J. Michael Andresen

In my recent blog post about an economic experiment in Washington, DC. My anti-union rant received four wonderful replies in the comments and through email, each excoriating me in their own way. My wife added her vituperation later in the evening. I love the debate, and will here respond to my critics. I should first say that I did not mean to say that the teacher's union is the only problem in primary and secondary education. I realize some might have thought that when I wrote "I think it is a travesty that the U.S. . . . trails most of the first world when it comes to primary and secondary education. I think the problem is the teacher's union." That was a bit strong! I meant to say that I think that's the biggest problem that might be amenable to change via government intervention in economic incentives. Adrian mentions a number of things that he would list as bigger problems (with Leanne chiming in agreement): general public apathy, commodification of educat...

Top three reasons I am more stereotypically female than Katie 1. She brings home way more bacon than I do. 2. She hates asking for help. She sometimes chooses to leave a store without finding what she wants rather than ask a clerk for help. I, on the other hand, usually make a bee-line for the nearest clerk when I enter a store, figuring they know much more about location of items than I do. 3. I do Katie's mending. Yesterday, I sewed a straying button back on to one of her business outfits. Top three reasons I am not really that worried 1. I can bench press way more than she can. 2. Her facial hair is sad and wispy. 3. While I did sew a button for her last night, it was on a sweater set, and it required hot pink thread.

Katie has been struggling through a heinous cold, and last night she wanted to eat pizza and watch Batman Begins so that we would be ready to see The Dark Knight . Sadly, many other people had the same idea. Not only was the movie all rented out from our local video rental store, but they called around to other stores, too. Not to worry, the clerk assured me. They had the DVD for sale! I knew that Katie was pretty set on the movie, so I asked how much it was selling for. Oops! It turned out that they were sold out of the DVDs they had for sale, too. All they had left was one copy of the deluxe DVD, selling for $34.99. I called Katie, and she confirmed that she really wanted to see Batman Begins . I bought the special two-disk DVD set amidst much laughter among the video store employees, who were all following my pathetic saga with some relish. We watched the movie last night and greatly enjoyed it. We ate Papa Murphy's gourmet vegetarian pizza while we watched. And it turns out th...

I won't say how the conversation started, but at one point over the weekend it became imperative to understand the colloquial usage of the term "balling." In particular, I needed to know how concerned I should be if I were to discover that a certain female acquaintance of mine was, in fact, balling. Katie was of little help: "I can't think what 'balling' would mean. That she'd be turning into balls?" I granted her that would be not particularly upsetting. In my memory, though, the term is slang for "having sex (with)." This would be slightly more disturbing, given the prepubescent nature of the female in question. A trip to Urban Dictionary calmed me at first. The first definition was quite salutary: 1. To be full of money. To be rich. Yo, dat ricer is balling. Nothing wrong with a young woman being rich, certainly! My understanding of the term was the second definition: 2. A male fornicating with a female. Steve was balling the shit...

I think it is a travesty that the U.S. is the envy of the world for post-secondary education but trails most of the first world when it comes to primary and secondary education. I think the problem is the teacher's union, which requires schools to give teachers tenure and pays teachers based on seniority. To improve the quality of teaching, schools need to pay teachers based on their performance and to fire those teachers who are least effective. What governments have tried to do is just spend more money. By raising taxes to give more money to schools, it was hoped, test scores would improve. It has not worked. Across the U.S. (and, interestingly, world-wide) there seems to be a very poor correlation between school spending and test scores (correcting, as always, for factors such as socioeconomic status, which very clearly do impact scores). For a while, I thought that school vouchers would be the way out of the problem. Allowing economic incentive to make schools more efficient (a...

I took a European vacation in April after being invited to a couple of scientific conferences, on in Italy and one in France. The first conference was on obsessive-compulsive disorder (which absorbs probably 2% of my professional effort), and the second was on Huntington's disease (20% of my effort, with the rest going to spinocerebellar ataxia type 1). I was gone for ten days. The OCD conference was the first weekend, followed by the HD meeting, leaving me the rest of the week and the next weekend to travel to five additional cities in four additional countries. This included three new countries toward my life goal of visiting 25 countries. The OCD conference is financed by a relatively well-off medical charity, and they splurge a bit on their annual meeting. We stayed in a fancy hotel overlooking Lake Como in Northern Italy (near the Swiss border). This is Lake Como, where I am waiting to take the water taxi to the hotel: It's a beautiful lake, with mountains rising straigh...