Baseball is in the air, as the first home games are done and dusted, and the season has begun. But let’s think back to when baseball was the national pastime, say 1948, when a game could reflect the best and worst of the country. A moment from The Memory Palace, as Nate DeMeo delivers a great moment in our national pastime. Teammates
An argument about indirect funds. Is it a slush fund or a lifeline?
“When I first heard that the Trump administration was going to cap “indirect costs” for NIH grants, I thought, in the spirit of generosity, that this was maybe a plausibly good idea.
… Taxing grants to cover general operational needs is, on the one hand, a totally legitimate process. …At the same time, your incentive as an institutional leader is obviously to bump up the indirect costs as high as you can for reasons that don’t always align with the intentions of the grant-makers.”
From Slow Boring, Trump's war on science
The war on cookin’ with gas has now entered the courts.
“In the New York City lawsuit, building industry groups and a union whose members work on gas infrastructure used the same logic that prevailed in the Berkeley case, arguing that the city’s electrification law is preempted by energy efficiency standards under the federal Energy Policy Conservation Act of 1975, or EPCA. This law sets national efficiency standards for major household appliances like furnaces, stoves, and clothes dryers. Under the law, states and cities can’t set their own energy conservation standards that would contradict federal ones. The trade groups argued that EPCA should also preempt any local laws, like New York’s, that would prevent the use of fossil fuel-powered appliances that meet national standards.”
From Wired, US Cities Seeking to Ban Natural Gas in New Buildings Just Got a Big Win in Court
Universities are big business. Columbia, the site of the most recent consternation with the Trump administration, has an endowment of $13.6 billion with a current return on investment of 11.5%. However, businesses are judged based on productivity and revenue.
“The push for scale further nudges the climate toward politicization. Administrative metrics favor large or online courses that can process hundreds of students simultaneously. Everyone knows that a 300-person lecture is more “efficient” than twenty 15-person seminars, regardless of pedagogical quality. In smaller seminars, extreme positions face questioning and discussion from peers and professors. There’s little opportunity for dialogue or intellectual give-and-take in a lecture or online format. A charismatic lecturer can present edgy viewpoints to hundreds of students at once, with no meaningful opportunity for debate. The metrics will show high enrollment and efficient resource utilization.”
From Compact Magazine, How Business Metrics Broke the University
Chuck Dinerstein, MD, MBA
Director of Medicine
Dr. Charles Dinerstein, M.D., MBA, FACS is Director of Medicine at the American Council on Science and Health. He has over 25 years of experience as a vascular surgeon.
