| Monday
December 31, 2001
Happy New Year
Some interesting links from Tracy
Walters:
Broadband in aircraft:
http://www.boeing.com/news/releases/2001/q4/nr_011211a.html
“Secret” Sound Archive:
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991728
Computers that improve themselves:
http://www.newsobserver.com/standing/collections/gilster/700000014439.html
Thanks!
And Roland notes that Universal's copy protection
is broken:
http://www.techtv.com/screensavers/supergeek/story/0,24330,2391656,00.html
Linux sees right through this, of course. If the
SSCA gets passed, Linux will essentially be outlawed, as there's no way to
even -try- to 'enforce' copy-protection, since there aren't these globby
layers of software running over which the user has no control.
--
------------------------------------------------------------ Roland
Dobbins
Which makes for interesting speculations. Men
with trench coats, opening them to reveal their wares. "Penguins,
little nerd?"
John Walker Lindh, Timothy McVeigh, and Theodore
Kaczynski all share a profound alienation from society, intolerance for
moral ambiguity, and disrespect for dissenting points of view. Each man
pursued his idiosyncratic vision as a means of compensating for social
awkwardness. The genius of civil society is the sublimation of physical
violence into rational discourse. Lindh, McVeigh, and Kaczynski rejected
this sublimation. Their particular ideologies seem irrelevant.
Civil society needs a place which will be attractive
to otherwise dangerous misfits. A place attractive enough that such men
will seek it of their own volition.
I suggest we colonize Ceres or Vega for this
purpose.
Steven Belknap
Well, the frontiers have often been
settled by oddballs, and have been a place of refuge -- and sometimes
rehabilitation -- for criminals. But I suspect space will be a tougher
proposition.
But then The Moon Is A Harsh
Mistress...
And on
Education:
Jerry,
Saw the brief discussion of this topic on your site.
Yes, everyone wants to get rid of bad teachers,
including the unions and members, however, the process is burdensome and
costly.
As a school board member, I approved moving ahead to
rid our district of two bad teachers. One had been teaching for more than
40 years. He never did anything egregious, but rather walked a thin line.
The district reduced his salary, refused him raises, gave him retirement
incentives. Other faculty members sat down with him and explained how much
money he was losing by not retiring. He refused to go, in part, because
everyone wanted him gone. The school principal made it clear that he would
celebrate when this teacher left. I left the Board in 1998. The teacher is
STILL teaching.
The second teacher was a tenured special education
teacher who did absolutely nothing. Often people would go by his class to
find him sitting behind his desk reading while students were doing
precious little. This teacher refused to support the district's special
education goals. He basically marched to his own drummer and thumbed his
nose at everyone.
In this case, the School Board members voted to
undertake the process to get rid of this teacher. This process costs close
to $150,000 by the time the lawyers get paid and all the paperwork gets
processed. It required the school principal to document every little
misstep the teacher made.
In the end, the district's lawyer felt that the
evidence against the teacher wasn't compelling enough to go forward
because NY State's hearing officers rarely dismiss a teacher, but instead
tell the school district that it needs to rehabilitate a teacher.
The ironic twist in this case, the principal who had
worked so hard to get rid of this teacher started drinking and her
dricking became an obvious problem. The district then wanted her gone.
The principal, being aware of the process and the
cost, offered to go for a settlement of $150,000; the cost the district
would have incurred to get rid of her through the formal channels. The
district paid her.
I don't believe local control is the answer. I
believe the abolishment of tenure is the answer. Who has a job for life
anymore? Even colleges and universities are diminishing the number of
tenure track positions on campuses.
Sue Ferrara
I replied to the effect that the
simplest solution is local districts which can abolish tenure, to which
she replied:
Local control would allow the abolishment of tenure,
but I don't know where you would find a school board of nine people with
the guts to take such action.
During my second year on the board, I wanted to vote
for tenure on a case by case basis because I didn't think one of the
principals deserved tenure. My colleagues refused saying it would
embarrass the one staff person and could set the board up for all sorts of
legal actions.
Consequently, we voted on tenure for all the
teachers and I voted no. Then in the minutes it appeared as if we had
voted on every person individually. I asked that the minutes be changed.
As you can guess, my fellow board members didn't
like me much.
S.
The implications here are clear. And
of course you were not elected to be popular with the other teachers. Open
and public meetings with parents present would help a lot. In LA that can
hardly happen, but in small local districts it can.
I propose no more than this:
somewhere there will be local districts that get it right. Others may then
copy them. The Soviet style we use now of command from Washington is not
working. At all.
And not only here:
The Times [London\ MONDAY DECEMBER 24 2001
On the front line in war against dunces BY
WILLIAM REES-MOGG
IF YOU dumb down secondary education, a
generation later you will find you have dumbed down everything, your
teachers, your politicians, your businessmen, your television, even your
scientists. The contrast of English generations is visible everywhere,
particularly in the two Houses of Parliament. The average age of the
Commons is a generation below that of the Lords; the peers are so old that
we were educated before the flood. Most of the unfortunate young persons
in the House of Commons have had a more modern education; it shows in
their relatively incoherent debates.
Only 40 years ago, the grammar and public
schools, which are themselves only fee-paying and independent grammar
schools, turned out students with a wider and deeper general education
than one now finds in the average university graduate. In the 1950s a good
student would leave a grammar school with some knowledge of four languages
and four great literatures; the fourth language was English, which was
learnt by contrasting its usages with Latin, Greek and French. The student
would have been grounded in mathematics and science, and would also have
studied English history and the Bible, which contains the holy books of
two world religions. Too few students had the advantage of this excellent
education. In 1964 a Labour Government was elected with a policy of
correcting this inequality, not by creating more grammar schools, but by
destroying those that already existed. They did not attack the private
schools; they destroyed the best part of state education. This was an act
of iconoclasm, far more destructive in its long-term consequences than the
destruction of the two great Buddhist statues by the Taleban.
We know when the grammar schools ended; they
began in 1510, when John Colet, then Dean of St Pauls, founded St Pauls
School. That school has survived only because it is not a state school.
From the beginning Colet aimed to teach the new learning, the Greek
studies that had been brought to Europe after the fall of Constantinople
half a century earlier. St Pauls School is a Renaissance institution. The
first students were cosmopolitan. There was no restriction of nationality
and Greek was taught as well as Latin. From the beginning it was
meritocratic, as it still is. The students had to be able to read and
write and had to be of good capacity.
Colet was influenced by his close friends,
including Thomas More and Erasmus, whom he had known since Erasmus first
visited Oxford in 1498. This Renaissance system of education spread by
example to many other schools. The great Busby at Westminster in the 17th
century, or Arnold at Rugby in the 19th, were teaching in the Colet
grammar school tradition.
Its greatest virtue was the study of
literature. Even in the 1950s, a student could leave a grammar school with
a fair chance of having studied Cicero and Thucydides, Virgil and Homer,
some French literature, perhaps Voltaire, and the classics of English
literature, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, perhaps Dryden and Pope, Gibbon,
the Romantic poets, and the major novelists of the 19th century. For some,
that was the start of a lifetime of reading, growing broader with time.
For others it was the only literary interest they ever developed.
The study of literature trains and extends
the human faculties. Our own imaginations, in their natural state, are
dull and limited. The great creative authors bring their power of
imagination to us, and their understanding of human nature. The great
thinkers give us at least some idea of the way in which their minds work.
We can almost hear Socrates talking.
Human psychology remains much the same over
time. People still feel jealous like Othello, malignant like Iago,
infatuated like Juliet, irresolute like Hamlet, ambitious like Macbeth or
Lady Macbeth. Logic remains the same; self-contradictory argument is in
the same model now as it was in the time of Aristotle. Literature is the
road to general understanding, at the heart as well as of the head.
Erasmus knew that; we do not recognise it
now. Dumbing-down continues to expand in ripples, long after the first big
stone has been thrown into the lily-pond. In the Christmas issue of The
Spectator, Julia Lewis writes a poignant piece: An Axe to the Roots of our
National Culture. In my view, the axe fell in the 1960s; we are now
grubbing out the roots. She tells how the Government is forcing libraries
to sell, and sometimes pulp, great works of literature in the name of
vibrancy and multiculturism.
With deadly bureaucratic precision, each
local authority has been given 8.5 years to replenish its entire stock.
Councils have to submit a library plan to the Department for Culture,
Media and Sport . . . the targets are to make sure that libraries are
vibrant and attract people to them. The result is the dumbing-down of
libraries, just as secondary education was dumbed down in the 1960s and
70s. Apart from the insult to the residual functions of local authorities,
this is authoritarian modernisation, with its contempt for the past.
Julia Lewis finds it is not only high
intellectual books that are thrown out. The Borough of Merton, whose
citizens could do with a good read, has been selling not only George
Eliot, who does after all get on television, and Dickens, but The Darling
Buds of May, as reader-friendly a book as one could hope for, and a
television series as well.
At her own library, Miss Lewis made a check,
using a book she had bought at one of these sales, One Hundred Great
Books! Masterpieces of All Time. The library computer revealed just seven
of these books. It registered as zero when I typed in Aristotles Ethics or
Malthuss Essay on the Principles of Population hardly surprising. But no
Pride and Prejudice, Robinson Crusoe, Madame Bovary, Brave New World or
War and Peace.
I have, at this point, to declare an interest
as the chairman of Pickering & Chatto Publishers; we publish collected
scholarly editions of historic English authors. We do indeed publish two
of the missing authors, Malthus and Defoe. My financial interest will be a
slight one, since our editions are not widely bought by the English public
library. Small print runs are expensive; we cannot find sales on the Harry
Potter scale for the 29 volumes of our collected Darwin.
Nevertheless, the pulping and sale of great
books angers any book-lover, and most publishers are book-lovers. In
English literature and learning, Pickering publishes or is preparing
editions of Leigh Hunt, Robert Southey, William Godwin, William Hazlitt,
Mary Shelley, Benjamin Disraeli, Horace Walpole, Christina Rossetti, Aphra
Behn, Fanny Burney, Daniel Defoe, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, John
Gay, Eliza Haywood, William Shakespeare, Thomas de Quincey, Mary
Wollstonecraft, H.G. Wells, Mariah Edgeworth, Wilkie Collins, William
Cobbett, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, Thomas Malthus, Robert Boyle, Charles
Babbage and Charles Darwin. These are our elite troop in the war against
the dunces.
The scholarship that has gone into these
editions is often English, but the sales mainly go to the United States,
Japan, or other countries overseas. We export something close to 90 per
cent of our books. In America and Japan, English literature is seen for
what it is: this islands greatest contribution to world culture. The
Germans do music; the English do books. I include, obviously, Irish,
Scottish and Welsh authors in the literature of the English language.
It may, perhaps, be too late to reverse the
iconoclasm of the 1960s that destroyed the grammar schools. It is not too
late to fight the book-pulping of the Department of Dumb, Dumber and
Dumbest.
For my part, I am throwing Daniel Defoe first
into the battle. He wrote almost every sort of literature, novels, Utopian
fantasies, histories, travels, social studies, economic pamphlets,
brilliant journalism, passable poetry. Of all the great English authors he
is the most varied in his subject matter, but always close to the
realities of human life. Pickering & Chattos biggest project for this
decade is a 44-volume edition of his works, the first proper collected
edition. It is being edited by Owens and Fairban, two leading Defoe
scholars. They come from the Open University, of which Defoe would surely
have approved. Bureaucrats may try to deaccession Defoe; with his help, we
can hope to dethrone them.
I regret the length of that but I
don't have the URL. And it does show some of the problem.
And Roland on complaints
about Star Office:
His problem with the fonts
isn't StarOffice; it's the fact that he hasn't set up fonts properly on
his Linux box.
I've done so, and I've lovely TrueType and Adobe
Type 1 fonts throughout XFree86, my window manager (WindowMaker), and all
my applications, including Mozilla and . . . StarOffice.
Mr. Tompkins should check out the Linux Font De-uglification
HOW-TO, located here:
http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/mini/FDU/
So there is hope for us all.
And Joel Rosenberg notes:
Unsurprisingly, Roland beat me to the font
deuglification matter. (When *does* he sleep? Or is "Roland"
merely a collective pseudonym for a league of experts -- sort of like Doc
Savage's sidekicks?)
Actually, with recent versions of Mandrake, it's
even simpler than in the deuglification howto. Just be sure that you set
up XFree 4.n when installing, leave the default of antialiasing on, and
then install a buncha Windows fonts using DrakFont. Direct messing about
with the XF86Config-4 file -- always a tricky matter -- isn't necessary.
Roland is a singular
individual...
An inquiry from a reader:
Dear Dr. Pournelle,
I want to design a clock, and was wondering whether
anyone can recomend a sub-$200.00 dollar CAD program. Preferably one that
will let me design my own gear train and model it in real-time 3D.
Thanks, Jim Snover
I have an answer, but I prefer to see
what the readers say first.
And now for something that ought to
really make you unhappy. From Robert Racansky:
If this doesn't make you angry, you must be smoking
crack.
Now that airport security screeners have been made
federal employees, allegedly in a move to imporove security, the current
workers will be replaced with ---
Well, they're not being replaced.
According to the New York Times (December 30, 2001,
at http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/30/national/30AIRL.html?pagewanted=print
), the Department of Transporation has decided to drop the requirement
that security screeners have a high school diploma, and is working
"to expedite the naturalization process for screeners who will lose
their jobs if they do not become citizens."
"The idea is to allow current screeners who
would otherwise qualify but may not have high school diplomas to be
eligible, so they do not get left behind," said Paul Takemoto, a
spokesman for the security administration, which is part of the Department
of Transportation. "Having a year of experience on the job is a
valuable asset, and many of those people are perfectly qualified, even if
they don't have a diploma."
Huh? I thought that the current group of workers was
too incompetent, and had to be replaced? That was supposed to be the point
of federalizing the security workforce.
So making airport security screeners federal
employees has:
1) Replaced few, if any, airport security screeners
2) Increased the cost of airport security 3) NOT increased the level of
security one bit 4) Increased the number of government employees 5) Made
it HARDER to fire incompetent security workers 6) Diverted scarce
resources from other security measures
After last week's "shoe bomber" incident
on American Airlines flight 63 from Paris, I'm sure that some moron will
want to make airport security screeners in France employees of the U.S.
government. The French might object, but -- well, we invaded their country
once, and that's when it was full of German soldiers...
As much of a joke as airport security has been for
decades, the private security firms are in NO WAY responsible for what
happened on September 11th. Box cutters were not on the FAA's list of
banned items. Meanwhile, the government agencies that SHOULD have done
more -- the CIA, the FBI, the INS, etc -- will probably be rewarded with
larger budgets, and as far as I know, no one there has lost their jobs
over their failure to carry out their duty to protect the United States
and its citizens.
Happy New Year.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/30/national/30AIRL.html?pagewanted=print
NEW YORK TIMES
December 30, 2001 "Rules Will Allow Airport
Screeners to Remain in Jobs" By DAVID FIRESTONE
After stoking high expectations that the federal
takeover of airport security would lead to a new breed of airport security
screener, one who was better educated and more qualified to assume a
position of increased responsibility, the Department of Transportation has
decided not to impose rules that would displace thousands of current
screeners.
Most significantly, the department will not insist
that screeners be high school graduates, a requirement that would have
disqualified a quarter of the present work force of 28,000.
As recently as Dec. 20, the department said in a
news release that "screeners must be U.S. citizens, have a high
school diploma and pass a standardized examination."
But the Transportation Security Administration, the
new agency created to supervise aviation security, announced a few days
ago that it would allow a year of any similar work experience in lieu of a
high school diploma.
<SNIP>
Transportation officials also said this month that
they planned to work with the Immigration and Naturalization Service to
find ways to expedite the citizenship process for screeners with good work
records. They also plan to increase the pay of screeners, which until
recently had been at minimum-wage levels, and to give a preference to
hiring displaced aviation workers.
< snip >
"What we really need are people who understand
how terrorists work, who can spot a false passport, who can ask the right
questions of the right people," said Isaac Yeffet, former director of
general security for El Al Airlines and now a private security consultant
in Cliffside Park, N.J. "Every screener is holding on his shoulders a
747 full of passengers. It is impossible to imagine that they would have
dropped out of high school."
Wonderful. But we must be seen to be
DOING SOMETHING, no? Mostly driving passengers crazy, as far as I can see.
Officiousness knows no limits.
And words of good cheer:
I had a talk with one of my committee members (Karl
Pribram) about age-related memory problems when I encountered them during
my PhD work. They're normal and seem to involve interference during
retrieval. (See chapter 5 of Gluck and Myers, 2001, Gateway to Memory, MIT
Press.) The cue that it's not Alzheimers is that when you're finally
reminded of the thing you're trying to remember, you can't understand how
you forgot it. I learned to use memorization cues to aid retrieval. Just
regard them as being a sign of your growing wisdom.
Cheers, -- --- Harry Erwin, PhD, Senior Lecturer of
Computing, University of Sunderland. Computational neuroscientist modeling
bat bioacoustics and behavior. <http://www.cet.sunderland.ac.uk/~cs0her/index.html>
Thanks. I hate to forget things, but I
don't forget what they are, just their names, and as you say, I can't figure
how I forgot "geranium" when I know what one is.
I never know what to do with mail
like this:
Subject: Hey AC low speed Goofball
FYI...
Just to let you know if you are still getting a 28.8
connection with Asheron's call when you have a 56k modem(in reality 53k as
you are right in saying) that the connection speed problem is most likely
related to your TELCO. Therefore I am guessing you live in the boonies. I
suggest instead of whining and complaining about Microsoft you start
whining and complaing about your bandwidth provider. The Zone does have
its problems here and there but anybody trying to play a MMORPG with a
28.8 connection shouldn't even bother. You may have a Pentium 4 but be
welcomed to the new world where CPU/Video card speed is no longer as
important as bandwidth. Try to think of it as this... Think about how slow
a floppy drive is and how long it can make you wait, now think about your
28.8 connection modem even slower which now brings even more data across
then your floppy drive did. To conclude it seems quite obvious to complain
to your Telco, either that or get a heavy duty connection like cable,dsl
or industry standard connections such as T1+. Also quite simply a wireless
dish networking scheme does not count everyone knows the data error rates
are so high on those you might as well use your 28.8 modem. After all the
clouds don't always cooperate when you want to play AC.
Bluey AC Harvestgain Michael Bedford [mikeb@blazenet.net]
Which is interesting, because (1) I
don't live in the boonies, I live in Studio City, (2) the only problems I
have with Everquest at 28.8 had to do with the video board, and replacing
the video boards with geforce 2 or 3 took care of the problems
nicely, allowing even Goofballs like me to play, and in fact once I got
past the login problems with Asheron's Call -- which were experienced by
tens of thousands -- it was no great problem except that so far the game
is nowhere near as fun as Everquest.
And quite simply, for me, Ricochet
worked just fine for Everquest. I can't say what it would have done with
Asheron's Call because Ricochet went away before I tried it there.
Apparently this Asheron's Call expert is telling me that unlike Everquest,
Asheron's Call won't work with 28.8 - 53K connections. Which is odd
because it has so far for me, but perhaps there are pitfalls I do not yet
see.
I fear what is obvious to him is not
obvious to me. I also suspect that some of my remarks have been copied to
some kind of Asheron's Call web page, and I am getting the usual comments
from experts.
My frustrations with the Microsoft
changeover to .NET and Passport were documented in view
183. Eventually Microsoft came to the rescue - as I say there, with 3
product managers and a PR person on the phone I probably got more
technical support than the average user did -- and it worked. My sound
problems were fixed by downloading and installing new sound drivers for
the Sound Blaster Live board in the system. It
all works now...
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