Home! Throwing money at things does not work.

View from Chaos Manor, Saturday, January 10, 2015

Was delayed. Still at home. Monday, January 12, 2015

Came home Friday night. Get about with a wheelchair and walker … I am not frail, but I have even less balance than before, and I had essentially none before. I will add to this all day. Essentially I cannot type fast, but I can use both hands now. That may not be as fast as 2 fingers, do not know yet.

Slow but I am here. And of course it’s all expensive.

Hillary’s Half-Baked Haiti Project [WSJ]

Caracol Industrial Park is failing to deliver on the promises made to foreign investors and Haitians.

By

Mary Anastasia O’Grady

Jan. 11, 2015 6:18 p.m. ET

On the fifth anniversary of the 7.0 magnitude earthquake in Port-au-Prince, Haiti remains a poster child for waste, fraud and corruption in the handling of aid. Nowhere is the bureaucratic ineptitude and greed harder to accept than at the 607-acre Caracol Industrial Park, a project launched by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with U.S. taxpayer money, under the supervision of her husband Bill and his Clinton Foundation.

Between the State Department and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), which hands out…

Hillary’s Half-Baked Haiti Project: Mary A. O’Grady

The news all over the weekend was about France, but there are other stories that may be more important. Haiti proves again that throwing money at a problem enriches bureaucrats, but does far less good for those we “help”. Of course for Haiti it has been this way a very long time. When I was in graduate school I had a fried from Haiti who was studying fishing science at the University of Washington. He had the same observations, foreign aid from the US went to US civil servants, Brown and Root contractors who imported all but the most menial labor at high prices, and Haitian officials working for Duvalier. Clinton sent Marines to restore a different crook to office, and Brown and Root continued to thrive, and little else changed as the roads degenerated into jungle again. Little has changed. Haiti will not be rich, but we have put enough money in there that it should be up to poverty level if we just dropped the money from airplanes.

Education’s No Dollar Left Behind Competition

K-12 spending has little bearing on student success, yet state rankings drive the money scramble.

By

Vicki Alger

Jan. 11, 2015 5:59 p.m. ET

One of education’s most important annual rituals began last week, when Education Week released its annual Quality Counts report, which grades states based on a variety of criteria, including spending. On cue came the predictable hand-wringing over K-12 education funding.

On Thursday Florida’s Duval County Public Schools Superintendent Nikolai Vitti told the Florida Times-Union that underfunding is undermining student achievement. “[I]magine how much stronger our students would perform if the policy commitments were maintained and balanced with an increase in per pupil funding,” he said.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/vicki-alger-educations-no-dollar-left-behind-competition-1421017161

Of course the best schools have 50% proficiency in reading. Yet I recall in Capleville with two grades to the room, 25 students (usually; sometimes more) to the grade, four teachers to the whole school – the 7-8 grade teacher was Principal, and there were no other officials, no guidance counselors, no frills, and surely no $5000 a year per pupil – EVERYONE could read better than most high schoolers can today. See my California Reader on Amazon for what we read in 6^th grade.

Throwing money at them makes schools worse not better. Cut the school budget and give local boards control, and get the education experts out of the way. Fire them or bribe to get out of the way. Let teacher teach and put some discipline in the classrooms and things might improve. They can hardly get worse than the experts have made them.

If this is true, it’s the most important discovery to date in human history.

<http://www.inquisitr.com/1745673/pulsar-observed-wobbling-out-of-space-time-and-vanishing-out-of-our-now/>

—————-

Roland Dobbins

It certainly seems significant.  This is perhaps a crucial finding for Einstein; I do not see how Petr Beckmann can explain the vanishing but I am not sure that ia really what was observed.

 

Web: www.nss.org <http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001EJ_Yd-dbwmXhomE0GHvhwWM1RjYLDRgETsoI8iPV2DGUEOt8oFD_LnQfhjUaG9wGXk_hiDGCg67lCJLDCS7curyr3NFEaW_PNp8ghjDslMCJL8W08cLAkuPWSfK50U3qM1jQnKf7x8oedxtFVINM-M5H_FHLKrQ1&c=a6Qs5IRzfyXMo0xE7XIHNZz4aqUrLraLaLe6tza19V36Ya7GXBuSAw==&ch=9Abw5bAFaycARgPM2duTGvcrtPDaKRqphLHg-LWxSd8mcBoZnzqEyQ==>

National Space Society Applauds Milestone on the Road to Space Settlement: First Precision Return of a Falcon 9 First Stage to an Ocean Platform

(Washington DC, January 12, 2015) The recent launch of NASA’s Commercial Resupply Services 5 (CRS-5) on January 10th represents a major step towards space settlement, according to the National Space Society (NSS). The Dragon capsule berthed with the International Space Station (ISS) at 5:54 am EST Monday, January 12th. This is the seventh flight of the Dragon, and the fifth of 12 contracted flights to the ISS by SpaceX.

CRS-5 marked a major step forward for SpaceX’s efforts to develop reusable rocket technology. Such technology is called for in Milestone 2 of the NSS Space Settlement Roadmap (http://www.nss.org/settlement/roadmap/ <http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001EJ_Yd-dbwmXhomE0GHvhwWM1RjYLDRgETsoI8iPV2DGUEOt8oFD_Lq__lWm6K7xYnZl-7_6CYoEmotz0B1JFUbOtre1AJwIDBbEevqUOtOqcK8eAIbsxsa2T77SH3Gdlbv6wuAaZxTWdePHVm6AClVGJUeTnMTtjv1dYMJhCqw-aqpQFb59b4ludm5Zi-nPTHKKPgSISLj4=&c=a6Qs5IRzfyXMo0xE7XIHNZz4aqUrLraLaLe6tza19V36Ya7GXBuSAw==&ch=9Abw5bAFaycARgPM2duTGvcrtPDaKRqphLHg-LWxSd8mcBoZnzqEyQ==> ), titled "Higher Commercial Launch Rates and Lower Cost to Orbit" based on, among other things, "re-usable vehicles." For the first time ever, SpaceX attempted to land a returning first stage on an ocean-going platform. The stage impacted the platform "hard" according to Elon Musk, SpaceX CEO. The ocean platform measures 300-ft by 170-ft, and achieving this level of precision on first stage return represents a significant milestone toward a reusable launcher. CRS-5 also utilized for the first time hydraulic grid fins to control the descent. Musk stated that the "grid fins worked extremely well … but ran out of hydraulic fluid right before landing." The next Falcon 9 flight will increase the amount of hydraulic fluid by 50%, raising the chance of a successful landing that will lead to ultimate re-use of the first stage and a significant drop in the cost of flying to space.

Nobody threw money at them  

<http://www.inquisitr.com/1745673/pulsar-observed-wobbling-out-of-space-time-and-vanishing-out-of-our-now/>

The headline is total hooey, and the science in the article is BS. The article in the ApJ — at least the abstract — indicates that all that is happening is that the relativitistic gravitational distortion is creating a gravitational lensing effect, and changing the direction of the pulsar "beams" as a result.

I quote, "The pulsar is fading fast due to geodetic precession, limiting future timing improvements."

http://iopscience.iop.org/0004-637X/798/2/118/article

Stephanie Osborn

Interstellar Woman of Mystery

http://www.Stephanie-Osborn.com <http://www.stephanie-osborn.com/>

 

It did sound a bit fuzzy to me, but it’s a bit out of my field.  So what did happen? Just change in direction  of a beam?  That happens all the time.

 

Google pushes to take Oracle Java copyright case to Supreme Court (ZD)

Summary:Can software code, and application programming interfaces in particular, be copyrighted? That is the question.

By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols <http://www.zdnet.com/meet-the-team/us/steven-j-vaughan-nichols/> for Linux and Open Source <http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/> | January 12, 2015 — 16:46 GMT (08:46 PST)

This is important, because how can there be a standard if copyright is used to make these things proprietary for seventy years?

 

 

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.