The Wall Street Journal ran a piece this morning that subtly made the case for increasing the number of hours American students spend in the classroom during their time in primary and secondary schools. Much of the article's argumentation rests on the fact that students in countries like Japan and Korea spend more time in the classroom and thus — or so the logic goes — outscore their American peers in areas like mathematics and science.

While I don't doubt public schools could devote more time to students, I'm not convinced it's more time in the classroom that accounts for the bulk of this "achievement gap" that separates American students from their international counterparts.

Unlike the United States, most other developed countries have a much more rigid educational hierarchy. In the UK, for example, students who fail to pass at least five GCSE exams, usually around the age of 16, cannot continue on the path toward admission to university. As a result, the lowest achievers don't contribute to the average achievement of UK students in a particular age group. Compare this to the United States' educational system, which does not regularly purge classrooms of weak students.

It's as if we were comparing the relative wealth of the United States and Japan by taking the average income across the whole population in the United States, but only the top 50% of income earners in Japan.

But more than that, my own experience contradicts this premise. While I'm not sure how experts compare educational achievement across countries, I think it's safe to say I was better at math than the average student in any developed country at every point in my high school career. Yet, I attended a public high school that — so far as I know — did not require us to spend considerably more time in the classroom than the average US secondary school.

I'm convinced the real fix for our education problem has more to do with the quality of teachers and cultural norms than the number of hours students are required to spend in the classroom.

Even at the college level, teacher quality makes a big difference in my engagement, perhaps even more than my interest in the subject itself. Just this last semester I signed up for a course on the French Enlightenment to fulfill one of my graduation requirements. It's a subject I have an interest in, though not to the degree I'm fascinated by, say, economic models of drug addiction. But the professor I had for that course was so good, I would by lying if I claimed I found any of my other courses more enthralling.

As to the second part, I'm never surprised that American students don't do better in mathematics given that American culture has accepted this bizarre notion that mathematics is "hard." In some sense, math is complicated. But so is the analysis of literature or history. I've taken a variety of advanced courses in math and economics, but none has challenged me more than the French literature course I took in my first semester of college.

I don't want to argue that primary and secondary education don't need to change. But I'm not convinced more classroom hours will make all that much a difference. It makes no sense to keep students in the classroom for one or two extra hours a week if they don't have engaging teachers and the mindset that, with enough determination, they can integrate real-valued functions.

As someone who consumes a lot of gadgetry, there often comes a point when the old needs to make way for the new. In years past, I've used eBay to unload my gently used gizmos and gadgets to people with less demanding technology needs. It's not a process I find especially enjoyable, though I still go through the rigamarole of taking photos, writing copy and setting a price. First and foremost, reselling my old gadgetry ensures my old peripherals don't contribute to the growing electronic waste problem. And I don't object to the revenue the sales generate either.

Today, however, I discovered Gazelle, a service that makes eBay — at least as I use it — obsolete. Users simply visit the website, find the gadget they no longer want and Gazelle mails a prepaid box to that same user. Gazelle then takes delivery of the item, verifies the condition of the gadget and sends a check. There's no copy to write, no photos to take, no wrangling with a buyer over method of payment.

I'm sure the reimbursements Gazelle gives its customers are not as large as the sums one could generate by selling the same item on eBay. But given the time commitment and uncertainty associated with listing an item on eBay, I'm not convinced a person isn't better off just using Gazelle.

I haven't actually used the service yet, but I have every intention to give the service a whirl when my iPad arrives in April. Gazelle claims they will give me about $50 for my aging 30 GB 5th generation iPod, which I see my iPad as replacing. (For interested parties, I pre-ordered a 32 GB WiFi-only iPad.)

I'll report back when I've given the service a try.

On the whole, I'm quite happy with my experience here at Bates. The criticisms of the institution I've posted on my blog previously are really quite superficial. The economics department could require a little more math, some professors really irk me, and it wouldn't hurt for the dining services people to serve some real bread.

But there is one office so ineptly staffed and managed I almost feel obliged to single them out for the inexcusably bad treatment they've given me in the past three years. Here's to you, Housing Office, for doing a really terrible job.

Before I go any further, I should explain how the college allocates housing to students after their first year. First, the Housing Office divides the student body into three sets by class year (e.g., the set of students in the class of 2013). Then, within each set, the Housing Office randomly orders the students in that set. As such, the seniors-to-be all have better positions than the juniors-to-be, and so on. Finally, over the course of three evenings, the three sets of students queue in our old dining hall and choose their rooms by scrawling their names on giant laminated floor plans of the various residence halls. The process in and of itself is rife with inequities and inefficiencies. I blogged about this last year, at about this time.

So how did the Housing Office inspire this vitriolic tirade?

This year, as in the previous two years I've been here, the Housing Office erroneously grouped me with the class of 2012, not the class of 2011 as they should have. The mix up is not entirely ridiculous, given that I matriculated in the middle of the 2007-2008 academic year, rather than at the beginning with most of my peers. Through, at the moment, thanks to the bevy of Advanced Placement exams I took in high school, I should graduate with the class of 2011 next spring. And even if I take a whole eight semesters to graduate, I would still graduate in the winter of 2011. (That said, after mis-categorizing me for two years, I feel like they should have made a note next to my name.)

Last year and two years ago, however, the folks in the housing office at least made an attempt to fix their errors. This year they obdurately refused to do anything about the issue. And not only that, but they were also less than pleasant (to put it mildly) about the whole incident.

Admittedly, I'm at least partly to blame for this mess. For in the previous two years, I spotted their mistake before they had assigned the lottery numbers, which apparently makes making changes easier. (This too makes me worry. Either they need to use different software or they're even more inept than I make them out to be.)

Even so, I did contact the Housing Office prior to the housing lottery actually taking place. Yet they were unflinchingly unhelpful. Even after I pointed out I had number 2067 (or something thereabouts) last year, versus 2129, which they assigned me this year, they were unwilling to make a change. Their last email to me regarding this subject closed, "There is really nothing we can do to change your class year." Up to that point, it must be said, I was annoyed, but hardly furious.

And in light of that communication, I diligently showed up earlier this very evening for the housing lottery for juniors-to-be. I did, however, arrive a few minutes early to make one last ditch attempt to reap the benefits of my having been here five semesters. It was this encounter that confirmed my belief that the Housing Office needs some significant personnel changes and a serious revamp.

After speaking to a variety of people, I was referred to one woman whose name I really should have taken down. She was so inept, I think she may have dethroned the tech support representative who claimed I knew nothing about using computers and hung up on me, in terms of really horrible interpersonal relations.

I asked her, "Would it be possible for me to at least cut in front of all the juniors?" I thought this a very reasonable proposal, given that I would still have had, in essence, the worst number among the members of the class of 2011. To which she responded by posing a question so idiotic it makes me question the intrinsic rationality of all humanity just to regurgitate it here: "Do you think that would be fair?"

Her tone left no doubt that the question was designed to be mocking, to convey to me the absurdity of my request. But it was her decision, not my request, that was absurd. First of all, the housing lottery is designed to give students a better room with each year. In my case, however, the fact that I actually had a better lottery number last year meant that, at least in the abstract, my room quality would decline over time. Second, if we were to travel back in time three years and apply the same standard the Housing Office used this year then, as a sophomore-to-be, rather than participating in the housing lottery at all, I would have been randomly assigned a roommate and put into first year housing. It just makes no sense.

And beyond that, this woman made absolutely no effort to express sympathy or understanding for my frustration. Did she apologize and point me to the convenient table of refreshments? No. Instead she treated me in the way I would treat an insubordinate three-year-old. As I continued to press my case, making many of the arguments I've presented here, she gave me the, "I'm not going to stand here and argue with you," line in a tone dripping with condescension. It was at that point I dropped my smile, reasonable tone of voice and generally composed demeanor, and closed with my most harshly worded verbal jab of the conversation, "This is absurd."

Most so-called elite colleges and universities, mine included, make a big deal of the fact they treat students like people and not faceless, emotionless blobs of human flesh. And, to be honest, my institution lives up to that standard almost all the time. But in this one instance, they stuck so steadfastly to their formulaic procedure and acted with such inconsiderateness that I feel almost as if my rights have been violated. This experience is really anathema to the whole idea of a liberal arts education and institution: one that is thoughtful, reasonable and that takes logic seriously.

Addendum

There's one part of that story I forgot to mention. At some point in my conversation with the inept woman, I asked her if I could appeal her decision or talk to her superior. In a move worthy of the very worst customer service representatives I've interacted with, she flippantly dismissed even the notion she could be in the wrong with a comment to the effect of, "Let's just say the buck stops with me." (I'm paraphrasing, but that was the gist of her muddled response.)

For the last seven years I've used an original Apple Wireless Mouse. That's the model without the laser tracking engine, easily soiled scroll nub or even the ability to simulate a right click. To provide some context, I bought it alongside my 12 inch PowerBook G4 way back in 2003. But a few weeks ago that mouse stopped working. So, as I still prefer a mouse whenever I'm sitting at my desk, I ordered the latest and greatest in Apple mousing technology: the Magic Mouse.

All in all, it's a nice product. The Magic Mouse feels sturdy, thanks to its mostly aluminum construction, and tracks much more accurately than my old mouse. It must also have a much better Bluetooth radio or better internals than its older sibling, as it connects and disconnects much more quickly than the original Wireless Mouse.

Of course, the "magic" moniker likely refers not to the aluminum body or laser tracking engine, but rather to the fact that the Magic Mouse has a multitouch shell, capable of separately tracking five fingers and detecting complex multitouch gestures. It's quite nice to be able to right-click with my real mouse for the first time in seven years. The scrolling with momentum works quite nicely, and feels quite natural, especially as I've become so used to the behavior on the iPhone. Scrolling from the top to bottom of a long page takes just seconds, but that capability doesn't come at the price of being unable to scroll precisely.

I don't know that the Magic Mouse is really "magical," however. It certainly has more advanced technology than many pointing devices with less whimsical names. But even my laptop's giant buttonless trackpad can detect more complicated gestures than the Magic Mouse. And, beyond that, it's not as if the Magic Mouse can conjure a bottle of Champagne out of thin air.

Apple also likes to associate the word "magic" with the iPad, billing it as, "A magical and revolutionary product." Just how magical that device is will have to wait until mine arrives in early April.

A few weeks ago I decided to buy some new music. More specifically, I needed a more difficult collection of relatively short pieces to use for practice sight reading during my occasional bouts of piano playing. After consulting a variety of online piano forums and blogs, I settled on purchasing a copy of the Henle Album from the fine folks at G Henle Verlag. It's a steal at about $10, it's beautifully engraved, and it's meticulously edited.

Prior to this purchase, I had never so much as heard of Henle. (Relatively speaking, I'm not an especially talented pianist, and so I don't have a whole lot of exposure to the world of music publishers.) So I spent a few minutes poking around their website to learn, for one, what it meant that everything they sold was labeled as "urtext."

I also learned that as recently as 2000, Henle hand engraved all of their sheet music. That is, as recently as ten years ago — at about the same time I purchased my first digital camera — Henle still employed people who cut lines, staffs, sharps and other musical notation into sheets of lead with delicate metal instruments to produce printed sheet music. In fact, they still have a short film on their website documenting the process. It's almost unbelievable.

On the one hand, the fact that the company stuck to their now-antiquated methods of production for so long makes me wonder about the company's management. But on the other, there is something remarkable about a company so committed to producing the most elegant, most functional printed music that they would keep employing people to engrave music by hand, in spite of the emergence of digital publishing tools.

Earlier this afternoon I read an interview with Loren Brichter, the man behind Tweetie and Scribbles, on The Setup. In the interview, Mr. Brichter notes that, while the Mac OS X flavor of his Twitter client has advertising unless users pay $19.95 to register the application, many of the people who opt to register their copy of Tweetie don't bother to turn off the advertising that in effect "pays" for the free version. At first, I this seemed very strange to me. I usually despise advertising. (Long live the TiVo!)

But as I thought about it, I realized that not only do I not mind the advertisements injected into my Twitter stream in Tweetie, I actually like having those ads in my Twitter stream. For unlike most other advertising, the Fusion ads in my Twitter stream are informative; I've learned about a variety of useful software products and web services, such as WuFoo. And when I've seen a particular advertisement before, or I find the good or service it promotes irrelevant to me, the injected ads don't blink, honk or otherwise try to take my attention of off my Twitter feed.

Which leads me to propose these two criteria for determining the goodness of an advertisement:

(1) A "good" advertisement conveys novel information
(2) A "good" advertisement imposes minimal costs to the consumer

Note that a given advertisement can meet and fail the first criterion at the same time, as whether an advertisement conveys novel information (or not) depends on who consumes the advertisement.

For instance, a banner ad for the Kindle on The New York Times' website might satisfy (1) for a 40-something doctor who spends her weekends kayaking, but who can't tell the difference between a DIMM and SIM. The same ad, however, might fail (1) if it's consumed by a 30-something advertising executive who paid $399 for the original Kindle the day it went on sale, and who has since upgraded to Kindle 2. In the first case, the banner ad conveys something novel: the doctor had no idea that Amazon.com sold an electronic reading device with over-the-air purchasing functionality. But in the second case, the ad tells the advertising executive nothing he didn't already know.

It's also interesting how the second criteria manages to capture some of the differences between print and electronic media. Advertisements in print magazines generally bug me far more than advertisements online, partly because ads in physical printed magazines add additional mass. I've always wondered why people subscribe to magazines like Vogue, even if the content is interesting, just because every issues has so many advertisements that its weight is often measured in pounds rater than ounces.

If I were more adept at constructing economic models, I could easily see this developing into a nice little paper with a title like "Optimal Advertising Theory."

From time to time the fine folks who run our dining commons allow a student or two to play deejay for the evening, regaling diners with whatever bizarre blend of music they wish. I've rarely been thrilled with the musical selections made by these individuals, though I'd be the first to admit I have far from typical preferences when it comes to music. (There's also not quite right about eating dinner to the sounds of a dance anthem.)

What really bugs me about most of these would-be deejays, though, is not so much the music they play, but the quality of the recordings of the music they play. More often than not, it's apparent they either ripped the song from a CD seven years ago or, more likely, downloaded it from some metaphorical Internet back alley without looking at the encoding information.

Back in the dark ages, when dial-up Internet connections were the norm and music players measured their capacity in megabytes rather than gigabytes, this tradeoff between sound quality and file size made sense. It was impossible to squeeze more than a few dozen songs onto a Diamond Rio (remember them?) with a quarter gigabyte of storage. Even the original iPod — with 5 gigabytes of storage at $399 — would only hold about 500 songs encoded at 256 kbps. Portability and flexibility came at the price of inferior audio quality.

Today, however, when even the most inexpensive iPod comes with eight gigabytes of memory and even a basic laptop ships with a capacious hard disk whose capacity is measured in hundreds of gigabytes, this tradeoff makes no sense. In fact, the two largest retailers of digital music — Amazon.com and Apple — now sell tracks encoded at 256 kbps, and many classical labels sell tracks encoded in a lossless format. So why do people persist in tolerating low-quality recordings?

Most people I ask this question say something to the effect of, "This music sounds good enough to me." Which drives me crazy. Anyone who claims they can't hear the difference between a track encoded at 128 kbps and 256 kbps should have their hearing checked. (Or buy a pair of halfway decent speakers.) I don't see why we should settle for less when having more has virtually zero cost.