Re: trend grading policies
This is a good point. But it can be handled by giving the midterm less weight to begin with. You have an argument for giving a midterm a lower weight, but not a variable weight. And I do give the midterm lower weight. A long standing tradition in Britain (and the derivative Irish system) was for all weight to be on end of year exams (classes typically ran for the whole academic year). When I arrived in Ireland in 1992, there were only two exams that counted for arts students in standard three year degree programs: at the end of the first year, and at the end of the third year. The first year exams determined whether you went into the pass or honours stream of classes; the third year exams determined your graduating grade. Exams at the end of second year did not count; they were only a guide to the student's progress. This is patterned after the Oxford-Cambridge system. There, it appears to work. At my university, like most universities in Ireland and the UK, it was not working. When I arrived here in '92, I immediately caused a ruckus by telling students in the MA class that their grade in my course depended on weekly homework assignments and a midyear exam as well as the end of year exam. They were unhappy because it upset their traditional study method. Classes began in October and ran through the beginning of April. There was then a month long study break, and then exams. The library was virtually empty until the break, when the students actually started studying. Because no one studied until the break, it made it very difficult to build on material over the course of the year. The problem is that 18 and 19 year olds are not mature to understand the importance of regular studying. Oxford and Cambridge solved this problem by weekly tutorials with regular academic staff. They could get away with this because of heavy taxpayer subsidies. Like most places, my university could not, so we got students who did almost no work until the last minute. Not surprisingly, as the number of students has grown (from 1000 twenty years ago to 15,000 now), the system has shifted to increased use of half-year classes, and a lot more examining during the year. I might also add that third year economics options were a mess, because almost no one took intermediate theory classes in second year seriously, because the exams did not count. William Sjostrom + William Sjostrom Senior Lecturer Centre for Policy Studies National University of Ireland, Cork Cork, Ireland +353-21-490-2091 (work) +353-21-427-3920 (fax) +353-21-463-4056 (home) [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.ucc.ie/~sjostrom/
Lott
I'm quite sure that if this happened with a Brookings scholar he would be fired. It will be interesting to see what AEI does. Hats off to Sanchez at Cato for discovering this. - - Bill Dickens Scholar Invents Fan To Answer His Critics By Richard Morin Mary Rosh thinks the world of John R. Lott Jr., the controversial American Enterprise Institute scholar whose book More Guns, Less Crime caused such a stir a few years ago. In postings on Web sites in this country and abroad, Rosh has tirelessly defended Lott against his harshest critics. He is a meticulous researcher, she's repeatedly told those who say otherwise. He's not driven by the ideology of the left or the right. Rosh has even summoned memories of the classes she took from Lott a decade ago to illustrate Lott's probity and academic gifts. I have to say that he was the best professor I ever had, Rosh gushed in one Internet posting. Indeed, Mary Rosh and John Lott agree about nearly everything. Well they should, because Mary Rosh is John Lott -- or at least that's the pseudonym he's used for three years to defend himself against his critics in online debates, Lott acknowledged this week. I probably shouldn't have done it -- I know I shouldn't have done it -- but it's hard to think of any big advantage I got except to be able to comment fictitiously, said Lott, an economist who has held senior research positions at the University of Chicago and Yale. Moreover, the AEI resident scholar acknowledged on Friday that he permitted his 13-year-old son to write an effusive review of More Guns, Less Crime and then post it on the Amazon.com Web site. It was signed Maryrosh. His son gave the book five stars -- the highest possible rating. If you want to learn about what can stop crime or if you want to learn about many of the myths involving crime that endanger people's lives, this is the book to get, the review stated. It was very interesting reading and Lott writes very well. He explains things in an understandable commonsense way. I have loaned out my copy a dozen times and while it may have taken some effort to get people started on the book, once they read it no one was disappointed. Lott denied that he was the author of the review, an assertion made on various Web sites that have been tracking the controversy. He said his son wrote it, with some help from his wife. They told me they had done it. They showed it to me. I wasn't going to tell them not to do it. Should I have? Lott's book, which argues that gun ownership deters crime, has been praised by gun advocates and attacked by those who favor gun control. Lott also is a lesser player in the now-diminishing debate over the 2000 elections. In a study two years ago, Lott reported that the decision by the major television networks to call the Florida election for Al Gore before the polls had closed everywhere in the state led thousands of Republican-leaning voters in the Florida Panhandle not to vote. Other researchers dispute his findings, which have been embraced by conservatives as well as by critics of exit polling. Lott said that he frequently has used the name Mary Rosh to defend himself in online debates. The name is an amalgam of the first two letters of his four sons' first names. In a posting to the Web site maintained by Tim Lambert, an Australian professor who has relentlessly attacked Lott's guns studies, Mary Rosh claims to be a former student of Lott at the University of Pennsylvania, where the economist taught between 1991 and 1995. I had him for a PhD level empirical methods class when he taught at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania back in the early 1990s, well before he gained national attention, and I have to say that he was the best professor that I ever had. You wouldn't know that he was a 'right-wing' ideologue from the class. . . . There were a group of us students who would try to take any class that he taught. Lott finally had to tell us that it was best for us to try and take classes from other professors more to be exposed to other ways of teaching graduate material. When a reporter attempted to read the posting to him over the telephone, Lott stopped him after the first few words. I'm sure I did that. I shouldn't have done it. Julian Sanchez, a Cato Institute staffer, is the cybersleuth who tracked Mary Rosh back to John Lott. Sanchez is a blogger -- someone who maintains a Web site where they report and comment on the news -- who had been tracking the debate between Lott and critics of his gun research. He became suspicious about Rosh after he noticed that several of Rosh's online defenses of Lott seemed to track closely with arguments the scholar himself had made in private e-mails to Sanchez and other bloggers. He tracked Mary Rosh's IP address (the computer code translation of the standard e-mail address) to Pennsylvania. I compared
Re: Economic anamolies and Kuhn
I've also heard that the New Keynesians accept a good deal of what the old Keyneisans and neo-Keynesians rejected, Alypius Skinner wrote: What's the difference between a new Keynesian and a neo-Keynesian? Perhaps a school goes from new to neo- when it becomes `Established'? Is economics suffering from a modifier shortage? After neo- I suggest ter-. -- Anton Sherwood, http://www.ogre.nu/
Re: Lott
--- William Dickens [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'm quite sure that if this happened with a Brookings scholar he would be fired. It will be interesting to see what AEI does. Hats off to Sanchez at Cato for discovering this. Writing under a pen name while creating no lies regarding the actual issues involved is a fireable offense?! -jsh __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com
Re: Economic anamolies and Kuhn
In a message dated 2/1/03 1:42:44 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: I've also heard that the New Keynesians accept a good deal of what the old Keyneisans and neo-Keynesians rejected, Alypius Skinner wrote: What's the difference between a new Keynesian and a neo-Keynesian? Perhaps a school goes from new to neo- when it becomes `Established'? When I first took economics back in 1978 the reigning school appeared to have switched from using the unmodified label Keynesian to neo-Keynesian, which mostly seemed to mean that they were trying to use cost-push inflation theory resucitate Keynesian theory from its obvious failure to allow for stagflation. In my PhD Macro class last semester the professor and Snowden's book used the term New Keynesians to refer to the current inheritors of Keyenes. Snowden also uses the term post-Keynesians to describe a somewhat different group. I also recall now that when I took master's level econometrics back in 1990 my instructor, a PhD candidate, called himself a post-Keynesian. He described the difference between a neo-Keynesian this way: where Paul Samuelson had written two cheers, but not three, for free markets in the econ text book I'd used in 1978, the post-Keynesians say, one cheer for free markets. David
Re: Lott
Writing under a pen name while creating no lies regarding the actual issues involved is a fireable offense?! He represented himself as someone who had taken courses from himself and presented testimonials about his character from that persona. That isn't lying? More to the point. Allowing a family member to submit a review of a book under a false name is a pretty serious breach of academic integrity. - - Bill Dickens
Re: Questions about the stagflation episode...
None of the above. Macro was already fragmented and remained fragmented after the 70s. Hard core monetarism probably did pick-up some adherents due to the events of the 70s, but the internal dynamic of the profession - - the relentless march of the rational actor model into all aspects of the work of economists - - was probably only speeded by these events. What stagflation did was convince people of the correctness of the Friedman/Lucas critique. This set nearly everyone off on a much more determined search for micro foundations for macro theory. I'll go out on a limb and say we still haven't gotten there. Thus Keynesian theory is still taught to undergraduates and it is what is behind most commercial forecasting models (though they may have some new-classical tweaks here and there). This is why I don't think this was a paradigm shift in the sense of Kuhn because there was no alternative paradigm to take the place of the Keynesian model. Bill Dickens [EMAIL PROTECTED] 02/01/03 02:06PM What would be the most accurare description of the economic profession's response to stagflation: 1) Everybody dropped Keynesianism and adopted a new model (monetarism?). 2) Macroeconomics broke up into competing schools, with different concepts and theories. 3) Keynesians kept going, but new economists adopted one or more models. Fabio
Re: Lott
--- William Dickens [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: He represented himself as someone who had taken courses from himself and presented testimonials about his character from that persona. That isn't lying? Not about the issues involved. The debate is about violent crime, not Lott. Frankly, given that he was writing under a pen name, I think it is funny that he'd make up a goofy little story about himself. It did have him saying to take listen to other economists and get difference views after all. If under his nom de plume, or however it's spelled, he fairly represented the facts and arguments of the gun-control debate, then he's committed no transgression--other than having a little fun. Probably the only reason he shouldn't have done it is that the state of logical reasoning in our society is so poor that ad hominems have considerable weight with alot of people. He has probably given fodder to those whose rhetorical style is a little, for lack of a better phrase, ad captandum vulgus. More to the point. Allowing a family member to submit a review of a book under a false name is a pretty serious breach of academic integrity. To amazon.com? I don't know about that. The forum operates under effective anonymity, with no references, virtually no standards, and little (if any) editorial review. His kid writes a review and submits it to amazon.com under his pen name? I don't see the harm. I respect your view on this, but I strongly disagree with it. I see no reason to judge Lott poorly as a result of this. __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com
Re: Lott
Writing under a pen name while creating no lies regarding the actual issues involved is a fireable offense?! He represented himself as someone who had taken courses from himself and presented testimonials about his character from that persona. That isn't lying? More to the point. Allowing a family member to submit a review of a book under a false name is a pretty serious breach of academic integrity. - - Bill Dickens I disagree on the second point. John Lott's children are just as free to submit reviews as anyone else--and lots of people use false names on Usenet. The more interesting question is whether his son had read the book--but I gather his mother helped with the review, and she surely has. -- David Friedman Professor of Law Santa Clara University [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.daviddfriedman.com/
