Gmail bleg

We are going Google here in Michigan-land and my university email switched over this weekend.

I will reserve judgement for now, but in the meantime I have a question:

Does anyone know how to delete an attachment from an email without deleting the email itself?

Addendum:

I am informed that Google's view is "don't delete, buy more space". Consistent with this, there is no way to do it in Google.  I have been pointed to two external programs that can do it; you can read about them here and here.

I am also told that there is some way to continue using the outlook interface on top of gmail, but that sounds above my pay grade.

Shame on Google for purveying software lacking critical features. They lost a fan today.

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Alfred Hitchcock, the Birds, and Tippi Hedren

Lots of Hollywood history I did not know.

I was sorry to learn that Hitchcock was such a jerk.

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Book: Crimea, The Last Crusade by Orlando Figes

I picked up Crimea, The Last Crusade at a used bookstore on Tottenham Court Road in London. The Crimean War was a bit of history that I knew next to nothing about, an omission well remedied by this book.

The book is written as serious popular history. The author has read widely in both the primary and secondary literature, and there are many pages of notes at the end. Still, the style was a bit less academic than I care for, both in the sense of detailed documentation and in the sense of explicit discussion of the literature in the text. I suspect for many readers this is a feature rather than a bug.

As suggested by the title (which is different in the American version I linked to above), the author emphasizes the religious nature of the conflict, which included Muslims, protestants and Catholics on one side and the orthodox on the other. The book is a good reminder that people used to take these differences quite seriously, and that at one time orthodox Christianity seemed just as exotic as Islam to many protestants.

Figes also does a fine job of interweaving political history with social history, both in the sense of discussing broader social trends on the home fronts of the combatants and in the sense of including sources such as sermons (odd and a bit scary to read Anglican ministers in England getting all worked up about the "heathen" orthodox) and letters written by soldiers on the front.  Also interesting was his detailed treatment of English Russophobia, and the shifting relationships between England and France.

I was also glad to finally learn a bit of the history of Florence Nightengale and the Charge of the Light Brigade, terms I think most everyone has heard but for which I had never before had any real context or understanding.

Recommended.

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Movie: The Dark Knight Rises

I found that the NYT review got me more stirred up than the movie.  The review has too much about current politics and, I think, a complete misreading of the politics of the movie itself, which is right-populist in much the same way as Law and Order. The line police are always good and noble, while politicians, police upper management (commissioner Gordon excepted and even he is a bit ambiguous here), rich people and lefty populists are all (Batman excepted), bad, or at least ineffectually wimpy. Not a vision that has much empirical plausibility or normative appeal, but people seem to like it.

They should have assigned A.O. Scott to review this one.

Still, putting aside the politics (what!), it is a very enjoyable film.  I assumed, given the length, that I would be bored at times, and conscious not of the movie but of the outside world, but I never was. And can you ever have too much Gary Oldman or Michael Caine?

I do wish they had done more with the catwoman character. Perhaps that bit ended up on the cutting room floor. She was interesting in her conflicted loyalties, but the potential depth was not really exploited in the film.

Still, this is recommended, and is about as good as it gets for summer fluff

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Assorted links

1. The Atlantic on archery in Bhutan. Charlie will like this one.

2. TSA grope and pillage.

3. Tyler Cowen remembers my colleague Miles Kimball in his graduate school days.

4. WSJ on changes in the first class cabin.

5. The American Men's Studies Association comes to Ann Arbor in April, in case you are looking for an excuse to visit.

Hat tip on #2 to a Facebook friend.

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Economic ignorance; left and right

Or, the data dissuade Dan Klein from his case of partisan differentiation disorder.

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Paper: Borghans and Schils (2012)

The Leaning Tower of Pisa
Decomposing achievement test scores into cognitive and noncognitive components
Lex Borghans, Maastricht University
Trudie Schils, Maastricht University
Draft version July 11, 2012

Abstract

Test scores on achievement tests depend on both cognitive and noncognitive skills. The predictive power of achievement tests is therefore potentially due to all components. The question of this paper is whether it is possible to disentangle cognitive and noncognitive factors from the performance on the test. Using data from the international achievement test PISA, we decompose the test scores into two factors. We investigate the development of the performance of students during the test, utilizing the (randomized) difference in the order of the test questions in the various test booklets. We document that performance substantially drops during the test and that this performance drop differs between types of students and countries. The estimated size of the drop is very stable over the years, while correlation between this drop and the test scores is small. This suggests that the decline in test scores during the test picks up something else than just cognition. The size of the decline in test scores during the test is related to personality traits, mainly to agreeableness, and to motivational attitudes towards learning. It also predicts outcomes in later life such as income and smoking in addition to the pure test score. The motivation effect can explain 19 percent of the variation in the average test scores between countries.

I saw this paper at the NBER summer institute last week and thought it was pretty cool.

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