rather skeptical. There are too many intangibles involve and reality has a tendency to sometimes intrude. A college selection program I played in the 90’s suggested a bunch of expensive private schools for me. I would have been miserable. My parents wouldn’t have sent me there to begin with. And, of course, for some the problem is and remains that “not enough people are going to college.” Lastly, colleges are punishing families for being financially responsible.

I got an assignment at Rushmore elementary yesterday. Rushmore is far and away the best school in Redstone. The test scores say as much, but even before I saw them I singled out that school as having an absurdly positively atmosphere. I was glad to get the assignment because I had feared that I had been blackballed there after this whole incident (which, by the way, actually worked out in my favor: I got paid for one 1.5 days because of a mistake on their part).

It was my third straight assignment for the third grade, oddly enough.

One of the girls was 4’8″. In the third grade. I wonder if the high school girl’s basketball coach already knows her name. Speaking of which, last year I had a middle school student whose gender I was uncomfortably unsure of until I saw that she was on the girl’s basketball team. She was approaching 6’0″. As for Miss 54″, she commented that her father and brothers were “very tall” so I doubt that it’s just an odd growth spurt. She also didn’t seem like the kind of kid to be held back unless she was close to the borderline.

With the exception of a couple, every time I teach below the 5th grade, I am informed that I am a very tall individual and/or I have very large feet. This time I was informed that I was a very tall individual. One of the boys was bragging to another of the boys that at least they came up to my beltline.

I finally met Mrs. Truman. For those of you who do not recall, my actual last name is less common than “Truman” and so it’s odd to have someone with my same last name. And any time I teach at the middle school, I am asked if there is any relation. This time I made a point of stopping by to introduce myself. I know that she knew of my existence because she accidentally got my Valentine’s Day bag when I left it behind. I was… kind of disappointed in her, actually. She had very dyed and very dried hair. She was very friendly to me and we had a laugh about the event of the previous year, but given all of the raves I’d heard about her, I figured she would remind me of a third grade teacher I liked rather than the one that I hated.

I commented that any time I am asked about her among middle school kids I am told that she is/was “totally awesome” and that I might have benefited from the association. She appreciated the compliment and said that it would probably be different in high school, though, because her husband is a parole officer and “a lot of kids at Redstone High School have to deal with him.”

With the exception of the last name and the Valentine’s Day incident, I wouldn’t have expected her to know anything about me, but she actually knew that I am that guy that drives out all the way from Callie. The principal stopped by and said hello and asked if I was still making that drive. That seems to be my role. The guy who makes that really long drive. It also makes me wonder if, while I haven’t been blacklisted, they still think of me as iffy because of the whole incident over six months ago. He was nice, though.

The principal is very popular. Which is not surprising, since he either has the plum job or is actually so good that Rushmore’s impressiveness is attributable to him. I guess I have been watching too many crime shows, because when I think of a popular male principal, a part of my mind thinks that we’re going to discover that he’s kept a 15 year old girl chained up in his basement for five years or something equally harrowing.

The day was largely uneventful. Getting third graders to be quiet is a challenge. At the bad schools, it’s to get them to stop talking to one another. The only blow-up we had today was actually over academics. They all swore that the answer key was wrong about something and just blew up about it, requiring the other third grade teacher to come over.

The thing I’ve learned about elementary school kids is that they love routine – at least in school. They are very good at pointing out if you are doing anything that is not according to the routine and The Way Things Are Supposed To Be. No matter how minor.

Teachers have cooler gadgets than I was in school. We had blackboards and later overhead projectors. They have “smartboards.”

Rushmore used to be an “open classroom” environment. This was a hippie venture where they didn’t have separate rooms for everybody but instead taught everything in a wide open area with different sections. This adventure did not last long. But you can see the layout is not that of a typical school. The big open area in the middle still exists and the classrooms shuffled off to the side. They added new classrooms over the summer, though, so it almost looks traditional, though the layout still looks odd. It feels like somebody emptied out a department store and put in a school.

For all of the praises I sing to the school, it’s actually most known for a student-on-student shooting that happened there a long time back.

I really, really meant to take some pictures of the anti-bullying and positive mental attitude posters in the classroom. One of them had a picture of Alice (from the Brady Bunch) and ALF, saying that you want to be like the former but not like the latter. Putting aside that these kids probably don’t know who Alice and ALF are, who wouldn’t rather be ALF? Almost all of the anti-bullying stuff puts the onus on the bullied to extricate himself from the situation or “talk it out.” No surprise there, but one of the posters involving frogs managed to sum up the attitude very neatly.

Kay Steiger sounds off the warning bells with regard to online college:

Via the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed, a new study confirms some earlier findings about the efficacy of online learning in two-year colleges. The study, conduced by the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College, looked at more than 50,000 students in Washington state’s community or technical college system. What they found was that students who load up on online classes, especially early in their higher education careers, are less likely to finish their degrees. This is worrisome, especially because, as CCRC notes in its report, the number of students taking online courses is only increasing.

Other commentary has pointed out that online learning requires a basic degree of computer know-how that a lot of people don’t have and that online learning requires a level of discipline that traditional learning doesn’t. These are both very valid points and two of the three main reasons why online education will never become a norm (even as computer know-how increases). But there is something else at work, which Steiger points out: online students are not the same as physical students in terms of student profiles.

The Atlantic has been raising the banner of the non-traditional student. This is part of the “problem,” if you view it as such. Non-traditional students returning to school may be a good thing, but they’re often going to be the most marginal students. Not because they’re lazy or dumb, but because they have a lot of other things going on. That’s precisely what attracts them to the flexibility of online learning in the first place. This is also one of the reasons that for-profit universities have such abysmal graduation rates. They cater to precisely these students.

When we talk about increasing college enrollment, this is one of the things that we have to be looking at. We’d partially be bringing into the fold a lot of people who are not, at present, in a great position to do well in school. It may be worth bringing them into the fold anyway! But we have to accept that one of the costs of this is going to be higher drop-out rates and at least some students potentially hurt along the way with debt but no degree. Unless we’re going to start paying people to go to college, we have to factor this into the equation.

This is something that brick-and-mortar universities themselves often look at. One university near where I live is trying like hell to make the transition away from being a commuter school that provides the opportunity for a great education to people without a lot of options in favor of being a more traditional university. Why? Because a lot of these students are failing out. This hurts the university’s profile by making it look like a school that is failing. But by changing the student body to a more traditional one, the hope is that the numbers will improve and the university will look better. The only sacrifice required is shuffling off the “wrong” people to schools that are less good.

And on a personal level, I grit my teeth when I hear people talking about how they want their kids to “work their way through college.” Presumably so that they won’t take it for granted. There may be something to this, though in my experience working while going to college is more often going to be a recipe for failure. A working student serves two masters. My ex-girlfriend, an honors student in high school, failed miserably in college due in no small part to the fact that she was working at a pet store the whole time. Could she have done both if she were more disciplined? Sure. But that’s the kind of disciplined student you don’t have to worry about in the first place. Meanwhile, my own GPA fell considerably when I started working while attending. It’s a serious distraction. Some people have no choice. But putting kids in that situation for the sake of making a point or thinking it will lead to better outcomes is mistaken.

How the oil boom is reshaping North Dakota.

The WSJ has a good article (subscription required) on school districts getting swamped by disability claims. It’s a really tough issue. You want to help those that need it, but a willingness to help those that need will bring in people who just want it. It brings new light to the concern of disappearing data.

A court in New Jersey has ruled that a boss can order a woman to pretend as though her dead daughter never existed.

New York is doing away with eye examinations for renewals. I was so pissed when I failed the eye test. I ignored the glasses requirement for a while until I realized that it turned out that I kinda sorta really did need them if I didn’t want to keep running up against curbs.

Snitching with a video camera is big business in South Korea. Think of it like red light cameras, except that anybody can do it.

The new Windows Phone is awesome. Does it matter?

China cancels a city. When I saw the headline I thought it was a reference to a new ghost city they were building, but instead it’s more of a districting thing.

The Post Office is declaring PR war on email (and electronic commerce). I wrote a post on the post office over at NaPP and there were more than a few drive-by commenters talking about how unreliable and unsafe email is compared to the good ole post office.

It turns out people need sleep. Though it doesn’t say so, it might also apply to doctors. Forgive me for being cranky, we just found out that Clancy will have 60 call days over the next three months.

I will grant the elephant picture above isn’t among the more compelling ones I have used. There’s a somewhat more… interesting… picture of animals and flowing water below the fold. (more…)

Coupon Shoebox has a piece up on ways to “increase your frugality” that range from the questionable to a couple that are okay.

Television programming: I have high speed Internet. I have Netflix. This means that I have access to TV shows the day after they air, and that I have access to movies — some of them using instant play with my TV via my Web-connected PS3. So, why am I paying more than $70 a month for TV service?

This one is fair enough… for the time being. But, as I will state more thoroughly in a future post, this model only works because others are paying for cable. If people start cancelling cable en masse, what do you think the odds are that the makers of television programs will take the hit and allow people to consume their product at lower prices? They are already hitting up Netflix hard and Hulu’s free offerings have diminished. Television programming is expensive at least in part because it is expensive to produce. The free (or cheap) ride will only take you so far. If you want TV programming, in the longer run, you’re going to have to be willing to pay for it.

Magazines: We are in the process of culling our magazines. Most have online versions, and there is no reason to be paying for magazine subscriptions when so much of what I read in terms of news and commentary is online anyway.

The same applies here, though to a much lesser extent. Content is not nearly as expensive to produce in the text form as the visual. Given this, I do believe that one way or another, it’s the content-producers that will have to make the adjustments and people in general are going to have to make due with lesser quality. So this one works, more or less.

Paper books: I love reading and I love books. But my husband recently pointed out that electronic versions of books for readers like the Nook, Kindle and iPad are much less expensive than buying hard copies. With the amount of reading I do, it would be relatively easy to recoup the initial cost of buying an electronic reader. Plus, electronic books would reduce the clutter in our home.

Errr, no, the electronic versions are not “much less expensive” than the hard copies. Unless you’re looking specifically at new release hard covers. A much better way to reduce spending on paperbacks is to buy used. Of course, buying used paperbacks won’t let you buy a neat new gadget under the banner of frugality, now will it?

Clutter: Speaking of clutter, we’ve got more of it than I like. I could definitely live without it. We’ve been practicing more mindful spending, so that we aren’t bringing in more clutter, but we could get rid of a lot of the stuff that we have.

Unless you think you’re going to make a lot of money getting rid of the existing clutter, this has little to do with frugality. More mindful spending does, of course, but that’s a thing unto itself.

Meat: I’m not saying I’m going vegetarian. But I have found that I don’t need so much meat. Meat is expensive, and it can affect your health if you eat too much of it. We’re looking into preparing more meatless dishes. This should lower health care costs down the road, as well as mean more money in our budget now.

This strikes me more as health sanctimony as it does frugality. McDonald’s hamburgers can be the cheapest food around.

Christmas presents: With the holidays just around the corner, many are already preparing for holiday shopping. But do you really need more stuff? You can save money by purchasing fewer, more thoughtful, presents. It’s hard to resist the consumer call of Christmas, but we are trying.

Well yes, spending less on gifts for others will save money.

Authenticity is the “in thing” for presidential candidates. But often, as is the case with Gary Johnson, authenticity is awkwardness. Johnson is now allowed in the debates, which is a good thing. Now he can lose the nomination because the GOP has no interest in a small government candidate who is pro choice and in favor of legalization, rather than simply rejecting him by virtue of never having heard of him. Progress!

I have never been one to know when to shut up and let something go and this was as true in my single-self love life as well as anywhere else. Some woman allegedly called her ex-boyfriend 65,000 times over the course of a year. That’s almost 200 calls a day. I feel less obsessive now.

It’s a common question as to whether or not we should pay college athletes. Fresno State players decided that if the university won’t pay them, then welfare should.

As mentioned previously, the University of North Dakota is having to change its mascot name from the Sioux due to the name being considered offensive to one of the Sioux tribes. The other Sioux tribe is offended by the prospect of the name being changed to something else. Meanwhile, the University of Kansas has been put on notice: Jayhawks is offensive.

An Atlanta cop arrested a disabled woman for sitting outside and waiting for the ice cream man. Putting aside the cop-abuse angle, loitering laws in general are a sign of societal dysfunction. In a sense, it’s actually more distressing when such laws are necessary than when they are not. As I’ve said before, you can tell the degree to which there is a crime/pandering problem by the size of the No Loitering signs on the storefronts.

This is a sign of dysfunction of another sort,l though I don’t know what to call it exactly. It makes me think of episodes of The Practice where the case for self-defense hinges not on whether an armed man is in your house, but rather whether he was stepping towards you at the time you shot you.

Massachusetts is overhauling alimony.

Frequent HC commenter Abel Keogh’s new book, Dating a Widower, is available.

A teacher in California is penalizing kids for saying “bless you.” Allegedly, it has nothing to do with the religious implications.

This really isn’t the point of a well thought-out piece, but after reading the opening paragraph:

California police will now be able to conduct warrantless searches of optical disc (DVD, CD, BluRay) factories to look for piracy and seize pirated discs, under a bill just signed by California Governor Jerry Brown (full text). Even those who think copyright law has gone much too far, or cherish fair use, shouldn’t defend such blatant, commercial piracy, which does nothing but deny creators the market for their artistic products. One need only look at China to see how such infringement can destroy creative industries.

My thought was that raiding the factories here will only mean more of the piracy will be done in China. Yet another way our government is pushing industry abroad…

(I agree with the piece, but that was the first thought that came to mind.)