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The Story's Story
Category Archives: Teaching
Teachers and the income ceiling
October 15, 2019 By Jake Seliger in Teaching Tags: Links, Teaching	2 Comments
The teacher pay gap is a myth? Maybe. This one has a different spin than the typical unthinking "teachers are underpaid" articles (it argues they're not, and yes there is data to support the assertion), which is why I point to it specifically, but I think both sides are underestimating an important point about flexibility and possibility in any given career; teaching has a relatively low pay ceiling and even if a given teacher wants to work twice as hard and make twice as much money, that's really difficult and potentially impossible. High IQ and high conscientiousness persons in other professions, meanwhile, can maximize incomes to a much greater extent than teachers. For example, as a consultant there are various avenues I can explore to further raise my income, but if I taught high school I couldn't. In big metro areas, too, there are also many more employers to choose from than most teachers can choose from, since there's usually one district, or a handful in nearby areas; at the same time, high rents in many superstar cities make teaching less attractive, so the "teacher pay" story is also a story about land-use regulations that raise the cost of housing—it's just never discussed in those terms.
Teaching has other challenges: bureaucracy is a real problem and so is low morale, perhaps related to bureaucracy. In most sectors, if you don't like the bureaucracy at one company you can switch to another, but this is considerably harder for teachers, since most districts are local monopolies. Financial returns to IQ also seem to be going up and at the same time we're making housing in many cities and first-tier suburbs out-of-control expensive—so teachers are really taking it financially, from both the cost-of-living side and from the payment side. I have heard through the grapevine, for example, that pretty much every new public school teacher in Seattle says the same thing about how she got there: "My husband got a job at Amazon and…" That's no doubt an exaggeration, but how much of one?
To use myself as an example, my parents moved from California to a boring suburb when I was a kid, and they left California because the cost of housing was so high. I checked how much they paid for the house in the boring suburb; in inflation-adjusted terms, they paid about $350,000 in today's dollars. The same house is estimated to be worth about $700,000 today, so the cost has just about doubled in real terms, but that suburb forbids townhouses in the vast majority of its land, so no one can buy the house, knock it down, and put two houses on the same lot. If that were legal, we'd not have the housing crisis we do in many high-productivity cities and their suburbs. If we could lower the overall cost of living, struggles around teacher pay would seem less dire. Oregon, for example, has legalized duplexes and fourplexes statewide, so it will offer a natural experiment in lowering housing costs.
Let's return to the original link:
shortages exist precisely where expected in a nationwide labor market that pays an increasing premium for STEM and other specialized skills. When researchers have examined the teaching vacancies that districts say they have trouble filling, they find that elementary, English, and social-studies teachers are not the problem. In fact, the Department of Education found that 20 states and the District of Columbia produced over twice as many elementary-education graduates as they had elementary-teaching positions to fill. At the same time, some districts struggle to fill STEM and special-education positions.
It's hard to measure teacher "productivity" and yet almost no one bothers trying. So the most productive teachers are incentivized to move somewhere they can be paid in line with their productivity, which can't be at most schools. Talk about an adverse selection problem! We have problems in data and definitions in both health care and teaching; rarely have two fields absorbed so much concentrated thought and produced so little change. The data and definition problems make it much harder to evaluate quality, inputs, and outputs than in other fields, especially those related to manufacturing. In most businesses, a major goal is simple (profit) and measurement is comparatively simple. The output of high-quality teaching may not manifest itself for decades, and very little of the value improvement is captured by the educator. By contrast, if you build a better widget, there's a decent chance you'll be able to capture more of the widget value beyond the cost of production.
Because we're not measuring, or able to measure, teacher quality effectively, most schools also seem to pay based on years of experience. Anecdotally, I've been told that it can be very hard to get hired by another public school after 10 – 15 years of experience, because then you're too expensive and most schools would rather hire cheaper teachers. So this is another way of ossifying the labor market.
There's also a narrative about teachers working a lot of hours per week, but Bureau of Labor Statistics data consistently show that teachers work 40 hours a week. One example, although I have seen many other similar ones. Anecdotes consistently run one way, and data consistently runs another.
Overall, however, it seems that the number of people trying to have a completely honest conversation around this topic is not high, and many who argue that we should pay teachers "more" don't know what "more" looks like. We may also see lots of composition effect problems, in which people who can get higher wages or better working conditions leave and get them, while those who can't stay at school districts and take what they can get, which is at least consistent with some of the teachers I had in high school, but that may not be desirable at the societal level.
Teaching demands starting where comprehension ends
February 11, 2019 By Jake Seliger in Links, Teaching Tags: Teaching	Leave a comment
"How Craig Barton wishes he'd taught maths" is from Timothy Gowers's blog, and many sections are not unique to math; they apply to teaching almost anything. Like this:
I'm jumping around a bit here, but a semi-counterintuitive idea that he advocates, which is apparently backed up by serious research, is what he calls pretesting. This means testing people on material that they have not yet been taught. As long as this is done carefully, so that it doesn't put students off completely, this turns out to be very valuable, because it prepares the brain to be receptive to the idea that will help to solve that pesky problem. And indeed, after a moment of getting used to the idea, I found it not counterintuitive at all.
In English, "pretesting" as such is often not possible, but it's useful to attempt to gauge students's knowledge and go back to wherever the student is confused—which may be very simple aspects of language, like parts of speech. I often had debates about this subject in grad school, when other grad students or professors would lament students's weak grasp of "basics" or "fundamentals" like comma rules. The stern professors had a point, in that university students should know those things, but I would counter that, if students don't know them, it's useful to teach them, even in "advanced" classes. Sometimes students seem to have not been taught much of anything in high-school English classes. Many high-school English classes have devolved into discussions of feelings and vague hand-waving about a given book, and students emerge from them with few concrete skills.
To be sure, sometimes the opposite is true. While teaching in grad school, I had a series of students, all good writers, all of whom had been taught by a particular teacher in a particular high school, and she apparently really drilled students in close reading and essay construction, like someone out of "The Writing Revolution." The results showed. I meant to send her a letter thanking her but never did. I would guess that she did a form of "pretesting," albeit without multiple-choice questions, to ascertain students's skill levels and then base each day in class on what students know. I used to do something similar at times, by doing quick yes/no questions based on raised hands, in order to get a sense of where students were. Now, reading "How Craig Barton wishes he'd taught maths," I think I should have spent more time and energy on assessment.
In most if not all subjects, it's not possible to teach (or learn) advanced topics without mastering fundamentals, so an instructor should go back to wherever someone lacks mastery and begin building up from there. If that doesn't happen, students—in the broadest sense, even outside formal school—at most muddle through and at worst waste everyone's time. It's nice to see someone as eminent as Timothy Gowers coming to a similar conclusion.
The Case Against Education — Bryan Caplan
March 12, 2018 By Jake Seliger in Academia, Books, Nonfiction, Teaching Tags: bryan caplan, school, the case against education	19 Comments
The Case Against Education is a brilliant book that you should read, though you'll probably reject its conclusions without really considering them. That's because, as Caplan argues, most of us are prone to "Social Desirability Bias:" we want to say things that are popular and make people feel good, whether or not they're true. Some true things may be socially desirable—but many false things may be too; the phrase "Don't shoot the messenger" exists for a reason, as does the myth of Cassandra. We like to create scapegoats, and messengers are handy scapegoats. Simultaneously, we don't like to take responsibility for our own ideas; and we like to collectively punish iconoclasts (at first, at least: later they may become idols, but first they must be castigated).
Caplan is an iconoclast but a data-driven one, and that's part of what makes him unusual and special. And, to be sure, I myself am prone to the biases Caplan notes. Yet, as I read The Case Against Education, I couldn't find many holes to poke in the argument. The book blends data and observation / anecdote well, and it also fits disturbingly well with my own teaching experiences. For example, Caplan notes that students find school boring and stultifying: "Despite teachers' best efforts, most youths find high culture boring—and few change their minds in adulthood." While "school is boring" seems obvious to most people, it's also worth asking why. Many of the reasons Caplan gives are fine, but I'll also add that "interesting" is often also "controversial," and many controversial / interesting instructors will take heat, as I argue in "Ninety-five percent of people are fine — but it's that last five percent:"
Almost no teacher gets in trouble for being boring, but a teacher can get in trouble or can get in trouble for being many values of "interesting." Even I've had that problem, and I'm not sure I'm that interesting an instructor, and I teach college students.
It's easy for outsiders to say that teachers should stand up to the vocal, unhappy minority. But it's less easy to do that when a teacher relies on their job for rent and health insurance. It's also less easy when the teacher worries about what administrators and principals will do and what could happen if the media gets involved or if the teacher gets demonized.
Despite the fact that no one actively wants school to be boring, the collection of forces operating on the school experience pushes it towards boredom. Many people, for example, are very interested in sex and drugs, but those topics also excite many students and parents, such that it's difficult to say much that's true about them in school.
As Caplan says, however, boredom is almost a feature, not a bug. Boring classes allow students to signal traits that employers value, like conscientiousness, intelligence, and conformity. Even if reading Ethan Frome is boring, being willing to tolerate Ethan Frome is important to people who would not themselves read Ethan Frome.
Caplan argues that most education is actually about signaling, not skill development. It's notable how little we in as a society have improved education in the last two decades, when the Internet has opened up many new learning and signaling opportunities. Caplan has a theory about why: using weird counter-signaling efforts itself signals non-conformity and general weirdness ("'alternative' signals of conformity signal nonconformity"). So we're stuck in a negative equilibrium.
He might be right. That said, I wonder if we're just seeing a lag: twenty years is a long time by some standards, but in the history of education it's a relatively short time. The problems with contemporary education also seem to argue that many employers would be well-served to ignore the signals sent by degree and search for alternate signals instead. Google claims to be doing this, but I don't know of any researchers who've audited or studied Google's internal data (if you do, please leave a pointer in the comments).
The people who most need to read this book are probably educators and high school students. The former probably won't read it because it punctures some of the powerful myths and beliefs that keep them motivated. The latter probably won't read it because high school students read very few books, and the ones most likely to read The Case Against Education are probably also likely to gain the most from higher education. So it's another of these books that's caught in a readerly catch-22.
Here is a Claudia Goldin paper, "The Race between Education and Technology: The Evolution of U.S. Educational Wage Differentials, 1890 to 2005;" as one person said on Twitter, "I agree with @bryan_caplan that the wage premium from education mainly comes from signaling, rather than learning vocational skills. But – I also believe widespread, generalist, higher ed can be a very good thing (as explained in ["The Race Between…"])."
I also wonder about this: "employers throughout the economy defer to teachers' opinions when they decide whom to interview, whom to hire, and how much to pay them." Do they? Do most employers require transcripts and then actively use those transcripts? It seems that many do look for degrees but don't look for grades.
One question, too, is why more people don't go into various forms of consulting; smaller firms are less likely to be interested in credentials than larger ones. I do grant writing for nonprofits, public agencies, and some research-based businesses. Zero clients have asked about educational credentials (well, a few public agencies have superficial processes that ask about them, but the decision-makers don't seem to care). Clients are much more interested in our experience and the skills demonstrated by our website and client list than they are in credentials. And when we've hired various people, like website programmers or graphic designers, we've never asked about education either, because we don't care—we care if they can get the job done. In restaurants, I've never stopped a server or hostess to ask if the chef went to cooking school. So smaller firms may offer some respite from degree madness; if there is a market opportunity for avoiding expensive college and the credentials race (for individuals), it might be there.
Yet at the same time, I feel (perhaps wrongly) that school did help me become a better writer. "Feel" is a dangerous word—it's hard to dispute feelings but easy to dispute data—yet I don't know how else to describe it. When I read other people's writing, especially other people's proposals, I often think, "This helps explain why I have the job I do." It's possible to get through college and learn very little about writing. Occasionally managers will learn that I teach writing and say, "Why can't college graduates write effectively?" An excellent question and one that requires 10,000 words of answer or no answer at all. But the alternative—not taking any writing classes—often seems worse.
Caplan also conducts many fascinating thought experiments, of sorts, although perhaps "contextualizes common practices and ideas" may be more accurate:
The human capital model doesn't just imply all cheaters are wasting their time. It also implies all educators who try to prevent cheating are wasting their time. All exams might as well be take-home. No one needs to proctor tests or call time. No one needs to punish plagiarism—or Google random sentences to detect it. Learners get job skills and financial rewards. Fakers get poetic justice.
Signaling, in contrast, explains why cheating pays—and why schools are wise to combat it. In the signaling model, employers reward workers for the skills they think those workers possess. Cheating tricks employers into thinking you're a better worker than you really are. The trick pays because unless everyone cheats all the time, students with better records are, on average, better workers.
Makes sense to me. I sometimes tell students that, if they manage to get through college without learning how to read and write effectively, no one comes back to ask me why. No college offers partial refunds to the unemployable who nonetheless graduate. The signal is the signal.
Many of you will not like The Case Against Education too because it is thorough. Caplan goes through his arguments, then many rebuttals, then rebuttals to the rebuttals. If you want a book that only goes one or two layers deep, this is the wrong book for you and you should stick to the Internet.
Many books also fail to convincingly answer the question, "What should we do about the problem identified?" Caplan doesn't. He argues that public spending on education (or "education:" as much of what seems like education should be called signaling) should be eliminated altogether, while simultaneously acknowledging that this is only slightly more likely than someone jumping to the moon.
Caplan fulfills many of the conditions of myth, but probably not enough people will read this book to truly hate him. Which is a pity: as I said in the first line, the book is brilliant. But socially desirable persons will reject it, if they consider it at all. And the education machine will press on, a monstrous juice press squeezing every orange that enters its maw. Once I was the orange; now I am the press.
One other answer to "What education does?" may be "to keep options open" and "provide a base from which to build later." Without some writing and numeracy skills, it'll be hard to enter many careers; while school may do a lousy job of building them (as Caplan demonstrates), if the alternative to school nothing (i.e. Netflix, hanging out, and partying), school may be a better option than nothing.
As for optionality, I think of my friends, many artistically inclined, who got to their mid or late 20s and around that time got tired of working marginal jobs, struggling to pay rent, working in coffee shops, crashing on friends' couches, etc. Things that seem glamorous at age 20 often seem depressing five or ten years later. Many of them have gone back to school of various kinds to get programming or healthcare jobs. In the former case, math is important, and in the latter case, biology and some other science knowledge is important. Those who blew off math or bio in high school or college struggle more in those occupations. So maybe education is about keeping at least some options open—or more options than would be open for someone who quits school or begins vocational ed in 8th grade.
Finally, education might be an elite phenomenon. We educate everyone, or, more realistically, attempt to educate everyone, in order to get a relatively small number of elite people into position to drive the entire culture forward. The people at the pinnacle of the scientific, technical, artistic, and social elites got there in part because they had access to education that was good enough to get them into the elite spheres where it's possible to make a real difference.
I'm not sure I'm in those elite spheres, but I may be close, and at age 15 I probably didn't look like such a good bet. Yet education continued and here I am, engaging in the kinds of conversations that could move the culture forward. If I'd been tracked differently at age 15 that might not've happened. Yes, the process is horrendously wasteful, but it's useful to give many people a shot, even if most people go nowhere.
To be sure, I buy Caplan's argument, but I've not seen this angle pursued by others, and it at least seems plausible. I also don't know how one would measure the "education as elite phenomenon" argument, which is another weakness of my own point.
Still, I've become more of an elitist because of my involvement in the educational system, which shows that most students are in fact bored and don't give a damn. When I started grad school I thought I could help students become more engaged by changing the nature of the short journal assignments: instead of just writing for me, students would start blogs that they would read and comment on. Education would become more peer-driven and collaborative. The material would seem relevant. Right?
After a semester or two of reactions that ranged from indifference at best to massive hostility at worst, I stopped and went back to the usual form of short written responses, printed, and handed in. That was easier on me and on the students, and it still at least exposed students to the idea of writing regularly. A few may have continued the practice. Most probably didn't (and don't). I learned a lot, maybe more than students, and I also learned that I'm a weirdo for my (extreme) interests in writing and language—but my own time in the education system and my own friend set had to some extent hidden that from me. Now, however, it's so apparent that I wonder what 24-year-old me was thinking.
Caplan helps explain what I was thinking; many people who go into various kinds of teaching are probably optimists who themselves like school. They're selected for being, in many cases, passionate weirdos. Personally, I like passionate weirdos and misfits and the people who don't fit well into the school system (I've been all three). But I seem to be unusual in that respect too, though I wasn't so weird that I couldn't fit into the convention-making machine. A good thing, too—as Caplan notes, it's individually rational to pursue educational credentials, even if the mass pursuit of those credentials may not be so good for society as a whole. Correlation is not causation, as you no doubt learned from your statistics classes and still understand today.
Here is a good critical review, not wholly convincing in my view, but worth thinking about.
Ninety-five percent of people are fine — but it's that last five percent
April 24, 2017 By Jake Seliger in Academia, Culture, Teaching Tags: Academia, reason	6 Comments
"How Airline Workers Learn to Deal with Passengers" reminds me of something I've noticed about teaching and consulting: 95% of people are fine, but that last 5% can occupy disproportionate time and mental energy.* There's a temptation to become somewhat armored against that last 5%, which negatively impacts interactions with the vast majority of normal, reasonable people.
A lot of public-facing professions seem to have this problem, including emergency medicine doctors, cops, retail workers, and public school teachers. Because the bottom 5% can be noisy and time-consuming, a kind of misanthropy can set in, as one begins to think the few represent the whole—even if, intellectually, one knows it does not. Mental, psychological, and emotional armoring can reduce one's overall effectiveness; this is particularly obvious in teaching, in which person-to-person connection plays a stronger role than it does in consulting.
Something about the human mind seems to make one negative interaction stand out more than 10 positive or normal interactions. I didn't realize this at first, so a small number of negative experiences affected me much more than they should have. There's a kind of crowding-out effect going on. Now, when I have to deal with someone who is unreasonable or at least not representative of the whole, I try to actively, consciously remind myself that they don't represent the whole. Behind every irrationally unhappy person there are probably 49 to 99 normal people who aren't giving me unwarranted grief.
Colleges in particular have been in the news lately, and a lot of people have read stories about crazy social justice warriors or censorious students—like the Middlebury College thing or the Halloween costumes at Yale brouhaha. Sure, these stories are in fact outrageous, but, again, they're also salient because they're unusual. Because they're unusual, they make the news (and these kinds of events do represent a problem, though the problem tends to be overstated).
Friends and acquaintances sometimes ask me about the activists students suppressing speech. Yeah, I do, a little, but not very much. The vast, overwhelming majority of college students, seem to want what college students have always wanted: to learn something; to get by; to get a job when they're done; to get laid; to learn something about themselves and the societies they live in; to make friends; to individuate from their families. You could add other items. Many students feel a vague sense of worry about being excellent sheep, and that worry is itself a sign of intellectual health. Most students, if they've thought about free-speech issues at all, vaguely support it. But a minority of well-organized and angry activists can make a lot more noise and news than the silent majority! As Nassim Taleb says, "The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority." A motivated minority, especially given the college-complaint apparatus, can create a lot of bureaucratic hassle.
Professors and other students often feel a kind of chilling effect, and one related to my essay, "How do you know when you're being insensitive? How do you know when you're funny?" Similar issues play out in many fields beyond teaching and consulting. One angry, unreasonable, or irrational customer or client drowns out a lot of generically happy or satisfied ones. Or consider "I was a landlord: This is what it taught me about people." Landlords have to be prepared for worst-case scenarios, and that preparation bleeds into their everyday scenarios and interactions.
Teaching, especially at the K – 12 level, suffers from defensive posture problem. A teacher who tries to be honest and interesting risks the ire of his or her angriest, unhinged, or most ideological students (and, even worse, their parents). Almost no teacher gets in trouble for being boring, but a teacher can get in trouble or can get in trouble for being many values of "interesting." Even I've had that problem, and I'm not sure I'm that interesting an instructor, and I teach college students. Students who complain about school being boring get told that school is supposed to be boring. Students who complain about school being interesting (or "offensive," or whatever) get much more attention.
It's easy for outsiders to say teachers should stand up to the vocal, unhappy minority. But it's less easy to do that when a teacher relies on their job for rent and health insurance. It's also less easy when the teacher worries about what administrators and principals will do and what could happen if the media gets involved or if the teacher gets demonized. It would be helpful for more administrations to make public statements like the University of Chicago's, confirming a commitment to free speech and open inquiry.
Social media probably amplifies many of the problem traits described above by allowing the least-reasonable people to organize, scream, and (not infrequently) lie. I don't know what, if any, solution exists to these problems, apart from most individuals to attempt to be as reasonable as possible and not succumb to the noisy but unhinged minority. Not much of a rallying cry, is it? No one, or almost no one, rallies for free speech and free inquiry.
* You can change the ratios some; I doubt the number of problem students reaches 10% in most scenarios, and I also doubt that the number declines below 2% (among professions that face the general public).
Why hasn't someone tried to build or fund a very low-cost, very high-quality college?
April 3, 2017 By Jake Seliger in Academia, Teaching Tags: Academia, cost, cost disease, education, Schools, Teaching	5 Comments
As the title asks, why hasn't someone tried to build or fund a very low-cost, very high-quality college? Or, if they have, what school is out there and has tried this?
It seems like a ripe strategy because virtually every (even slightly) selective school is pursing the same prestige strategy. Yet even as they do so, news about outrageous student loan burdens is everywhere and probably affecting the choices made by students. At the same time, college tuition has been outpacing inflation for decades—and everyone knows it. Education is a component of the "cost disease" that is afflicting other sectors too. The number of college administrators has grown enormously (though that may not be the prime factor behind public-school cost increases). Still, it used to be possible to work summer jobs and graduate with little or no debt; schools in the 1960s or 1970s don't appear to have been dramatically worse at education than schools today, and in some ways they may have been better, yet today colleges are many times more expensive.
College costs and debts have soared, and at the same time the number of PhDs granted far outstrips the number of tenure-track and teaching jobs. Most universities and even many colleges care far more about research, much of which is bogus anyway, than teaching. Many universities don't care about teaching at all, as long as the professor shows up to lecture, isn't drunk, and doesn't trade sex for grades. I hear many, many grad students and early professors lament the way their schools don't care about teaching. So there's a surplus of cheap PhDs out there who would desperately like to be professors. While professors who only teach two or three classes per semester complain relentlessly about all the "work" they supposedly have and how "busy" they allegedly are, it could be very easy to get professors to teach far more than they currently do at most schools, further reducing costs.
In short, the supply of faculty is there, and the supply of students ought to be there. So, with the setup above, let me repeat: why hasn't anyone attempted to start a teaching-focused college with low tuition and extremely high-quality academics? I'm thinking of a school with a mandate to minimize the number of administrators and sports teams. One could even eliminate tenure, and thus ensure that PhDs hired today won't still be on the payroll in 40 years.
This situation sounds like a community college, but I'm imagining a school that still draws from a national applicant pool and still maintains or attempts to maintain an elite or comprehensive academic character. Think of a liberal arts school but scaled up somewhat and with fewer administrators. If I were a billionaire I might try to do this; stupendously rich people loved endowing schools in the 19th Century, but that seems to have fallen out of fashion. Still, it worked then, so perhaps it could work now.
It may be that schools are really selling prestige and status, and consequently a low-cost, high-quality teaching school would be too low prestige and low status to attract students.
Still, and again as noted previously, pretty much every school, public or private, is pursuing the exact same prestige, admissions, and marketing strategy. With one or two exceptions (CalTech, University of Chicago—okay, there are a few others, but not many), they don't even try (really or seriously) to distinguish themselves, and almost every school competes for the same BS college rankings. Such a uniform market seems ripe for alternate approaches, yet none are being tried or have taken off (so far as I know).
* Maybe it was easier to start colleges in the 19th Century, when regulation was nonexistent and complex subsidies of various kinds weren't available. In the 19th Century, many colleges were also founded with the explicit intent of saving students' souls, so perhaps the lack of religiosity in today's billionaires and/or most of today's students is a factor.
* Current schools might just be too damn good at marketing for others to break in.
* Maybe there are efforts afoot and they've either failed or are too small for me to have noticed.
* Current schools are pursuing a complex price discrimination strategy, in which the sticker price is paid by a relatively small number of students, and much of the study body receives "scholarships" that are really tuition discounts. Maybe this system is more appealing to students and possibly schools than a transparent, everyone-pays-$5,000-per-year strategy.
* Students by and large pay with their parents' money or pay with loans, so many an unbundled version of a school really is less attractive than one with lots of administrators, feel-good projects, fancy gyms, etc.
* Billionaires who might fund this are busy doing other things with their money.
* The number of "good" or at least weird and different students who would try such a school is not great enough (given the current cost of college and the number of students out there, I find this one hard to believe, but it isn't impossible).
I'm guess that number four is most likely, but maybe there are other features I'm missing.
Circumstances under which going to law school can make sense
December 22, 2016 By Jake Seliger in Academia, Teaching Tags: law school, lawl, lawyers	1 Comment
The reasons you should avoid law school are well known and I won't repeat them here, but the other day I was explaining to a former student why she shouldn't go to law school and she asked a perceptive question: Who should go? Under what conditions should a person go?
The answer is "almost no one" and "almost never," but law school can be okay in a handful of circumstances:
* People who have already worked in law firms, probably as a paralegal but maybe under other circumstances, and who thus understand what the day-to-day life of a lawyer is like. That firm should have a job waiting and ready to go for the person before the person starts law school.
* People who have family (or close family friends) in law firms who can set the law school applicant up with a job straight out of school. If your uncle has a firm and wants you to take over that firm, law school can make sense.
* People with a very specific sense of what they want a law degree for and what they want to do with it—for example, people who desperately want to fight for voting rights, or immigrant rights, or something along those lines, and are convinced that those fights will be their life's work, regardless of other challenges.
That's really it; if I'm missing something, leave a comment or send an email. Law school mostly works for people who don't need law school and only need the credentials that law school entails. There is a reason why most lawyers learned the craft on the job as apprentices, and law school only became a requirement in the post-World War II-era as a way of raising the salaries and status of then-existing lawyers.
Even going to highly ranked schools doesn't make sense because, while you may get a big-firm job straight out of school, you'll still be shackled to the work by student loan debt slavery, and you'll still have to be a lawyer at the end (which most people don't really want to do), and you'll still probably not make partner (which means that you're mostly working to line someone else's pocket).
Don't go to law school.
Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change From the Cult of Technology — Kentaro Toyama
November 17, 2015 By Jake Seliger in Academia, Books, Nonfiction, Teaching Tags: Computers, education, geek heresy, kentaro toyama	Leave a comment
My review on Grant Writing Confidential is actually germane to readers of The Story's Story, too, so I'll start by directing you there. The book's central and brilliant point is simple: for at least a century various people have imagined that better technology and the spread of technology will solve all sorts of social ills and improve all sorts of institutions, with education being perhaps the most obvious.
There are many other fascinating points—too many to describe all of them here. To take one, it's often hard to balance short- and long-term wants. Many people want to write a novel but don't want to write right now. Over time, that means the novel never gets written, because novels get written one sentence and one day at a time. Technology does not resolve this challenge. If anything, Internet access may make it worse. Many of us have faced an important long-term project only to diddle around on websites:
Short-term pleasure often leads to long-term dissatisfaction. That intuition underlies the psychologist's distinction between hedonia and eudaimonia. Pleasure-seeking hedonism is questionable, but maybe long-term eudaimonic life satisfaction is good.
One sees these issues all over. Porn remains ridiculously popular (though some consumers of it are no doubt fine). Many people drink soda despite how incredibly detrimental soda is to health, and in my view how bad soda tastes compared to, say, ice cream. TV watching time is still insanely high, though it may be slightly down from its previous highs. There are various ways one can try to remove agency from the people watching porn while drinking soda and keeping one eye on a TV in the background, but the simpler solution is to look at people's actions and see revealed preferences at work.
Most people don't have the souls of artists and innovators trapped in average everyday lives. Most people want their sodas and breads and sugars and TV and SUVs and all the other things that elite media critics decry (often reasonable, in my view). Most people don't connect what they're doing right now to their long-term outcomes. Most people don't want to be fat but the soda is right here. A lot of people want a better love life but in the meantime let's check out Pornhub. Most people want amazing Silicon Valley tech jobs, but Netflix is here right now and Coursera seems far away.
And, to repeat myself, technology doesn't fix any of that. As Toyama says of one project that gives computer access to children, "technology amplifies the children's propensities. To be sure, children have a natural desire to learn and play and grow. But they also have a natural desire to distract themselves in less productive ways. Digital technology amplifies both of these appetites." I had access to computers as a teenager. I wasted more time than I want to contemplate playing games on them, rather than building the precursors to Facebook. Large markets and social issues emerge from individual choices, and a lot of elite media types want to blame environment instead of individual. But each individual chooses computer games—or something real.
It turns out that "Low-cost technology is just not an effective way to fight inequality, because the digital divide is much more a symptom than a cause of other divides. Under the Law of Amplification, technology – even when it's equally distributed – isn't a bridge, but a jack. It widens existing disparities." But those disparities emerge from individual behaviors. People who want to be writers need to write, now. People who want better partners or sex lives need to quit the sugar, now. One could pair any number of behaviors and outcomes in this style, and one could note that most people don't do those things. The why seems obvious to me but maybe not to others. The people who become elite developers often say coding is fun for them in a way it apparently isn't to others (including me). Writing is fun to me in a way it apparently isn't to others. So I do a lot of it, less because it's good for me than because it's fun, for whatever temperamental reason. Root causes interest me, as they do many people with academic temperaments. Root causes don't interest most people.
Let me speak to my own life. I've said variations on this before, but when I was an undergrad I remember how astounded some of my professors were when they'd recommend a book and I'd read it and then show up in office hours. I didn't understand why they were astounded until I started teaching, and then I realized what most students are like and how different the elite thinkers and doers are from the average. And this is at pretty decent colleges and universities! I'm not even dealing with the people who never started.
Most of the techno-optimists, though—I used to be one—don't realize the history of the promise of technology to solve problems:
As a computer scientist, my education included a lot of math and technology but little of the history or philosophy of my own field. This is a great flaw of most science and engineering curricula. We're obsessed with what works today, and what might be tomorrow, but we learn little about what came before.
Yet technology doesn't provide motivation. It's easy to forget this. Still, I wonder if giving 100 computers to 100 kids might be useful because one of them will turn out to be very important. The idea that a small number of people drive almost all human progress is underrated. In The Enlightened Economy Joel Mokyr observes that the Industrial Revolution may actually have been driven primarily by ten to thirty thousand people. That's a small number and a small enough number that the addition to or subtraction of a single individual from the network may have serious consequences.
This isn't an idea that I necessarily buy but it is one I find intriguing and possibly applicable to a large number of domains. Toyama's work may reinforce it.
When there are too many administrators, which ones do *you* fire?
October 16, 2015 By Jake Seliger in Academia, Teaching Tags: Academia, administration, administrators, bureaucracy, bureaucrats, education	Leave a comment
You know there are too many administrators when even The Nation argues there are too many administrators.* More importantly, though, everyone regardless of political bent is against "administrators" in the abstract but almost no one lists which administrators should be on the chopping block. Too few articles and polemicists say, "These are the 100 positions I'd eliminate at the University of Washington." If a school decided to fire its "Diversity" department in the name of cost cutting, The Nation would be the first publication screaming about racism and institutional indifference and the betrayal of high-need populations. Everyone rails about administrators, but no one has concrete plans to halt their proliferation.
Consider UC-Berkeley's "Vice Chancellor's Office for Equity & Inclusion;" perhaps UC-Berkeley doesn't need seven "equity and inclusion" teams or 17 employees in the Vice Chancellor's Office for Equity & Inclusion.** The staff includes several financial analysts and a graphic designer exclusive to that office. California's public salary database shows that that graphic designer earned $75,800 in 2014. The Development Director earns $109,000. The Executive Assistant earns $91,400. The Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion earns $209,000 a year. And so on. But UC-Berkeley will probably never cut this department (maybe that's a Good Thing).
One sees this elsewhere. At Marymount Manhattan College, last week I got an email about a "Change of Title IX Coordinator." That's another part of one administrator's job that didn't exist decades ago. In addition, the email says the school "undertook an assessment of how best to comply with evolving federal and state legislation." Which is another way of saying, "We spent a bunch of time and man hours." Followed, since this is a large, modern organization, by numerous email followups. There were also "mandated student, faculty, and staff trainings" (emphasis added). Maybe that work is good and maybe it isn't, but it's still indicative of the time and energy and activities that otherwise hated administrators are doing.
(Title IX, by the way, is the subject of Laura Kipnis's hilarious, expensive Title IX inquisition. I wouldn't blame you if you left this somewhat dry article to read her funnier, ribald essay.)
I don't want to pick on any particular school or even the education industry specifically. Regulatory compliance costs are increasing in virtually all industries, including the financial industry (link goes to a PDF) and many others. We rarely consider the systematic effects of regulatory compliance and instead think of each particular regulation / requirement in isolation. Nonetheless, when we get a lot of regulatory and other mandatory or optional costs together, we see the need for more lawyers, bureaucrats, administrators, and other people who all need to be paid and who have to be at least somewhat good at abstract thinking, writing, and statistics.
To be sure, the presidents and so forth making $500,000 or more per year is obscene on its face, but those are a relatively small number of positions, and, while I agree that college presidents should behave more like part of the university and less like corporate titans, I'm not sure that a small number of overly paid people is the biggest problem. I am sure that the next time I see someone announcing that we need to first fire all the administrators I'll send them this post and get nothing in response.
* But here's one, alternate explanation.
** Much of this post and its research came from a friend, who gave me permission to publish it.
*Do* we need Shakespeare?
June 19, 2015 By Jake Seliger in Culture, Teaching Tags: Language, mcardle, Shakespeare, Teaching	Leave a comment
Megan McArdle asks: "Do We Need Shakespeare?", and she offers some theories about why we might that don't rely on "Because we've always done it that way," including "What remains is a sort of stubborn belief that people ought to study literature because it is somehow good for them" and "Maybe the best argument you can make for English class is that it offers a way for people like myself, and many thousands of future English teachers, to find out that they like English class."
Still, I'm not so sure. I began imagining reasons almost immediately, but most reduced to, "Because we've been doing it that way for a long time." Which can be reduced to "path dependence." Teaching a writer who seems incomprehensible at first glance and requires experts to decipher also raises the status of (some) teachers and professors, who have knowledge that can't be readily accessed by every day people. That Hansonian reason, however, isn't real good reason why we should choose Shakespeare plays over some other means of teaching English.
Let me try to develop an alternate possibility that will likely make many people unhappy. I've begun to think that education is really about cultivating a relatively small elite who really push forward particular domains (which is a variant of McArdle's comment about the thousands of future English teachers). In other words, mass education doesn't matter nearly as much as intensely educating a small number of very high skill people, but those people probably aren't identifiable in advance. This idea isn't purely mine, and I've been thinking about it explicitly since reading Joel Mokyr's The Enlightened Economy, in which he writes:
It is important to stress that the Industrial Revolution was the creation of an elite, a relatively small number of ingenious, ambitious, and diligent persons who could think out of the box, and had the wherewithal to carry out their ideas and to find others who could assist them. This is not to return to the heroic interpretations of the Victorian hagiographers such as Samuel Smiles and credit a few famous individuals with the entire phenomenon […] Even these pivotal people were a minority, perhaps a few tens of thousands of elite workers, well trained through apprenticeships supplemented sometimes by informal studies.
Wow: Something as big a deal as the Industrial Revolution may have been driven by a small number of people. I've also read a lot about the early computer industry and the early development of integrated chips, and that too seems to have been driven by a small number of physicists and mathematicians, with particularly important companies like Fairchild Semiconductor and later Intel starting off with tiny workforces. Most of the world didn't matter much to the development of those industries, even though those industries are now so large that a large part of the workforce spends our time in front of glowing screens that show executed code most of us don't understand and can't write. Computers and the Internet are the biggest stories of our age, possibly excepting global warming and mass extinction, yet many of us aren't substantially participating and don't care to.
The unpleasant answer may be that most of us don't matter that much to the process. By the same token, most people who learn to despite reading from being made to read Shakespeare may never be good readers, writers, or thinkers—but they're not the ones who push the world forward, intellectually speaking. Instead, those of us who go on to realize that, say, "
Shakespeare's Genius Is Nonsense: What the Bard can teach science about language and the limits of the human mind" are the ones who matter, at least in this domain.
Most Westerners are uncomfortable with outright elitism, but I'd ask: How many of us really work as hard as we can at a given domain? In "How A Slight Change In Mindset: Accelerated My Learning Forever," Tristan de Montebello observes that few of us really throw ourselves into learning. Most of us learn as much as we need to to survive and do okay and reproduce, but not much more than that. You can tell as much via behavior.
That may be true in language as a domain as well. I read more than the vast majority of people I know, and yet there are people who read and write much more than even I do.
To return to Shakespeare, I'd also argue that sometimes complex, weird, or seemingly outdated works force us to read closer and more carefully than we might otherwise. Shakespeare makes contemporary readers work harder to understand what the writer means—which is ultimately a useful and under-used skill. Just look at most Internet forums: since the 1980s and Usenet, going forward all the way to today with Reddit, we have numerous places where people gather online and utterly fail at basic reading comprehension (this is one reason I spend little time posting there and much more posting here).
Under this theory, reading someone like Shakespeare is akin to lifting weights: a 500-pound deadlift may not translate directly into 500 pounds of force in a game, but it sure translates more force than a guy who can't deadlift 500 pounds.
Still, I'm treating the argument that Shakespeare-is-good like a lawyer and trying to come up with the best possible argument, rather than arguing from first principles. I'm not fully convinced we need Shakespeare, as opposed to some other writer or group of writers, as a necessary component of teaching English.
"Uber [or Airbnb] for Private Tutors"—I'd sign up
June 11, 2015 By Jake Seliger in ideas, Links, Teaching Tags: adjuncts, Economy, on-demand, Schools, uber	Leave a comment
Tyler Cowen suggests "Uber for Private Tutors," which sounds like a great idea, but I'm not sure Uber is the right comparison group. Rather, the better comparison is to Airbnb: I'd want to be the penthouse of tutors, so to speak, and charge appropriate superstar fees. The best tutors are probably worth orders of magnitude more than average tutors.
Uber by contrast dictates fees to drivers, which drivers can take or leave. I'd rather see the opportunity for markets to decide how much I'm worth. Rides are also probably more similar to each other than tutors are to each other, so Airbnb is the comparison choice I prefer. One could also begin to imagine a combination of MOOCs, things like Coursera, tutor matching, and the like nibbling away at the current school experience.
I have the academic credentials and experience necessary to sign up for Airbnb for private tutors, and I live in New York City, which probably has a lot of pent-up demand for tutors-on-demand. I'm working as an adjunct professor at Marymount Manhattan College, and while I enjoy and appreciate the work it isn't hard for me to imagine a better-paid situation arising. Uber for private tutors could supplement the large, existing adjunct workforce or even supplant some people who are currently adjuncting.
That being said it isn't clear to me that people hiring tutors would care about credentials so much as they'd care about personality, though maybe both are important.
My latest novel: THE HOOK
You should read my latest novel, THE HOOK.
In Anything You Want, Derek Sivers says: "The coolest people I meet are the ones who find me through something I've written." Reach me at seligerj@gmail.com.
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text:
First copy of rare Harry Potter book to sell for up to £30k in Staffordshire auction
The book has been sitting on a book shelf for over 20 years
Bethan ShufflebothamLife Writer
A valuable copy of the first Harry Potter Book is set to make thousands of pounds at a Staffordshire auction.
The first edition copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone has been sitting on a bookshelf in Luxembourg for over 20 years before being flown to Hansons Auctioneers, in Stafford, wrapped in a tea towel!
Hansons Auctioneers book expert Jim Spencer has valued the book - which is in good condition - at £20,000 to £30,000.
It is going to be auctioned off at Hansons' Staffordshire Library Auction, on October 13.
It's one of only 500 copies printed, of which 300 went to schools, leaving 200 in circulation.
The novel had been sitting on a shelf for 21 years - purchased by a dad living in Luxembourg who wanted to teach his children English - but he never expected it to be a first edition.
The retired British expat, who wished to remain anonymous, said: "A couple of months ago when JKR bounced into the main news I decided to re-read the Potter series.
Jim Spencer with his fourth Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone hardback first edition
"I knew there had been a few first editions sold recently and Hansons was featured on the BBC website so, just to be safe, I checked the criteria.
"I did not think mine would be valuable as it was certainly not purchased when first published. I was very surprised and shocked to see that it did in fact tick all the boxes, but still could not quite believe it until I checked with Jim Spencer.
"I needed English books to read to my three children at bedtime as I was on a mission to teach them my native language from an early age. Their mother is Luxembourgish and they were going to state schools here in Luxembourg, so I needed to make a bit of an effort."
The show must go on! Popular festive light display set to return this Christmas - with a twist
Take a look at the new £9m Delamere Forest Visitor Centre - less than an hour from Stoke-on-Trent
The book has spent two decades collecting dust on the shelf. When the dad realised he had a valuable first edition on his hands, he decided to sell it to pay off his daughter's student loan, and help her apply for a mortgage.
He posted the book to Jim wrapped in a tea towel - a nod to the Hogwarts house-elves, like Dobby, who wore tea towels with the Hogwarts crest on it. Hansons Auctioneers are now based at Bishton Hall, in Stafford.
There are various ways to identify a Philosopher's Stone first issue, published by Bloomsbury in 1997, including duplication of '1 wand' on page 53. However, most importantly, the issue number must read: '10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1'.
The book was wrapped in a tea towel as a nod to the garments worn by the house elves in the series
Jim said: "True first issues are seriously scarce. Only 500 were printed, 300 of which were sent to schools and libraries. This is extra rare because it's one of the remaining 200. And yet this is my fourth one in just over a year!
"It's a cliche phrase, but they really are the holy grail for collectors. I'd dreamed of finding one for years before my first magical discovery in Staffordshire.
"This new copy deserves to do really well because it's in astonishingly good condition. I would love to see it make £50,000. When the vendor contacted me, he said he'd come to me because I'm 'the number one man in the world for Harry Potter'. What a wonderful compliment.
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"I was very moved by the vendor's story. This book helped his daughter prepare for school, and now it's going to help her buy a home."
Jim has urged Potter fans to dive into their bookshelves and see if they have a valuable copy in their home.
He added: "You may not have a hardback first edition but first issue paperbacks are increasingly collectable, and I've handled quite a few of those - one sold for £6,500 in our last library sale.
"I still receive countless calls and emails every day from people who think they may have a first edition, mostly nothing of note, but I stay hungry and keep searching.
!I handle lots of signed works and other first editions from the Harry Potter series, but the first three novels are the ones that count."
The hardback first edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is due to be sold in Hansons' Library Auction on October 13. To find out more, email jspencer@hansonsauctioneers.co.uk
Burton NewsFive-bedroom farmhouse for sale in Staffordshire countrysideIt has five bedooms, two bathrooms and original features
Ballerina who escaped Nazis with kids shot by German plane in Netherseal
NethersealHer children were strapped to her as she made the journey across the English Channel

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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Heard on Air:
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Miles Sanders and Boston Scott sit atop the Eagles' backfield pecking order, and Corey Clement has rediscovered his explosiveness after spending the better part of two seasons on the mend.
With three spots virtually etched in stone, is there room to conceivably force the team's hand into storing four running backs on the 53-man roster?
When the Eagles finalized their impressive haul of undrafted free agents shortly after the conclusion of the 2020 NFL Draft, Cincinnati running back Mike Warren was considered to be among the class's crown jewels.
The 5-foot-9, 218-pound bruiser was coming off a productive junior season for the Bearcats in which he carried the ball 261 times for 1,265 yards and 14 touchdowns.
It seemed like a foregone conclusion that Warren would contend with holdover Elijah Holyfield for what would presumably be the third or fourth spot on the depth chart.
It was almost as if his undrafted counterpart, running back Adrian Killins, was written off entirely.
While Warren or Holyfield would undoubtedly fill a need as a between the tackles grinder, Killins boasts game-breaking speed and the ability to change direction on a dime.
Generously listed at 5-foot-8, 177 pounds, Killins served as an all-purpose weapon over his four years at Central Florida. As a senior, Killins registered 87 carries for 629 rushing yards and seven touchdowns and added eight receptions for 120 yards and a touchdown as a receiver. He also yielded 206 yards on 11 kick returns, parlaying a productive senior campaign into an invitation to participate in the East-West Shrine Bowl.
For his Knights' career, Killins totaled 406 carries for 2,459 rushing yards and 25 touchdowns, contributed 70 catches for 864 and eight touchdowns in the passing game, and returned 47 kicks for 1,025 yards and a touchdown. His 2,459 rushing yards and 25 touchdowns both rank fifth in school history.
Despite Killins' consistency and on-field impact over his four-year collegiate career, he failed to receive an invite to the 2020 NFL Scouting Combine -- an event where Killins would have been a legitimate contender to record the fastest 40-yard dash.
Killins' winding path has led him to Philadelphia, where he battles long odds to make the roster. However, with Sanders and Scott missing practice time, the diminutive sparkplug has maximized his opportunities by earning his keep at running back, wide receiver, and special teams.
The undrafted rookie is a prime example of a young player that likely needed a preseason to optimize his stock, however. If he Eagles opted to go heavy at running back, the chances are it wouldn't be for a one-dimensional utility player.
Limitations aside, Doug Pederson values what Killins brings from a speed, acceleration, and versatility perspective.
"I do," Pederson said in a Zoom call with reporters on Wednesday. "I really -- obviously he's getting, as you mentioned, a lot more reps because with [Eagles RB] Miles [Sanders] being out right now and then [Eagles RB] Boston [Scott] being limited in practice and making sure he's good and whatnot there. But [Killins] has really come in -- I'll tell you, I've been impressed from the standpoint of his knowledge and understanding. We've made him a running back. We've made him a receiver. We've put him in some tough situations. He's handled it extremely well, and he does a nice job as a receiver in that receiving role out of the backfield. He's got really good speed and quickness that is definitely, for a guy his size, beneficial.
"So I'm just looking forward to -- again, it's unfortunate not having preseason games to be able to watch these young players play, but just being able to see him in practice and what he can do and where he can possibly help us this season if that's the case."
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This stunning Trinity floorplan (elevation B) will not disappoint! You'll be greeted by an open floor plan that highlights a spacious family room, dining room and gourmet kitchen plus a front flex room area. The private master bedroom upstairs, includes a spacious bathroom with double vanity, enclosed water closet and a large walk-in closet. Two additional bedrooms and secondary bath are located in their own private area on the east and west side of this home. Covered patio a plus!
I was searching for a Property and found this listing (MLS® #7727110). Please send me more information regarding 1905 Cypress Gate Dr, Leander, TX, 78641. Thank you!
I'd like to request a showing of 1905 Cypress Gate Dr, Leander, TX, 78641 (MLS® #7727110). Thank you!


Counting - Counting from one to nine.
Next Number - Identify the next number in a sequence.
Missing Numbers - Missing number in a sequence..
Counting Backwards - Counting in reverse.
Number Line - Numbers missing on a number line.
Biggest Number - Identifying the largest number.
Smallest Number - Identifying the smallest number.
Counting Teens - Counting numbers from ten to nineteen.
Next Teen - Identify the next teen in a sequence.
Place Value - Place value to millions.
Rounding - Round numbers to nearest 10, 100, or 1000.


MALIN + GOETZ 8oz foaming cleansing gel synthesizes natural eucalyptus with amino acid-based cleansing agents. Gently and effectively purifies and balances all skin types, especially sensitive and eczema prone, unlike traditionally harsh detergents. Blended to hydrate, rinsing free of residue without irritation, drying, or stripping; helping to reduce epidermal stress. Natural fragrance and color. Easily integrated into daily maintenance and prevention regimen; cleansers can be blended to create personalized bathing experiences.
Made with 0.4% Eucalyptus Extract. Bath + Shower. Amino Acid Hydration Technology. 8fl.oz. 236ml.


The Loudoun County Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR) is prepared annually by the Division of Accounting and Financial Analysis in the Department of Finance and Procurement.
The report identifies the county's financial position and marks the country's financial activities over the previous fiscal year. The most recent CAFR, for Fiscal Year 2018, is online as are the CAFRs for each year dating back to Fiscal Year 2001.
Loudoun County is consistently recognized by the Government Finance Officers Association of the United States and Canada for Excellence in Financial Reporting for the CAFR. The CAFRs are consistently judged to have met the high standards of the awards program for governmental accounting and financial reporting. The reports have also been cited for demonstrating a constructive "spirit of full disclosure" to clearly communicate the county's financial story.
Fiscal Year 18 Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (PDF) Opens a New Window.
Fiscal Year 17 Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (PDF) Opens a New Window.
Fiscal Year 15 Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (PDF) Opens a New Window.
Fiscal Year 14 Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (PDF) Opens a New Window.
Fiscal Year 13 Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (PDF) Opens a New Window.
Fiscal Year 2001 to Fiscal Year 2012 CAFRS and Other Financial Reports (PDF) Opens a New Window.


A chesterfield-inspired sofa in soft velvet. Perfect for the children's room or living room and is easily combined with our dark grey storage seat. In polyester. The product is not flame retardant because the chemicals included in the treatment are not approved according to the "REACH" legislation.


This geeklist is a collection of the games from the 2013 Solitaire Print and Play Contest. The entries this year have been awesome! I hope that you'll enjoy these games!
At the time of this writing, the contest is still in the voting phase so head over to the Contest Thread, try some games, and vote for your favorites!
In general, the people want to make films of their genre, which produces resources of the same color. However, I think I'll have a rock, paper, scissors thing where the resources can help get new things in other categories or against an AI. For example, Acclaim can get a new producer, or Power can stop a union strike.
In "Colony 9" Humanity is exploring space, the final frontier, and establishing colonies in other planets. The player must build different structures to establish a colony before the spaceship with the people (civil, military) that lives there arrives. But beware of aliens and other disasters!
Colony ZXC123 is being threatened by the Boss Squad, and it's up to you and your CRMA (Combat-Ready Mechanized Armor) to protect them! Roam the area around the colony, defeating deadly monsters and enemies, escaping deadly encounters, and confronting the deadly members of the Boss Squad in deadly single combat!
This is a pretty quick dice game, based on the game Cribbage. I'm calling it Cubbage (cube bage), but might change the spelling a lititle. You need 13 dice (6 of one color, 6 of another, and 1 final die which should be different if possible), and something to keep score. A Cribbage board works best, but pencil and paper can be used too. For those that know Cribbage, there are many similarities, but it isn't the same game. Scores each round seem to be higher, and the player has an advantage over the invisible opponent. You will probably want to track how much you win by, and start you opponent several points ahead. Also note that the numbers are different from Cribbage, and you might catch yourself saying the wrong thing.
Its a solitaire dungeon crawler type that plays with a small deck. A portion of the cards are dealt face down in a variety of layouts such as "the Pyramid solitaire game" then players will have a hand of 5 cards which will act as their inventory of potions and other items. To explore simply uncover a card that is free if it is a monster you need to fight it by playing a card from your hand adding the bonus to beat at least 2 of its 3 stats. Once a monster beaten it goes to your discard pile which in turn increases your inventory like a deck building game. On the other hand if you miss then you remove cards from the top of your deck. If your deck runs out its game over.
The mad sorcerer Grislyk has stolen the Book of Lore from the elves and hidden it in his dungeon lair. As the elven warrior maiden Kora, you must brave three increasingly dangerous levels to recover the Book, destroy Grislyk's magical Black Crucible, and slay the wizard himself. Magical artifacts will help you evade Grislyk's traps and slay his army of goblins and skeletons, but you will also need your wits and a bit of luck, for knowing when to search, when to fight, and when to run is the only way to survive the DUNGEON OF DEADLIEST EVIL.
The story takes place in Dystopia, a megapolis in a not so distant future, filled with corruption, dangers and crime.
You are one of the four agents of Sector 9, a special investigation team, of the Dystopia Police Department (DPD). A murder has been committed, and you'll have to investigate the different many locations of Dystopia interrogating the people you encounter and looking for leads and hints on the investigation. You'll also need to analyze the info you gain, which will give you clues that will ultimately unveil who the criminal is. Once you know who the criminal is, you'll need to seize him/her/it.
You're caught in an endless, ever shifting nightmare hunted by The Shadow – an ominous all devouring presence. You try to outrun it and avoid going insane from the horrors of the nightmare, but it's just a matter of time until you succumb. Mechanically the game is a simple push your luck, risk management game consisting of a small rulebook, a one page game board, 10 small markers and a six sided die (markers and die must be supplied by you). The game also has an "Active" version (requiring more components) where you for example have to hold your breath in real life to avoid drowning in the game.
Have you ever wanted to see what would happen if Darth Vader and the Terminator had a battle to the death? What about Megaman vs Sonic the Hedgehog? Well, your glory days are finally here! Come and experience the glory days of print and play in a game that would be so expensive to produce that Games Workshop and Fantasy Flight Games would keel over and go bankrupt trying to get this game to make money. This game stole IP`s from as many sources as possible to bring you THE ultimate grudge match. Hurry up and try it before every lawyer this side of New York City drops a C and D letter so large, it would crush the empire state building.
A game set in the Battlestar Galactica universe using a variation of Mads L. Brynnum's "Dice Of Arkham" mechanic, you must safely guide the Human Fleet to Kobol before the Cylon fleet rips you to shreds! More than a simple re-skinning, mechanics have been changed or modified to create a unique playing experience!
You are Captain Sama Kollin, commander of the U.N.S. Herald, the first human spaceship capable of trans-light-speed travel. Your mission is to guide your ship in its voyage of exploration, accomplish results that repay humankind of the tremendous efforts that made the voyage possible, and come back to Earth to ignite enthusiasm for the New Frontier and silence the Isolationists.
Irish Freedom covers the Irish war of independence, and then the Irish civil war. The player controls the Irish forces fighting the British, then, after the treaty with Britain, plays the role of Michael Collins' Free State forces against the anti-treaty Republicans.
this game loosely follows the story of Heracles rescuing Alcestis from Thanatos in the Underworld. in the game he'll battle various dead warriors and mythical monsters while visiting some of Hades' scenic places. all of these location and encounter cards will be shuffled together. so you'll know things are coming but not in what order.
K-Day: Kaiju War! is an action point-based solo dice game in which you play Zillasaur, and have 14 days to destroy cities to score victory points. You mission is not as simple as it sounds, as Guardian kaijus emerge to roam and protect the land. So wreck the cities! Destroy their armies! Battle kaijus! This is K-Day: Kaiju War!
The setting of the game is a small town in rural France in the middle of the Vichy government/Nazi occupation era. The player takes the role of a small band of resistance members, trying to complete tasks to annoy, delay and/or overthrow the occupiers and the dirty collaborators in the Milice before the townsfolk lose hope completely.
A card & dice driven solitaire game that takes place in Chicago during prohibition. Each turn consists of four phases: Upkeep, Assignment, Actions & Events. You assign dice (the number of which is based on your reputation in the game) to actions each turn. The game lasts 22 turns which is dictated by the Event Deck so no having to keep track of what turn you are on. A unique play through each time!
A Night in Deepwail Manor is a short and simple push-your-luck game for 1 or 2 players playable in 5-10 minutes that uses only a small deck of around 30 custom cards. The player (or players) will control two children who explore the creepy Deepwail Manor on a dare and face eerie locations and dangerous encounters as they venture deeper into the mansion.
The game is, in essence, a horror survival game: ammunition for your firearms is limited and your character is relatively squishy and your best bet tends to be to run. Each character presents their own challenges and advantages, having different equipment initially available but essentially the same goals. All the while, a spooky narrative table adds to the ambiance and horror.
Tombs is a quick and easy game of tombraiding in both colour and (printer kind)lineart versions. The tombs board is a brickwork grid of tiles the player must navigate to reach thier goal. However the Tomb is always geared against the player who must keep thier valiant band of explorers alive by managing equipment to argument the trials of the Tomb and steal the treasures.
Zombie Solitaire is like regular Klondike solitaire with one big difference: you get to destroy Zombies!!!


Just a quick post to follow on from last week's OOTD!
I was going out to a meal for my boyfriend's birthday and wanted to put a bit more makeup on that usual. It wasn't the best job I've made as I was in a little bit of a rush, and now I'm annoyed that I definitely could have blended this better!
My base is Estee Lauder Double Wear Foundation with Maybelline 24 hour stay powder. I've then used a Rimmel brow pencil to fill my eyebrows in a little. I've used Makeup Revolution's Hot Spice palette to give my cheeks a little glow!
On my eyes, I used my Naked 3 palette mixed with a plain black eyeshadow for the outer crease. For liner, I used Maybelline's Eye Studio Master Duo 2-in-1 Glossy Liquid Liner very finely, and used Urban Decay's Subversion primer and Perversion mascara, which I absolutely love. I also have Mac's Hot Gossip on my lips.
I loved how simple this was, and it really didn't take long to create, as you can probably tell. I'm not a makeup artist though, I'm a busy law student, so please forgive!


With the dawn of the digital age, cybersecurity has become ultra- important. Cases like Equifax and Target losing access to their customers' private, personal data has business owners and IT managers scrambling to protect their company's data.
The University of Toledo Launchpad Incubation program will host an event to tackle this topic Thursday, March 21, at 11:30 a.m. in Nitschke Technology Commercialization Complex Room 2075.
This program is part of Launchpad Incubation's Launch Hour series, a panel series where local experts share their business and specific experience to help business owners around the region. The panel will be moderated by Adam Salon, partner at JumpStart Inc.
The LaunchPad Incubation Program at The University of Toledo is northwest Ohio's premier business startup and entrepreneurial assistance program for innovative and high-tech companies. Housed at a renowned public research university, LaunchPad Incubation is a pioneer for business development in northwest Ohio and southeast Michigan.
Register for the free event on the Launchpad Incubation website.
For more information, call the Launchpad Incubation program at 419.530.3520.
The University of Toledo Engineering Career Development Center will host the Spring 2019 Engineering Career Expo Wednesday, Feb. 27, from noon to 4 p.m. in the Thompson Student Union Auditorium.
"This year continues to mark a milestone for the center: celebrating 20 years of placing more than 20,000 engineering co-ops," Angie Gorny, director of the Engineering Career Development Center, said.
More than 120 companies from across the United States and 700 engineering students, graduates and alumni will participate. Companies scheduled to have representatives on campus include Cooper Tire & Rubber Co., Dana Inc., GEM Inc., Johnson & Johnson — DePuy Synthes, GE Appliances, Honda, Matrix Service Co., Marathon Petroleum Corp., Owens Corning, Owens-Illinois Inc., PCC Airfoils, SSOE Group, and North Star Bluescope Steel LLC.
The undergraduate mandatory co-op program is one of only eight mandatory engineering co-op programs in the country.
More information can be found on the UT College of Engineering Career Development website or by contacting Gorny at angela.gorny@utoledo.edu.
Since she was a little girl growing up in Málaga, Spain, Dr. Ana C. Alba-Rubio brainstormed ways to motivate those around her to protect the planet.
Dr. Ana C. Alba-Rubio, assistant professor of chemical engineering, holds a Lego model showing how the dual-function material would capture carbon dioxide and convert it into methanol and higher alcohols that could be fed into a fuel cell to produce electricity to power factories.
Now an assistant professor of chemical engineering at The University of Toledo, she is pioneering a new method for factories to approach environmental stewardship and fight pollution with help from a five-year, $558,795 grant from the National Science Foundation.
The Faculty Early Career Development award, known as CAREER, is one of the most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through the integration of research and education.
Alba-Rubio is creating a dual-function material, which acts as an absorber and a catalyst, that could be placed at the top of industrial smokestacks as an alternative to current processes of capturing and sequestering carbon dioxide. The material would capture carbon dioxide and convert it into methanol and higher alcohols that could be fed into a fuel cell to produce electricity to power the plant.
Alba-Rubio's method would eliminate the energy requirement, corrosion and transportation issues associated with the processes currently used. Instead, the new material would transform carbon dioxide into a useful product on site.
World carbon dioxide emissions have increased 55 percent in the last 20 years, according to the Global Carbon Project, including 2.7 percent from 2017 to 2018, the largest jump in seven years.
As part of the grant-funded research, Alba-Rubio plans to engage students from elementary school to high school in her activities to expose them to chemical reactions and catalysis, as well as raise awareness of the effects of carbon dioxide on global warming.
"As a Hispanic woman, I have a strong interest in increasing the participation of underrepresented groups in science, and I will continue providing hands-on experiences to migrant students in Ohio's rural communities and other underrepresented students through the programs that The University of Toledo offers to Toledo Public Schools," Alba-Rubio said.
She is especially passionate about serving as a role model to encourage girls to pursue careers in science. Alba-Rubio is gathering support from other successful women across northwest Ohio in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics to create a coloring book titled "Women Scientists Near You" to distribute to elementary schools throughout the region.
Two events will bring more than 600 area students to The University of Toledo to celebrate Engineers Week.
Founded in 1951, Engineers Week will be celebrated Feb. 17-23 and is dedicated to increasing understanding and interest in engineering and technology careers.
Approximately 200 high school students from 24 districts will be on campus Tuesday, Feb. 19, to be an Engineer for a Day.
They will arrive at 9 a.m. and watch a movie, "Dream Big," in the Lois and Norman Nitschke Auditorium, and then learn about different careers during a tour of UT's engineering facilities, and engage in hands-on activities with UT engineering students. After lunch, the high school students will shadow a professional engineer in the community.
The UT College of Engineering also will host its second annual Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day. More than 450 sixth- through eighth-graders from 20 school districts will visit the University Thursday, Feb. 21, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
While on campus, the girls will tour the University's engineering facilities, eat lunch with UT engineering students, and spend the afternoon participating in hands-on activities.
For more information, contact Bosch at bryan.bosch@utoledo.edu.
Dr. Aakash Agarwal, shown here holding a prepackaged surgical screw, has petitioned the FDA to revamp how screws used in spinal fusion sureries are handled to avoid contamination.
Spinal fusion surgeries generally require four to six pedicle screws, but in the vast majority of procedures performed in the United States, surgeons begin with a tray containing 100 or more screws of different sizes to ensure the right size is immediately available within the operating room.
Because so few implants are used in each procedure, most screws are washed and sterilized repeatedly with other contaminated instruments from the operating room before they are actually used during a surgery.
But Agarwal said that isn't practical or safe, and he's calling on the Food and Drug Administration to ban the process in the United States.
In a paper published in the Global Spine Journal, a team of experts led by Agarwal found screws that had been repeatedly reprocessed are harboring a number of contaminants, including corrosion, soap residue and organic tissue.
The researchers recently submitted a formal petition along with their data to the FDA.
Agarwal and his fellow researchers — which included Dr. Steven R. Garfin, interim dean of the University of California at San Diego School of Medicine, and Dr. Jeffrey C. Wang, co-director of the University of Southern California Spine Institute and president of North American Spine Society — presented evidence in a separate paper that individually sterile-packed screws also are picking up contaminants as they are handled in the operating room.
The researchers devised a study in which two groups of individually packaged screws were used during live spine surgeries at multiple centers across the United States. One group of screws had a built-in intraoperative guard, while the other group did not have such a guard. The screws were prepared for insertion then sent away for analysis.
That could potentially lead to infection and biofilm formation at the screw-bone interface.
No microbial growth was detected on the screws that had integrated guards, which is meant to shield the screw itself from being exposed to air or touch while loading it onto the insertion device.
The findings were published in Global Spine Journal and multiple conference proceedings. It also has been published by news media, including Becker's Spine Review, Spinal News International, Orthopedic This Week and Orthopedics Today.
Also involved in the research were Dr. Vijay Goel, Distinguished University Professor and Endowed Chair and McMaster-Gardner Professor of Orthopaedic Bioengineering at UT; Dr. Anand K. Agarwal, professor at UT's Engineering Center for Orthopaedic Research Excellence; Dr. Hossein Elgafy, professor of orthopaedic surgery at UT; and Dr. Boren Lin, postdoctoral fellow at UT's Engineering Center for Orthopaedic Research Excellence.
Data on surgical site infections following spine surgery varies, but a recent randomized trial from Mount Sinai Beth Israel hospital in New York found a 12.7 percent incidence rate. Agarwal said that could represent up to 100,000 patients suffering from surgical site infection in the United States alone.
"We shouldn't be knowingly putting bacteria and other contaminates inside a patient's body. With the disclosure of these evidences, it would be impossible to not undertake necessary safety measures," Agarwal said.
In addition to his faculty appointment at UT, Agarwal is the director of research and development for Spinal Balance, a private company that was founded in 2013 by a group of UT research professors. The firm, with its corporate office at the UT LaunchPad Incubation building, was created in part to address the problem of surgical site infection stemming from contaminated implants.
Agarwal also was recently appointed to the editorial board of the Clinical Spine Surgery journal by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins for his contribution toward original research and peer reviews in the spine field.
Created by Dr. Sarit Bhaduri, UT Distinguished University Professor of Mechanical, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, NovoGro is a moldable bone substitute putty used to fill gaps in bone and encourage new bone growth. It is used primarily in complicated fractures that would not otherwise heal properly on their own.
Dr. Sarit Bhaduri, center, held the R&D Magazine award he received for NovoGro, a synthetic bone graft substitute he created with Dr. Anand Agarwal, left, and Dr. Vijay K. Goel. R&D Magazine named their invention as one of the year's most exceptional innovations in science and technology.
R&D Magazine has annually selected the top 100 revolutionary technologies of the past year since 1963. Among this year's other winners were Dow Chemical, Texas Instruments, the MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and NASA's Glenn Research Center.
Bhaduri teamed up with Dr. Vijay K. Goel, UT Distinguished University Professor and Endowed Chair and McMaster-Gardner Professor of Orthopaedic Bioengineering, and Dr. Anand Agarwal, UT research professor of bioengineering, to license the technology from the University and co-found the biomedical firm OsteoNovus Inc. Agarwal also serves as the president and chief executive officer of OsteoNovus, where the product has undergone further development.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has cleared NovoGro for use in two different indications — spine and the extremities.
Currently, NovoGro has a half dozen clinical users across the country and is trying to grow the client base significantly in 2019.
The company's corporate offices and manufacturing facility are housed within The University of Toledo LaunchPad Incubation Program.
A team of engineers at The University of Toledo created a new procedure and design software to more accurately estimate the structural capacity of existing pavement that could save the Ohio Department of Transportation millions of dollars on road improvement projects and be adopted by states across the country.
Dr. Eddie Chou is leading a team of UT engineers that designed software to estimate the structural capacity of existing pavement that could save the Ohio Department of Transportation millions of dollars on road improvement projects.
The Transportation Research Board, a unit of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, selected UT's project for developing a revised pavement overlay thickness design procedure as one of 32 High-Value Research projects nationwide to be highlighted at its annual meeting Jan. 13-17 in Washington, D.C. The meeting attracts 13,000 transportation professionals from around the world.
The new method is specifically designed for composite pavement — concrete pavement already topped with a thick layer of asphalt — which accounts for the majority of ODOT's four-lane and interstate highways. Previously, ODOT used a design method that was originally developed for rigid, concrete pavements that tended to produce designs often deemed too thick and wasteful for today's roadways, as pavement becomes thicker with each additional overlay.
For an update, ODOT turned to the engineer who crafted the original design 25 years ago: Dr. Eddie Chou, UT professor of civil and environmental engineering, and director of the Transportation Systems Research Lab.
The UT research team adopted a three-layer model for back-calculating the properties of the soil subgrade and pavement layers, instead of the old two-layer model that combined cement and asphalt into one.
Chou said the new design reduces on average about five inches of overlay thickness, and the reduction of each additional inch of overlay can save approximately $120,000 per mile.
"In addition to being more environmentally friendly, the potential cost savings can be substantial considering each year ODOT rehabilitates several hundred miles of existing composite pavements by laying additional asphalt on top," Chou said.
The revised design procedure was implemented into design software that adopts the improved back-calculation model. The software also offers an optional feature that takes into consideration the effects of temperature.
The Ohio Department of Transportation and Federal Highway Administration sponsored the UT research.


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CultureEnvironmentAnimalsClimateSustainability
Last Day of the "Rethinking Animals" Summit
It is the last day of the "Rethinking Animals" Summit, and leaving behind the early Sunday sun for the cool dark of the SVA Theatre lobby, I already feel as if things have gotten serious.
I'm not long positioned at one of the few precious tables spotted around the lobby when a woman approaches me. There's a certain quality to the hair of women who love and spend a lot of time in nature that I've always envied. It consistently looks as if it just spent five hours drying in the rays of the sun and breezes off the sea. This woman has such hair. She approaches me with a gentle confidence that one would no doubt need in approaching a wild boar and asks if she might set up camp with me until the conference begins. I do not know this at the time, but the kind woman with the amazing hair will later turn out to be Beth Allgood, the U.S. Country Director for the International Fund for Animal Welfare (aka IFAW).
Buoyed by my ignorance and assuming I'm simply in the company of a fellow interested attendee, I ask her what she thinks of the conference so far. I know I'm in the presence of an insider as soon as she mentions the inclusion of both "marine and terrestrial welfare," saying with a slight sense of wonder "Rarely do we get these issues on the same docket…I don't know any other conferences that do that." Indeed, from the first day, the conference has hosted a wide variety of speakers and presentations. Today alone we are looking forward to, among others, a handful of entrepreneurs, a racecar-driving environmental activist, and an impressive pre-teen.
Beth and I exchange some pleasantries about the quality of the conference, which she passionately applauds, and the size of the room, but it doesn't take long for the uncertainty and fear that's constantly churning underneath the mundanities of our lives to boil up.
"I take comfort that our systems are falling apart," Beth tells me with what might be the slight bitterness of someone who has been pointing out the obvious for too long. "We've been on this trajectory since the 1800s, and now we're at a breaking point" she declares, "Now, change is going to be forced." We are joined by a couple other veteran conference attendees, the word "corporatocracy" is bandied around a bit, and, by the time the gentle bell comes over the speakers to lure us into the theatre, I find myself mildly depressed.
This sensation not helped by the sight of empty chairs, the theatre is perhaps half-full. Nonetheless, we form an enthusiastic bunch, and the women who sit next to me shoot me conspiratorial smiles as the chatter dies down. Founder and President of Thinking Animals United Bonnie Wyper comes on first to address the audience and introduce the opening speakers. In a strategic move for a Sunday morning, we begin with a clip from the documentary "illUmiNations: Protecting Our Planet." At this conference, we are easy marks for the gentle emotional pandering of the projection of endangered animals. It implements this through the subsequent dissolve of the images as the clip shows us what will happen to the Florida Panther and the Burmese Star Tortoise because of our careless ways.
At first, I think I must be hormonal with the way that the video seems to be affecting me. But then I hear the woman next to me whisper hoarsely to her friend, "I get a little teary when I see that," and, peering around the dark room through my welling eyes, I realize that there is indeed a puppet-master at work with our heartstrings. Of course, half the attendees are furtively wiping at their eyes. This video is their affirmation, a collective catharsis which we can all walk away from saying, "Look at how important the work is we're doing." And though it undoubtedly is, I can't help feeling manipulated. Empathy becomes the theme in the first presentations. But what use is empathy in this room which has been overflowing with empathy from the beginning?
The first speaker is Patrick Ramage, Director of Marine Conservation at IFAW. He gives a well-spoken and calculated presentation of his journey into the animal welfare world, complete with pictures of Elvis impersonators. He delivers some stirring and emphasized statements, such as "The future and welfare for animals and humans are not separate. They're one."
Beth Allgood's only regret about the conference is that it is, in her opinion, far too unattended. Leaving the summit myself, I think she is right. And even moreso, I'm not convinced that the people who did attend are necessarily the ones who should be attending. I can't help but think of our political situation. I know, I'm sorry. Let me hide it in a musical metaphor. We are all being forced onto a bandwagon; the more that come to town and the bigger they get, the less room there is to move around between them, listening to different tunes. Once you're on a bandwagon, it's a real rave. Everyone's collectively swaying to the same beat, singing along the same lyrics to the same song. But once you're on, the music of all the other bandwagons is drowned out. You never really know what's going on with the variety of other songs besides the dim, vaguely annoying hum that they're reduced to.
The people that need to hear the inspiring stories about changing your values and the potentially groundbreaking statistics about the impact of coral reef health are the people who were not sitting alongside me in that theatre. They're the people who didn't know this conference was happening, who weren't aware that "marine and terrestrial welfare" was even a thing, let alone two completely different camps. The relatively small and enthusiastic crew of scientists, activists, and businesspeople undoubtedly do belong there, and they deserve all the commendation and pats on the back in the same way marathon runners deserve orange slices and the congratulatory praise of strangers. They need fuel for the fight, and the conference definitely offered this up.
And yet, if only those other seats had been filled with non-converts, with representatives of the "corporatocracy," I can't help but feel there may have been an even higher purpose, a greater possibility that was missed as the event swept quietly in and out of town. But stepping down from the bandwagon is hard, and forcing someone down in a "free country" is even harder. Let's just hope the music doesn't get so loud that we drown the others out completely.
Allison Hagg is a roving Minnesotan and sometimes writer currently living and studying in the Upper West Side of New York City.
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