Grade Capital

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Instructor-review Web sites like RateMyProfessors.com are nothing new for today’s tech-savvy students. But even though online rants and raves can suggest which courses to take and which to avoid, they provide users with only a vague idea of how they would fare in a particular course. Until now.

A new site created and maintained by a Yale undergraduate is about to take online course shopping one step further. The site, Gradifi.com, promises to give students a more statistically sound review by actually predicting the grade an individual student would receive in a course, reports the Yale Daily News.

Wired Campus: Yale Student Creates Grade-Predicting Web Site – Chronicle.com, Caitlin Moran.

In theory, grades are like ‘money in the bank,’ as they say; it’s capital that you can invest after graduation to help ensure that you get a good job, etc. That’s certainly the general feeling students get– at least the competitive ones. The social capital– who you meet– and the institutional capital– the school’s reputation and history– might well be more important, of course.

What are the income differences are between A students and B students at Yale? My guess is that it is pretty minimal. Our current president, by all reports, was a C student there. So I think the reasons for this competition are a little mysterious. It’s less like students trying to get ahead and more like a drinking game.

Competition begets competition; competitive schools also attract and encourage the most competitive students. I think, though, that this might be a kind of ‘investment bubble’ that suggests the profound weakness, even decadence, of the old meritocratic system of assessment. This idea of a ‘grade’ as a measure of success is hopefully going the way of the standardized entrance exam.

Posted in: Writing

“What are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?”

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At this point, McCain should be embarrassed to even say that tax cuts for the rich help the economy. Tax cuts for the rich help the rich, they don't help the economy. It's that simple.

This economic catastrophe was many years in the making. There is no painless way to recover from the collapse of the housing bubble and the correction from an over-valued dollar. We do know that Senator McCain's plan to keep giving the rich more money is not a road to prosperity because that is exactly what we have been doing.

We can't know exactly how Senator Obama will address the economy's problems if he takes office in January in part because we don't know exactly where the economy will be. However, a plan that focuses on supporting ordinary workers and promoting clean technologies, is likely to produce much better results than policies that are focused on redistributing even more income to the wealthy.

CEPR – The Whiner’s Recession, Dean Baker.

This piece could be subtitled, “Or why continuing the Bush/McCain class war is not a good idea.” Or maybe that Einstein quote about the definition of insanity as repeating the same thing again and again and expecting new results. I keep thinking, too about that “Drill Baby Drill” chant at the Republican Convention.

My immediate family, most of whom live on the Texas and Louisiana coasts, have been emailing in all weekend, reporting on everyone, talking about who had to leave for shelter and how long it might be before the electricity comes back. My mother was particularly scared by the Tornado warnings Friday night, in Lake Charles.

Meanwhile gas prices shoot up and giant financial institutions collapse. I can’t help but wonder if people are connecting all of the dots. We can’t blame global warming for a storm, although we might blame it for the ferocity. We can blame so-called free market capitalism, though, for destroying wetlands, which make the storms worse.

The Republican party, starting with Reagan, have consistently dismissed alternative energy and refused to provide capital and leadership. The gas hikes from Ike are a result of the disruption of domestic refineries and supplies. Unless we want to relocate our refineries in a bunker somewhere, Gulf Oil will always be unreliable.

Posted in: Autobiographical, Economics, Writing

Twit Twit

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It is easy to become unsettled by privacy-eroding aspects of awareness tools. But there is another — quite different — result of all this incessant updating: a culture of people who know much more about themselves. Many of the avid Twitterers, Flickrers and Facebook users I interviewed described an unexpected side-effect of constant self-disclosure. The act of stopping several times a day to observe what you’re feeling or thinking can become, after weeks and weeks, a sort of philosophical act. It’s like the Greek dictum to “know thyself,” or the therapeutic concept of mindfulness. (Indeed, the question that floats eternally at the top of Twitter’s Web site — “What are you doing?” — can come to seem existentially freighted. What are you doing?) Having an audience can make the self-reflection even more acute, since, as my interviewees noted, they’re trying to describe their activities in a way that is not only accurate but also interesting to others: the status update as a literary form.

Laura Fitton, the social-media consultant, argues that her constant status updating has made her “a happier person, a calmer person” because the process of, say, describing a horrid morning at work forces her to look at it objectively. “It drags you out of your own head,” she added. In an age of awareness, perhaps the person you see most clearly is yourself.

I’m So Totally, Digitally Close to You – Clive Thompson – NYTimes.com.

I’ve grown increasingly skeptical about Utopian claims for technology, mostly becuase they seem to ignore or minimize modern capitalist culture. Whatever else it is, micro-blogging is the latest in a long line of products designed to distract. That may or may not be good, and people may or may not use it for its original function.

I just don’t believe, though, that you can separate it from its “get rich now” roots; whatever else Web 2.0 might be or might become, it arises out of the same profit-minded system that produced the pet rock. So I was happy to see Thompson’s thoughtful piece and particularly surprised by the ending. Thompson suggests that micro-blogging may encourage self-reflection.

He also suggests what seems obvious: that these are, in effect, defensive technologies designed to help ameliorate the alienation and isolation that has always accompanied capitalist cultures. Things can get rough if the center is profit not people. The hope, of course, is that these technologies might also take on an offensive form too.

Posted in: Economics, Language, Writing