Tuesday, June 6, 2017
D–Day
The map is not the territory.
Alfred Korzybski
If a foreign government had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightfully consider it an act of war.
Glenn T. Seaborg, National Commission on Education, 1983
The Normandy Invasion was the most complex event in the history of mankind; the first landing on the Moon was the second.
THE MOST IMPORTANT WEATHER FORECAST OF ALL-TIME: D-DAY, JUNE 6, 1944
“Years later, during their ride to the Capitol for his inauguration, President-elect John F. Kennedy asked President Eisenhower why the Normandy invasion had been so successful. Ike’s answer: “Because we had better meteorologists than the Germans!”
Remembering D-Day
Seventy-three years ago, Americans, British, Canadians, Free French Forces, and their allies launched the most complex operation ever implemented by human beings: The invasion of Normandy.
See Newt Gingrich’s D Day presentation at http://mailchi.mp/gingrichproductions/remembering-d-day?e=2692b32928
When I left the Army in 1952, the theory of a liberal arts education (and really, of college education) was that some percentage – not all – of citizens would benefit from it, and thus there was public – taxpayer – support of them. There were also privately owned and run schools like Harvard, but they didn’t get general taxpayer money; presumably those who went to them were rewarded for having done so, but it wasn’t really a matter of public policy.
But the public policy idea was that a college education for those who would benefit from it – which was by no means all, or even a majority of the general population – was a good public investment. Tennessee’s policy was to admit the top 10%, more or less, to tuition free college education. That was the effect: the actual law specified that all those who graduated high school having successfully completed an “academic preparation program” were to be admitted to state colleges tuition free. Academic preparation specified four years of English, algebra, geometry, a foreign language, and some specified science; you didn’t have to take that, but if you hadn’t, the state higher education didn’t have to admit you, and could charge tuition.
Other states had similar programs. I was eligible for the “Korean Bill of Rights”, which essentially paid my tuition wherever I went, and ended up at the State University of Iowa (Iowa City) through a number of chance driven circumstances. Iowa at that time had a “core” program that included a year of Western Civilization under George Mosse and some other compulsory courses designed to make you an “educated person”.
That was in 1952. There was no “Federal aid to education” although the subject was debated. After sputnik, there was demand that the Federal Government aid the state schools, including the colleges, so that we would have an education system we could be proud of.
In 1983 Nobel Prize laureate Glenn T. Seaborg headed a national commission to evaluate our education system; it was mostly dedicated to the primary and secondary schools. The general consensus was that our higher education system was all right (that was explicitly said at a plenary session of the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science even as it deplored the primary and secondary schools). Dr. Seaborg’s conclusion was that the schools were awful; this in 1983. He blamed it on the system imposed by the Federal Government (aided by the Courts).
He said, “If a foreign government had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightfully consider itch an act of war.” It is generally agreed that the schools have not improved since that time; and that criticism now applies to much of the academic “higher education” system as well.
Exclusive Test Data: Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills
Results of a standardized measure of reasoning ability show many students fail to improve over four years—even at some flagship schools, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of nonpublic results
Students at Plymouth State University in New Hampshire showed extensive progress in critical thinking over four years, as measured by a test called the CLA+.
By
Douglas Belkin
June 5, 2017 2:17 p.m. ET
Freshmen and seniors at about 200 colleges across the U.S. take a little-known test every year to measure how much better they get at learning to think. The results are discouraging.
At more than half of schools, at least a third of seniors were unable to make a cohesive argument, assess the quality of evidence in a document or interpret data in a table, The Wall Street Journal found after reviewing the latest results from dozens of public colleges and universities that gave the exam between 2013 and 2016. (See full results.)
At some of the most prestigious flagship universities, test results indicate the average graduate shows little or no improvement in critical thinking over four years.
Some of the biggest gains occur at smaller colleges where students are less accomplished at arrival but soak up a rigorous, interdisciplinary curriculum.
For prospective students and their parents looking to pick a college, it is almost impossible to figure out which schools help students learn critical thinking, because full results of the standardized test, called the College Learning Assessment Plus, or CLA+, are seldom disclosed to the public. This is true, too, of similar tests.
[snip]
Exclusive Test Data: Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical Thinking Skills
Douglas Belkin
Freshmen and seniors at about 200 colleges across the U.S. take a little-known test every year to measure how much better they get at learning to think. The results are discouraging.
At more than half of schools, at least a third of seniors were unable to make a cohesive argument, assess the quality of evidence in a document or interpret data in a table, The Wall Street Journal found after reviewing the latest results from dozens of public colleges and universities that gave the exam between 2013 and 2016. (See full results.)
At some of the most prestigious flagship universities, test results indicate the average graduate shows little or no improvement in critical thinking over four years.
Some of the biggest gains occur at smaller colleges where students are less accomplished at arrival but soak up a rigorous, interdisciplinary curriculum.
For prospective students and their parents looking to pick a college, it is almost impossible to figure out which schools help students learn critical thinking, because full results of the standardized test, called the College Learning Assessment Plus, or CLA+, are seldom disclosed to the public. This is true, too, of similar tests.
Some academic experts, education researchers and employers say the Journal’s findings are a sign of the failure of America’s higher-education system to arm graduates with analytical reasoning and problem-solving skills needed to thrive in a fast-changing, increasingly global job market. In addition, rising tuition, student debt and loan defaults are putting colleges and universities under pressure to prove their value.
A survey by PayScale Inc., an online pay and benefits researcher, showed 50% of employers complain that college graduates they hire aren’t ready for the workplace. Their No. 1 complaint? Poor critical-reasoning skills.
“At most schools in this country, students basically spend four years in college, and they don’t necessarily become better thinkers and problem solvers,” said Josipa Roksa, a University of Virginia sociology professor who co-wrote a book in 2011 about the CLA+ test. “Employers are going to hire the best they can get, and if we don’t have that, then what is at stake in the long run is our ability to compete.”[snip]
YOUR GOVERNMENT AT WORK
Epic fail: Every student flunks state exam
http://www.wnd.com/2017/05/epic-fail-every-student-flunks-state-exam/
Zero proficiency in math, English in probe of 6 inner-city schools
Published: 19 hours ago
Art Moore About | Email | Archive
Art Moore, co-author of the best-selling book “See Something, Say Nothing,” entered the media world as a PR assistant for the Seattle Mariners and a correspondent covering pro and college sports for Associated Press Radio. He reported for a Chicago-area daily newspaper and was senior news writer for Christianity Today magazine and an editor for Worldwide Newsroom before joining WND shortly after
In an astonishing outcome, an investigation of six Baltimore schools found not a single student passed the state’s proficiency test in the subjects of math and English.
Five high schools and one middle school were surveyed in a probe by Baltimore’s Fox TV affiliate, which spotlighted one school in which 89 percent of the students had the lowest score on a scale of 5.
Scores of 4 or 5 indicate proficiency with the subject, but at Frederick Douglass High School, only one student got as high as a 3 on his state exam.
WBFF-TV profiled one student at the high school who was among the 50 percent of his class that graduated. At the age of 3 months, Navon Warren’s father was shot to death, and before his 18th birthday, two uncles and a classmate were gunned down on the streets of his city.
Of course we are all aware of the exponentially rising costs of “higher education” and the decreasing economic value of a college degree. The answer of the experts is always the same: give us more money. Next time for sure.
The last time the US had schools admired worldwide, control of the schools was left to the consumers – parents of the students – and to those paying for the schools – the local taxpayers. This of course assured some awful schools: Although one wonders how bad they were compared to today’s average. The remedy for the awful schools was to centralize control of all schools in the experts of the Department of Education. That produced today’s situation which is indistinguishable from an act of war against the American people. The remedies proposed mostly assume that the experts will continue to run things: look at the arguments against the current Secretary of Education.
Sunspots and Weather – The Proposed Connection
I had always been puzzled about how sunspots could affect weather here on Earth. Turns out that the mechanism is extra-solar cosmic rays. When the Sun is active and the Sunspot numbers high, the solar wind is higher and extends beyond the Earth’s orbit. Cosmic rays are substantially deflected by the solar wind, and effectively sweep away cosmic rays. When the Sun becomes more quiescent, the Solar Wind fades somewhat, and no longer deflects as many cosmic rays. The cosmic rays that do reach the Earth break up molecules in the atmosphere, and some of these stray atoms (or shattered molecules) are somewhat more effective in forming condensation nuclei high in the atmosphere. Put simply, cosmic rays cause clouds. Clouds in the stratosphere increase the Earth’s albedo, and somewhat less sunlight reaches the Earth’s surface.
And we get a little colder. The effect isn’t large – but it doesn’t have to be. Russian scientists claim to have discovered the complex periodicity of patterns of waves within the Sun, and they predict that in the next 30 years, there will be a “grand minimum” of solar activity, perhaps to the level of a Dalton Minimum, and perhaps even another Maunder minimum. To paraphrase Professor Egon from Ghostbusters; “It would be bad.” The sunspot cycle goes in an (approximately) 11 year cycle, but recent cycles have been less intense, and have tended to take longer than the 11 years that we’re familiar with. This present solar cycle may be of 13 years, and the peak of the last solar maximum was below most of the cycles, since the early 1800s.
Proof? No, but it’s a whole lot more circumstantial evidence that SOMETHING weird is happening in the Sun. Note the high-altitude balloon flights (done by spaceweather.com) that are revealing that cosmic ray counts have been increasing as we’ve been heading into a solar minimum.
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Ken Mitchell Citrus Heights, CA
“‘There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. When there aren’t enough criminals, one MAKES them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. … Create a nation of law-breakers, and then you cash in on the guilt.'”
Ayn Rand “Atlas Shrugged”
Translate “weird” to mean “something we don’t quite understand and have problems modeling.”
Re: Basic Income
The various statements I have seen about the undesirability of a basic income (yes, Dr. Pournelle, including yours) all miss a basic point. We are about half way, I would guesstimate, to a situation unprecedented in human history; the situation in which the labour of a large fraction of humanity is worthless. The era in which unskilled labour could make a go of it is drawing to a close. For example, if construction was carried out in a rational manner out of somewhat later than the late 19th century, unskilled construction labour would be out of a job; and the “burger-flipping” jobs are about to be destroyed by robots that are cheaper to keep, more reliable and don’t spit (or worse!) on the food.
So what are the millions of people without a useful purpose in a high-tech society supposed to do?Ian
I have often pointed out that within less than a decade, over half the jobs in the US can be done by a robot costing no more than 10 times the annual pay (less benefits) of the person doing it. This makes over half the people in the US “useless” in the conventional sense. Most concede the fact, but don’t want to discuss it. Of course there are a number of service jobs that a human can do that would be difficult to program a robot to do.
But when the Republic does not need half its citizens, it is a matter of some concern. I have my ideas about possible measures we can take, but I have no certainty other than that it will happen.
I can’t tell from this whether anything significant happened or not. It’s slow reading:
Top-Secret NSA Report Details Russian Hacking Effort Days Before 2016 Election
Matthew Cole, Richard Esposito, Sam Biddle, Ryan Grim
June 5 2017, 12:44 p.m.
Russian military intelligence executed a cyberattack on at least one U.S. voting software supplier and sent spear-phishing emails to more than 100 local election officials just days before last November’s presidential election, according to a highly classified intelligence report obtained by The Intercept.
The top-secret National Security Agency document, which was provided anonymously to The Intercept and independently authenticated, analyzes intelligence very recently acquired by the agency about a months-long Russian intelligence cyber effort against elements of the U.S. election and voting infrastructure. The report, dated May 5, 2017, is the most detailed U.S. government account of Russian interference in the election that has yet come to light.
While the document provides a rare window into the NSA’s understanding of the mechanics of Russian hacking, it does not show the underlying “raw” intelligence on which the analysis is based. A U.S. intelligence officer who declined to be identified cautioned against drawing too big a conclusion from the document because a single analysis is not necessarily definitive. [snip]
This is probably more interesting to me than it will be to you. My cousin the late Dr. George Pournelle used to be Associate Director and Curator of Mammals at the San Diego Zoo. He was well known for finding ways to let the animals determine their environment, rather than impose his own ideas. As an example, no one knew the right temperature for one exotic species. George simply provided a range of floor temperatures. “The animal knows what’s best for him…”
Rule No. 1 When Making Baby Rhinos: Try Not to Get Squashed
https://www.wsj.com/articles/rule-no-1-when-making-baby-rhinos-try-not-to-get-squashed-1496675147
Zookeepers aim to save an endangered species of the horned beasts by planting embryos in surrogate mothers; ‘she’s getting a little prickly back here’
Researchers at the San Diego Zoo hope to save the endangered northern white rhinoceros by implanting their embryos in more-plentiful southern whites. It’s not an easy task. Photo/Video: Jake Nicol/The Wall Street Journal
By
Jim Carlton
June 5, 2017 11:05 a.m. ET
ESCONDIDO, Calif.—Amani has deep-set eyes and shiny skin. Her name is Swahili for “peace,” and she has a youthful vigor that makes her an ideal candidate for motherhood.
She also weighs 4,400 pounds, has a dagger-shaped horn and sports a tail that lashes like a whip. She can charge at 30 miles an hour.
Helene
It’s Barbara Durrant’s job to get the rhinoceros pregnant.
How do you turn a two-ton rhino into a mom? Start with a treat of her favorite grass, perhaps a little cooing and maybe a tummy scratch.
Dr. Durrant, reproductive-sciences director at San Diego Zoo Global, which runs San Diego Zoo and the safari park here, is in a race to prevent extinction of the northern white rhinoceros. For help, she’s turning to Amani and five other southern white rhinoceroses to serve as surrogate mothers.
The last three known northern whites, in Kenya, can’t breed because of age and other factors. That leaves vials of frozen sperm and eggs collected from other northern whites before they died. “It kind of gives me chills,” Dr. Durrant said, holding a vial of rhino sperm, “to even hold this vial in my hand.”
The zoo wants to create northern white rhino embryos and plant them in wombs of southern whites, which are more numerous.
The first trick is getting a creature weighing as much as a Ford F-150 pickup to step into a holding chute.
A trainer assisting Dr. Durrant lured one of the rhinos on a recent day with an irresistible bouquet of goodies including orchardgrass, a tall-growing plant sometimes used in pastures for farm animals and a rhino favorite.
Barbara Durrant, right, helps perform an ultrasound on Amani. Photo: Jake Nicol/The Wall Street Journal
Dr. Durrant reached through a metal barrier, and recoiled. “Ouch! She pinched me a little,” she said, after her arm got caught between the rhino and the bar of the enclosure.
These rhinos here don’t mean ill, their handlers say, but they can injure someone accidentally if they make sudden movements. Trainers practice “protected contact,” staying behind steel gates and reaching in to do their work.
That work sometimes is simply warming up Amani and the five other females—Helene, Livia, Nikita, Victoria and Wallis—that arrived at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park two years ago from private reserves in South Africa.
The rhinos’ handlers pamper them with a temperature-controlled barn, an outdoor “maternity yard” and 3.5 acres of hills and lagoons. The animals spend their free time browsing, rolling in mud, playing with balls and generally just standing around.
Trainers offer them treats—bananas, celery, cucumbers—and give them caresses to put them in the mood. “Sometimes our training session is ‘Go pet rhinos,’ ” said zookeeper Jill Van Kempen.
Rhinos tend to bond with individual trainers. “We think they know who we are,” said Ms. Van Kempen.
Zookeeper Jill Van Kempen and Wallis. Photo: Jake Nicol/The Wall Street Journal
Rhinos are endangered because poachers hunt them for their horns, prized in Asia for supposed medicinal qualities biologists say don’t exist. Rhino horn contains keratin, the protein in fingernails.
The northern white is one of 1,000 species whose cell material the safari park preserves at about minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit in a locked room called the Frozen Zoo.
Along with the rhino genetics are vials from animals such as the California condor, black-footed ferret, Przewalski horse, Somali wild ass and po’ouli, a bird that went extinct in Hawaii about a decade ago.
Dr. Durrant, who oversees the zoo’s artificial-insemination program, over her career has helped impregnate everything from turtles and pheasants to giant pandas at home and abroad.
This will be her first rhino attempt. The zoo hopes to start inseminations this year with southern rhino sperm to test out procedures, Dr. Durrant said. After that, it plans to try in vitro fertilization of northern whites, transferring embryos into the rhinos’ wombs.
On the recent day, Helene ambled into a holding pen for an ultrasound test to check whether she was ready to be a surrogate rhino. Trainer Marco Zeno piled orchardgrass on the ground and cooed “good girl.” Two researchers patted her through the barrier as they approached her reproductive end.
Rhinos are misunderstood, their handlers say. While they sometimes do charge at vehicles in the wild, they do so only when they feel threatened, said Lee Kirchhevel, who leads caravan tours of rhino habitats at the safari park.
Helene grunted contentedly as assistant Parker Pennington nonchalantly reached up to her armpit into the rhino’s rectum, holding an ultrasound probe to examine the animal’s ovaries to gauge the growth of follicles containing eggs.
A vial of northern white rhino sperm. Photo: Jake Nicol/The Wall Street Journal
The manual-insertion procedure, Dr. Durrant said, “puts our arms to sleep sometimes.”
Getting the rhino to this point took months. Handlers first prodded her with a ballpoint pen as she ate, to get her used to the handling and poking from behind.
The 20-minute procedure went smoothly, as Helene remained focused on the orchardgrass. “If they stop eating, you know something is wrong,” said Dr. Pennington, a postdoctoral associate in reproductive sciences. “Fight or flight could start to kick in, and you don’t want either.”
The rhinos have different personalities. “Livia is the one more sensitive; Victoria is cautious around strangers,” Dr. Durrant said.
Next up was Amani, the largest. She devoured the treats but started shifting in the chute and wagging her tail—prompting a call for help from Dr. Pennington, who was arm-deep in the rhino.
Tail-wagging can suggest restlessness, indicating the animal may want to move, shift weight or go do something else with its mass that would be wise for a human to avoid.
“She’s getting a little prickly back here. Get her tail,” Dr. Pennington said, as Dr. Durrant reached to hold the potentially hazardous appendage to one side.
Zookeeper Weston Popichak hurried to the rhino’s side, patting and scratching her stomach through the barrier. That seemed to calm her down.
“These are big animals,” he said, “and they may not realize how big they are.”
It’s nice work if you can get it…
Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.
