Day: August 9, 2006

Are Swim Tests Finally History?

The Associated Press reports that the final holdout colleges and universities are finally getting rid of their swim tests.

Swim tests are an early 20th century anachronism when a wave of interest in physical fitness combined with the two World Wars, etc., led many colleges and universities to require students to demonstrate that they could swim before being granted their degrees.

And, like anything, once something is institutionalized it is damn hard to get rid of. So Notre Dame, MIT and other institutions of higher learning still require students to pass a swim test to graduate.

Along with the sheer silliness of it all (I’d require students to pass an advanced critical thinking test, but then again that’s not a skill necessarily encouraged at all institutions of higher learning), the swim test has run into very contemporary problems. According to the AP,

There are administrative hassles finding instructors and accommodating students with chlorine allergies or religious objections to being seen in bathing suits. But mostly, it’s just a headache getting hundreds of college students to show up for any one event at an appointed time and place.

Are they kidding? Getting college students to show up on time for an event is trivially easy to accomplish — simply add beer (presumably, after the swimming test has been successfully administered).

I wonder what traditions and practices that we take for granted will be considered antiquated in the early 22nd century. Perhaps institutions that still require basic introductory computer courses? (Those have been an anachronism for a couple years now).

Meatbot Massacre — A Board Game Produced on the “Ransom” Model

Daniel Solis and Greg Stolze are game designers who used what he calls a “ransom model” to produce and sell a board game, Meatbot Massacre, on the Internet. Essentially, Stolze announced the game, set up a PayPal account, and then said the game would be released as a free PDF download once the account had received $600 in donations.

The project was announced in January 2005 and reached the $600 level of donations in April — several months ahead of the September 2005 deadline.

They have nice account of their little experiment, including some suggestions for people who want to try the model for themselves.

The only thing that would have made the experience even better would be if they had released the fan-funded game with a Creative Commons license.

GPS Coordinates Ain’t Nothin’ But a Number

Hundreds of years after Adam Smith demonstrated that free trade between nations enriched both nations, mercantilism is alive and well even among those who are smart enough to know better.

It is very odd to see someone like Rogers Cadenhead argue against outsourcing on this sort of basis,

I don’t begrudge Seal’s people taking their shot at the Indian dream, but I think it’s in Americans’ self-interest to make outsourcing as expensive as possible.

This sort of myopic (and wrong-headed) version of American — and, even more directly, European — self-interest has helped to condemn hundreds of millions of people to needless poverty around the world. Specifically, American and European agricultural policies and protectionist trade policies have made it almost impossible for farmers and workers in the developing world to be competitive. The result is a double whammy — artificially high prices for goods in the United States and artificially inflated poverty levels in the developing world.

If Europe and the United States were serious about tackling third world poverty, the single most effective thing they could do would be to end their obscenely subsidized support of agriculture and other protected industries.

In a world where technology has largely wiped out the importance of distance, locking out Indian IT workers simply because they live at the “wrong” GPS coordinates is equally absurd and economically damaging to both the United States and India.