Chaos Manor View, Thursday, March 05, 2015

While Steve Barnes was over for a story conference, we do talk about other things. One of them was his 11 year old son’s fascination with the California Sixth Grade Reader http://www.amazon.com/California-Sixth-Grade-Reader-Pournelle-ebook/dp/B00LZ7PB7E/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1425595105&sr=8-1&keywords=california+sixth+grade+reader available on Kindle.

His son very much liked the story of Jason and the Argonauts, but he is even more fascinated with the Macaulay poem Horatius at the Bridge. That’s no real surprise: just as girls are intrigued with the story of the romance in The Courtship of Miles Standish. Horatius has action, great lines, verses you can learn. Prior to this he was sort of reading at level in his school, meaning he had controlled vocabulary readers, and although he knew how to sound words out, he seldom had to do it because he seldom encountered new word and did care to read them if he did because the text wasn’t interesting. Horatius, on the other hand, is full of unfamiliar words, and he very much wants to know them because the poem is exciting. Not that this is anything that professors of education didn’t know in 1914, but they don’t know it now.

I was pleased to hear it because that is one of the reasons for getting the reader published. And I wasn’t surprised that he shows no similar interest in The Courtship of Miles Standish. Most boys don’t.

The physical therapist was here with her ingenious tortures. Of course I feel better afterwards, but it makes for an interesting hour.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2014/10/27/359302540/ive-got-the-ingredients-what-should-i-cook-ask-ibms-watson

I’ve Got The Ingredients. What Should I Cook? Ask IBM’s Watson (NPR)

OCTOBER 27, 2014 5:40 PM ET

LAURA SYDELL

IBM’s Watson computer has amused and surprised humans by winning at Jeopardy! Now, one of the world’s smartest machines is taking on chefs.

Well, not exactly. Watson is being used by chefs to come up with new and exciting recipes in a feat that could turn out to be useful for people with dietary restrictions and for managing food shortages.

If you give Watson a few ingredients and cuisine specifications, it can help you with recipe ideas. I had a few things in the kitchen, but I didn’t know what to make with them — ground turkey, frozen peas, dried mushrooms, canned tomatoes. I live in San Francisco, so it’s easy to get Asian and Mexican spices.

I sent an email to Watson and a couple of days later, the recipes arrived in my inbox. Watson sent three recipes for ground turkey and another for Mexican green pea pancakes. I picked one of the taco recipes and decided to make the pancakes.

The ingredients Watson chose were surprising. For example, the tacos called for grated citrus peel.

Though Watson can’t taste the recipes it churns out, it has an understanding of the chemistry behind taste. It understands what we humans enjoy and why, says Steven Abrams, an engineer with The Watson Group.

There is considerably more, but you get the idea.

The late L. Sprague de Camp was one of the funniest men ever to write science fiction, but he had no sense of humor; or at least as odd a sense of humor as anyone you will ever meet. He said he studied humor and jokes, and wrote what intellectually he thought would be funny. He did so successfully, as anyone who ever read The Incompleat Enchanter and his other fantasies knows full well. The point being that much of what is peculiarly human is intellectually understandable and describable; in theory a robot could do what Sprague did. Of course many of Sprague’s friends thought this was actually one of his jokes..

http://sploid.gizmodo.com/mind-control-breakthrough-quadriplegic-woman-flies-f-3-1689274525

Arati Prabhakar—director of the Pentagon’s advanced research arm DARPA—has revealed a breakthrough achievement in machine mind control. Jan Scheuermann, a 55-year-old quadriplegic woman with electrodes in her brain, has been able to fly an F-35 fighter jet using “nothing but her thoughts.”

= = =

Scheuermann—who is quadriplegic because of an hereditary genetic disease—was recruited by DARPA for its robotics programs. Scientists and doctors implanted electrodes in the left motor cortex of her brain in 2012 to allow her to control a robotic arm, which she did successfully. But she’s not using the robotic arms to control the joystick in the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II simulator used for the tests. She is controlling the plane with “nothing but her thoughts,” according to Prabhakar, pure neural signaling:

Instead of thinking about controlling a joystick, which is what our ace pilots do when they’re driving this thing, Jan’s thinking about controlling the airplane directly. For someone who’s never flown—she’s not a pilot in real life—she’s flying that simulator directly from her neural signaling.

The implications of this for robotics are obvious.

Coldest year on record

Hello Jerry,

I second your opinion that warm is preferable to cold.  Makes for a larger supply and better selection of food, too.

Re:  “It’s cold outside, even after the warmest year in history.”

The headlines worldwide and the lead story on EVERY news broadcast, as well as being the focus of the SOU message, was some iteration of ‘2014 was the warmest year since records began in 1880.’.  Of course it was all because of anthropogenic CO2 (ACO2) AND spelled doom if ACO2 were not drastically reduced or eliminated by the taxing and regulating of every human activity that produced a government-identified and quantified ‘carbon signature.

What wasn’t prominently featured in the stories is that the record was set by 0.02 degrees.

NONE of the stories expressed the slightest curiosity as to whether we have had a world wide data collection system in place since 1880 that allows the ‘annual temperatures of the earth’ to be placed in rank order by year OR whether the overall precision of the network over the 135 years was adequate to justify a ‘record’ anomaly of 0.02 degrees as statistically significant.

Of particular interest to me is that NO prominent climate scientist or group focusing on ‘climate change’ expressed ANY doubt as to the validity of the record OR its significance as a harbinger of ACO2 driven doom.

Bob Ludwick

To emphasize: the previous heat records were set in the 1930’s, and the “record” only starts in 1880 or so. We know that in 1880 most of the data were not accurate to a tenth of a degree, certainly not to a hundredth. Moreover, in the 30’s I cannot believe that data from the USSR, China, Chinese Turkestan, Russian Turkestan, much of Viet Nam, much of Indonesia, much of Africa were reliable at all and at times were not even available. The same would be true of parts – large parts – of South America. They had other worries to occupy their attention. China was largely under warlords, or Japanese occupation. I could continue but surely the point is made? We simply do not know the average temperature of the Earth to a tenth of a degree, now or in the 1930’s; the models assume warming, but actual data shows no warming for a decade.

Clinton’s E-Mail System Built For Privacy Though Not Security – Bloomberg Business

(Bloomberg) — A week before becoming Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton set up a private e-mail system that gave her a high level of control over communications, including the ability to erase messages completely, according to security experts who have examined Internet records.

“You erase it and everything’s gone,” Matt Devost, a security expert who has had his own private e-mail for years. Commercial services like those from Google Inc. and Yahoo! Inc. retain copies even after users erase them from their in-box.

Although Clinton worked hard to secure the private system, her consultants appear to have set it up with a misconfigured encryption system, something that left it vulnerable to hacking, said Alex McGeorge, head of threat intelligence at Immunity Inc., a Miami Beach-based digital security firm.

The e-mail flap has political significance because Clinton is preparing to announce a bid for the Democratic nomination for president as soon as April. It also reminds voters of allegations of secrecy that surrounded Bill Clinton’s White House. In those years, First Lady Hillary Clinton fought efforts by some White House advisers to turn over information to Whitewater investigators and, later, sought to keep secret records of her task force on health-care reform.

Representative Trey Gowdy, a South Carolina Republican who leads a special committee looking into the events surrounding the 2012 terrorist attack at a U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya, said he will subpoena Clinton’s e-mails.

“We’re going to use every bit of legal recourse at our disposal,” Gowdy said Wednesday during an interview on CNN.

Private Service

The committee also said Wednesday that it has discovered two e-mail addresses used by Clinton while secretary of state.

Nick Merrill, a Clinton spokesman, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, though he said in a statement Tuesday that her practices followed “both the letter and spirit of the rules.”

Setting up a private e-mail service was once onerous and rare. Now, it’s relatively easy, said Devost, president of FusionX LLC, based in Arlington, Virginia.

I have mixed emotions here. I would rather have a private mailbox were I Secretary of State. But there are matters of security and public responsibility. But an official mailbox gets lots of Spam..

Our abysmal schools

I would like to remind you that:
In India, with like 1.35 BILLION people, about half of them are illiterate.
I don’t mean can’t read at the eighth grade illiterate. I mean ILLITERATE.
If half of India’s population is illiterate, then how is our educational system failing? Well?
And yet, because there are so many desperate poor people in India, you can still get brilliant people to work for you for two dollars an hour.
This is not because the American educational system is somehow failing. This is because India is an overpopulated cesspit of misery almost beyond our understanding.
If an American of average ability, with an IQ of 100, gets a market wage of $12 an hour, and an Indian national, with an IQ of 140, gets a market wage of $2 an hour, this is not because Americans are stupid. It’s because Indians breed like crazy so that even the smartest of them have to settle for sub-poverty wages.
Supply and demand, people. Supply and demand.
Stop blaming Americans. Americans in WWII beat the cr*p out of the Japanese even though their real wages were five times greater. Poverty is not virtue, even though getting a smart person to work for you for pennies an hour might make it seem so..

TG

Thank you, but I am well aware that some countries have a lower literacy rate than ours, and I do not share your inferences from that. Indeed, I do not share the modern view of literacy, at least of English; one can read or one cannot read, and learning to read took place in the first and second grades when I was in school – indeed both those grades were in the same room. Alas there were a few children in 3^rd and 4^th grades who could not read – were illiterate – and that greatly concerned the teachers. But for the most part, if you had four years of schooling, you were literate. The Army found that of illiterate recruits, more than 90% had never attended school to the fourth grade. Of course this was conscripts, who were all men, but there is no reason to suppose girls less able to learn English.

The California 6^th grade Reader, http://www.amazon.com/California-Sixth-Grade-Reader-Pournelle-ebook/dp/B00LZ7PB7E/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1425595105&sr=8-1&keywords=california+sixth+grade+reader was the required reader in California public schools in 1914. Look at it on line and tell me that California schools are still that good. Your WW II examples draw conclusions about those who had that reader or a similar one in 6^th grade.

I do not “blame” Americans, I observe what has happened to our schools. Even our teachers try to send their children to private schools, and who can blame them? There are good schools in America, but alas fewer and fewer are public tax supported schools, even though public school costs have far more than doubled as our literacy declined.

Supply and demand only works in a market economy. Since Federal aid to education the public schools are part of a command economy. That can produce good schools, and has in many places; but ours has not. I would welcome some injection of supply and demand into our school system, but it is unlikely.

For those who cannot afford private schools, teach your children to read before the education system gets hold of them. English pupils were expected to learn to read at age four or five until recently; your protoplasm is as good as theirs. Start with phonic works like Hop On Pop. Keep exposing them to challenges, and when they are old enough – which is well before the teachers say they are – give them access to tablets and The Kahn Academy on line. I would recommend Mrs. Pournelle’s Reading Program, but she has given up publishing it.

Or you can accept our current situation. I did not make up the data in Tuesday’s View. The source was http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/03/02/u-s-millennials-post-abysmal-scores-in-tech-skills-test-lag-behind-foreign-peers/?hpid=z4 and the Washington Post is not a right wing paper.

Melancholy Elephants by Spider Robinson

Spider has published this online, so the link is as legitimate as it gets.

Having just watched a web report about a law suit over the song “Blurred Lines,” the item is also timely.

http://www.spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants.html

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

Chaos Manor View, Wednesday, March 04, 2015

Larry Niven and Steve Barnes were over this morning for a story conference, and then we went to lunch. Very productive morning. That used most of the day.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/richard-s-lindzen-the-political-assault-on-climate-skeptics-1425513033

The Political Assault on Climate Skeptics

Members of Congress send inquisitorial letters to universities, energy companies, even think tanks.

By

Richard S. Lindzen

March 4, 2015 6:50 p.m. ET

23 COMMENTS

Research in recent years has encouraged those of us who question the popular alarm over allegedly man-made global warming. Actually, the move from “global warming” to “climate change” indicated the silliness of this issue. The climate has been changing since the Earth was formed. This normal course is now taken to be evidence of doom.

Individuals and organizations highly vested in disaster scenarios have relentlessly attacked scientists and others who do not share their beliefs. The attacks have taken a threatening turn.

As to the science itself, it’s worth noting that all predictions of warming since the onset of the last warming episode of 1978-98—which is the only period that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) attempts to attribute to carbon-dioxide emissions—have greatly exceeded what has been observed. These observations support a much reduced and essentially harmless climate response to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide.

In addition, there is experimental support for the increased importance of variations in solar radiation on climate and a renewed awareness of the importance of natural unforced climate variability that is largely absent in current climate models. There also is observational evidence from several independent studies that the so-called “water vapor feedback,” essential to amplifying the relatively weak impact of carbon dioxide alone on Earth temperatures, is canceled by cloud processes.

There are also claims that extreme weather—hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, floods, you name it—may be due to global warming. The data show no increase in the number or intensity of such events. The IPCC itself acknowledges the lack of any evident relation between extreme weather and climate, though allowing that with sufficient effort some relation might be uncovered.

There is considerably more, but you get the idea. The politics are ugly; the science is at best ambiguous.

So much for global warming…

http://www.dcclothesline.com/2014/11/18/nasa-admits-winters-going-get-coldermuch-colder/

“Climatologist John Casey, a former space shuttle engineer and NASA consultant, thinks that last year’s winter, described by USA Today as “one of the snowiest, coldest, most miserable on record” is going to be a regular occurrence over the coming decades.

“Casey asserts that there is mounting evidence that the Earth is getting cooler due to a decline in solar activity. He warns in his latest book, Dark Winter that a major alteration of global climate has already started and that at a minimum it is likely to last 30 years.”

Charles Brumbelow

NASA Admits That Winters are Going to Get Colder…Much Colder

http://www.dcclothesline.com/2014/11/18/nasa-admits-winters-going-get-coldermuch-colder/

The Maunder Minimum (also known as the prolonged sunspot minimum) is the name used for the period roughly spanning 1645 to 1715 when sunspots became exceedingly rare, as noted by solar observers of the time.

Like the Dalton Minimum and Spörer Minimum, the Maunder Minimum coincided with a period of lower-than-average global temperatures.

During one 30-year period within the Maunder Minimum, astronomers observed only about 50 sunspots, as opposed to a more typical 40,000-50,000 spots. (Source)

Climatologist John Casey, a former space shuttle engineer and NASA consultant, thinks that last year’s winter, described by USA Today as “one of the snowiest, coldest, most miserable on record” is going to be a regular occurrence over the coming decades.

Casey asserts that there is mounting evidence that the Earth is getting cooler due to a decline in solar activity. He warns in his latest book, Dark Winter that a major alteration of global climate has already started and that at a minimum it is likely to last 30 years.

Casey predicts food shortages and civil unrest caused by those shortages due largely to governments not preparing for the issues that colder weather will bring. he also predicts that wickedly bitter winter temperatures will see demand for electricity and heating outstrip the supply.

The United States is preparing only for Climate Change brought on by CO2. That change was thought to be warmer, not colder; but eliminating CO2 increases will reduce Climate Change and and thus we will be all right. Of course the theories predict warmer. And that hasn’t happened for some time, but theories apparently trump evidence.

And with the Congressional activities there won’t be any evidence. No one will conduct the experiments. It would all be a joke were it not so dangerous. Cold is a terrible thing. Prepare for high energy prices.

It’s cold outside, even after the warmest year in history.

Office 365

I am confused about your problems with Office 365 when it’s not connected to the internet. I use Office 365 on a Dell Venue 11 i5 tablet, which uses Windows 8.1 as the operating system. It’s Dell’s version of a Microsoft Surface Pro. (I’m not brave enough to use my school/personal computer to test Windows 10 yet. Perhaps this summer, except I’ve already scheduled learning R as opposed to SPSS which they teach in class.) I got the tablet right before starting in a Ph.D. program at the University of Central Florida, so I’ve had it for about seven months.
The Office 365 subscription I have is the University one, which as far as I can tell is a free for UCF students version of Office 365 Personal. Office 365 Personal ($6.99/month) allows you to download and install full versions of Microsoft Office locally. Except at installation, those local versions have never asked me to authenticate them on the internet. OneDrive (where I save my stuff) keeps a local cache as well as saving everything on the cloud.
The system works whether I’m on the internet or in a black hole of connectivity. Files are available whether I’m on the internet or in a black hole of connectivity. If I’m unconnected, my files are synchronized once I get connected.
Are you using the free version of Office 365, which only works online and uses your web browser to access limited functionality online apps? Perhaps that’s the problem. If not, then I’m not sure what’s happening.
BTW, I’ve been using OneNote for years and love it, although I haven’t been using handwriting on the tablet. For some reason, I just write too big on the screen, and my handwriting is no more legible large than it is small.
I’ve also just installed Dragon. I’m going to try to use it to write the first draft of my next paper. I’ll see if I need to get a microphone, or if the tablet’s microphone is adequate.
Hope your sprains heal soon.

Fredrik Coulter

Office 365 Followup

I wrote earlier about my lack of difficulties with Office 365 regarding online authentication. Last I checked, you cannot install Office 365 without online access; they don’t sell it on disk. As such, the best thing to do is immediately authenticate the software as soon as it’s downloaded and installed. You know you’ve got internet at that time; otherwise it wouldn’t have been installed in the first place.

Fredrik Coulter

I bought Office 365 and paid with Pay pal.

As you say, I must have had Internet access to install Office 365, since I cannot had had a disk; and of course I did. Moreover I used Outlook and Word when I was in hospital in December – I still need a way to import the two days worth of Outlook over to my main machine. But when I tried without Internet access, I was informed that I could not authenticate my Outlook, and when I tried to open Word 365 I got the same message. Later after I got Internet access again, they opened although there was a lot of clicking to be done. If you do not open Office 365 with Internet access this seems to happen. But see below. As to how you authenticate it on installation I must have done since I could use it. That doesn’t seem to have saved me.

I have always been a OneNote fan. I am delayed in installing Dragon. Thanks for the kind words.

And perhaps Eric has found the source of the problem:

    According to Microsoft, Office 365 only needs to authenticate once every 30 days. I suspect you had gone a long time without using any of the Office apps on the Surface while also on a working connection. It’s also possible that the Windows 10 install reset the counter. What isn’t clear is whether Office tries to authenticate more frequently than the 30 days, moving forward the period when prolonged loss of connectivity would become a problem.

Eric Pobirs

I certainty made no attempt to access Office 365 on the Surface Pro in February. I vaguely recall using it in January on Swan – Office 365 lets you have several legal copies.

SanDisk Squeezes 200GB Into a Tiny microSD Card

Stop for a second and take a look at the fingernail on your baby finger. That’s roughly the size of a microSD card that can now hold a whopping 200GB of data thanks to SanDisk. Remember when USB flash drives with a full gigabyte of storage were mind-blowing? We were so foolish back then.

Available sometime in the second quarter of 2015, the new microSDXC card uses the same technology that SanDisk developed for the 128GB microSDXC card it introduced last year, but with an improved design allowing the company to increase storage capacity by 56 percent. The new card also boasts transfer speeds of up to 90MB/sec, but once available its $400 price tag might be a little hard to swallow—even if the card itself isn’t.

Too bad there’s no slot for it in the new Galaxy S6. [SanDisk]

That 200 GB microSD card

    I strongly suspect that come November, if one went to SanDisk with the intent of buying that 200 GB microSD card, they would react with surprise. Such an oddball capacity suggests it exists solely as a demo of their manufacturing prowess, pushing against the physical volume constraints of shipping flash memory, rather than a product with a viable market. Consider, 128 GB microSD cards can now be frequently found for around $80. Which means you could have five of those, with a cumulative capacity of 640 GB for the cost of just one 200 GB unit.

    You’d have to have a very specific and valuable usage scenario to justify the purchase. Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if this item is never made available to retail. Samsung recently announced their latest advance in the reduction of flash cell size, followed by the announcement of the parts they sell for main storage in cell phones and tablets doubling in capacity, bring entry level from 16 GB to 32 GB and the upper limit on a single chip setup to 128 GB. Once this class of flash memory is available to SanDisk they should have little difficulty producing 256 GB microSD cards for a far lower MSRP meant to actually sell product, rather than as a stunt.

Eric Pobirs

I hadn’t thought about it. Very likely.

But then we have:

Jerry,
When it comes to SSDs, 200Gb is *not* an odd size.
Flash memory has a fairly low lifetime in terms of the number of erase cycles that can be made with the memory still functional, often on the order of 1000 erase cycles.
However, not all the memory cells last for the same number of erase cycles – there is a statistical distribution. Manufacturers “overprovision” their SSD memories by understating the actual capacity and using the extras as spares to replace the cells that fail early. Thus it is common to find flash memory products in “odd” sizes (i.e. not a power of 2).
With so-called “multi-level” cells (MLC and TLC and probably other acronyms) the situation becomes more blurred. Most cheap flash memory is multi-level, i.e. each memory cell is not a single bit but can store two bits (or maybe more) by dividing the charge into three levels + 0, or more. This allows the same product to store double the data, at the cost of some reliability. The reliability can be (somewhat) recovered by including ECC codes.
Flash memory has become extremely complex, and it is no longer to be expected (although it may happen) that capacities will be a power of 2.
Chris barker

Sex and terrorism

Perhaps, but I suggest there’s an extra element missing from that equation, and that’s pride. Self-respect.  A person on welfare may be able to have sex and kids, but that’s not nearly the same thing as having a marriage that’s recognized and honored by your community.  A warrior and a husband has status and respect that a welfare dependent can never have. 
Man does not live by bread alone.   That’s the mistake liberals make, I think.   They think that seeing to people’s physical needs is all there is to contentment, self-fulfillment, and it’s not , it’s the bare bottom tier of Maslow’s pyramid.  That’s why, ultimately, welfare doesn’t satisfy. 
Respectfully,
Brian P.

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

Chaos Manor View, Tuesday, March 03, 2015

Slow day. The physical therapist was here today. I had to tell her about the fall yesterday, and she looked at the places where I have pains, called them sprains, and came up with tortures which made them better, but they are still sore.

Took Roberta out for dinner. Well, sort of. Went to Tony’s, a neighborhood Mexican place we both like, no tablecloths, unlimited quantities of pico de gallo, and everyone friendly. I’ve been to Hugo’s and a pizza place, since the stroke, but this was the first time since that we’ve been to Tony’s..Hasn’t changed.

Nothing unexpected in Netanyahu’s speech to Congress today. The President made a point of telling the world that he didn’t watch it, but he didn’t like it and there were no viable alternatives in it. All of which is true. There no viable alternatives we don’t know about, and none of them looks good. Over time the alternatives grew fewer and fewer – inevitably – and the ones remaining got more unpleasant and therefore less viable. One of the few remaining ways to stop Iran’s nuclear capability now is with massive military force on the order of the Iraq invasion, and this President isn’t going to do that. Another possibility is massive Israeli airstrikes against all of Iran’s nuclear facilities, and that probably isn’t enough; it might take nuclear weapons, and Israel would hand anti-Semites everything they ever wanted if they did that. Joint Israeli-NATO air strikes might do it, but it would not be quick, and likely would need ground ops as well.

Massive economic warfare has a very low probability of success. It is too late for that. We have delayed far too long; can we now live with an Iran that has nuclear weapons? We’d better learn how. Mr. Obama may delay that day until after the next inauguration, but not much longer.

If there are other alternatives, I would much appreciate hearing them. What won’t work is friendliness. I wish it would.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/03/02/u-s-millennials-post-abysmal-scores-in-tech-skills-test-lag-behind-foreign-peers/?hpid=z4

U.S. millennials post ‘abysmal’ scores in tech skills test, lag behind foreign peers (WP)

By Todd C. Frankel March 2 at 10:21 AM

There was this test. And it was daunting. It was like the SAT or ACT — which many American millennials are no doubt familiar with, as they are on track to be the best educated generation in history — except this test was not about getting into college. This exam, given in 23 countries, assessed the thinking abilities and workplace skills of adults. It focused on literacy, math and technological problem-solving. The goal was to figure out how prepared people are to work in a complex, modern society.

And U.S. millennials performed horribly.

That might even be an understatement, given the extent of the American shortcomings. No matter how you sliced the data – by class, by race, by education – young Americans were laggards compared to their international peers. In every subject, U.S. millennials ranked at the bottom or very close to it, according to a new study by testing company ETS.

“We were taken aback,” said ETS researcher Anita Sands. “We tend to think millennials are really savvy in this area. But that’s not what we are seeing.”

The test is called the PIAAC test. It was developed by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, better known as the OECD. The test was meant to assess adult skill levels. It was administered worldwide to people ages 16 to 65. The results came out two years ago and barely caused a ripple. But recently ETS went back and delved into the data to look at how  millennials did as a group. After all, they’re the future – and, in America, they’re poised to claim the title of largest generation from the baby boomers.

U.S. millennials, defined as people 16 to 34 years old, were supposed to be different. They’re digital natives. They get it. High achievement is part of their makeup. But the ETS study found signs of trouble, with its authors warning that the nation was at a crossroads: “We can decide to accept the current levels of mediocrity and inequality or we can decide to address the skills challenge head on.”

The challenge is that, in literacy, U.S. millennials scored higher than only three countries.

In math, Americans ranked last.

In technical problem-saving, they were second from the bottom.

“Abysmal,” noted ETS researcher Madeline Goodman. “There was just no place where we performed well.”

But surely America’s brightest were on top?

Nope. U.S. millennials with master’s degrees and doctorates did better than their peers in only three countries, Ireland, Poland and Spain. Those in Finland, Sweden and Japan seemed to be on a different planet.

Top-scoring U.S. millennials – the 90th percentile on the PIAAC test – were at the bottom internationally, ranking higher only than their peers in Spain. The bottom percentile (10th percentile) also lagged behind their peers. And the gap between America’s best and worst was greater than the gap in 14 other countries. This, the study authors said, signaled America’s high degree of inequality.

The study called into question America’s educational credentialing system. While few American test-takers lacked a high school degree, the United States didn’t perform any better than countries with relatively high rates of failing to finish high school. And our college graduates didn’t perform well, either.

There is a lot more, but you get the idea. Our high schools are awful. And now the rot has spread to many of our colleges. We have sown the wind for decades; we now reap.

There is much we could do, but we will not do it. We will continue to mandate programs from the District of Columbia with its terrible schools, imposing new theories on Podunk, Iowa and East Misery, Missouri. We will continue to act as if anyone believes that the solution is more money. And the schools will get worse.

Alas Babylon.

Subject: Could IBM’s brain-inspired chip change the way computers are built? (WP)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/on-it/could-ibms-brain-inspired-chip-change-the-way-computers-are-built/2015/02/28/8cf45e5a-be99-11e4-8668-4e7ba8439ca6_story.html

Could IBM’s brain-inspired chip change the way computers are built? (WP)

By Amrita Jayakumar March 2 at 7:00 AM

The human brain is a powerful supercomputer, but it consumes very little power.

The brain is also excellent at processing information efficiently — billions of neurons are deeply connected to memory areas — which gives us the ability to access the data we need to make a decision, quickly make sense of it and then resume normal operation.

That fundamental structure is what sets us apart from machines. It’s the reason we can think and feel and process millions of pieces of data in a fraction of a second every day, without our heads exploding.

Computers don’t work this way.

For decades, they’ve been built to perform calculations in a series of steps, while shuttling data between memory storage areas and processors.

That consumes a lot of power, and while computers are good at crunching huge volumes of information, they’re not so good at recognizing patterns in real time.

With funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and partnerships from national laboratories, engineers at International Business Machines created a chip last year that could imitate the structure of the human brain, in the hope that it would lead to a more efficient model of computing.

The result has the potential to transform the way computers are built in the future, according to IBM, while consuming as much power as a hearing-aid battery.

IBM’s long-term goal is to build a “brain in a box” that consumes less than 1 kilowatt of power and yet can quickly identify patterns in large data sets, said Dharmendra Modha, IBM’s chief scientist for brain-inspired computing.

Applications for this technology range from national security to disaster response. That’s why IBM’s team and scientists from Lawrence Livermore, Oak Ridge and other national laboratories took a trip to Capitol Hill last week to demonstrate the technology before lawmakers.

Devices powered by the chip could be used to perform biosecurity checks by sifting through biological samples to identify harmful agents, or power autonomous spacecraft, or monitor computer networks for strange behavior, scientists said.

IBM’s flagship supercomputer, Watson, which is built on today’s computer architecture and consumes large amounts of power, exemplifies linear calculation, Modha said.

In contrast, the chip has the ability to recognize or “sense” its environment in real time, similar to what humans do with eyes and ears.

For instance, the chip has been used to play a game of Pong by “looking” at the ball and moving the paddle to meet it.

Again there is much more. Clearly, while the average and even above average schools continue to deteriorate, there are still sources of well trained innovative development scientists.

One of my advisors comments:

Designing and scaling up the hardware is the easy part. Figuring out how to use it is difficult.

It’s been about 14 years since the first GPU with reasonably flexible programmability (NVIDIA’s GeForce 3). It didn’t take long before people started using it for general-purpose computation (I hosted a panel at the first conference on this topic— see the panel slides), but the process of co-evolution continues. Computer scientists influence the evolution of GPU programming models, and GPU designers offer new ways to build programmable hardware.

The same process has actually been underway with neural networks for five times as long, since that concept dates back to 1943. Neural networks were basically all software-based for the first several decades, but hardware entered the picture at least 20 years ago (from IBM!). Progress has been very uneven, but I have to assume that if commercial applications for simple neural networks were forthcoming, we’d have seen them by now.

IBM wants to make very complex neural networks, but I don’t know how they intend to configure them (the equivalent of “programming”), and I don’t know if any of their proposed applications are truly better served by neural networks than they might be by distributed processing (separate small CPU cores spread throughout a robot or vision sensor or whatever). Much of what makes the human brain valuable is encoded in its configuration, the way that its sensors and actuators are pre-wired into the brain’s structure. It took an awful lot of trial and error to work out these elements, and I don’t think anyone would claim the result is particularly optimal; in many ways, it’s barely functional.

Still, I don’t mind that IBM is working on this problem. It could turn out to be hugely valuable. I think it’s just too early to say.

A sentiment I tend to agree with, but we must understand that while computer power probably follows an S curve (ogive), we are on the exponential part of it, and probably can expect a thousand fold increase in computing power at least. I tend to believe in more.

http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1325860&

3D Printing Everywhere from Lab to Factory (EE Times)

Cars, lab equipment, DIY nearly anything

R. Colin Johnson

3/1/2015 10:04 AM EST

PORTLAND, Ore. — Printers that print three-dimensional (3D) objects were invented as a way to enable kids to make cool toys for themselves. But now dozens of companies are making industrial-sized versions capable of making production quality products — such as the Local Motors car — and custom parts for laboratories that used to have be to go to the machine shop.

“The first question we ask when we conceive of new part for an experiment is if we can print it ourselves on the 3D printer,” said Alex Millet, a visiting student from Puerto Rico who works with professor Andrew Zwicker, head of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL).

According to Zwicker and Millet 3D printers have become a crucial piece of laboratory equipment, allowing them to make one-offs of practically any piece of laboratory equipment (except lenses and other glass parts). 3D printers build up layers of plastic, metal, ceramic or organic materials. The piece is merely designed using a computer aided design (CAD) program that transfers instructions to the 3D printer — telling it when and what to “extrude” to form each layer of an object — with 100-micron accuracy.

The biggest advantage — except low cost — is the speed at which experiments can be accelerated, since the 3D printer can one-off custom parts in a matter of hours — including the CAD programming time — instead of sending the plans off to a machine shop and waiting days to get the part back.

Before using the 3D printer, Zwicker’s team tested its parts for resilience to heat, pressure, stress and strength, finding them adequate for most laboratory experiments — including dielectric insulators for electrodes. Funding was provided by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science under its Fusion Energy Sciences program.

Local Motors
Beside labs, now even mass production is being switched to 3D printing, a capability not unnoticed by Chinese manufacturers, who are investing heavily in the manufacture of 3D printers. But is China’s large, relatively inexpensive workforce working themselves out of a job by making 3D printers?

One company trying to short circuit the exploitation of cheap foreign labor is Local Motors, which is promising to open 100 microfactories to make its vehicles locally in every country where they will be sold, each customized to meet the needs of local residents.

They are also building a Mobi-Factory in the back of a semi-trailer so that vehicles can be produced in-place in remote locations that cannot support the expense of a permanent micro-factory. So far they are planning on three models, the Rally Fighter (pictured), the Racer and the Cruiser, all manufactured by the same 3D printer from different CAD files.

Local Motors U.S. factories will be introducing the Rally Fighter to the commercial market later in 2015 using the 3D printer to make both its body and chassis. The electric car will use motors and other drive train parts from Renault. The company also will allow engineers and partners — and eventually even consumers — to go online and use its CAD tools to produce customized vehicles with features that fit their particular application. Currently Local Motors has micro-factories in Phoenix, Ariz and Las Vegas, Nev. with Washington D.C. next on the list.

— R. Colin Johnson, Advanced Technology Editor, EE Times

The Color Blue

I present comments; I have no expertise in this matter ;

Jerry,

I need to research this some more,  but the assertion that ancient Hebrew did not have a word for the color blue may not be correct.

The third paragraph of the Shma (daily prayer starting with,  “Hear O Israel,  the Lord is our God,  the Lord is one) makes reference to tassels (called tzitzit) on the prayer shawl (called the tallit). This paragraph of the prayer is a quote from Numbers 15:37-41.  The paragraph includes a direction that the tzitzit are to include a blue thread.

This suggests at least one source dating from at least 400 BCE (and perhaps older) referring to the color blue.

Hugh Greentree 

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

I read your mail on the color blue with interest. [Yesterday] Doing some reading of my own, I find it is espousing the ‘relativist’ school of color theory. It is by no means the only one. There is a ‘universalist’ school as well, one that relies on human biology.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_color_naming_debate
It is a fascinating question; can they really not see blue until they have a word for it? Then who first invented the word?   Or is it that they can see the difference but literally don’t have the language for it? If you have the words “black” and “white” but not “gray” in your dictionary?  How would you describe gray?  As lightish black?  What if you’re not given any choices and can only choose one answer, as on a multiple choice test?

Respectfully,

Brian P.

In Exodus 24:10 (English Standard Version): “and they saw the God of Israel. There was under his feet as it were a pavement of sapphire stone, like the very heaven for clearness.” The sapphire stone referenced is Lapis Lazuli, a very beautiful blue stone. No matter what folks may think of what happened to the Elders of Israel in this account, the significant side event is the reference to a pavement that was blue. It was noticed, it was a familiar color like unto Lapis Lazuli and this comes from antiquity. The word blue may be recent, but folks have noticed likeness for quite some time.

Chuck Fenton

Dr. Pournelle,
Perhaps the Jews learned to see Blue before the rest of the world? I don’t read Hebrew, but per Wikipedia, the description of Tzitzit comes from the book of Numbers 15:38
“Speak to the children of Israel, and say to them, that they shall make themselves fringes on the corners of their garments throughout their generations, and they shall put on the corner fringe a blue (tekhelet) thread.”
Also per Wikipedia Tekhelet appears ~48 times in the Tanakh, and was obtained as far back as 1400 BCE and was described as the color of turquoise. I don’t know how this fits in with “when did we begin to see blue,” but perhaps the Torah and the existence of Sanai turquoise mines need too be reconciled with the theory?
-d

Jerry:

Being one of countless men stricken with red-green color “blindness,” I see blue as one of the two colors most clear (the other being yellow).

To me, there are shades of red and green which are indistinguishable from each other in natural sunlight, but which are as different as black and white under lighting of different spectra. There are shades of green which are indistinguishable from grey under natural sunlight.

Looking at an aeronautical chart, I can’t tell the difference between blue and magenta lines unless there are lines of the other color close to the one I’m looking at (in which case they are sharply different and identifiable). Due to this, my FAA medical certificate prohibits me from flying at night (when, ironically, color differences are more

apparent) or from airports which are controlled by colored lights from the control tower (in other words, “no nights and no lights”).

I’ve never seen “deep blue sea” as being blue. It’s almost black to me.

Shallow water, such as La’ie Bay, is clear with color patches in it, some of which are blue. The dark paint favored by Navy-warbird owners is definitely blue, even against the background of the “non-blue” ocean itself, while people with normal vision say that the paint and the ocean are exactly the same color. Thus, planes which are all but invisible to them are as obvious to me as if they were painted yellow!

Even when colors are seen, color vision is largely a matter of interpretation. At what point does red become pink? Why is there no equivalent of “pink” to describe an equally diluted intensity of green?

Ancient people SAW blue, but it was so pervasive that they couldn’t describe it any more than we can describe the taste of salt. They didn’t have a word for “gravity” either, but they were still fully aware of its existence! Once the Egyptians began creating blue dyes, that color needed its own definition.

Keith

Jerry:
Regarding Blue, Words, and Cognition.
The Russian language has two words for blue: синий (navy blue) and голубой (sky blue). An English speaker confined to the nouns would be forced to call both colors “blue.”
Does the ancient lack of a word for “blue” mean the ancients couldn’t “see” blue? Ancient Greek had no word for “velocity,” but their natural philosophers were certainly aware of change of location over time. They just couldn’t discuss it compactly.Sort of like English-speakers discussing Gemütlichkeit.
Mike

I really have no conclusions, and I am certainly not a Biblical scholar. I am mildly color blind and my father was more so.  We know that adult lactose is a fairly recent development (25,000 years or so.) I am inclined to agree with Mike Flynn, but I don’t know how recent a development is color blindness – or the lack of it.

And that is enough for tonight. My sprains are not painful but they are annoying. More tomorrow.

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