Friday Odds & Sods is Riding the Blinds

Hello, All!  This weeks post comes to you from the wilderness of southern Virginia through the miracle of government-standard WiFi and courtesy of the decaying remains of America's once-great passenger rail system.  All people have their particular hobbyhorses, and one of mine happens to be a fondness for trains.  Even though air travel might offer to get me to my destination in a mere two hours, I prefer to take a more leisurely journey down the East Coast, even with all the attendant bumps and jerks as we roll down the line.  There is something to be said, I think, for turning travel not just into a rush from one point to another, one that would ideally obliterate all notions of space, into a part of travel just as worthy as departure and arrival.  At the very least, having a few hours on the rails is an excellent opportunity to catch up with all the tasks left undone before one embarks on a vacation!

• History, to wax etymologically for a moment, is simply an inquiry, and as Herodotus knew, is just at home in the farmer's hut as in the palace of the King of Kings.  In that spirit, the recently-uncovered writings of three schoolboys of the 1890s.  
• NPR offers a helpful new service in addition to providing Carl Kasell's voice on your home answering machine: A new website that will tell you how likely a machine is to make you completely economically redundant.
• On a more serious note, it was recently announced that a prominent study about the effect of personal narratives on people's opinions about gay marriage was a near complete fabrication.  As someone with many connections both personal and professional to the world of academia, and especially to the social sciences, I find this a particularly disturbing development.  Certainly it does not take the most keen-eyed of observers to note that there is a problem with dishonesty in many studies in both the so-called hard and soft sciences.  Yet given the perverse system that we have created in higher education, combining the worst features of the kill or be killed free market and the stingy resources of federal funding, where one's entire career can hang on getting the right grant or being published in the right journal, is it any wonder that such scandals are a regular occurrence?  This before even considering how many of these falsehoods go unsuspected and undetected.  The Academy at its best expands the frontier of human knowledge in all areas, and certainly men being what they are will never be free of the malicious or the craven who are in the main responsible for these disasters.  But I think it should be apparent that our current university system is deeply flawed, with false reporting being one of the most obvious symptoms, and is in desperate need of top to bottom house cleaning.