Elsewhere on the Chronicle site is an article by me and four scientists on overpublication in the sciences. Here are the opening paragraphs:

"Everybody agrees that scientific research is indispensable to the nation's health, prosperity, and security. In the many discussions of the value of research, however, one rarely hears any mention of how much publication of the results is best. Indeed, for all the regrets one hears in these hard times of research suffering from financing problems, we shouldn't forget the fact that the last few decades have seen astounding growth in the sheer output of research findings and conclusions. Just consider the raw increase in the number of journals. Using Ulrich's Periodicals Directory, Michael Mabe shows that the number of 'refereed academic/scholarly' publications grows at a rate of 3.26 percent per year (i.e., doubles about every 20 years). The main...

Last year I did a post on the many commentators who observed the protests in Iran and declared that the protesters' primary tool of protest was Twitter. One after another thinker and speaker termed it a "revolution," as when Clay Shirky announced, "This is it. The big one." He called the protests "the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media." I'll have a post on Shirky next week.)

And here was Andrew Sullivan's prediction: "It reveals in Iran what the Obama campaign revealed in the United States. You cannot stop people any longer. You cannot control them any longer. They can bypass your established media; they can broadcast to one another; they can organize as never before. ... The key force behind this is the next generation, the Millennials, who elected Obama in America and may oust Ahmadinejad in Iran. They want freedom; they are ...

President Obama speaking at Kalamazoo Central High School:

"You all were raised with cell phones and iPods; texting and e-mail; able to call up a fact, a song, a friend with the click of a button—so you're used to instant gratification. But meaningful achievement, lasting success—that doesn't happen in an instant."  These are words to repeat over and over to teenagers.

And here is a YouTube video sent to me by a couple of high-school students in Northbrook, Ill.  They made it in response to The Dumbest Generation, taking an extra cue from Leno's "Jaywalking" segments, and it's hilarious and worrisome at the same time. 

In the Washington Examiner, Glenn Reynolds lays out some arguments that higher-ed financing is about to go soft. First of all, he cites the reasons why colleges have been able to raise tuition much faster than rates of inflation.

"First—as with the housing bubble—cheap and readily available credit has let people borrow to finance education. They're willing to do so because of (1) consumer ignorance, as students (and, often, their parents) don't fully grasp just how harsh the impact of student loan payments will be after graduation; and (2) a belief that, whatever the cost, a college education is a necessary ticket to future prosperity."

If people start to become, first of all, more pessimistic and, next, more knowledgeable about the actual benefits of a college degree, or rather an expensive college degree as opposed to a (relatively) cheap college degree, the system is in trouble....

What motivates the Tea Partiers?

More than anything else, the conviction that individuals in Congress, state houses, governors' mansions, and the White House have mishandled the people's money. Tea Partiers attribute the mismanagement to a socio-political condition, that is, the separation of politicians over time into a political class with ties and alliances and obligations all its own.

A fair illustration appeared not long ago in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by Robert Wilmers. Under the title "What About Fan and Fred Reform?," it asks why amidst all the financial-regulation discussion going on two of the leading players in the meltdown have gone untouched, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The raw numbers are overwhelming:

"The public has focused more on taxpayer bailouts of banks, auto makers and insurance companies. But the scale of the rescue required in September 2008 when Fan...

A few weeks back, a post on Frank Rich's rhetoric yielded a lively comment section, with several people defending Rich against the charge that in spite of his sharp intelligence the prose slides into lazy locutions, easy allusions, and overheated metaphors. Let's look at Rich's column this weekend. It raises the issue of the Obama Administration's handling of the Gulf spill, particularly in light of recent attacks on the competence of the president coming from all parts of the ideological spectrum.

(See this Times story, which contains some feeble bureaucrat-speak from Carol Browner, Obama's climate adviser, such as this: "'This is obviously a difficult situation,' Ms. Browner said on NBC's Meet the Press on Sunday, ‘but it's important for people to understand that from the beginning, the government has been in charge.'")

Rich's column addresses the question of Obama's competence,...

Here's an article at Education Next on a spreading trend in secondary education: the competition.  According to the author, bees and other contests are proliferating by the year, and participation in each one continues to rise. The article mentions several of them in different subjects: the Scripps National Spelling Bee, the National Geographic Bee, MATHCOUNTS (with participants increasing by 10 percent in the last two years), the National Science Bowl (sponsored by U.S. Dept of Energy), a Bible Bowl, and the International Brain Bee. They host competitions and give out awards and dollars to winners.

Of course, the elements and principles behind the competition run against many of the basic premises of education theory. "Today's teachers generally cringe at everything about that development," author June Kronholz writes. "All those hours spent on one narrow academic focus! All that rote ...

One of the biggest academic stories of recent years was the Duke lacrosse scandal, and one of its central exhibits was the rush to judgment by Duke faculty members who signed the notorious "Group of 88" statement two weeks after the allegations surfaced. As everyone knows, the case fell apart despite DA Mike Nifong's efforts to railroad the accused. Long before Nifong was disbarred, K.C. Johnson raised serous criticism about the Group of 88's response, citing particularly the signers' disrespect toward due process and their overheated, bullying, and illiberal reading of identity politics into the affair from the start.

If anybody was wondering about how the neglect of basic rights might have damaged the reputations of the signers, however, Johnson has a recent update on the careers of several of them. It appears at Minding the Campus under the title "Whatever Happened to the Group of 88...

Next door at the Percolator blog appeared a bit on a new study of the importance of books in the home.  It linked to the abstract for the article and gave a nice summary of the findings:

"But what's surprising, according to a new study published in the journal Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, is just how strong the correlation is between a child's academic achievement and the number of books his or her parents own. It's even more important than whether the parents went to college or hold white-collar jobs."

While the formal education of parents matters to the academic achievement of the children, it actually doesn't influence it as much as does the book factor.

In the comment roll, because only the abstract was available, people wondered about what the study controlled for.  Here is a summary from the conclusion of the article:

"In sum, we find that parents' commitment ...

Here is a list of 10 conditions that the medical administration of marijuana are purported to relieve.  As the story notes, 14 states allow medical marijuana distribution. Although one sees crackdowns taking place in Los Angeles (imagine a city heading toward bankruptcy devoting precious law enforcements to that).

This is why it is altogether disappointing that the Obama Administration has chosen to continue policies and resource distribution in place for many years in spite of its rhetoric to the contrary.

Here is a story from Law Enforcement against Prohibition that responds to the release of the Administration's National Drug Control Strategy. It notes that despite the claim of balancing health/prevention and policing/enforcement, the strategy devotes almost twice as much funding to the latter as to the former—precisely the same proportions as did the Bush Administration.

It isn't ...