Last week, we published our annual "Academic Sweet Sixteen" bracket, which ranks the teams in the NCAA tournament based on their basketball team graduation rates. While it's important to consider how many players leave school with degrees in their hands, there's a significant flaw in the comparison. We have no way to determine whether players who graduated actually learned anything or obtained the skills necessary to enter the workforce.

The California Air Resources Board (CARB) meets tomorrow. Their plan is to weaken the laws that govern pollution from automobiles. In particular they plan to reduce the number of Zero Emission Vehicles that were originally required by the law popularly known as the Zero Emissions Mandate or ZEV Mandate. In a show of public will we need anyone available from San Francisco to Reno to come to the rally and let CARB know that Zero Emission Vehicles, with out any dictates to which technology will get us them, should be in large numbers on the road. Plug-in hybrids should be encouraged as well as pure electric vehicles that use batteries and if the automakers want to make fuel cell vehicles sooner rather than later in large numbers they are certainly welcome to do so. The point is, we need those vehicles on the road now, so CARB shouldn’t be working to limit the numbers of vehicles in the near future. Be there to show your support for clean air that comes from having cleaner cars.

Plug in America Press Conference and Rally

Date: Wednesday - March 26, 2008

Time: 10:30 a.m.

Where: California EPA Building

..........1001 I Street

..........Sacramento, Ca

Two weeks ago, we wrote in favor of a proposal to change how student loan defaults are calculated for the purposes of college accountability. We argued that lengthening the timeframe the government uses to measure student loan defaults could bolster everyone's ability to judge the quality of education offered by different institutions of higher education. Unfortunately, the House of Representatives seems to have caved to pressure from the trade school industry in particular and significantly weakened the proposal in ways that make it less useful. Today, we take a look at the good, the bad, and the ugly of the House's action.

Colleges have won their battle with the Bush administration over accreditation reform. After two years of being chastised and pressured to better report on student learning, and then being threatened with new federal accreditation regulations, colleges turned to their longtime allies in Congress and found support. The Higher Education Act reauthorization bills, as passed by the Senate and the House, would prevent the Department of Education from issuing regulations on the accreditation process.

In the spirit of Meteor Blades's diary to post what we like about our 'not first choice' candidates, I present you: Praise Ball.

To make it tougher - Only one liners allowed!!!

Here's my list.

Disclaimer: I am not backing anyone yet

Hillary Clinton - Competent

Barack Obama - Inspiring

John Edwards - Vision

Chris Dodd - Leadership

Joe Biden - Knowledge

Bill Richardson - Foreign Policy chess master.

On the Republican side: (with some low shots)

Mitt Romney - Another Winter Olympics

Rudy Guiliani - T inclusive EDNA. :-)

John McCain - No 'Regent U' graduates at DOJ

Ron Paul - No War, No IRS, No Public Education.

Mike Huckabee - Health Care without the science.

Tom Tancredo- Less LA traffic.

I can't wait to see the wit at work on Dkos. Below the belt shots accepted only if you find a positive way to phrase it.

Let's play, Praise ball!

Empowerment.  We have all heard the term flung around so freely.  "We are going to empower our employees to..... increase sales by 20%,......reduce wastage.....improve our work force utilization"....and so on and so forth. So, typically a team is commissioned by management, is stacked with agreeably qualified employees, and the team goes to work, using all those neat little statistical tools and the ideology of Total Quality or one of it’s many successors.  Genuine improvements are usually made, and reasonable systems to lock them in are developed.  The team has a celebratory dinner at which they are congratulated and then promptly decommissioned.  Daily management is left to preserve their gains, but other priorities or changing business conditions distract them.  Within a year or two things are back as they were.

This is not real empowerment however.  This is not real continuous improvement.  These are only examples of corporate executives playing short-term games with Quality for the purpose of manipulating investors and potential investors.  It is a game that is focused on the next quarterly report, not on the long-term health and adaptability of a particular facility or company.

This is the second diary in a series on outsourcing. I decided to write the series to explore the mechanics, technologies and finer points of global supply chain operations and product quality. In this one, I examine some of the technical issues associated with inspection of products to find defects. A number of recent diaries have demanded inspections of foreign-sourced products, especially foodstuffs. Hopefully the material over the fold will be useful to those discussions.

And yes, I discuss melamine in pet food. If you are impatient, I suggest that you go to the bottom of the diary and read that section, then go back and read the first part to understand what the heck I was talking about.

I've read with interest the recent diaries on trade deals, foreign suppliers, and food safety. These are hot issues. However, many diarists and commenters don't really know the ins and outs of the global supply system and outsourcing. They know the problems, but not the mechanics - and details can matter.

Since it's been my academic field for 20 years, I'm starting a diary series to explain some of the mechanics that drive the global supply system. The series is intended to be technical and non-partisan. However, I promise that understanding how trade and outsourcing works won't weaken your next rant - it may give it a sharper edge.

This diary examines ways that purchasers deal with quality in sales transactions. Since most international trade is business to business (B2B) rather that business to consumer, the discussion focuses on that. I'm not expecting a big readership for this one, but I plan to link back to it from future installments. If you have questions, please ask them. I will either update, or add the answers to the later installments.

On May 26th, 2005, I wrote a journal entry entitled, "The National Biodiesel Board is WRONG." It was a response to the federal biodiesel tax incentives that were put into place and then extended, as a result of NBB lobbying. In it, I expressed a number of concerns I had about the way that the tax incentives were structured, and predicted that they would be 1) bad for small businesses, 2) bad for the concept of 100% biodiesel as fuel, 2) bad for the segment of the industry that is based around recycled oil sources, 3) insignificant at lowering prices (the incentives were heavily marketed as price reducers), and 4) perhaps most importantly, bad for the quality of biodiesel in this country.

cont'd after the fold...