Stress and Aging

I have always looked a lot older than I am. I guess that’s due, in part, to stress (Washington Post, free registration required):

If the findings are confirmed, they could provide the first explanation on a cellular level for the well-documented association between psychological stress and increased risk of physical disease, as well as the common perception that unrelenting emotional pressure accelerates the aging process.

I guess I need to learn to chill out. Alcohol? Drugs? Less caffeine? Well…. here’s a quote from a recent piece in Slate:

While diet and intake of antioxidant vitamins appears to have had little effect on longevity, moderate wine drinking and daily consumption of caffeinated coffee were both linked to living longer.

So the existential question for today is, “Should I or should I not drink coffee?”

Nature vs. Nurture and Adoption

As a parent of both biological and adopted children, I found this posting at The Marginal Revolution fascinating. Before we adopted our daughter, I did quite a bit of reading about adoption. One source said that parents of adopted children believe that genes are much more important in influencing how children turn out than do parents who have no adopted children.

Another piece that was published long ago by the Child Welfare League indicated that the best predictor of how well an adoption would turn out was how well the child matched up with the adopting parents pre-adoption image of the child (i.e. did the parents get what they wanted or were they forced to accept second or third choice because of the shortage of adoptable infants?). In fact, when that study was conducted, one couldn’t reject the hypothesis that the effective marginal product of social workers placing adoptable infants was zero or negative.

I have more on that topic in my piece, “the Social Costs of Adoption Agencies” that appeared in International Review of Law and Economics 6 (1986): 189-203. I also have a short piece (available here) on “adoption” in the New Palgrave Dictionary of Law and Economics (1998).

Students, Studying, and More Lies

A little over 80 years ago, when I was an undergraduate, several respectable folks told me that I should expect to study two hours outside of class for every hour of lecture time. I figured that wasn’t too bad. I had about 16 hours of classes each week; so if I studied 32 hours, that would leave me with plenty of time for my part-time job and lots of leisure. Hah!

I attended Carleton College in Minnesota. Students there were called “bookers” because they studied so much; the most popular date was to invite someone to go to the library to study together. At the end of my first year, someone did a survey, asking how much we studied. As I recall, I exaggerated a wee bit and reported that I had studied an average of 35 hrs/wk during that year. I was shocked to see the final results of the survey: on average, students at Carleton reported that they studied about 50 hrs/wk! Either they were better liars than I was, or they worked harder. Either way, no wonder I was in the bottom half of my class.

This fall, following what had been said to me back then, I informed my intro students that I expect them to study about two hours out of class for every hour of lecture. Judging from some things that even the good students have said (or posted to their personal blogs), not many are studying this much. And the students here are no different from others all across North America, or so it seems from this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (Thanks to Professor Banaian for the link)

One puzzling thing about the article:

About 40 percent of students say they earn mostly A’s, with 41 percent reporting that they earn mostly B’s.

Really??? 81% of students, on average, receive (I can’t imagine they “earn” them) As and Bs? How is that? Are they all taking sociology courses? Or are they lying about how well they’re doing? Or has there been tremendous grade inflation in most schools? Or are today’s students just really really smart? Or what?

And if students receive As and Bs with so little work, what on earth are they doing with their spare time? Are more of them working longer hours at part-time or full-time jobs so they can afford to attend college or university? Are they watching more television? Socializing? Web-surfing?

They Call This Good Baseball Coaching???

An article in the NYTimes magazine profiles several sports academies for young athletes. Most of the article highlights the phenomenally high cost of such programmes. The high costs seem quite consistent with tournament theory in economics: if you hold out a very big prize for the winners (in this case, making it to the big leagues in any major sport), people will be more likely to put forth an extra effort (and pay extra money) to win that prize. It should not be surprising that people respond to incentives.

I wonder how successful at least one of these academies is going to be, though. Its coaches are teaching their young baseball students not only that it is good to make outs, but also how to do it!

Out at the ball field, I watched a four-hour practice devoted to ‘’situations.” ”Runner on third base, one out, infield drawn in — what do you do?” Bolek asked. Tommy was the first to answer. ”You hit a fly ball.” ”Right,” the coach said. For the next 30 minutes, hitters stood in against pitching from an assistant coach and practiced taking the kind of swing that would produce an outfield fly ball. When the infielders moved back, they practiced hitting ground balls to score the runner. They worked on sacrifice bunts and on hitting ground balls to the right side of second base to move runners from second base to third base. …. The coaching at IMG is also, undeniably, first rate.

Phhhttt.

Any general manager who has an inkling of the content of Moneyball will not want to sign kids who think it is good to make outs. Young players should be taught to get hits and take walks and avoid making outs! Sabremetrics has a long way to go, I guess, before it affects many of the people still doing the training and coaching. Too bad.
(thanks to John H. for the pointer)

A Climate of Hate

So far as I can tell, most professors try to have an impact on students’ ideas and thinking processes; that’s one of the reasons we do these jobs. Sometimes, though, as we try to have an impact on our students, professors can be overwhelming, overbearing, and overpowering. Sometimes it is explicit and the result of being control freaks; sometimes it is just because professors operate from a position of authority, controlling the students’ grades.

But we should draw the line before we get to the climate of fear and hate that has been created in some classrooms at Columbia University:

“Professorial power is being abused,” said Ariel Beery, a senior who is student president in the School of General Studies, but stresses he’s speaking only for himself. “Students are being bullied because of their identities, ideologies, religions and national origins,” Beery said.

When polemics begin to dominate scholarly inquiry, we have good cause to worry about the quality of education the students receive at such institutions.
Link from Ben and Clive (President of SAFS, the Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship).
Also see this.

The Budget of the Governess General

When Adrienne Clarkson became Canada’s Governess General in 1999, she had an annual budget of $11 million to run a chiefly ceremonial office. Her current budget is $19 million per year. Her office has been under attack for quite some time because of its overspending, including a $5 million circumpolar junket to Moscow last year. Now it looks as if her annual budget will be cut by about $417K. That’ll really cut down on her profligacy!

To see a picture of the Governess General being greeted by the Esquire Bedel (guess who) at The University of Western Ontario, click here.

Upon reflection, I think I could do her job for about $4 million/year.

Drive-Throughs, Anti-Intellectuals, & the Environment

Lake Tahoe, California, has banned drive-throughs at fast-food restaurants since 1987, believing that drive-throughs contribute to air pollution. In Canada, Toronto (pronounced TRAH-nah) and Windsor have banned drive-throughs in residential areas, arguing drive-throughs lower air quality in the neighbourhood. Kitchener, Ontario, is considering the same policy, as are some municipalities in British Columbia.

The stated reason for these bans (air quality) is simply incorrect. It turns out that parking your car, going in to get your food, and then restarting your car uses more fuel and causes more pollution than idling your car while you wait in a drive-through queue. The results of a study done by RDWI showing this result are summarized in the National Post ($ subscription required, thanks for the tip, Jack). Furthermore, banning a drive-through in one area can induce some people at the margin to drive farther to a different area where they can use a drive-through, thus further contributing to pollution.

I expect that some people favour the ban on drive-throughs because they don’t want the extra traffic in their residential neighbourhood. Others, however, see drive-throughs as a hated symbol of our North American consumerism. This nefarious group happily asserts that drive-throughs contribute to air pollution, even though the evidence is that using drive-throughs reduces pollution! What a bunch of feel-good anti-intellectuals.

Maybe overall air quality would be improved if we left our engines running while we go into the doughnut shop to get our coffee and bagel?

Drive-Throughs, Anti-Intellectuals, & the Environment

Lake Tahoe, California, has banned drive-throughs at fast-food restaurants since 1987, believing that drive-throughs contribute to air pollution. In Canada, Toronto (pronounced TRAH-nah) and Windsor have banned drive-throughs in residential areas, arguing drive-throughs lower air quality in the neighbourhood. Kitchener, Ontario, is considering the same policy, as are some municipalities in British Columbia.

The stated reason for these bans (air quality) is simply incorrect. It turns out that parking your car, going in to get your food, and then restarting your car uses more fuel and causes more pollution than idling your car while you wait in a drive-through queue. The results of a study done by RDWI showing this result are summarized in the National Post ($ subscription required, thanks for the tip, Jack). Furthermore, banning a drive-through in one area can induce some people at the margin to drive farther to a different area where they can use a drive-through, thus further contributing to pollution.

I expect that some people favour the ban on drive-throughs because they don’t want the extra traffic in their residential neighbourhood. Others, however, see drive-throughs as a hated symbol of our North American consumerism. This nefarious group happily asserts that drive-throughs contribute to air pollution, even though the evidence is that using drive-throughs reduces pollution! What a bunch of feel-good anti-intellectuals.

Maybe overall air quality would be improved if we left our engines running while we go into the doughnut shop to get our coffee and bagel?

Drive-Throughs, Anti-Intellectuals, & the Environment

Lake Tahoe, California, has banned drive-throughs at fast-food restaurants since 1987, believing that drive-throughs contribute to air pollution. In Canada, Toronto (pronounced TRAH-nah) and Windsor have banned drive-throughs in residential areas, arguing drive-throughs lower air quality in the neighbourhood. Kitchener, Ontario, is considering the same policy, as are some municipalities in British Columbia.

The stated reason for these bans (air quality) is simply incorrect. It turns out that parking your car, going in to get your food, and then restarting your car uses more fuel and causes more pollution than idling your car while you wait in a drive-through queue. The results of a study done by RDWI showing this result are summarized in the National Post ($ subscription required, thanks for the tip, Jack). Furthermore, banning a drive-through in one area can induce some people at the margin to drive farther to a different area where they can use a drive-through, thus further contributing to pollution.

I expect that some people favour the ban on drive-throughs because they don’t want the extra traffic in their residential neighbourhood. Others, however, see drive-throughs as a hated symbol of our North American consumerism. This nefarious group happily asserts that drive-throughs contribute to air pollution, even though the evidence is that using drive-throughs reduces pollution! What a bunch of feel-good anti-intellectuals.

Maybe overall air quality would be improved if we left our engines running while we go into the doughnut shop to get our coffee and bagel?

Gingerbread Cookies

Some of the fanciest and most impressive gingerbread cookies in the universe are made by Bernadette and Mary. I’ve known them for over a decade, and they are terrific, hard-working people.

Their cookies are not cheap, but they are the best-decorated you’ll ever see and the best-tasting you’ll ever taste. They use top quality ingredients, and they ship their cookies anywhere in the world. They can be reached here (I get nothing from any click-throughs, so you know I really mean it).