According to this book Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, on the question “are undergraduates really learning anything once they get there?” the answer according to U of Chicago review is “for a large proportion of students, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s answer to that question is a definitive no. Their extensive research draws on survey responses, transcript data, and, for the first time, the state-of-the-art Collegiate Learning Assessment, a standardized test administered to students in their first semester and then again at the end of their second year. According to their analysis of more than 2,300 undergraduates at twenty-four institutions, 45 percent of these students demonstrate no significant improvement in a range of skills—including critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing—during their first two years of college.  http://www.press.uchicago.edu/presssite/metadata.epl?isbn=9780226028552.

Well that’s money well spent.  Guess the kids must be really cramming a lot of learning into their last two years.

According to the NYT today (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/30/us/30film.html?hp) the last Kodachrome processing facility in Parsons Kansas will close today.  I bet my kids don’t even know who Paul Simon is, never mind what he probably imagined would be a timeless metaphor for his song.

I can just imagine what it would be costing me for photo processing for the girls given the endless pile they produce daily.

Kodak gave Steve McMurray, the Photographer who took this famous picture for National Geographic, on Kodachromme of course, the last roll of film they produced.  My picture might have been an iconic mashup except for the fact that we’d been up late and Margaret wouldn’t take her sunglasses off, and my digital camera overexposed (-:

So first produced in 1935, who’d have believed even ten years ago that picture images would get even more ubiquitious and Kodak would have very little to do with it.  And looking forward from ten years ago, that there would be mobile phone cameras, Facebook, and Posterous.  Another buggy whip.

I’ve been sitting here in a hotel lobby reading my email, newspapers on my laptop, pulling a picture of Margaret out of my photoshop album, and blogging, watching a french woman across from me skype one person after another………..

Plus ca change………………Bonne annee

Sitting in the lobby of the hotel in Tucson, listening to Bing Crosby singing “it’s beginning to look a lot like christmas”, watching the palm trees whip in the wind and the rain come down in buckets as el nino enjoys itself in the city that gets 340 days of sunshine, might be kind of depressing.

But tomorrow’s forecast is for sun, after loosing 5 golf balls and shooting 107 yesterday there is lots of room for improvement, and i didn’t spend $400 for a ticket for the Winter Classic that looks like its going to get rained out.  Mostly I’m sitting in a nice resort in Arizona.

It isn’t a bluebird blue day, but it isn’t bad, just different. 

Canada continues its record of excellence in cold weather sports other than hockey, stranding 260 motorists between Sarnia and London due to a snowstorm yesterday, more than twice as many as the 100 stranded outside Buffalo on December 10.  Canadians patiently waited their turn to be rescued.  Americans not so much.  In a surprising related development, Canada actually found some military and helicopters to help, while the US relied on local sheriffs on snowmobiles.  Guess the US Military were busy elsewhere.

Canada Military Evacuates Motorists Stranded by Snow

Printed in The Wall Street Journal DECEMBER 15, 2010

By KATE LINEBAUGH…… “Canada’s military began airlifting hundreds of motorists stranded for 24 hours on a stretch of highway in southwestern Ontario, after a blizzard snarled traffic and caused a key U.S.-Canada bridge to suspend commercial traffic into Ontario. The Ontario Provincial Police estimate 360 vehicles were stuck as the storm dumped snow over rural Highway 402 about 20 miles east of Sarnia, Ontario. No injuries were reported.”

More than 100 motorists stranded on Thruway

The Buffalo News ^ | 12/11/09 | Lou Michel and Peter Simon

More than 100 motorists are stranded on the Thruway between Dunkirk and the Pennsylvania border, locked in by blowing snow since 1:30 a.m. when the Thruway closed.

Many motorists stuck in the snow have been in contact with state police by cell phone. State police on ATVs and Chautauqua County Sheriff’s deputies on snowmobiles are trying to reach the stranded motorists.

WBEN caller Will from Derby said, "If the State Police and the Thruway Authority can’t handle this, call in the National Guard. We’re going on 13 hours out here with no food, no water, no lavatory facilities. It’s like a third world country."

http://gizmodo.com/5704158/nasa-finds-new-life?skyline=true&s=i

Think it’s a sign of trust?  Americans are willing to turn their back to Canadians without worrying about the longest undefended border in the world?  Maybe its that the US is kind of busy on the other border at the moment, and they know Canadians are too polite and law abiding to get busy digging tunnels under the border and shooting anything that moves.

Now that the golden calf of refinancing homes and mortgages has been eviscerated, and the carcass of our hamburger / class-action suit / Black Friday based economy has been thoroughly picked over (apparently the last time the US had the current 11.7M manufacturing jobs level, according to the Bureau of Labour Statistics, was April 1941), the “banks” have to find something new to monetize and trade.  Seems like the only buoyant sector these days is government employment.  And municipal parking lots, but they are already monetizing that.

We spend $477 Billion annually on Federal Gov’t employees, and 60% of that is Union jobs, so we know that is all stable, dependable long-term earnings flow.  Could we divide up say by Department of Energy, Defense, Education, Bureau of Labour Statistics, etc., and then create some tranches by Dept and Job Class e.g. AAAA for Dept of Defense / senior bureaucrat / union job, Moody’s can develop a new business rating this stuff so it’s all official and we know what we are buying, NYMEX can create a futures market so these employees and government can hedge their future labour costs….presto, another ponzi scheme bubble in the making that the FI’s can rich off.  CLMDO’s.  Collateralized Long-term Millstone around the neck of US citizens Debt Obligations.  I could get a partnership at GS if I could pull this off. 

“A recent Heritage Foundation study found federal workers earn 30-40% more money on average than counterparts in the private sector.  Including non-cash benefits adds to this disparity. The average private-sector employer pays $9,882 per employee in annual benefits, while the federal government pays an average of $32,115 per employee.”  Luckily around 60% of these jobs are Union jobs

In 2005, 7420 federal workers were making $150,000 or more per year.  In 2010, a whopping 82,034 federal workers are making $150,000 or more per year. Source: USA Today

Then it probably helps to know how and what we are currently using.  Not having a picture of that was frustrating me, until someone at work send me this graphic which, compliments of the US Energy Dept., does a nifty job of putting a lot of information into a simple map.

Energy Flow, 2009

(Quadrillion Btu)

1 Includes lease condensate.

2 Natural gas plant liquids.

3 Conventional hydroelectric power, biomass, geothermal, solar/photovoltaic, and wind.

4 Crude oil and petroleum products. Includes imports into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

5 Natural gas, coal, coal coke, biofuels, and electricity.

6 Adjustments, losses, and unaccounted for.

7 Coal, natural gas, coal coke, electricity, and biofuels.

8 Natural gas only; excludes supplemental gaseous fuels.

9 Petroleum products, including natural gas plant liquids, and crude oil burned as fuel.

9 Petroleum products, including natural gas plant liquids, and crude oil burned as fuel.

10 Includes 0.02 quadrillion Btu of coal coke net exports.

11 Includes 0.12 quadrillion Btu of electricity net imports.

12 Total energy consumption, which is the sum of primary energy consumption, electricity retail

sales, and electrical system energy losses. Losses are allocated to the end-use sectors in

proportion to each sector’s share of total electricity retail sales. See Note, “Electrical Systems

Energy Losses,” at end of Section 2.

Notes: • Data are preliminary. • Values are derived from source data prior to rounding for

publication. • Totals may not equal sum of components due to independent rounding.

Sources: Tables 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, and 2.1a.

U.S. Energy Information Administration / Annual Energy Review 2009

http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/pdf/pages/sec1_3.pdf

American people have spoken.  Wholesale changes in our elected representatives. Too bad none of the politicians are paying attention.

Republican leadership say they are going to focus on beating Obama in 2012.  Democrats are going to elect Reid and Pelosi so they can have the same leadership that led them into last Tuesday’s massacre. 

Whether you like the actual bills or not, Pelosi got stuff done, for which she was rewarded by being turned into a dartboard.  Personally i think it looked good on her, but either way that’s the profession she chose, and in this economy being a wealthy liberal woman incumbent from San Fransisco is probably not the best profile to have, unless you like being a dart catcher.

But rallying from leading the charge of the light brigade, she cares about her constituents, the american people, and the future of our country so much that she’s going to consent to lead the democrats into this lame duck session and a minority house for the next two years.  hmmmmm.

Or she’s embarrased,  a professional politician, and doesn’t care about anything quite so much as her ego, her job, and her legacy. 

Glad they all listened and learned.