Claremont McKenna College recently redesigned its website. Here are my thoughts on the redesign. Note
that I don’t have any data, and I haven’t conducted any tests on users, so the stuff I’m writing here might be totally bunk. But if no one has any data, we might as well go with my opinion, as I’ve read the entire back collection of
articles on useit.com, as well as Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think, and CMC’s Public Affairs Office probably hasn’t.

The Good

The new “Quick Links” bar.

This has a good list of places that I visit most often. This should probably be contextual based on the page you’re currently on, so the “Faculty” page would have different quick links than the “Students” page, but again they should be testing this on actual users.

Contact information on most pages.

Most pages have phone numbers and addresses listed in a prominent location. This is an excellent step and something I’ve called for.

The footer.

On a site like CMC’s where users have a diverse set of goals, you want to get people to where they are trying to go as quickly as possible. The footer makes this possible with a ton of deep links to pages you probably want to visit.

Much more readable faculty profile pages, as well as an acknowledgment that social media and student websites exist.

The Bad

Horribly small default font size.

The default font size is 11px, which is fine for people under 40, but really difficult to read for people over 40, especially because users don’t know how to change the font size in their browser. In addition, a small font size makes a link more difficult to click on because the target is so small – see Fitts Law. The small font size makes it hard to distinguish text in low contrast environments as well.

Not changing the color of visited links.

On a Google search results page, I can see at one glance which links I’ve already visited, because they are purple. No such luck on CMC’s site, which displays every link in blue. This violates rule #3 of Jakob Nielsen’s Top 10 Mistakes of Web Design, and has been shown in tests to disorient users, and cause them to visit the same page over and over.

The menu bar text shows up inconsistently.

The menu bar is the series of grayish-red boxes, which as you can see contain no text. This photo was using the latest version of Chrome on a Mac. Props to CMC for trying to use Cufon but they need to work out the bugs and test in all browsers.

No mobile version of the site.

Mobile devices should load an alternate stylesheet that presents the main content without the fluff, to save bandwidth and optimize the information presentation for a smaller screen.

Clicking on the logo doesn’t take you back to the frontpage.

When you click on the logo in the corner of every page you are taken to cmc.edu/discovercmc, instead of the homepage. This violates a well known usability convention: if the logo is clickable, it should take you to the homepage. I challenge you to find a top 500 website where this is not true.

No Analytics.

This means that Public Affairs isn’t collecting data about which pages are popular, which keywords users are searching for to find our site, and which links are being clicked on, which implies they don’t really care about how users use the site, and will hurt their ability to iteratively improve the site navigation in the future.

No caching site resources or minifying Javascript.

Page load times are slow; CMC scores only 63/100 in Google’s Online Page Speed tool. Because no images, scripts or stylesheets are cached, they have to be reloaded every time the user reloads a page. This is costly in terms of speed and bandwidth. Fortunately this is easily fixable in Apache.

The Ugly

The homepage.

Holy cow, this is a mess. Some of the problems:

• No search bar. This is stupid – the search bar exists in the page’s source  but is hidden from the user.
• Fourteen links to other pages. On a page whose goal should be to get users as deep within the site as quickly as possible, having this few links is unacceptable.
• Incredibly small link targets make the links hard to click.
• No skip links for disabled users.
• The “Discover CMC” link looks like an ad, and I missed it the first six times I visited the homepage
• There’s no way to determine at a glance what separates CMC from every other university. One of the boxes has some bland text below a “Why CMC” header but the page has to do better.
• It’s not clear where you should click to find any of the items described here:
• No meta description or keywords, which are essential for search engine optimization (SEO).

Fortunately, if my search habits are at all typical, most people use Google instead of the homepage to find resources on CMC’s site. But the new homepage is the flagship, and it violates most usability guidelines. It reminds me of flash intro sites from the ’90′s that used to load when you went to Nike.com or Boo.com. Those flash intros looked really cool when they were presented to management, but loaded slowly and caused loads of usability problems, which is why sites don’t have flash intros anymore. The homepage is a huge step backwards from the old page.

Big Images that Convey No Information

Here’s the homepage for current students:

And here are the parts of that page that are actually clickable:

The prime real estate on the page is taken by an unclickable infographic telling us that upperclassmen return to campus on August 28. Here’s the same information, in a more compressed format:

“8/28 Students Return”

The image on the page is 465 pixels wide by 290 high, or 134850 pixels of screen real estate. My compressed version is roughly 150 pixels wide by 18 high, for 2700 pixels of screen space, a 4900% improvement in information density.

More generally, big images take forever to load (especially important on mobile devices) and don’t contribute anything to the page. User test after user test shows users ignore filler images, and that visual bloat is annoying.

The SEO strategy/URL’s are still awful.
To illustrate CMC’s nonexistent approach to search engine optimization (SEO), I’ll use the faculty page for my
thesis reader:

The page looks OK – the email link is a little wonky but it’s fine. Now, what are the keywords we’d like to use to describe this page? The biggest one is the name of the professor – Ananda Ganguly. The second biggest is his department, Accounting, and then maybe we want to also have CMC as a keyword.

URL Contains No Keywords

Let’s look at the page URL, which Google uses as part of its PageRank formula to determine what’s actually on the page:

http://www.claremontmckenna.edu/academic/faculty/profile.php?Fac=519

This URL does not contain any of our relevant keywords, making the page tougher to find in a Google Search.

Nondescript Page Title

Let’s look at the page title, which shows up in the browser bar, and is the bright blue link text when the page shows up in Google results, as well as a large component in the PageRank formula:

The page title is “Academics,” which tells you zero about the page content. Since this page title is so non-descriptive, Google had to use its own algorithm to give the page a descriptive title in search results:

Generic Meta Tags

Let’s look at the page meta description, which shows up as the black text below the blue text in a search result in Google:

The meta description is “Academics and research at Claremont McKenna College,” which is generic enough that Google has to try to find better text on the page to use. The result isn’t optimal:

No H1 Heading

Pages should have exactly one h1 heading containing information about the primary subject of the page text on the page. There’s a perfect candidate – the professor’s name, Ananda Ganguly. This text does not have an h1 heading – in fact, there’s not a single h1 heading on the page.

No Alt Text for Images

There’s a nice image of Professor Ganguly on the page. Images can’t be crawled, it’s important to provide an alt tag so Google knows what’s in the image, as well as for blind users or users on slow internet connections. However, the image does not have an alt tag, so Google doesn’t know the subject of the image.

Those are some really, really basic SEO optimizations. Figuring that stuff out would make CMC pages more prominent when researchers from other schools search for work done by CMC professors. I haven’t done a thorough examination but I’m not confident that the rest of the site does much better.

Conclusion

I have the following questions for the CMC Public Affairs Office:

1. When deciding what to emphasize in the site redesign, did you interview a single user of the site? Did you ask any students, prospective students, faculty members, staff members, alumni members, or parents, about how they use the CMC website?
2. How does the redesigned site address the complaints raised by users in question (1)?
3. Could you explain how the new frontpage does a better job of conveying CMC’s brand than the old frontpage? When you showed the frontpage to prospective students for 30 seconds and asked them to say what set CMC apart, what did they tell you?
4. What metrics are you using to determine the success of the site redesign?
5. What was the decision making process during the design of the site? Was evidence from user testing ever presented to inform design decisions?

CMC’s website hasn’t been that great for years and it’s good to see that it’s finally getting more attention and resources. But while the new design is flashy, it’s not clear that it became more usable, which is disappointing.

Do you have any suggestions for the new cmc.edu makeover? Please post your suggestions, comments, criticisms below.

Banking

Banks take your deposited money and loan it out to home-buyers, businesses and others. Because lending is profitable, they are willing to pay you money to hold your deposits. They will pay you a percentage of your deposit every year. This is what’s known as the interest rate.

However, interest rates are currently really low. The current best interest rate for a savings account is 1.14%, which means that if you have $1000 in a savings account for a year, you’re only going to make $11.40 in interest. So it’s not really that important right now to pick a bank because of its high interest rate.

A smarter move is to pick a bank that minimizes fees. There are two main sources of fees – ATM withdrawal fees and overdraft fees (when you try to withdraw more money than you actually have in the account). Fortunately, there are some banks that are not evil. I recommend Ally Bank, a new online bank. You can withdraw your money from any ATM and Ally will refund the fee. Also, you can sign up for overdraft protection, which will transfer in money from your savings account (with no fee) if you overdraft in your checking. They also have 24 hour customer service and funny commercials. The one downside is they do not have physical branches, so if you like depositing your money with a teller, you might not want an Ally account.

Credit Cards

Credit cards are very convenient – they allow you to buy things now and figure out how to pay for them later. They also offer great rewards programs, for example free flights (after enough purchases) or 1% cash back on every purchase that you make.

The downside is that if you don’t pay off your balance in full every month, they charge a very high rate – often 15% or more – on your outstanding payments, and your credit score will take a significant hit. So the rule with credit cards is pretty simple – don’t buy stuff that you can’t afford. Do not sign up for a credit card if you think you would go into debt. The only way they make sense is if you pay off your balance in full every month.

On the flipside, if you are currently in credit card debt, paying it off should be your #1 priority. If I have $1000 in debt and I pay 15% per year in interest, I can save $150 in interest payments by paying off the credit card now, instead of one year from now – a guaranteed 15% return. This will outperform most bank and market investments, as well as help boost your credit score.

Your credit score is a number which tells lenders how likely you are to pay them back (Above 800 is a very good score and below 650 is a very bad score). Having good credit is very important for getting good rates on loans for a new home, car, or line of credit. Not paying your credit card balance in full will always damage your credit score. You should regularly ask your card issuer for credit limit increases, even if you do not use anywhere near your full credit limit, because it helps your credit score to have lots of available credit that you aren’t actually using. Federal law states that you can view your credit score for free once every 12 months at annualcreditreport.com. Do not go to freecreditreport.com, the site with the catchy commercials, because they will scam you, and it is not free.

In terms of choosing a credit card, the general advice is to put all of your rewards on one card (instead of using store-specific cards, which don’t give you as good a deal), and to avoid a yearly fee, as there are enough good cards now that don’t have one. I used bankrate.com to compare credit cards. Also, many credit cards have little known perks like automatic 1-year warranties on all purchases and discounts at many national retailers – see this post on Ramit Sethi’s blog for more information.

Investing

The US government’s Social Security and Medicare programs are growing at an unsustainable rate. This means that you should not count on having much, if any retirement help from the government, and you should save enough to cover the entire cost of retirement. Thanks to the miracle of compound interest, money you invest now will likely increase to 10 or 20 times its value by the time you retire. You should try to set aside 10-15% of any money you earn for retirement, or a rainy day.

The best evidence we have says that, Warren Buffett aside, it’s  extremely rare for anyone to beat the return of the stock market over a long period of time. Of course, people can beat it in the short run, just like if you had 1,024 people flip a coin ten times in a row, you would expect two of them to have all heads or all tails. However, there’s an easy way to perform at least as well as the overall stock market – invest in index funds, which allow you to own shares in thousands of companies for the price of one share (this is how all of my money is invested). Index funds also have low or no fees, compared with a mutual fund, which might charge you 1% or more every year to manage your money.

However, index funds aren’t perfect for everyone, and I’d recommend you take advice from a more serious source than relying on my personal opinion before deciding how to invest your money.

Also, the best evidence we have says that people who buy and hold investments tend to do better than people that frequently buy and sell stocks. When you buy and hold, you don’t have to pay fees or taxes from selling or purchasing shares. Furthermore, you don’t have to worry about whether you could be earning a better return or whether the market is going to do well or poorly. I would recommend using Sharebuilder.com for an investment account – it costs $4 a trade.

Roth IRA

A Roth IRA is a specific type of retirement account. Normally if you use your job income to buy a stock, you get taxed twice – income tax on your paycheck, and capital gains tax if your investments make money. However, if you put your money in a Roth IRA account, you pay no tax when your investments gain money, which gives your return a huge boost. The catch is that you can only get the tax benefit if you are older than 65 when you withdraw the money – otherwise you have to pay tax at the normal rate.

Now I know this sounds really complicated, but you can set up a Roth IRA account on Sharebuilder in under 15 minutes. You can put the lower of your total earned income for the year, or $5000, into the account. I would recommend trying to max out this account every year.

More Information

Feel free to ask questions, leave suggestions in the comments or email me with thoughts. I’d also recommend checking out Ramit Sethi’s blog, I Will Teach You To Be Rich.

Here’s how it works:

1. I open the Firesheep extension and connect to an open wireless network.

2. You connect to the wireless network and check your Facebook. So that you don’t have to enter your password every time you go to a new page, Facebook stores a piece of data called a “cookie” on your computer.

3. That cookie gets passed through the air from the wireless hub to your laptop without getting encrypted. I use Firesheep to steal the cookie and double click on your name to log in to your Facebook, Flickr, Google, LinkedIn or other account with one click.

Firesheep, shown in the screenshot, makes hacking personal information off a wireless network as simple as browsing the net.

I tested this out on my laptop while connected to the CINE wireless network. Within about four minutes, the extension let me hack into my Google Account, my fake Facebook, my Twitter and my CMC Forum account without logging in to any of those sites.  I was then able to log into each of these sites and post messages.

This vulnerability has been known for a long time, but usually required fairly advanced knowledge about networks and some technical tools. Now, however, it’s easy enough for even the Microsoft Office-proficient to steal a user’s session. Most of the affected sites are taking this seriously, and implementing steps to improve their security, but for the time being, your data is extraordinarily vulnerable. Here are some ways you can protect yourself:

#1. Don’t access Google, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, LinkedIn, or any site you care about, over an open wireless network, or in an Internet cafe. On campus, this means that you shouldn’t be using the CINE or the Claremont networks. As a rule of thumb, if you can access the network for free without providing a password (Starbucks, etc), you shouldn’t use it to access any data that you care about. What’s more, don’t leave these sites open in open tabs while you’re on those networks, because the connection is still open even though you’re not refreshing the page.

#2. There is a way to securely access your data on open networks. It’s called HTTPS, and it’s the system that online banks and credit card companies use. You can tell if a site is using HTTPS if you see this in the URL in your browser:

There are some extensions for Firefox that force sites to use HTTPS for your information; check out the HTTPS Everywhere extension, which will force Facebook, Google, Twitter and others to use the HTTPS connection for every link between your computer and the network. In your GMail Settings, click on the “Always use HTTPS” option. You can get more information about counter-measures here.

#3. Read the emails that Bruce Frost and Jeremy Whaley, CMC’s technology security experts, send out, and don’t hesitate to email them if you have questions about your online security.

Please note that using any application to browse other people’s information is at best highly unethical, and at worst, illegal, and that you should not use this tool for pretty much any reason. I received my roommate’s permission before snooping his laptop, and even then I did not open any of his accounts on my computer. If you want to be safe on the Internet, you need to know what evil people can do while you’re on it.

KB: Most traditional advice about success correlates working hard with being successful; the students who work the hardest enjoy the most success. You advise people differently. Could you explain why?

CN: It’s important to be clear. There’s a difference between “hard work” and “hard to do work.” I completely agree that hard work is crucial. Both satisfaction and interesting opportunities come from becoming very good at something, and this requires the application of hard focus, again and again, over a long period of time. Most standard beliefs about success, however, think “hard to do work” is important, which means, for example, juggling a very difficult course load, managing dozens of activities, regularly working late into the night to keep up with all of your obligations.

What I tell students is do less, but do what you do better. This is the foundation for being both successful and happy.

KB: Why is it that more people aren’t advising students to follow a similar strategy?

CN: When it comes to impressiveness, it’s much more straightforward to just take on a really demanding load and have people say “wow, I can’t believe you’re doing all that,” than it is take the time to become really good at a small number of things and let those lead you to really impressive places.

KB: What have you learned since you started researching successful students? In other words, how has your philosophy changed over time?

CN: When I started writing about successful students, I focused on the small-scale tactics such as time management and study habits. I figured, naively, that if you could fix these, you could have a successful and happy student career. Over time, however, I noticed that many students would just react to more efficient habits by piling on even more work. I realized that if I wanted to improve their lives, I needed to tackle the root issues of what students think makes them impressive.

KB: One problem that I’ve noticed is that some students, especially students without a clear idea about what they want to do, pursue many activities because they’re worried that focusing too much in one area means they have to give up pursuing other topics they’re also interested in.

CN: People place too much emphasis on their “interests.” We live under this myth that we all have passions lying dormant inside of us, and if we can just identify and follow them we’ll be happy in life. I think this is nonsense. People who are passionate about what they do are very good at what they do. If you want interesting passionate work, choose something and get good at it: this, in turn, will open up all sorts of interesting opportunities in your life. Dabbling with passing fancies is not going to give your life meaning.

KB: What are the biggest difficulties for students who are starting to try your philosophy?

CN: Two things:

First, the idea that doing lots of stuff is impressive is ingrained in the American student psyche. It is scary for many students to take the plunge into radically reducing their course and activity load and committing to immersing themselves in a small number of things.

Second, this approach requires hard focus. I don’t mean hard to do work, like staying up late in the night, but more like 1 – 3 hours, most days, of uninterrupted concentration. Most people are bad at this…at first. Attention is a muscle, and expose to constant text messaging and Facebook status checking diminishes that muscle. Many students are frustrated that they can’t just jump right into monk like focus. But it comes with practice. Start with 20 uninterrupted minutes spent no where near a phone or computer. Every two weeks add 10 minutes.

KB: You stress the importance of removing distractions and boosting your ability to focus for long periods of time. Could you talk about when you realized this was a problem for you, and how you fixed it?

CN: I talked about this some above. But I will also add that I take my ability to focus really seriously. I’m a theoretical computer scientist and a writer, for me to regularly engage in focus-busting activities would be like an athlete with a milkshake habit. Here are some things I do to help keep my focus muscles strong: I’m not on Facebook (nor have I ever been). I’m also not on twitter, or any other social media thing that generates regular distracts. I am generally hard to contact if I don’t know you. I have a non-smart phone, on purpose. I’m bad about returning calls and e-mails, so people don’t expect much from me in terms of quick responses. I do huge amounts of work away from a computer. I practice sustained thought every day in the 1 – 3 hours I spend walking my dog and working out.

KB: Many CMC students plan to enter government, finance, or consulting after college, and the career path for these fields is more or less rigid; what advice do you have for these students?

CN: Do less. Do better. People love students who show the ability to be a star. Notice, this is different than students who show the ability to handle lots of simultaneous work. If you follow the do less, do better motto, this will open up interesting opportunities that you might never imagined now.

In addition, if your approach to student life is to sacrifice now so you can get a job that will make you happy later, you’re absolutely wrong. Practice now living a life that you both enjoy and is interesting and successful. If you don’t get in this habit now, it’s likely that you’ll spend the next 30 years stuck in the “sacrifice now, be happy later” mindset, until, eventually, you realize you’ve never really been happy with what you’re doing.

Finally, at the risk of being blunt: don’t go into finance. The only people I know who are happy in finance are jerks. And the money is less useful than you think. Do less. Do better. And let that take you somewhere worth going…

Noise Canceling Headphones. You need to get work done, but the computer labs turn into zoos. Slip these over your ears and enter your own world. After the first few times people try to ask you things and you say “What?” they’ll stop talking to you, letting you focus on your work. BOSE and Monsters can cost you over $300; instead pick up a pair of Audio Technica ATH-ANC7B’s, which give you the same quality but cost less than half as much.

Knowing how to use the library. I haven’t bought books in two years; I get them all from the library for free. As an added bonus, seniors get to check out books until the end of the semester. You can get any book you want out of the library; if you can’t find it in the library catalog, search on LINK+, the network of over 100 California libraries. And if they don’t have it, submit a request for a librarian to get it through Interlibrary Loan, which basically means they’ll scour the country to get the book for you. You can get any academic paper you want through the library too. Enter the article title, author or journal on this page. If they don’t have it, you can also use InterLibrary Loan, who will purchase a copy of the paper for you.

Scheduling thesis like a class. One of the toughest parts about getting hard work done is actually sitting down to do it, especially when your thesis isn’t due for another two months and you have a bunch of things to do this week. If you never give yourself time to do it, you’ll bury yourself in other work. Automate that decision by setting aside time in your calendar every week that’s simply “thesis time.” Go to a quiet place and work.

Binders. I keep one for my thesis and my research seminar. I keep dividers for Thesis Lit Review Papers, Lit Review Paper Notes, Thesis Documents (IRB application, a copy of the thesis topic form, etc), Advisor Discussion Notes, Seminar Notes, Seminar Handouts, and Seminar Coursework.

Dropbox. Sometimes you’ll be working on your laptop and sometimes in the computer lab; it’s important to keep your files sync’ed between the two computers. Dropbox keeps your files synchronized between all of the computers you work on. With Dropbox you can store up to 2 GB of files for free, and their software syncs everything in the background.

Productivity software. Your computer is a mean temptress. Try to eliminate distractions by handicapping your computer. I like WriteRoom for Mac, which blocks out your whole screen and gives you a place to enter in text. Other apps to try are Freedom, which blocks the Internet, and your ability to turn it on again for up to eight hours, for both Macs and PCs, and the NoMoreTabs extension for Google Chrome, which limits you to 5 tabs at a time (if you open more tabs, it closes old ones).

CMC filed a brief in support of the bill. Vice President for Business & Administration Robin Aspinall noted in the brief, “With regard to CMC’s campus, the [City of Claremont's] presumption that one parking space is required for every two members of the campus community has been shown to result in the College providing about 16% more parking spaces than are actually needed.” The bill mentions the “positive results” from banning freshmen from parking at the Colleges, without mentioning the desire of freshmen to have cars on campus.

Senior Parking Lot

By giving the colleges permission to build fewer parking spaces in conjunction with class bans, the new regulation may have serious consequences for 5C students.  As the colleges continue to expand, administrators may find it simpler and less expensive to restrict parking for underclassmen than to construct more parking spaces. Not one of the 5C schools currently has plans to further restrict on-campus parking, however.

Even though this bill gives 5C administrators further incentive to restrict students’ future abilities to park, few students knew about the bill. City Council publicized the bill with ads in the Claremont Courier and through mailers to property owners near campus, but students were not directly notified. Only one student, from Harvey Mudd, showed up at the hearing to express dissent.

Aside from the school’s endorsement of the measure, there are no other signs that CMC’s administration is making a move to further restrict parking on campus.

CMC’s ban on freshmen cars was just enacted a year ago. The administration chose to restrict freshman access instead of other alternatives such as charging more for permits. “When we banned freshman cars, we did not think that charging more in parking fees was an equitable way to deal with the problem.  In such a system, the wealthy can buy something that others cannot,” said Vice President for Student Affairs Jeff Huang.

Scripps is the only 5C school with no parking restrictions. CMC, Pomona, Harvey Mudd and Pitzer currently do not let freshmen have cars, and Pitzer also does not allow sophomores to have cars.

The administration is testing the new Dry Week policy at the recommendation of the Alcohol Task Force, set up last year to evaluate CMC’s alcohol policy. The student-dominated body recommended the change, expressing concern that a ban on drinking was inconsistent with the administration’s attitude that students should be responsible for themselves. The Dry Week prohibition led students to focus on subverting the rules, leading them to “behave irresponsibly,” said Dean of Students Mary Spellman.

Let the games begin! Live doves were released at 6:01

DOS is also expanding the scope of its off-campus and dry events, increasing their budgets substantially. Last weekend the five colleges sent 850 students to the Dodgers game, and tickets were sold out for a trip to the Raging Waters waterpark.

The administration will conduct a thorough evaluation of the no-Dry Week experiment within a few weeks. But most people seem happy with an early end to the ban. And so far, there have been no hospitalizations due to alcohol poisoning. It will be more difficult to evaluate the effects on the other stated reason for the Dry Week policy: to allow students to settle into their classes.

6:01, the student body’s traditional party to kick off the drinking year, was largely a success. One of the biggest downsides of the party, however, was that host-campus CMC allowed only its own students to attend. With students from the other four colleges prohibited from participating, and many CMC students attending the Giants vs. Dodgers game, some students commented that the party felt emptier than past 6:01′s.

That didn’t stop people from having a good time, of course. “It was a healthy, responsible party, where the event was the focus and alcohol was an add-on,” commented Spellman.

And 6:01 did have its minor mishaps. The DJ originally booked for the event was asked to leave. Claremont Police arrested one particularly enthusiastic student. And one of ASCMC’s expensive new speakers was stolen, as SAC Chair Seth Winterroth ’12 noted in an e-mail sent to students Sunday night. But Spellman called these “isolated incidents” and said that, overall, ASCMC did a “phenomenal job” planning fun events during orientation and the first week of school.

With only six days of classes, and one official party, gone, both ASCMC and the administration seem to be working out the kinks.

Alexander Reichert ’11, Dorm Activities Chair, confirmed that tomorrow night’s TNC would be a CMC-only event. Pitzer and Scripps students will be allowed to join starting with next week’s TNC. ASCMC does not have the budget to afford security for a 5C party every Thursday night, Reichert noted. The other schools’ student activity groups have not contributed money for their share of the security costs, which is why they are not allowed to attend. Students will be allowed, however, to register guests at almost any CMC Thursday party, and Saturday night parties will still be open to the 5C’s.

The administration is taking these measure more because of worry about the security of CMC students than worries about the amount of alcohol they are drinking. Last semester, TNC was limited to CMC students after Spring Break, prompting fears that the school was “cracking down” on student parties. But budget constraints are the primary problem, not a hardline position from the administration.

When I was in India, it was amusing to see volunteers put up with 100+ degree heat, squat toilets, no toilet paper, hard-as-rock beds, scrubbing laundry, food poisoning, and power/water outages without much complaint, and then go apeshit because the wireless was down, as it often was in our corner of the subcontinent. It gives you an idea for how important the Internet has become to those of us from the West, but it also makes us look particularly shallow to the NGO staff, who provide the wireless as a favor, and were generally bemused at our behavior.

When the Internet was working it was prone to abuse, selfishness and bickering that you didn’t see from the same people in other circumstances. A month before I left we found out someone was sneaking into the lab at night, downloading porn and movies on BitTorrent, slowing the connection to a crawl. When volunteers have to share the one or two terminals in the office, time is precious but people still use it for chat and Facebook, despite the signs and people waiting. And the people waiting like to check the screen and privately pass judgment on the user’s surfing habits. You mean you’re keeping me waiting just to chat?

From your brain’s point of view, checking the Internet is like playing the slots; most of the information we get is bland but sometimes, the thrill of getting exciting news or hearing from a sexy lady makes our heart race. So each time we go online we’re essentially gambling on what sort of info we are going to receive, akin to pulling the handle on a slot machine. Second, there’s something about clicking the mouse, consuming information and opening new pages that gives us the illusion that we’re putting in a lot of work. Third, once you’re on the Internet it’s really easy to continue to lazily consume information, allowing more bits to flicker across the screen, instead of doing actual work.

Productivity on the Internet is an illusion. Researchers have found out that once you get distracted it takes an average of 11 minutes to get back to your original level of focus. An Internet connection is a gateway to infinite distraction; there will always be more items in your RSS feed or Facebook feed or NY Times stories to click on. When you don’t have the Internet, you might not be able to look up facts or dictionary words but you also won’t spend two hours looking at spring break photos on Facebook or down Wikipedia’s rabbit hole.

In India, I was really productive in the 18 hours every day that I didn’t have Internet, and I’m making plans to maintain that productivity when I get home. I’ve been training myself to focus – starting with 5 minutes at a time and slowly working up. I canceled my smartphone contract and traded it for a $10 phone (and $15/month contract). I use Freedom, the mac app that disables the Internet more often. I process email while offline; Thunderbird lets messages sit in my outbox and sends them all at once. And maybe when I’m back at CMC I’ll work in the middle of the football field, supposedly the only place at CMC without wireless.

I like referring to people who are on surfing binges as vampires – there’s something about the way they look up from the screen, startled and slightly guilty, after having lazily sucked information from the terminal for three hours. It’s not attractive, and I’m as guilty of it as anyone. The Internet is a productivity killer, and it brings out really ugly behavior in people. Don’t let it happen to you.

Myth #1. There’s a magic bullet that will lift poor people out of poverty.
Economists and donors have spent a lot of time searching for the one instrument that’s going to lift people out of poverty. It’s not likely that one exists. Here are some examples of false cures.

• In the 1960′s, we thought we could get growth by filling the gap between a country’s savings rate and some necessary amount of investment. That was a mistake, because countries had an incentive to save less.

• Then we thought that providing primary education for everyone would lift people out of poverty. Now, we have almost universal primary education around the globe, but it’s had virtually zero effect on growth.

• Then we thought that poor people were having too many kids, dividing their nation’s resources too many ways. It turns out that people everywhere are having about as many kids as they’d like to.

• Then we tried to withhold aid unless a country made certain reforms that would help growth. But Western governments weren’t happy that their foreign aid budgets weren’t being spent, so they often gave the money to poor countries anyway.

• Now people are saying microfinance is going to give people the loan they need to build a business and get out of poverty. There’s no doubt that microfinance is helping, but it’s not true that people need one BIG loan to get out of poverty. Most poor people borrow or lend small amounts throughout the year, to meet their cash flow needs.donors want low overhead, most charities do not evaluate their programs to see where money’s being spent effectively and where it’s being wasted. Without feedback, they’ll waste far more money on their programs than on administration. Low overhead ratios also lead charities to favor high cost programs over cheaper ones that are as effective.

If you’re worried about wasted money, be more wary of unhelpful programs than bureaucratic spending. Overhead is not a good way to evaluate charities.

Myth #2. Earmarking money for “sexy” projects helps.

Sexy projects are buzzwords, tangible items that get donors really excited, like building orphanages, houses, donating modern technology, or microfinance. Unfortunately money for these causes is often wasted.  After the tsunami in Thailand in 2005, everyone wanted to give money for orphanages and boats. Much more money was spent on these causes than was actually necessary. Orphanages had trouble finding enough orphans to house, and some families actually abandoned their children at orphanages because they couldn’t afford to feed their children. If the money was not earmarked, it could have gone to helping those parents afford to keep their kids.
NGO’s also built way more boats than were actually lost in the tsunami, leading to overfishing and waste.
Money is fungible, so the only result of earmarking your donation is that certain sexy projects will be over-funded. There’s a whole lot of boring work that goes on in aid, like logistical support, and helping people apply for government services. Beware of giving money for projects and causes that sound innately sexy.

Myth #3. Gifts in kind are useful donations.

The only people who know what an area actually needs are the people that are on the ground in that area. Most gifts in kind may not be appropriate for the season, or culture; for example, warm clothes for Haiti, expired medicines, or shoes. Disaster areas need to import a lot of urgent equipment, as fast as possible. Sending over your old goods can clog up ports and prevent more urgent shipments from getting through. NGO’s also have to pay someone to go through all the gifts and sort the useful ones from the non-useful ones.
More generally, sending gifts in kind can increase aid dependency, or destroy local markets. For example, someone who made or sold shoes in Haiti would not be able to compete against free shoes from abroad.
Maybe you’re concerned that if you give cash, the aid agency won’t spend it effectively. But if you don’t trust the agency with your cash, then why are you willing to give them your donated goods? And they might simply decide to sell whatever goods you’ve sent along and buy more useful ones.
Unless you’ve spoken to someone in the region and they’ve specifically requested gifts in kind, it’s better to give cash.

Myth #4. Brain drain is a bad thing.
Some people worry that poor countries waste money training workers who plan to emigrate, or that when skilled workers leave a poor country, they leave that country worse off. These assumptions are false. Wages in the West for skilled workers are often ten or twenty times as high as they are in the home country.¹ These high wages give workers an incentive to invest in education, which they wouldn’t have if they couldn’t migrate. Earning a higher wage allows skilled workers to send more money back home than they could ever make if they hadn’t left. Workers retain close ties to the nation of their birth, and many move back home later on. These workers often have leadership skills. For example, 46 current heads of national government received their education in the United States.
From a human rights point of view, people everywhere have a right to freedom of movement. Allowing skilled workers to migrate to rich countries is not “stealing” labor from poor countries. More migration encourages more people in the home country to develop skills in the first place.

Myth #5. Foreign aid is the best way to help poor countries.

We’ve been doing development and foreign aid for fifty years, without having much effect on a poor country’s level of growth. There are two things that have made poor countries better off: Free trade, and immigration.
Free trade makes US consumers better off because the increased competition lowers prices. It also gives producers in poor countries access to markets around the world, and lets them compete with richer producers in the US. Free trade’s effect on unemployment in the US is mostly short-term, and must be compared with the benefits to producers in poor countries and to consumers around the world.
Right now the economy of Haiti is destroyed. The best way to help Haitians is to allow them to immigrate to the United States, where they could find jobs, and send money to people who choose to remain in Haiti. That will help the Haitian people much more than billions of dollars in development and foreign aid money. But our government is more interested in sending money than actually helping Haitians.

Myth #6. We know better than the locals.

A lot of Westerners assume that because we are wealthier and we have fancy educations, that we know better than the people we’re trying to help, and if only we could teach them, if only they would listen to us, they could escape their desperate situations. This is a dangerous belief; if it was easy for people to escape poverty they would have done so a long time ago. It’s extremely difficult to make things any better without an extensive knowledge of the local culture, the language, and the people. The people who know best what to do are those closest to the affected areas. Our job should be to help them out.
So, be really careful about believing you can take a trip to India, or Africa, and change the world.

Here are some ways we can do better. The most important thing is to be aware of the difference between showing that you care and actually caring. Many people give money, or wish to go volunteer, because they’re interested in showing other people that they care about the poor. It’s good to want to show other people that you care, but it’s important to do it in a way that helps reduce poverty.

Showing that you care:

Disaster relief
Volunteer tourism
$0.10 donation
Sending your old clothes

Caring:

Disaster preparedness
Paying a local
$4 donation
Giving cash

Most importantly, do some research for yourself, hold charities accountable, and spread the word about how to be smarter about foreign aid.

For more, take a look at the GiveWell project, which evaluates the effectiveness of aid organizations, and Bill Easterly’s blog about foreign aid follies, aidwatchers.com.

1 Bill Easterly, The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics.

2 Daryl Collins, Jonathan Morduch, Stuart Rutherford, and Orlanda Ruthven, Portfolios of the Poor: How the World’s Poor live on $2 a Day (Princeton University Press, 2009).

(You can easily categorize people by the type of milk they drink. Nondrinkers have weak minds and weaker bodies; most of them will get osteoporosis by the time they reach 50. I have respect for whole fat milk drinkers, who appreciate the creamy taste and streaks down the side of their cup after they take a sip. Nonfat drinkers are generally sensible people. Two percent drinkers are wafflers, as indecisive in life as they are in their choice of milks. As E-40 likes to say, go hard or go home.)

Knowing that Indians drink raw milk does not get me any closer to figuring out where I can get it; I have no idea where I can find my dairy grail. I imagine slipping a ten rupee note to an eleven year old, who sends me around the corner to collect a cracked, dirty bottle. Or luring a cow down an alley with some fresh cud, then donning gloves and milking it.

Instead I headed to a nearby dairy shop and asked, in English, if they had unpasteurized milk. I get blank stares. “Unpasteurized, you know, untreated milk.” The odds are high that people who sell milk without first sterilizing it have no idea what the word ‘unpasteurized’ means. So I ask my friend Abhilasha if she’ll help me. Abhilasha is a sensible girl who recently graduated from Rutgers with a degree in biology, who probably understands why milk is pasteurized. “Why do you want to do that?” she asks me. This is a crucial test. I tell her you don’t get to try it everyday and I’m curious to see what it tastes like.

The next day we head back to the dairy shop and ask if they have unpasteurized milk. The shopkeeper makes the same face Abhilasha did when I told her I wanted to try it, and says no. We ask where we can get it in Udaipur, but he says he doesn’t know. Undaunted, we try the next shop down the street; they have no idea either. At the third shop we try, they let slip that you can get it in Suraj Pol, halfway across town. Now we have a name; I’m thrilled. Abhilasha looks bemused.

Before heading over, we duck into a thali place to eat lunch. At twenty five rupees, and with flies constantly buzzing around, this is the cheapest thali place in town, but it’s good enough to earn a visit every ten days or so. Abhilasha asks, out of curiosity, if they have “freshmilk.” Unbelievably, the owner says yes, he gets it from a nearby village. I order two glasses.

Indians don’t drink cold milk, so we wait awhile for our glasses to cool. It smells stronger than normal milk. Finally we clink glasses and take a taste. Maybe it’s just the amount of time I’ve spent thinking about it, but the milk is a sort of combination of liquid Babybel and whole milk, entirely drinkable, and it balances out the spice from the thali we’ve been eating.

So if you get a chance to try unpasteurized milk, you should. It’s not gonna make me keep my own cow in the backyard or anything, but it’s a novelty drink.