Monthly Archives: January 2012

View 709 Wednesday, January 18, 2012

My head is buzzing with thoughts about our novel. Imagine if you were given the task as a military mission: fix the schools so that no geek is left behind. We need boffins. Find and teach them.

That’s a direct oversimplification, but it’s important, and it requires a lot of thought. One of the things I found while looking into it was a commentary onf the upcoming Apple education technology announcement: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2012/01/apple-education-jobs/ . It includes a 1996 interview with Steve Jobs on education and technology.

I used to think that technology could help education. I’ve probably spearheaded giving away more computer equipment to schools than anybody else on the planet. But I’ve had to come to the inevitable conclusion that the problem is not one that technology can hope to solve. What’s wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology. No amount of technology will make a dent.

It’s a political problem. The problems are sociopolitical. The problems are unions. You plot the growth of the NEA [National Education Association] and the dropping of SAT scores, and they’re inversely proportional. The problems are unions in the schools. The problem is bureaucracy.

He’s dead right, of course. Technology alone cannot fix the problem. But it can help: technology does make possible some solutions that are otherwise politically impossible. In our novel we are changing the political rules, but in fact technology does that also.

We won’t know what the technological innovations are until Thursday.

On Thursday, Apple is hosting an “Education Event” in New York City. Thanks to reporting by sister publication Ars Technica, we expect Apple to announce a new digital publishing tool — a “GarageBand for e-books” — to create interactive, HTML5-based texts that can be read on Apple’s iOS devices.

I’m looking forward to it.

Wikipedia has gone black for the day, and I for one have found that less irritating than I thought it would be. There’s plenty of information that hasn’t been summarized and wikied. I’ve also been using Bing to find it. I agree that the copyright laws need reform, but that reform needs to be made with authors and artists in mind, not just publishers. One reason pirates were so successful in the music industry was that the publishers had all the stakes, and artists often encouraged their fans to pirate their works, since the artists weren’t getting paid anything from ‘legitimate’ sales. Authors of books don’t have quite that antagonistic a relationship with their publishers, but their interests aren’t identical either.

That’s for another time, but so far the lack of Wikipedia hasn’t inconvenienced me, and I’ve been finding Bing about as useful as Google. One thing the blackouts have done is break a few habits.

And this just in:

Wikipedia blackout dodge

Turns out that if you disable Active Scripting then Wikipedia works just fine. Lots of other sites don’t–which leaves me wondering what exactly they do that relies so heavily on scripting.

—

Mike T. Powers

Here is a warning:

Does Gumby have an alibi?

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/fake-ipad-2s-made-clay-sold-canadian-stores-220733489.html

The tablet computers, like most Apple products, are known for their sleek and simple designs. But there’s no mistaking the iPad for one of the world’s oldest "tablet devices." Still, most electronic products cannot be returned to stores. For the the stores and customers to be fooled by the clay replacements, the thieves must have successfully weighed out the clay portions and resealed the original Apple packaging.

Future Shop spokesman Elliott Chun told CTV that individuals bought the iPads with cash, replaced them with the model clay, then returned the packages to the stores. The returned fakes were restocked on the shelves and sold to new, unwitting customers.

M

Beware

View 709 Tuesday, January 17, 2012

As usual, Newt Gingrich came off well ahead in the Republican debate. When asked about unemployment compensation and how long it should be, he turned the topic to the proper channel: what ought the unemployed to be doing with unemployment compensation. He began that with an observation that ought to be central to every plan: “99 weeks is an Associate degree.”

My mother was always rather ashamed of not having a full four year college degree: she had an associate degree from a Florida Normal School. That was, in those days, sufficient for her to be a first grade teacher, and in those days first grade teachers in rural Florida schools were expected to teach all the children to read by the end of first grade. I once asked her if any children left first grade who hadn’t learned to read. She said there were a few, but “They didn’t learn anything else, either.” The notion that a child of normal or dull normal intelligence would leave first grade unable to read was simply not thinkable: everyone knew that didn’t have to be, and thus was intolerable.

And 99 weeks is an Associate degree. And we have no shortage of children unable to read. 99 weeks is an Associate degree. Look up the health care jobs one can qualify for with an associate degree. Look up the technical jobs one can qualify for. Sometimes problems solve each other.

(Regarding teaching reading, for those who are interested in reading, see Roberta Pournelle’s web page; anyone reading this can learn how to teach almost anyone how to read. Her program requires about 70 half-hour lessons, some of which may have to be repeated. That’s about 11 weeks to completion, or 9 teaching cycles in 99 weeks. Being able to read before getting to the public schools is a big head start. Alas, Head Start doesn’t think its pupils are “ready” to learn reading. Roberta’s research indicates otherwise. Being able to read is a terrific head start.)

Romney did a pretty good job of dealing with the “Bain Capital” nonsense. If we had a reasonably educated journalism profession that wouldn’t be needed. I was required to read Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy as an undergraduate. It should be required for anyone in America who claims an education. Capitalism is a means for allocating resources, and has proven to be the most efficient means of gathering returns on investing those resources. Doing so requires what Schumpeter called “creative destruction”, meaning the closing down of inefficient and wasteful firms. This is what the Soviet Union lacked, and over time more and more resources were misallocated and produced less and less return on investment. All of that was predicted and indeed was the underlying principle of the Cold War strategy of containment: communism and other central planning allocations of resources was doomed if it had to stew in its own juice. So it went.

Note that there are always exceptions. Unbridled capitalism produces what the market wants, and the unregulated market has no restraints on its desires. I usually summarize this by noting that the unrestrained and unregulated market will eventually offer human flesh for sale.

There are also reasons related to national defense to maintain some domestic industries because access to them might be cut off in time of need. Obviously many uncompetitive firms will claim their vital necessity and thus a need for subsidies or protective tariffs – actually, some quite efficient firms will make that claim and grasp for what they can get. These are matters for rational debate, but electoral politics is seldom decided by rational debate – as witness the “Bain Capital” advertisements.

All in all, the Republican candidates all came off well. I think Newt was the clear winner, but, except for a few painful skirmishes, it was a positive debate.

We used to memorize and discuss this in tenth grade. That was in Tennessee, but this poem and others like it were once part of the common heritage of growing up in America.

Jim Bludso of the Prairie Bell

John Hay

Well, no, I can’t tell you where he lives,
Because he don’t live, you see.
Leastways, he’s got out of the habit
Of living like you and me.
Oh, where have you been these last three years,
That you have not heard tell
How Jimmie Bludso cashed in his checks
The night of the Prairie Belle?

He weren’t no saint; them engineers
Are pretty much all alike:
One wife in Natchez under the Hill,
Another one here in Pike.
A careless man in his talk was Jim,
An awkward hand in a row,
But he never flunked and he never lied,
I reckon he never knowed how.

And this was all the religion he had:
To treat his engine well,
"Don’t ever be passed on the river
And mind the pilot’s bell."
And if ever the Prairie Belle took fire,
A hundred times he swore,
He’d hold her nozzle against the bank
Till the last soul got ashore.

All boats have their day on the Mississipp
And her day come at last.
The Movastar was the better boat,
But the Belle, she wouldn’t be passed.
And so she came tearing along that night,
The oldest craft on the line,
With a negro squattin on her safety valve
And her furnace crammed rosin and pine.

And the fire broke out as she cleared the bar
And burned a hole in the night.
Quick as a flash, she turned and made
For the willow bank on the right.
There was runnin and cussin, but Jim yelled out
Above the awful roar,
"I’ll hold her nozzle agin the bank
Till the last galoot’s ashore."

Through the hot, black breath of the burning boat
Jim Bludso’s voice was heard,
And they all had trust in his cussedness,
For they knowed he’d keep his word.
And, sure as you’re born, they all got off
Afore the smokestacks fell,
And Bludso’s ghost went up alone
In the smoke of the Prairie Belle.

He weren’t no saint, but at Judgment
I’d run my chance with Jim
‘Longside of some pious gentlemen
Who wouldn’t shake hands with him.
He seen his duty, a dead sure thing,
And he went for it, there and then,
And Christ ain’t gonna be too hard
On a man who died for men.

View 709 Monday, January 16, 2012

Huntsman withdraws and endorses Romney. The only surprise here is that it took so long after New Hampshire. That is probably because it took a few days for Huntsman’s father to decide he didn’t want to pay any more to keep the campaign going. The Huntsman Corporation is huge, and Jon Huntsman Junior’s father is worth at least a billion. He could easily afford to finance more campaigning, but it is pretty clear that Huntsman could not win the nomination. I’m sure Huntsman Sr. took one last poll and confirmed that, then declined to pay any more for the campaign.

Candidate Huntsman has been CEO of the Huntsman Corporation prior to being a successful governor of Utah, so he has both private and public executive experience. He has connections to both the conservative and the establishment wings of the Republican party, but it is important to note that Huntsman was one of the few Reagan White House staffers who got promoted (to Assistant Secretary of Commerce) by George H W Bush. Bush did not much care for Reagan or Reagan’s people and systematically eliminated them from both the White House and other Executive Department positions. Bush I later appointed Huntsman to be Ambassador to Singapore; he was the youngest US ambassador in about a hundred years.

He was very effective as an ambassador to Singapore, then Indonesia, and later China, and is an obvious candidate for Secretary of State no matter who wins the nomination. He is not so enamored of the country club Republicans as to be repugnant to the conservatives, and his diplomatic skills are great.

Huntsman is a fairly representative of the younger generation of what is generally called the Establishment, holding positions considerably more conservative than the self-styled Liberal Republicans of Rockefeller’s day. He is not notably an opponent of the notion of “Big Government Conservatism.” We probably have not heard the last of him.

I note that Newt’s latest ads are back to the positive track, and I haven’t heard the highly negative anti-Romney ads lately; but then I don’t get local South Carolina radio and TV programs.

The Climate Change debate has opened again.

"New molecule could help cool planet" actual conclusion.

The important part of this whole article is contained here "The molecules detected by the research team occur naturally in the presence of alkenes, chemical compounds which are mostly released by plants.

"Plants will release these compounds, make the biradicals and end up making sulphuric acid, so in effect the ecosystem can negate the warming effect by producing these cooling aerosols," Percival said."

Conclusion:

When there is more CO2, plants grow larger and faster (plant growth is up at least 7% right now worldwide). When there are more and bigger plants, there are more of these cooling molecules. Result, whatever warmth CO2 adds is offset by these molecules.

If CO2 produces more warmth, plants can grow at higher latitudes, result, more total plants, more cooling molecules, see above.

If CO2 produces more warmth, there will be more evaporation, more rainfall, less deserts, more plants, see above.

Final conclusion, it appears that the geoengineering we need to prevent global warming is already present. This rather explains how this planet has managed to maintain a relatively even temperature for so long, despite such things as the faint early sun paradox and such. It appears that this planet has many such things that do this, like the chemicals given off by plankton (dimethylsulfide) that are stimulated by warmth and aid in cloud formation and thus shade, cooling things down again, the way warmth creates evaporation creates clouds that move heat from down here to up there where it can be radiated away while it drops cooling rain, fans us with wind, and acts as a sunshade (there is a band of thunderstorms constantly around the equator doing just this right now), and probably others. This can explain why the global warming prophesied by the computer models has not occurred, and why the label attached to that has had to change, first to "climate change" and then to "climate disruption", both of the latter suffer from the problem of then explaining exactly how CO2 can do anything but produce warming. Unfortunately, in a world with already present, free biradicals, DMS, and sunshade clouds, we are not in need to spent trillions to offset something that seems to have plenty of things to handle it already.

In other words, chill out, literally.

Oh, and throw another log on the fire.

D

==

“Pollution-gobbling molecules in global warming SMACKDOWN:”

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/01/16/criegee_biradicals/print.html

I saw a story on this a few days ago but it didn’t register – the thrust of the earlier story was the potential use of Criegee biradicals as climate change agents. Now the importance becomes clear. These Criegee biradicals are another important element of our atmosphere that was not fully known or appreciated, and thus not part of climatic models. I guess the bishops of AGW must recast their catechisms — er — models.

Ed

I have said repeatedly that the proper approach to the Climate Change crisis is not financially disastrous limits to technology and economic growth, but the development of engineering methods to enhance natural forcing mechanisms. Admittedly the existence of proven means of changing climate would bring about enormous political pressures: while it is likely that most of us would be better off in a world a bit warmer with a bit more CO2, there are also those who would prefer a dead halt and stability, and a few who would prefer a rollback to the climates of the 1940’s. The politics would get fierce – but at least there would be something to debate.

What we have now is uncertainties.

And on that score, Mike Flynn, the best statistician I have met since Tukey, says:

Death by Data: The End of Science as We Once Knew It?

There is a disturbing article in The Atlantic dealing with the steadily increasing mountains of data, the ease of storing them, the expenses of reviewing and editing them, the ease of sharing them, etc.

"To Know, but Not Understand," by David Weinberger

http://m.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/01/to-know-but-not-understand-david-weinberger-on-science-and-big-data/250820/

Summarizing briefly:

Henri Poincare famously said that just as a house is not simply a pile of bricks, science is not simply a pile of facts. It is the construction of those facts that make a science. No fact is self-explaining. It is only when facts are joined together in the light of a theory that they have any meaning. The problem today is that there are too damn many bricks.

Weinberger writes:

"For Sir Francis Bacon 400 years ago, for Darwin 150 years ago, for Bernard Forscher 50 years ago, the aim of science was to construct theories that are both supported by and explain the facts. Facts are about particular things, whereas knowledge (it was thought) should be of universals. [bf added]

"We therefore stared at tables of numbers until their simple patterns became obvious to us. Johannes Kepler examined the star charts carefully constructed by his boss, Tycho Brahe, until he realized in 1605 that if the planets orbit the Sun in ellipses rather than perfect circles, it all makes simple sense. Three hundred fifty years later, James Watson and Francis Crick stared at x-rays of DNA until they realized that if the molecule were a double helix, the data about the distances among its atoms made simple sense. With these discoveries, the data went from being confoundingly random to revealing an order that we understand: Oh, the orbits are elliptical! Oh, the molecule is a double helix!

A theory is a narrative that "makes sense" of the data. From the theory we can predict the data and deduce the mathematical laws that describe their regularities. The laws are the cement between the bottom layer of data and the capstone of theory. When the theory predicts thus-far-unknown data, we have the opportunity to confirm or falsify the theorem. It’s all great fun.

Starting already years ago, instrumentation in the factory began delivering continuous data on strip recorders and the like. This overturned the old spot-checking at discrete time points and resulted in a heap of data and what I called "paralysis of analysis." This has been happening in science, in spades, and folks don’t always realize that they are applying statistical methods that were developed for sparser data streams, where the challenge was to extract meaning from meager samples. A t-test is useless for two large data sets because for large enough values of n there will always be a non-zero difference between them.

Weinberger tells of a program, Eureqa, which will jump into the mass of data and noodle around until it constructs equations that predict the outcomes with tolerable accuracy. Sounds like a combination of orthogonal factor analysis and step-wise regression on steroids. (I assume it pays attention to functional coupling, covariance, and variance inflation factors.) What comes out are equations that accurately produce the Ys, but whose factors may not correspond with any physical factor. The result is equations that work, but the researcher does not understand what they mean.

One is reminded of Billy Ockham and his razor. He said we should keep the number of terms in our models as small as needed for them to work, because we would not otherwise understand the model. The real world, he added, could be as complex as God wished. Weinberger seems to be getting at the same issue. The modern way of science, which ran from Bacon and Descartes to our own time, may have to give way to some other way of knowing; just as medieval way science gave way to the modern. Weinberger calls that a different way of knowing things; but I am inclined to go with his title and say it replaces understanding with simple knowing. I did a typically discursive blog post on this at http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2012/01/autumn-of-modern-science.html

Now, if the factors churned up by Eureqa-like programs out of brickyards full of data, are not explicable as physical entities, we would have to say that the important factors are "hidden." The researcher knows what his inputs need to be to get the outputs; but he doesn’t know how he gets them. "Hidden" is what "occult" means, and the use of occult powers of nature to manipulate nature was called "magic."

So it may be that Arthur C. Clarke was more right than he knew when he said that a sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic.

Mike Flynn

When I studied Philosophy of Science under Gustav Bergmann at the University of Iowa in the 1950 I concluded that the scientific method was essential to knowing anything, and in keeping with young people of that time I thought that the relentless application of the scientific method would solve all problems. We knew how, now; all we needed was to learn the methods and apply them. Bergmann was a member of The Vienna Circle and thus an extreme positivist, and at the time I found that very attractive. I later learned to modify my logical positivist views to something closer to Karl Popper’s views, but that’s a subject of a much longer essay. The point is that we were certain that there was nothing we could not understand by the relentless application of logic.

At the same time, academic psychology was divided between the behaviorists who debated the distinction between hypothetical constructs and intervening variable and used pseudo-mathematical formulas with unknowable terms in them to appear “scientific” as opposed to the Freudians and their orthodox and heretical descendants who used case histories rather than data, and postulated Ego and Id and other concepts. (One late descendent of Freud, through Jung, is L. Ron Hubbard with his Dianetics.)

Most of that nonsense is gone from academic science now although it remains as “theory” in Modern Languages Departments and in some of the Voodoo Science departments; but the optimism of positivism as modified by Popper remains.

Now we have to wonder if we do have the tools we need to understand the data we have. Most Climate Scientists don’t really know how their models work; they postulate various feedback loops, but there are enough variables in there (give a physicist five manipulable constants and a couple of functions and he can explain anything) that can be adjusted to – well, to what? What no model has yet done is to start with the initial conditions of some distant time in the past – at least fifty years – and let it run to generate that actual climate history since then.

And perhaps that is the key here: the models are falsifiable propositions. They can only be tested by seeing if their predictions come true. It is argued that the consequences of ignoring the disaster predictions are so severe that we just can’t wait: we have to start making trillion dollar decisions now, because the models tell us that we have no choice.

Sometimes philosophy of science can be important. Pity that not very many modern students know anything about it. It used to be called Epistemology, and was one of the foundations of philosophy, but that, too, appears to be headed into extinction. And it’s lunch time, and I don’t want to spiral down into rambling about The Coming Dark Age. Despair is a sin.

Instead, rejoice: there may be an engineering solution to Global Warming, assuming that nature hasn’t already beat us to it.