Sunday links

How green are your beans? On buying local vegetables.

Stand back, I'm going to try science: casual sex doesn't cause emotional damage edition.

Stop me if I've linked to this before: on destination memory.

The dance video picked by Sociological Images for this discussion is pure awesome.

Pandering to a narrow audience of quantitative social scientists: there is a Fake Gary King on Twitter. (Also, here's the real one. Both are good feeds.)

Cool photo manipulation on DeviantArt: fish island.

Assessing higher education

Kevin Carey writes in Democracy on the higher education market in the United States and how the lack of credible information on student achievement is severely undermining the efficiency of the market. It is a well written, important piece, and deserves serious (political) attention.

He argues that the market for higher education lacks a credible source of information on education quality and student achievement. As such, colleges have little incentive to work on the teaching quality they can provide for the money they charge. In fact, this lack of teaching achievement ratings directly impacts the distortion in academic careers, where being a good teacher is of very limited use on one's CV. (As just one example, my university does give out teaching prizes to the best teachers. However, the attitude of an older graduate student toward these prizes strikes me as fairly representative: "If you are getting teaching prizes, you're focusing too little on your research.") In the words of Carey:

The information deficit also acts as a powerful impediment to reform. Anyone who has ever attended college knows that many college teachers are terrible at their jobs. Universities like to pretend that great scholars make great instructors, but one indifferent, outdated lecture from a tenured professor is enough to conclude otherwise. Because scholarly outcomes are visible, in the form of publications and citations, while teaching outcomes are currently not, colleges privilege the former above the latter. Tenure-track professors are routinely discouraged from spending too much time teaching, lest students distract from the mandate to publish. Legitimate evaluations of professorial teaching skill are practically unknown.

Teaching performance statistics being unavailable, universities and colleges rely on reputation effects to attract students, which in turn disproportionately benefit a) old and b) expensive colleges. As a result, colleges not only have little incentive to focus on teaching quality, they have incentives to raise tuition prices as a way of signalling quality.

If this is a problem, why have assessments of teaching attainment not entered the public domain as one of the many possible ways to assess college quality? As Carey shows, the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (NAICU) opposes efforts to make student achievement data public, universal, and commonly used in college evaluations. For example,

[In 2006], Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings convened a high-profile "Commission on the Future of Higher Education." In the course of its deliberations, the bipartisan commission bemoaned

a lack of clear, reliable information about the cost and quality of postsecondary institutions, along with a remarkable absence of accountability mechanisms to ensure that colleges succeed in educating students. The result is that students, parents, and policymakers are often left scratching their heads over the answers to basic questions, [including] which institutions do a better job than others not only of graduating students but of teaching them what they need to learn.

The commission went on to recommend upgrading an archaic federal data collection system to take advantage of newly developed IT systems, including electronic student records, under the aegis of existing federal privacy laws that prohibit the release of any personal student information. When the topic was broached in mid-summer, the president of NAICU issued a press release denouncing it as "Orwellian" and "an assault on Americans’ privacy and security in the shadow of the Fourth of July." When the Commission persisted, 1 Dupont Circle [NAICU] ran to Congress, which obligingly passed a law making the new information system illegal.

The conclusion is depressing:

Lawmakers in Congress have spent years loudly complaining about rising college costs. Yet in the course of a few years, they shut down two of the biggest potential sources of the information that is badly needed to make higher education markets begin functioning in a cost-containing way.

In a country that so firmly believes in competition as the basis for efficiency and success, this state of affairs is, frankly, unacceptable. Colleges and universities are there to educate as well as carry out research, and should be assessed on their performance of both activities. In addition, the current distortion of prices keeps disadvantaged students out of the market for higher education - an entirely unnecessary cumulation of disadvantage.

Hat tip to Comment Central.

End of term reflections

December may be the month academic blogs go to die (well, hopefully just to be reborn in January). To illustrate the point: I am pretty sure I read that sentence somewhere at some point this month and thought about blogging it, but term papers/coursework/teaching/grading/holiday parties must have gotten in the way. And now I have forgotten where I got that sentence from. But hey, at least one of the items on that list was "holiday parties".

Term is officially over for me now, and as of yesterday I am at home in Estonia, recovering from jetlag and a busy term. This feels like a good time to look back on my third term in graduate school and reflect on the experience. So, without further adue, here are some tidbits of what has been going through my head in the last weeks and days:

About graduate school: I already blogged about the rewards of teaching, but haven't mentioned the one thing that made it possible for me to gain that experience: the flexibility of graduate school. Teaching for the first time took up a lot of time and energy, and I am happy that I am in a programme where I can set my own priorities term by term. I have the opportunity to focus on teaching, or courses, or research, I can work with renowned academics, and I very rarely hear the word 'no', no matter what it is I want to do. This ability to set my own agenda makes grad school, which can be a high-pressure and stressful experience at times, that much more enjoyable. This term, it allowed me to focus on teaching, and I am very grateful for that experience.

About the US: I have now lived in Boston for almost 18 months. During this time I have come to believe that one of the best features of American culture is, hands down, Thanksgiving. This holiday, which just looks strange from the outside, is a wonderful tradition once you celebrate it yourself. It is non-denominational, which makes it particularly easy to adopt for someone non-religious like me, and it is fairly uncommercialised, which makes it easy to focus on spending time with friends and family (well, in my case friends who feel like family). I cooked my first turkey this year, and I already feel the tradition sticking - if I move back to Europe, I will surely become one of those annoying people who insists on celebrating an obscure American holiday her friends don't understand and who hunts around for a turkey in late November every year.

About coming home for Christmas: I have really gotten used to living in the US, to the extent that I didn't really miss Europe (though I did miss my family) this time around. Even so, the little things that are different at home, and that I stumbled across as soon as I got on the plane home, made me "homesick after the fact" if you can say that. Examples: getting off the plane to -17 degrees Celsius and snow. Seeing old ladies at the market trying out five different varieties of pickled cabbage before choosing one (incidentally, who can celebrate Christmas without pickled cabbage?). Being (correctly) stereotyped as Estonian on the plane by virtue of some visual cue I am not entirely sure about. Being stereotyped as Russian in the mall in Tallinn because I wore dangly, sparkly earrings (isn't it amazing how subtle differences in appearance can amount to serious social signalling). Ah, the little things in life. I still navigate the social signals of Estonian society better than I do the American ones, which makes being home a relaxing experience. And this feels particularly well deserved after the term just gone.

Happy holidays everyone!

The origins of the webcam

This history of the internet is an interesting read, but by far the best piece of information on it is the origin of the first webcam:


That's right, it was set up to monitor a coffee machine at a Cambridge lab - so that lab users wouldn't need to make trips to an empty coffee pot. Coffee, you make the world go around in so many ways.

Also, does anyone else wonder who actually ended up making the coffee at that lab? The poor members of some less enterprising lab that shared the kitchen area?

Thanks to Bernard for sharing.

Sunday links

Found at marbury: an interview with a suicide bomber.

A great real-life Princess Jasmine photo.

BBC reports on drunken monkeys.

Venn diagram: how governments get a job done.

Your daily dose of happiness: here.

YouTube pick: Europe according to Estonians.

Is this newsworthy?

Time for another edition of 'European in America', this time on a very current topic (think health insurance). I follow BBC News, and this news blurb from last week stood out to me as a prime example of cultural difference in action:

Flood insurance deals 'vary greatly'

There is a lack of consistency in the way insurance companies treat flood victims who are looking to make claims, the National Flood Forum has said.

I read this blurb out to my American housemate, who replied with a fairly blank "Ok, so what?". My point exactly: in the US, differential flood insurance treatment would not make the news. In the UK, it is considered unfair enough to make it to the BBC News frontpage. As it should, imho. Sometimes I just miss home.

Sunday links

Public service announcement: I have been ill for two weeks now, and between it being the end of term and me sleeping 10 hours per day, there has not been much Coffee Shop Philosophy going on. Sorry! But Sunday Links is here as always, and I hope to be back on my feet (blogging) again soon.

A tongue-in-cheek, hilariously dry take on Kate Moss.

The BBC reports on alcoholic monkeys.

The NYT picks 100 notable books of 2009.

Mind Hacks: the consequences of faking it.

A Newsweek reporter's ordeal in Iran.

yay!everyday is a great place for your daily dose of cool.