Paul M. Jones

Group work is largely an academic joke, a process where the weaker members of the group rely almost exclusively on the stronger, more conscientious students to carry them all to the grade they want. (Of course, the same “weak rely on the strong” dynamic prevails in real-world group work as well.) Group work serves lazy students and professors quite well -- the low-performing students can relax while their peers complete the task, and the professors have fewer papers or projects to grade.

While easy classes and group assignments may do little to further the students’ actual education, that’s not the point, is it? After all, the real purpose of many second-tier (and even some first-tier) public- and private-university business degrees is to provide the mandatory credential required by employers, who then do the actual, on-the-job training the position requires.

This is largely representative of my own experience. Via Business School: Where Education Dies - By David French - Phi Beta Cons - National Review Online.

Every time there is a discussion about cutting some government program, people line up to whine about how that cut is going to hurt somebody. Then you get the sob stories… So we never cut anything. Guess what? They’re not called Budget Pillows or Budget Tickles. They’re Budget CUTS. Cuts are supposed to HURT.

via HAPPY TAX DAY! « Monster Hunter Nation.

My Benchmarking talk has been accepted for OSCON 2011. Looking forward to updating it for the occasion. Woohoo!

If Lustig is right, then our excessive consumption of sugar is the primary reason that the numbers of obese and diabetic Americans have skyrocketed in the past 30 years. But his argument implies more than that. If Lustig is right, it would mean that sugar is also the likely dietary cause of several other chronic ailments widely considered to be diseases of Western lifestyles -- heart disease, hypertension and many common cancers among them.

via Is Sugar Toxic? - NYTimes.com.

UPDATE (same day): a good followup: http://justoneminute.typepad.com/main/2011/04/now-sugar-causes-cancer.html

Instead, the cuts that actually will make it into law are far tamer, including [...] $2.5 billion from the most recent renewal of highway programs that can’t be spent because of restrictions set by other legislation. Another $3.5 billion comes from unused spending authority from a program providing health care to children of lower-income families.

….The spending measure reaps $350 million by cutting a one-year program enacted in 2009 for dairy farmers then suffering from low milk prices. Another $650 million comes by not repeating a one-time infusion into highway programs passed that same year. And just last Friday, Congress approved Obama’s $1 billion request for high-speed rail grants -- crediting themselves with $1.5 billion in savings relative to last year.

About $10 billion of the cuts comes from targeting appropriations accounts previously used by lawmakers for so-called earmarks….Republicans had already engineered a ban on earmarks when taking back the House this year.

Republicans also claimed $5 billion in savings by capping payments from a fund awarding compensation to crime victims. Under an arcane bookkeeping rule -- used for years by appropriators -- placing a cap on spending from the Justice Department crime victims fund allows lawmakers to claim the entire contents of the fund as budget savings. The savings are awarded year after year.

via Ahem, a lot of the spending cuts are frauds -- Marginal Revolution.

An Egyptian military tribunal just found guilty the 26-year-old Maikel Nabil Sanad. What is his alleged crime? Insulting the army. How did he do it? Reported about misbehavior by the army. What is his sentence? Three years in prison.

via Rubin Reports » Egypt Goes Full Circle: Back to Imprisoning Bloggers.

One of the very few XKCD comics that I think is actually funny, not merely juvenile. Via http://cafehayek.com/2011/04/the-con-in-econometrics-made-visible.html.

Think of this next time anyone tells you they found a correlation on anything, *especially* in economic reporting.

... government has promised more than it can realistically deliver and, as a result, repeatedly disappoints by providing less than people expect or jeopardizing what they already have. But government can’t easily correct its excesses, because Americans depend on it for so much that any effort to change the status arouses a firestorm of opposition that virtually ensures defeat. Government’s very expansion has brought it into disrepute, paralyzed politics and impeded it from acting in the national interest.

via Big government on the brink - The Washington Post.

Reaching Earth orbit and only spending a thousand dollars per pound to get your spacecraft there--it's long been the shining goal of the launch business. Tuesday, Elon Musk, the founder of Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), made an announcement promising a new launch beast that could reach that mark in a couple of years--and shake up the space industry. He unveiled a new launch vehicle dubbed "Falcon Heavy." It's a derivative of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, which successfully delivered a pressurized capsule into orbit in December after a successful first flight last summer. But Musk says the Heavy will be able to blast five times as much payload into orbit.

via SpaceX Falcon Heavy Rocket - Private Space Technology - Popular Mechanics.

There’s a $1.6 trillion deficit but the feds are still hiring. As of March 23 they were hiring someone to run a Facebook page for the Deparment of the Interior (at up to $115,000 a year). They were hiring equal opportunity compliance officers at the Peace Corps and Department of Interior for $150,000 to $180,000 a pop. They were hiring deputy speechwriters for officials at relatively obscure agencies. …P.S.: The point isn’t so much that these federal employees are overpaid, though they are. The point is that if there were any actual sense of a deficit crisis in Washington these are jobs that would not be filled at all.

via If you worry about government cutting too much … | The Daily Caller - Breaking News, Opinion, Research, and Entertainment.