August linkdump

• The company that makes OldReader, the RSS reader I fled to after the sad demise of Google Reader, is from Madison!  OK, Middleton.  Still part of Silicon Isthmus.
• I never new that Mark Alan Stamaty, one of my favorite cartoonists, did the cover of the first They Might Be Giants album.
• Hey I keep saying this and now Allison Schrager has written an article about it for Bloomberg.  Tenure is a form of compensation.  If you think tenure is a bad way to pay teachers, and that compensation is best in the form of dollars, that’s fine; but if California pretends that the elimination of tenure isn’t a massive pay cut for teachers, they’re making a basic economic mistake.
• New “hot hand” paper by Brett Green and Jeffrey Zweibel, about the hot hand for batters in baseball.  They say it’s there!  And they echo a point I make in the book (which I learned from Bob Wardrop) — some of the “no such thing as the hot hand” studies are way too low-power to detect a hot hand of any realistic size.
• Matt Baker goes outside the circle of number theory and blogs about real numbers, axioms, and games.  Daring!  Matt also has a very cool new paper with Yao Wang about spanning trees as torsors for the sandpile group; but I want that to have its own blog entry once I’ve actually read it!
• Lyndon Hardy wrote a fantasy series I adored as a kid, Master of the Five Magics.  I didn’t know that, as an undergrad, he was the mastermind of the Great Caltech Rose Bowl Hoax.  Now that is a life well spent.
• Do you know how many players with at least 20 hits in a season have had more than half their hits be home runs?  Just two:  Mark McGwire in 2001 and Frank Thomas in 2005.

I am cranky about people who are cranky about the tenure system

Via Deane Yang’s Facebook feed, this New York Times round table on the question of tenure, featuring weigh-ins from faculty members in education, English, religion, education again, and economics.  Notice anything missing?  Like, say, science, engineering, law, and medicine?  I said this before but I’m cranky about this piece so I’ll say it again.  The reason we need tenure in these fields is not because we’re worried about getting fired for teaching an anti-establishment line on epsilons and deltas.*  It’s because universities have to compete with private employers for scientists, mathematicians, engineers, lawyers and doctors.  Mark Taylor writes:

If you were the C.E.O. of a company and the board of directors said: “We want this to be the best company of its kind in the world. Hire the best people you can find and pay them whatever is required.” Would you offer anybody a contract with these terms: lifetime employment, no possibility of dismissal, regardless of performance? If you did, your company would fail and you would be looking for a new job. Why should academia be any different from every other profession?

Maybe because academia pays a lot less than many other professions?  Does Taylor have any suggestions as to what alternative benefit we should offer candidates in order to make an academic job worth their while?  Does he really think that, absent tenure, our board of trustees would tell our chancellor, “Hire the best people you can find and pay them whatever is required?”

Right now, tenure is what universities have instead of money.  I don’t see a lot of money coming our way soon.  So I think we’d better hold on to tenure.

* Although this actually happened to Cauchy!