It’s getting Warmer, isn’t it? Rambling on education.

View 805 Sunday, January 05, 2014

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

Christians to Beirut. Alawites to the grave.

Syrian Freedom Fighters

What we have now is all we will ever have.

Conservationist motto

If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan. Period.

Barrack Obama, famously.

Cogito ergo sum.

Descartes

Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum. Cogito,

Ambrose Bierce

Ramble on Education: Silicon is cheaper than iron. And cheaper than muscle, too.

Climate Scientists Icebound

It’s Sunday afternoon and I just got up. Yesterday I had intended to get some work done, and didn’t; just not enough energy. Last night I went to bed with a mild sore throat and headache and by morning I had the works. Stuffy head, headache, sore throat, ache all over, so I only got out of bed a few minutes ago.

Ramble on education.

Everyone is doing year end analyses, and I should as well, but I’m just not up to it. I have identified two big issues, the Global Warming mess, and the coming dissolution of American Education from pre-school through university, but those are not easy to write on when your head is full of cotton wool We do have some indications of change in the right direction. More and more students, graduating with a lifelong debt, have discovered that they got neither education nor training in useful skills for their money, while the accrediting agencies continue to support the obvious grade inflation.

At the same time, technology advances make skilled workers more productive than they used to be, meaning that we need fewer of them. The great industrial advances following World War II that made a majority of blue collar workers middle class citizens are no more: there’s no need for a huge population of factory workers. For a long while automation created jobs; it’s not so clear that this is automatic now. The result is that there’s less for the average citizen to do in the traditional economy. And as the robots get better at their jobs, some companies are finding it much cheaper to buy robots and do the work here rather than send stuff overseas for cheap labor; another trend that will continue. And our education system continues to raise prices, demand a larger share of income, and shows no sign of comprehension as to what is going on.

Moore’s Law may be slowing down, but there are a couple of iterations to go; and I remind you that doubling of the current state, not just another iteration of the doubling of the previous state. Think on it. The next doubling of computer power for the price will add as much new productivity as did all the doublings by Moore’s Law from the first Altair to last year’s desktops. Now, I know this is a first approximation and some of the effects can be discounted – but only some. And we have at least two more iterations of Moore’s Law to go. Actually, one suspects, we have many more than two coming.

Back in the very early days of computing, when I was working with old Zeke, my friend who happened to be a Z-80 computer running CP/M and CBASIC with 8” floppy disk drives, I came up with one of Pournelle’s Laws: Silicon is cheaper than iron. Therefore the days of the spinning metal disks were numbered.  In those times hard drives were huge and a 30 megabyte drive consisted of platters larger than soup plate, and the only hard drive available to people like me were a Honeywell Bull 5 megabyte which came with a case and power supply the size of a two drawer file cabinet; lights dimmed in the house when you turned it on. It seemed an easy prediction to make. But even as I said it, CPU flops became cheaper. Data separation on both hard drives and floppies started an exponential dive. Precision control of milling machines got better exponentially. We went inexorably from 5” Winchester drives with 5 megabytes to 25 megabytes, 100 megabytes, a gigabyte. Now a terabyte external drive is under $100.

At the same time silicon drives got cheaper and cheaper. They still cost more per gigabyte than spinning metal, but that gap is closing, and few new computers are built without at least one silicon “hard drive.” It too dates from about 1983 when I said silicon is cheaper than iron, but remember that Moore’s Law is both inexorable and exponential.

And my head is full of cotton wool so you’re free to speculate on the effects of this, but one is clear: the new technology makes traditional college and university education as obsolete as were the 8” floppy disks that sparked my observation. You can store and distribute the best classroom lectures in all the world, and do that cheaply. Since most of the expensive universities now use graduate students – often graduate students who don’t speak English very well – as teaching assistants to sort of conduct class discussions and actually deal with the students, the solution to that kind of college class is easy to see. We don’t need the highly paid tenured faculty at all for undergraduate education. Colleges can go back to being affordable for people like my wife and I – affordable and useful as well. It takes some thought but the clues are here. Of course we will go through another generation of illiterates running the Republic before anything can be done, but the mechanism for saving our own children to be survivors during the coming generation of chaos already exists.

And as it happens, I got this mail today.

SUBJECT: Qualification inflation

Hi Jerry.

Some more evidence pointing towards qualification inflation, as discussed many times before in Chaos Manor:

http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/01/03/critics-complain-of-qualification-inflation-as-more-canadians-hold-university-degrees-and-low-paying-jobs/

Cheers,

Mike Casey

Global Warming Questioned?

An Antarctic expedition intended to demonstrate global warming in the Antarctic became icebound in mid summer, and has caused other ice breakers to require rescue. At last count 22 crew members will remain trapped in the ice and wait for conditions to improve. The climate models had predicted open water in summer, but that didn’t work. Predicting just when the ice conditions will get better is a bit difficult since Winterset here is High Summer down there.

Of course the great faith in the consensus on global warming – oops, climate change – has not changed. It is too warming! And all that ice in the Eastern US, and all that ice trapping the scientists, is weather, not climate, and we know we don’t know how to predict the weather. And we can explain what looks like anomalies in our predictions. Let us make a few adjustments in our billion dollar models, and all well be well.

I continue to hold about the same opinions as Freeman Dyson: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CM9YR6PZKo

For a somewhat whimsical presentation see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00Y9EZDdpUw

And for a pretty good lecture on the data, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yze1YAz_LYM

I tend to prefer papers to presentations, but this is what I could come up with for the moment.

I make no doubt there are plenty of explanations as to why the models didn’t show why three icebreakers couldn’t get through in mid summer. They just haven’t come out yet.

And I’d better get back to bed.

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