May 16, 2008
Bush 'Appeasement' Comments Outrageous, Says Steve Gimbel
Steve Gimbel, at Philosophers’ Playground, is frothing at the mouth over President Bush’s remarks in Israel about “appeasement.”
As The New York Times put it:
President Bush used a speech to the Israeli Parliament on Thursday to liken those who would negotiate with “terrorists and radicals” to appeasers of the Nazis — a remark widely interpreted as a rebuke to Senator Barack Obama, who has advocated greater engagement with countries like Iran and Syria.
Gimbel, of Gettysburg College, writes:
There are so many angles from which outrage should flow from Bush’s “appeasement” comment in front of the Knesset. Making a cheap Nazi reference in front of the Israeli legislature that is celebrating the founding of the nation which was came about in no small part because of the actual horrors of Nazism is tasteless. Taking a nation’s celebration of their 60th anniversary and hijacking it for domestic political shots is rude. Misrepresenting diplomatic engagement for appeasement is dishonest. Overlooking the fact that Bush himself is engaged in exactly this sort of diplomacy with fellow axis of evil leader Kim Jong Il and that the Israelis have a history of diplomatic engagement with their national enemies, not to mention criticizing a fellow American overseas after the Dixie Chicks fiasco, is nothing short of hypocritical.
All of this is disturbing, but what is truly stunning is that here is George W. Bush, the man whose policy of pre-emptive war, whose infantile black-and-white, with us or against us mentality, whose antipathy towards well-established and effective means of diplomacy put not only our country in greater danger, but which has made Israel significantly less safe. This man then stands in front of the government that now has to worry more about the safety of its citizens because of his policy stance and then in his embarrassingly adolescent manner lashes out at one of the adults for suggesting that we need to stop shooting ourselves and Israel in the foot, something everyone in the room knows we have to do. This is nothing short of oblivious.
He becomes even more outraged as the post goes on.
Alex Kafka | Posted on Fri May 16, 10:04 AM | Permalink | Comment [23]Research Gone Wrong
From Nature comes a sad tale of the retraction of two high-profile biochemistry papers, a process that turned a Duke University professor against one of his graduate students.
In February, Homme W. Hellinga retracted articles that he had published in Science and the Journal of Molecular Biology claiming to use a computer program to design a highly active enzyme, one of biochemistry’s tough problems. Mary A. Dwyer, then a graduate student in Mr. Hellinga’s laboratory, had performed much of the work described in the two articles, but she told Nature that at the time of publication, “I felt like we weren’t quite there yet.”
Another scientist, John P. Richard, a chemistry professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo, tried to repeat the work but could not, turning up what looked like problems with Mr. Hellinga’s experiments. After Mr. Richard contacted Mr. Hellinga, the Duke professor contacted Ms. Dwyer last fall, after she had moved to another department at Duke to do postdoctoral research.
She told Nature that Mr. Hellinga said, “I find it really hard to believe that you didn’t make this up.” She defended herself, showing him data from her laboratory notebooks. But Mr. Hellinga referred her to the dean’s office, which conducted an inquiry into potential research misconduct.
In February, the papers were retracted and Ms. Dwyer was cleared of the charge, but scientists expressed concern over what really had happened — as well as outrage at the way Mr. Hellinga had treated his student.
And Nature agrees. In an editorial the journal opines, “As Dwyer’s adviser, Hellinga was responsible for training her. If she made mistakes, they are ultimately his responsibility.”
Read the whole sad story with an online subscription to Nature.
Lila Guterman | Posted on Fri May 16, 09:02 AM | Permalink | Comment [5]May 15, 2008
Why Solitaire (Might) Make Professors Better
In 2001 Ian Ayres, a professor at Yale Law School, took to the opinion pages of The New York Times to record his displeasure with those students who use their laptops during class to surf the Internet, play games, e-mail, or even trade stock.
Ayres now has a prominent supporter in Saul Levmore, dean of the University of Chicago Law School, which has taken the step of blocking Internet access in most of its classrooms. Levmore notes that Internet usage "appears to be contagious if not epidemic" during classes.
In praising Levmore's decision, Ayres stresses that there is no good a priori argument against multitasking. "The case is at best an empirically-informed hunch about what is the best way to teach. I see some power to a parentalism argument that teachers should ban surfing because it impedes students’ ability to learn," Ayres writes on the Freakonomics blog.
But Ayres does concede that some of his more crafty students have come up with a plausible argument in favor of laptop-based distractions in the classroom: If he is forced to compete with the Internet for his students attention he will have more incentive to be an engaging presence in the classroom.
Evan Goldstein | Posted on Thu May 15, 11:10 AM | Permalink | Comment [5]Obama as Muslim Apostate? Rubbish, Says Juan Cole
Juan Cole, at Informed Comment, holds his nose in discussing Edward N. Luttwak’s May 12 New York Times column on how Obama might be perceived as a Muslim apostate.
Luttwak, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, argues against the notion “that an Obama presidency would be welcomed by the Muslim world.”
Says Luttwak:
As the son of the Muslim father, Senator Obama was born a Muslim under Muslim law as it is universally understood. It makes no difference that, as Senator Obama has written, his father said he renounced his religion. Likewise, under Muslim law based on the Koran his mother’s Christian background is irrelevant.Of course, as most Americans understand it, Senator Obama is not a Muslim. He chose to become a Christian, and indeed has written convincingly to explain how he arrived at his choice and how important his Christian faith is to him.
His conversion, however, was a crime in Muslim eyes; it is “irtidad” or “ridda,” usually translated from the Arabic as “apostasy,” but with connotations of rebellion and treason. Indeed, it is the worst of all crimes that a Muslim can commit, worse than murder (which the victim’s family may choose to forgive).
Aside from the larger politics of the matter, Luttwak suggests that it would pose special risks to Obama’s personal safety.
Nonsense, says Cole. “It is just so discouraging that such an ignorant and illogical comment was made by a prominent American pundit,” he writes, “and that The New York Times leant its pages to this complete drivel.”
“Of course, this column is a stealth way of bringing back up the myth of Obama being a Muslim, and it is profoundly dishonest,” Cole says.
He disputes Luttwak’s Koranic interpretation, and his historical and political reasoning.
The bottom line, though, according to Cole, is that “Barack Obama never accepted or practiced Islam as an adult (which would be age 15 in Islamic law) and therefore according to classical Islamic jurisprudence cannot be an apostate.”
Regarding security, Cole says:
An American president might be in danger in the Middle East. But it would be because of the hatred for the United States provoked by the brutal military tactics of the Bush administration and by its blithe unconcern for the welfare of Palestinians and other local people.Alex Kafka | Posted on Thu May 15, 10:29 AM | Permalink | Comment [18]It would be because Bush is the apostate, since he was born under the U.S. constitution but he left it for a faith in torture, killing innocents, neocolonialism, and mass murder (as at Fallujah).
That’s the apostasy that Middle Easterners most mind.
May 14, 2008
Intervention in Myanmar?
Yes, says Amitai Etzioni, of George Washington University — bomb it with rice and medicine.
Drawing on Francis M. Deng’s notion of “sovereignty as responsibility,” Etzioni writes:
An invasion would cause only more casualties on both sides. Nor should we bomb its obstructionist military, as temping as this might seem. However, if the authoritarian rulers of this country (or any other) continue to endanger the lives of many hundreds of thousands of their people by refusing to accept badly needed food and medicine, then the international community should act. It should provide food and meds by air drops. Too often nations bomb nations — killing thousands in the name of one value or another. Such bombings must pass a much higher test before one can judge them as justified. “Bombing” food and meds—to save lives—should come much easier. Like right now.Alex Kafka | Posted on Wed May 14, 10:42 AM | Permalink | Comment [9]
Will Credit-Card Debt Be the Next Financial Crisis?
Is the credit-card debt crisis becoming the next housing-debt crisis? That prospect is raised by Robert Reich, a former secretary of labor, now a public-policy professor at Berkeley.
“The Federal Reserve reported recently that consumer credit — basically everything we all owe money on except our houses — rose more than 7 percent last month to $2.5-trillion worth of revolving debt,” Reich writes. “And the price tag is mounting daily as interest charges accumulate.”
Card companies offer what look like great deals, he says, then suddenly crank up interest rates and penalty fees, and shorten billing cycles. “Sound familiar? It’s just like what mortgage lenders were doing before the bust,” he says.
Congress and the Fed are contemplating action, Reich writes, but the bankers’ lobby is powerful, and argues that if card companies can’t come down hard on debtors, other customers will end up being charged the difference. That was housing lenders’ argument too, says Reich, who writes that “the Fed may be the only hope for protecting Americans while avoiding the kind of meltdown that hit the mortgage market.”
“It’s another reminder,” he writes, “of how our democracy has drifted into the hands of nondemocratic agencies like the Fed, because the political branches are answerable to money interests rather than to the public interest.”
Alex Kafka | Posted on Wed May 14, 10:25 AM | Permalink | Comment [12]May 13, 2008
Carbon Trading: McCain vs. Obama (With Mankiw as Ref)
The Harvard economist Greg Mankiw weighs Sen. John McCain’s views on carbon trading against Sen. Barack Obama’s.
“Over time an increasing fraction of permits for emissions could be supplied by auction,” McCain said, “yielding federal revenues that can be put to good use.”
“Not bad,” responds Mankiw, “but … why over time? Why not immediately? And how high would that fraction become?”
Mankiw likes Obama’s support of a cap-and-trade system through “a 100-percent auction.”
Alex Kafka | Posted on Tue May 13, 10:13 AM | Permalink | Comment [4]Batting Order for Conference Presentations
A reader asks the Undercover Economist, Tim Harford at the Financial Times, what the optimal time is to give a presentation at a conference.
The columnist cites research on TV talent shows like American Idol by a husband and wife team, the economist Lionel Page and the psychologist Katie Page. Harford explains:
The Pages were able to measure whether it was an advantage to appear first or last, or immediately after a flop or a show-stopper. Because most singers appeared several times, the Pages could take account of the fact that the show’s producers might deliberately open and close with strong performers. In effect, they looked at what happened to the same contestant when they appeared earlier or later.
The bottom line is that it’s OK to go first but better to go last. A partial explanation is that these acts are easier to remember.Alex Kafka | Posted on Tue May 13, 10:01 AM | Permalink | Comment [5]
May 12, 2008
Explaining the Lack of Economic Diversity on Campus
Over the past few years, a number of elite colleges and universities have launched campaigns aimed at providing more financial aid to financially-strapped students. But as Karin Fischer recently reported, "the proportion of financially needy undergraduates at the nation's wealthiest colleges and universities actually dropped between the 2004-5 and 2006-7 academic years."
Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation and longtime advocate of class-based affirmative action, offers an analysis of what factors might explain the apparent anomaly.
The primary reason, according to Kahlenberg, is that aid policies are only part of what drives enrollment. "In order to receive aid, low-income and working class students must first be admitted. Because such students often attend lousy schools, even highly talented and hard working students -- who have tremendous potential -- don't look as good on paper as their more privileged colleagues. Research finds that while colleges and universities give substantial preferences to under-represented minorities (blacks, Latinos and Native Americans) and other groups, they give basically no preference to economically disadvantaged students, despite claims to the contrary."
Evan Goldstein | Posted on Mon May 12, 01:05 PM | Permalink | Comment [7]Mankiw Moves Harvard
Harvard University economist Greg Mankiw resents an attempt by the Massachusetts House of Representatives to enact an annual tax of 2.5 percent on college endowments that exceed $1-billion. Massachusetts is home to nine universities with endowments that surpass the $1-billion level. According to The Wall Street Journal, such a tax would cost Harvard -- which has an endowment of $35-billion -- more than $840-million annually.
Mankiw flatly declares the proposed tax "one of the most pernicious ideas I have heard of late." And were the tax to pass he urges a radical course of action for his home institution: Create a satellite campus somewhere warm -- maybe Palm Springs? -- call it Harvard South, and transfer much of the endowment to the new campus. Harvard North should then begin to sell off land in Massachusetts, eventually making Harvard South the main campus. "If Massachusetts state lawmakers remain hostile, close Harvard North down entirely," Mankiw writes.
Richard Florida, who received some recent attention in the Nota Bene column of The Chronicle Review, likes Mankiw's idea: "If states and cities are willing to pony up billions for convention centers...and hundreds of millions in industrial incentives for factories, how much do you think they [might] come up with for a Harvard, or MIT, or Stanford, or Oxford relocation? Universities are already setting up foreign campuses. Trust me, it's just a matter of time until this game gets big."
Evan Goldstein | Posted on Mon May 12, 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comment [8]