Peter Thiel Converses with Bill Kristol
Saturday, October 11th, 2014Crowley’s children
Saturday, October 11th, 2014It turns out all those nutty Christian evangelists who warned that rock and roll was satanic were right, Jules Evans notes:
[Aleister] Crowley appears on the cover of the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. John Lennon once said ‘The whole Beatles thing was do what you want, you know?’
A statue of him also appears on the cover of the Doors’ album, Doors 13. The Doors admired Crowley as someone who’d ‘broken through to the other side’, and who was a master of anarchic showmanship. Jim Morrison once said, in very Crowley-ite words: ‘I’m interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos, especially activity that appears to have no meaning.’
Jimmy Page was a huge Crowley fan, and bought his house next to Loch Ness. Crowley’s famous motto, ‘Do What Thou Wilt’, was embossed on the vinyl of Led Zeppelin III.
The Rolling Stones and Marianne Faithfull were into Crowleian magic through the film-maker Kenneth Anger — hence their album His Satanic Majesties and their song Sympathy for the Devil. Jagger also made the soundtrack to Anger’s film, Invocation to my Demon Brother, while Marianne Faithful appeared in Anger’s Lucifer Rising, which starred a future member of the Manson Family.
David Bowie was also a big fan of Crowley — he mentions him in the song ‘Quicksand’, and was very influenced by Crowley’s magic techniques, symbolism, and superman philosophy. Bowie was deep into the occult in the 1970s, particularly during the making of ‘Station to Station’ when he feared he’d invoked an evil demon, and that witches were trying to steal his semen to make a Satanic love-child (no, really).
In the 1980s, of course, various metal bands were explicitly into Crowley, from Black Sabbath to Iron Maiden. More recently, and perhaps more surprisingly, Crowley’s ideas are apparently an influence on rap stars like Jay-Z, Kanye West, and that ardent practitioner of sex magick, Ciara.
More broadly, as we’ll examine, pop culture helped to make Crowley’s philosophy of unfettered egotism — do what thou wilt — the ruling philosophy of western society. We are all Crowley’s children.
Great Martian War
Friday, October 10th, 2014The Great Martian War mixes authentic (and inauthentic) World War I footage with SFX War of the Worlds tripods — and a not-at-all-period soundtrack:
The History Channel has a two-hour special planned:
We made the decision from the start not to use WWI archive footage that showed real casualties or troops fighting. Though we strongly believe our show honours the veterans of WWI and seeks to look at the war afresh through a science fiction story we recognised the need to be sensitive to the original archive material and the people in it.
As well as the untreated period archive that illustrates our story we had in some cases to insert realistic computer graphics into that archive. That was a complex process of creating super realistic Alien war machines animating and rendering them then match compositing them into archive that was often hugely distressed and degraded. The modern animated elements then had to be similarly degraded so that they bedded into the period archive. No two pieces of original archive are alike so each shot presented a very complex set of issues for the teams involved.
On top of that we created a number of shots using live action of extras in detailed period costume on a purpose built trench system, (the same one used for the WWI scenes in ‘Downton Abbey’!), and on location. Our Aliens were then composited into this footage and the whole thing retro treated with pops, scratches, grain and distress to sit alongside original war footage, hopefully invisibly.
We also co-opted real archive from the years around the war and re-interpreted it to help illustrate our story. We don’t pretend to bring to our fake documentary the kind of rigour necessary in real documentary. We needed to re-interpret archive to tell our fictional story. So for instance our footage of riots around the Whitehouse is real but took place after WWI… And in a world where Germany, France and Britain fought on the same side against a single Alien invader our uniforms and kit do not always strictly chronologically match the timeline of the real war!
Much of the available ‘real’ archive WWI footage of frontline ‘combat’ was actually reconstructed during and after the war well away from the front line for propaganda and dramatic purpose, but where we had any doubt we avoided that archive and made our own. We did this from scratch, painstakingly constructing our shots with reference to photos and footage from the war and deliberately tried to confine ourselves to angles and camera technology available in 1913- 17. Cameras then were hand cranked at an irregular frame rate locked onto a tripod and rarely mounted in anything moving.
Star Wars Art: Posters
Friday, October 10th, 2014
The Philosophy of the Science of Poker
Friday, October 10th, 2014
Be Careful What You Let Through the Trapdoor
Friday, October 10th, 2014You need to be careful what you let through the trapdoor, Jules Evans warns:
The arts, sex, drugs, magic and religion are all ways of ‘turning off the mind’, going beyond rational consciousness, opening the trapdoor and following the Imagination down into the dark, to try and find the treasure. But I think, in that perilous descent, it’s absolutely crucial what motive you have, and your moral ability to handle what you encounter without losing your shit.
Many artists and magicians make that descent for selfish motives — for money, sex and power. That’s very risky — it’s like the Nazis in Raiders of the Lost Ark trying to use the Ark for selfish reasons. You end up with a melted face.
I’d say Tolkien had the best idea about how to mine the Imagination without awakening too many Balrogs. You need to go in with a small ego, like a hobbit, with a fellowship of people around you to guide you when you feel lost. And you need to be prepared to give away whatever treasure you find, rather than trying to hang on to it for your own power. That’s the way to create great art, and it’s the way to live a meaningful life. Crowley’s ‘Do What Thou Wilt’ doesn’t end in happiness or power. It ends in emptiness, addiction, madness and self-destruction. It’s a lie — perhaps the oldest lie of all.
(Hat tip to Neovictorian 23.)
The Eccentric Polish Count Who Influenced Classic SF’s Greatest Writers
Thursday, October 9th, 2014Alfred Korzybski deserves a more prominent place in our histories of science fiction, Lee Konstatinou argues:
Korzybski inspired a legion of students, and the meta-science of “General Semantics” that he created affected disciplines as diverse as literary criticism, philosophy, linguistics, psychology, and cybernetics.
But his most powerful effect might have been on John W. Campbell’s Golden Age. Indeed, Korzybski is probably the most important influence on science fiction you’ve never heard of.
Alfred Korzybski was a Polish aristocrat who came to North America near the end of World War I after being injured in the war. Trained as an engineer, he created a philosophy he called General Semantics (not to be confused with semantics as a linguistic discipline). General Semantics was part of a much larger philosophical effort, early in the twentieth century, to create a logically ideal language and a contribution to intellectual debates about the so-called “meaning of meaning.”
Attempting to build on the work of Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead, Korzbyski tried to explain, among other things, why humans were uniquely prone to self-slaughter. He hoped, quixotically, that his meta-linguistic system might save us from our own worst tendencies.
Korzybski coined the well-known slogan, “The map is not the territory,” to sum up his ideas:
To defeat our Aristotelian habits of mind, to help humankind achieve what he called “sanity,” Korzybski created a mental and spiritual training regime. He recommended that we achieve a “consciousness of abstracting,” an awareness of our own process of abstracting the world, in order to gain a better understanding of what he called “silence on the objective level,” the fundamentally non-linguistic nature of reality. Korzybski advised that we engage in a “semantic pause” when confronted with a novel stimulus, a sort of neurocognitive Time Out.
He profoundly influenced Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, A.E. Van Vogt — and many others:
Many other Golden Age writers, such as H. Beam Piper and Reginald Bretnor, incorporated Korzybski into their fiction. And his influence stretches well beyond the conventional boundaries of the Golden Age.
Frank Herbert, for instance, ghostwrote a nationally syndicated column on General Semantics, under Hayakawa’s byline, while writing Dune (1965). Korzybski’s ideas are visible in Herbert’s depiction of the Bene Gesserit’s mental and physical training regime.
Immigrants Retain Their Social Status
Thursday, October 9th, 2014The evidence shows that immigrant groups tend to retain the social status that they arrive with, Gregory Clark points out:
The same goes with more recent immigrants to the United States. Due to visa restrictions, certain immigrant groups were permitted entry to the United States only if they could prove they had skills that were needed in the U.S. labor market. For example, the Africans, Chinese, Christian Arabs, Filipinos, Indians, Iranians, and Koreans who did gain entry into the United States were from the upper echelons of their home societies. And, in the United States, they enjoy significantly higher than average social status (as measured, again, by the number of doctors per 1,000 members of the group). Groups who, for various reasons, did not face the same restrictions — including the Hmong, Latinos, and Maya — entered the United States with low social status and have struggled to achieve upward mobility since. Immigration to the United States, in other words, rarely changes one’s social status.
The same pattern is echoed in Europe. In the 1960s and 1970s, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, and Switzerland created guest worker programs to recruit unskilled workers for basic factory jobs, often from Turkey’s poor, rural areas. Today, the children of those Turkish immigrants all perform worse on language and mathematics tests than domestic populations, which is a reliable indicator of lower social status. The lower status of their parents was thus reproduced in their new home countries.
By the same token, countries that selected elite immigrants to begin with now have high-performing immigrant classes. For example, the United Kingdom selects immigrants based more on education and skills. As a result, African, Chinese, and Indian immigrants outperform their British counterparts; although children of white British parents born between 1963 and 1975 attained on average 12.6 years of education, children of African migrants stayed in school for 15.2 years, those of Indian migrants for 14.2 years, and those of Chinese migrants for 15.1 years.
How To Make a Pile of Dough With the Traditional City
Thursday, October 9th, 2014Nathan Lewis looks at how to make a pile of dough by bulldozing a big-box shopping center and replacing it with a dense urban neighborhood:
I took the example of a shopping center in Binghamton, New York. Binghamton is probably not a good place to do this, because nobody needs another nine million square feet of floorspace in Binghamton. However, since all shopping centers are basically the same, we can use that example. At a density of 100,000 people per square mile, reached in some Paris neighborhoods, 15,000 people or a third of the entire population of Binghamton could live here. However, those 15,000 people already have houses, so we don’t need to build any more in Binghamton. In a place like Darien, Connecticut, however (an upscale New York City suburb), lots of people might like to live in a place like this (good schools), and pay a premium for it, especially if it was within walking distance of the train station.
Bulldozing this thing is pretty easy, because its mostly just parking lots anyway, and the buildings themselves are rather insubstantial.
This photo is about 800 meters across, and the land plot is about 93 acres. That is quite large, actually.
Here are some of our design goals:
1) We are assuming that we have to interface with Suburban Hell as it exists, so that means lots of parking needs to be provided, and a way for automobiles to get in and out easily. Parking will be in enclosed, multistory parking garages, mostly integrated into multi-use buildings.
2) Our land use plan is something like this:
- 60% building footprint
- 30% parks, courtyards, yards, gardens, and other public and private open space, which consist of Places, not “green space”.
- 10% roadways, broken down into:
- About 20% of streets are Arterial Streets, with two to four lanes of dedicated automobile roadway in the middle, probably some trees or grass as a buffer, and sidewalks on either side. No on-street parking.
- The remaining 80% of streets (by length) are Really Narrow pedestrian-centric streets, of 10-30 feet wide, no segregated automobile roadway, no sidewalks, and no green buffers.
3) Building height is generally 3-6 stories, a typical Traditional City height.
4) Some buildings can be taller, particularly those which are adjacent to Arterial Streets. This would be more of a Manhattan-style Hypertrophic approach. Big buildings and big streets go together easily. So, you can add your 35-story highrise apartments and offices here too, if you want.
5) The treatment of the perimeter is an interesting design point. How should our neighborhood interface with the rest of Suburban Hell? Put a wall around it? (Lots of walled cities are very nice.) Put a green buffer around it? It might be nice for it to be separated from the rest of Suburban Hell, like its own little island of Traditional City fabulousness. Shall we put a row of buildings along the existing very large automobile roadways? I opt here for a combination of some park space along some streets (isolation), and some buildings along other streets. One nice thing about park space is that you can decide to build on it later if you want. Ideally, although being long and skinny and serving as a buffer, this will be usable and enjoyable as a park, not just a wall of shrubbery.
6) Block size is roughly 100-200 feet along the short side and 200-500 feet along the long side.
So, here we go:
The darkened areas are parks. The small darkened area on the left is a paved town square. You could add some smaller squares and parks here and there as well. The wide, double-lined streets are Arterial Streets. The single black lines are Really Narrow Streets.
Although most of the streets here are Really Narrow pedestrian streets, almost all of the blocks have at least one side adjacent to an Arterial Street. An entrance to enclosed parking can be put on the side facing the Arterial Street, so that cars can enter and exit without having to drive on the Really Narrow Streets. Vehicles will be allowed on the Really Narrow Streets, but, seeing as they would have to share the road with people walking, and also there’s no place to park there, the main reason that motorized vehicles would be on the smaller streets is for deliveries and dropoffs.
This site has about four million square feet. At 60% building footprint, and an average height of four stories, that would mean about 9.6 million square feet of space here. That is a lot, although some of it would be used for parking.
Stop the flights now
Wednesday, October 8th, 2014Epidemiologist David Dausey says, stop the flights now!
Individuals who suspect they have been exposed to Ebola and have the means to travel to the United States have every reason to get on a plane to the United States as soon as possible. There are no direct flights from the three most-affected nations, but passengers can transfer elsewhere, as Duncan did. If they stay in Africa, the probability that they will survive the illness if they have it is quite low. If they make it to the United States, they can expect to receive the best medical care the world can provide, and they will have a much higher probability of survival. So they are motivated to lie about their exposure status (wouldn’t you, in their shoes?) to airlines and public health officials and travel to the United States.
Forget Electric Cars
Wednesday, October 8th, 2014The co-CEOs of Nat G CNG Solutions urge us to forget electric cars:
At Mike Scully’s Apple Towing in Houston, just one of their big Ford F650 tow trucks saves more gasoline each year than 20 Nissan Leaf electric cars. When it comes to reducing carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides and other pollutants, Mike’s F650s are equally impressive, and his fuel cost per mile is about the same as that of a four-seat Jeep Wrangler. What is Apple Towing’s secret? The F650 tow trucks run on natural gas, which they refuel for less than $1.70 per gasoline-gallon equivalent, or gge.
PIRA Energy Group estimates that natural gas in transportation will approach 800 million gges this year. Do some simple math and it quickly becomes apparent that natural-gas vehicles (NGVs) will displace 10-12 times more gasoline and diesel than the 250,000 electric cars currently on the road. When complete, Apple Towing’s small fleet of 24 natural-gas tow trucks will displace more gasoline than around 700 Chevy Volts. And here is a nice side benefit: Those Volts would cost federal taxpayers a whopping $5.3 million in subsidies while Mr. Scully’s F650 Fords cost them nothing.
[...]
Apple Towing’s Mr. Scully asked our company, Nat G Solutions, to upgrade his F650s and at the same time install a natural-gas fueling compressor in his parking lot and hook it up to his city gas line. The great infrastructure crisis disappeared.
[...]
For diesel trucks, a new generation of retrofit systems — from companies like NGV Motori USA and Landi Renzo — allow us to upgrade the big diesel engines to run on a 60/40 blend of natural gas and diesel, which is combined in real-time inside the engine. If the compressed natural gas runs dry, the truck switches back to 100% diesel and keeps on driving. This dual-fuel approach is now opening the door for long-haul natural-gas trucking without the need for multibillion-dollar infrastructure incentives or even the need to go out and buy new tractor-trailers.
[...]
Ford has been leading the way in building “gas prepped” trucks — typically a $350 option — which enables any Ford-certified “qualified vehicle modifier” to install an approved natural-gas system without affecting the original power-train warranty. Nearly the entire F-series line, from F150s to F650s, is now available in a natural-gas-ready version as are the Transit and E-series work vans. GM has taken a more incremental approach, with fewer models available so far, but the industry has responded by creating aftermarket EPA-certified upgrades for nearly every GM truck and SUV on the market.
Most of this new technology remains aimed squarely at the work-truck market, exactly where it ought to be focused. This segment drives the most miles, drives the biggest vehicles, and burns the most fuel.
You can be fooled in a thousand subtle ways
Wednesday, October 8th, 2014I didn’t realize how Gary Taubes came to write Good Calories, Bad Calories:
He majored in applied physics at Harvard, where he also played on the football team’s defensive line. (John Tuke, one of his teammates, recalls that Taubes stood out for his intensity.) After Harvard, Taubes headed to Stanford for a master’s in engineering with visions of becoming an astronaut. It was only after realizing that NASA wasn’t likely to send a man of his size to space—Taubes is 6?2? and 220 pounds—that he decided to pursue an interest in investigative reporting that had been sparked by reading All the President’s Men.
He attended Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and soon landed a job at Discover magazine. He caught a break in 1984, when a profile of particle physicist Carlo Rubbia led to a deal for his first book, Nobel Dreams. Taubes thought he would be documenting a breakthrough in physics. Instead, the book chronicled Rubbia’s errors and the machinations he used to outmaneuver his fellow physicists. Taubes was struck that science could be so subjective at the highest levels—that it’s not just the big mistakes that scientists have to worry about but the numerous small ones that accumulate to support their misconceptions. “You can be fooled in a thousand subtle ways,” he says.
That lesson stuck with him when, almost by accident, he turned his attention to nutrition science in 1997. By then a freelancer and running low on rent money, he called his editor at Science and asked if there were any assignments he could turn around quickly. The editor mentioned a paper in The New England Journal of Medicine that detailed a dietary approach to reducing blood pressure without restricting salt. Maybe he could write about that?
Taubes knew almost nothing about the topic. He would end up spending the next nine months interviewing 80 researchers, clinicians, and administrators. That research resulted in an August 1998 article headlined “The (Political) Science of Salt.” It was a sweeping takedown of everything scientists thought they had established about the link between salt consumption and blood pressure. The belief that too much salt was the cause of hypertension wasn’t based on careful experiments, Taubes wrote, but primarily on observations of the diets of populations with less hypertension. The scientists and health professionals railing against salt didn’t seem to notice or care that the diets of those populations might differ in a dozen ways from the diets of populations with more hypertension.
Taubes began to wonder if his critique applied beyond salt, to the rest of nutrition science. After all, one of the researchers Taubes interviewed had taken credit not only for getting Americans to eat less salt but also for getting them to eat less fat and eggs. He kicked off a multiyear research project that culminated in 2002, when he published a New York Times Magazine cover story on fat that would vault him into prominence and onto the path to NuSI.
Under the cover line “What if Fat Doesn’t Make You Fat?” Taubes made the case that we get fat not because we ignore the advice of the medical establishment but because we follow it. He argued that carbohydrates, not fat, were more likely to be the cause of the obesity epidemic. The piece was a sensation.
Devaluation of Young Men
Tuesday, October 7th, 2014James Howard Kunstler discusses the devaluation of young men:
I played fiddle at a small-town, country dance last night with several other musicians and it was a merry enough time because that kind of self-made music has the power to fortify spirits. About half the dancers were over 40 and the rest were teenage girls. The absence of young men was conspicuous. Toward the end of the evening, it was just girls dancing with girls. A wonderful and fundamental tension was not present in the room.
The young men are out there somewhere in the country towns, but this society increasingly has no use or no place for them, except in the army. There is absolutely no public conversation about the near total devaluation of young men in the economic and social life of the USA, though there is near-hysterical triumphalism about the success of young women in every realm from sports to politics to business, and to go with that an equal amount of valorization for people who develop an ambiguous sexual identity.
There really is no local forum for public discussion in the flyover regions of the USA. The few remaining local newspapers are parodies of what newspapers once were, and the schools maintain a fog of sanctimony that penalizes thinking outside the bright-side box. Television and its step-child, the internet, offer only the worst temptations of hyper-sexual stimulation, artificial violence, and grandiose wealth-and-power fantasies. There aren’t even any taverns where people can gather for casual talk.
Many of the remaining jobs “out there” are jobs that can be done by anyone — certainly the office work, but also the jobs with near-zero meaning, minimal income, and no status in the national chain burger shacks and box stores — and young women are more reliably subject to control than young men jacked on testosterone, corn syrup, and Grand Theft Auto.
Of course, the idea that higher education can lift a population out of this vortex of anomie is a cruel joke, especially now with the college loan racket parasitizing that flickering wish to succeed, turning young people into debt donkeys. The shelf-life of that particular set of lies and swindles will hit its sell-by date soon in a massive debt repudiation — and the nation will come to marvel at the mendacious system it allowed itself to get sucked into. But this still only begs the question of what young men will do in such a deceitful system.
My guess is that they will shift their attention and activity from the mind-slavery of the current Potemkin economy to the very monster we find ourselves fighting overseas: a domestic ISIS-style explosion of wrath wrapped in an extreme ideology of one kind or another replete with savagery and vengeance-seeking. The most dangerous thing that any society can do is invalidate young men. When the explosion of youthful male wrath occurs in the USA, it will come along at exactly the same time as all the other benchmarks of order become unmoored — especially the ones in money and politics — which will shatter the faith of the non-young and the non-male, too.
Adam Smith and the Romance Novel
Tuesday, October 7th, 2014The novel was the up-and-coming genre of the 18th century:
The cultural ubiquity of the novel in our age makes it hard to remember, first, that it is a genre and not just a word for any narrative (despite what the youth of America seem to think), and second, that it had or ever needed a rise. But rise it did, in the 1730s and ‘40s.
The seminal literary historian Ian Watt was one of the first to study the phenomenon, and to link the rise of the novel to the simultaneous rise of the middle class and of middle class literacy. This new class, accustomed to the typical literary division between tragic aristocrats and royalty on the one hand and comic, lower class characters on the other, needed a place to read about itself, and to see its own values reflected well. They also suddenly had cash, which makes such desires relevant.
The productions that were called novels in the early-18th century were essentially tabloidized versions of the goings on in royal places. Their titles tell you more or less all you need to know about them: Letters From a Nobleman to His Sister (they’re close), The Mercenary Lover, The Secret Memoirs and Manners of Several Persons of Quality of Both Sexes. But a large part of the pleasure of such novels was not in seeing real life sketched in the form of fictional persons. It was figuring out if Countess Vanity-in-her-Wardrobe was meant to stand in allegorically for, say, the opposition leader in Parliament, or refer to some highborn member of the queen’s household.
But in the 1740s, long fictional prose narratives that had previously concerned themselves with aristocrats became … a little less about aristocrats. Starting with Daniel Defoe and really taking off with Samuel Richardson, novels centered on the conflict between politically connected aristocrats and the members of the classes below them.
In Richardson’s extraordinary popular debut, Pamela, Or Virtue Rewarded, a ladies’ maid resists the seductions of her boss so effectively that he marries her. Things take a more tragic turn for the eponymous heroine of Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady, a woman of the Austenesque gentry class who has the misfortune to run into a degenerate lordling who will feel very bad about himself after he rapes her and drives her to one of those shockingly common stress deaths of the 18th and 19th centuries.
The highborn ladies of the previous nouvelles scandaleuses (we say it in French when sturdy middle-class English won’t do) are often already married, so courtship is really not the point of those novels. The “romance” of the early romance novel is purely in the imagining of oneself enjoying the things that Adam Smith alluded to in his first description of the invisible hand in The Theory of Moral Sentiments: the palaces and equipages of the rich and splendid. It may also lie in the realization that even people who occupy those high states can be unhappy and comically ridiculous, even in the throes of our envy of them.
But with Richardson’s novels, the question of courtship and the ethics of the pursuit of money came under the fiction’s scrutiny, just as they came under Smith’s eye in The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations. It’s not the aristocracy that Smith addresses when he talks about the proper attitude towards getting money: They already had it, after all. It’s to that same middle class that was reading Richardson’s tales of aspiring women.
Grades in Context
Tuesday, October 7th, 2014Grade inflation has led universities to offer context to students’ grades:
Starting this fall, UNC-Chapel Hill transcripts will provide a little truth in grading.
From now on, transcripts for university graduates will contain a healthy dose of context.
Next to a student’s grade, the record will include the median grade of classmates, the percentile range and the number of students in the class section. Another new measure, alongside the grade point average, is the schedule point average. A snapshot average grade for a student’s mix of courses, the SPA is akin to a sports team’s strength of schedule.
[...]
Researchers collected grade data for 135 U.S. colleges and universities, representing 1.5 million students. They found that A’s are now the most commonly awarded grade – 43 percent of all grades. Failure is almost unheard of, with D’s and F’s making up less than 10 percent of all college grades.
The study found that grade inflation has been most pronounced at elite private universities, trailed by public flagship campuses and then less selective schools. Grading tends to be higher in humanities courses, followed by social sciences. The lowest grades tend to occur in the science, math and engineering disciplines.
[...]
Indiana University used to do it, but stopped because of a software change. Dartmouth College and Cornell University include median grades on transcripts. Cornell used to publish the information online, but quit in 2011 after a study revealed that enrollment spiked in classes with a median grade of A.
But there is a larger move to transcripts with broader information about students’ learning outcomes, said Brad Myers, Ohio State University registrar and president of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers.
“We’re really trying to say, ‘Here’s what the student has mastered, and isn’t that what you’re after, more than whether the student got a B or a C or a D in this class?’ ”
Princeton University made headlines for a 2004 policy that sought to limit A’s to 35 percent in undergraduate courses – seen as a radical approach to regulate grades. Earlier this month, a faculty committee there recommended dropping the policy, saying it was too stressful for students and was misinterpreted as a quota system.