Monthly Archives: February 2013

View 761 Friday, February 08, 2013

I have been working fairly steadily and making progress on Lucifer’s Anvil, so I was late noticing that today the KUSC (Local Good Music station) pledge drive started. Like KUSC this place operates on the Public Radio model: it’s free, but it’s supported by subscribers, and if we don’t get enough subscribers it will go away.  I am pleased to say that we get enough subscribers, but of course they have to be renewed, which means that sometimes I have to bug the readers about subscribing and renewals. I don’t do that except during the times when KUSC does pledge drives. It’s that time again. It’s time to Pay For This Place.

My interview with Leo Laporte last Wednesday

Triangulation interview. 

[Note that for the first six minutes or so of the show, there is a typo in the on-screen caption which lists your Web site URL.]

<http://twit.tv/show/triangulation/90>

 

Roland Dobbins

The Los Angeles Police Department remains on tactical alert, as it would during a riot, meaning that all available officers are available at all times. The City remains in a state of siege, largely because the Christopher Dorner Manifesto – an 11 page document written by the former Naval Reserve Office and former LAPD Police Officer – in essence declares war not only on LAPD but on all law enforcement officers, and the relatives of at least some LAPD officers. He has already killed the daughter of a former LAPD captain and her fiancé, and killed and wounded other police officers not part of LAPD. He’s certainly armed and dangerous. He has also generated some sympathy among ‘the people’ but it is hard to tell how much from the news media, which alternates between exploitation and hysteria.

The manifesto itself was withdrawn from where it was posted on the Internet by a local LA radio station, but of course there have to be copies available. I didn’t look very hard. The Christian Science Monitor has this. http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2013/0208/Christopher-Dorner-manifesto-A-guide-to-ex-cop-s-rampage

Meanwhile I am due to go to Boston beginning at 0 dark thirty Wednesday morning, while the biggest snowstorm in history is hitting the New England area. I am still planning on going on the theory that the storm will be over before Tuesday, but we’ll see. The airports may all be closed. They may not be. Interesting times.

This morning Rush Limbaugh was castigating President Obama for not being in the command scene during the last of the Benghazi crisis. According to Limbaugh, the President told the Secretary of Defense “Do what you have to do,” and vanished from scene.

If this is true, I would say it is to the President’s credit, and reminiscent of President Reagan who, told of the opportunity to capture a known terrorist by taking him from an EgyptAir 737 now in flight. The risks and benefits were explained. The President ordered the military to do it. When asked if he wanted to be kept up to date on the operation, he said, “Sure. Let me know when you’ve got him.” This in contrast to President Carter, who was on the phone to Colonel Beckwith at all phases of the doomed attempt to rescue the American embassy personnel held captive in Tehran. As von Moltke the elder put it after his success against the Austrians at Sadowa, his was probably the last battle in which a general did not have a telegraph wire from supreme command up his bum. That was prophetic of Carter but not always. Reagan told his people to do the job and got out of the way.

This sounds like what President Obama did. If we seek enlightenment on why so little was done after that, we have to ask the Secretary of Defense and the duty officers in command – why the President’s blank check wasn’t passed along to the theater commander. “Do what you have to do” sounds like the kind of orders that put heart in a soldier. Why didn’t Panetta call the theater commander and simply say, “The consulate is under attack. Use whatever resources you have to get the American personnel and consulate employees out of the consulate and safe house. The President says do what you have to do. I’ll get out of your way now.”

We can ask why nothing was done, but it’s hard to say the President didn’t give the right order.

It’s lunch time, and it’s snowing in Boston.

Mr. Pournelle,

Just in case no one else points this out, Dorner’s manifesto document is not 11 pages long. It is actually 22 pages, and the "media" have been conducting significant editing on the document.

http://www.soopermexican.com/2013/02/07/news-media-scrub-cop-murderers-manifesto-of-pro-obama-pro-hillary-loved-msnbc-pro-gay-and-anti-gun-comments/

If you have the 11 page version, you’re not getting the full story; presumably it will get no media play that Mr. Dorner is rabidly in favor of the Democrat party…

It’s pledge drive time. This place operates on the public radio model. It’s free to everyone but it’s supported by subscriptions. If you haven’t subscribed this would be a good time to do it, and if you haven’t renewed your subscription in a year, this would be a time to do that. You have been reminded. Subscribe or renew now.

View 761 Thursday, February 07, 2013

Bill Gates’ Measurements

I read a description of Gates’ ideas in the Wall Street Journal. Assuming the Journal quoted him correctly, much of what he wants to "measure" consists of inputs rather than outputs. Counting the number of vaccinations is measuring an input. What really matters is the reduction in illness. That’s an output, and is the thing which should be measured. All too often people assume a connection between an input and some desired output, and then measure the input. That’s a measure of effort, not a measure of results. During the Vietnam War the Air Force used to measure effort like number of sorties and tons of bombs dropped, not what effect it had on the enemy. This attention to measures of effort rather than measures of results seems to prevail throughout government.

Joseph P. Martino

I once had this conversation with Bill Gates, back about the time he had the first big conference on the CD-ROM, so I think he understands the difference, but I agree that the Wall Street Journal article doesn’t make that very clear. A better example is measuring the effectiveness of schools by the amount of money spent per pupil: nearly everyone knows that throwing money into a school system seldom improves it, and often by rewarding existing (bad) practices has the opposite effect from improving education. So has it been in the past, and so shall it be in future. Numerous studies have confirmed that. Neither more money nor smaller classes are reliable means of improving education.

The first and most important problem in public education is to understand what the goal is. It may be that the best way to do that is to ask why someone without children should pay for the education of other people’s children. Education is not a Constitutional right or entitlement, and even the aggressive federal courts don’t assert that.

The usual argument in favor of compulsory education is that an educated electorate is necessary to the health of a republic. A secondary one is that an educated public is a good investment since it promotes economic growth and a wealthier nation.

You will note that the militant egalitarianism that insists that education is an entitlement and everyone is entitled not only to an education but the same education as anyone else gets does not in fact promote the goals stated in the above paragraph and often makes achieving them impossible. It may be very good for a 15 year old retarded girl to be mainstreamed and kept in age appropriate classes, but it is demonstrably a heavy tax on the other students, who get fewer teacher resources – and this assumes that there are no order and behavior problems, which always absorb teacher and learning time without much positive return. When entitlement rights get involved in education, the educational results generally are worse, and often are far worse. Of course some will argue that it is good for the children of normal and above normal intelligence to be exposed to the sub-normal because there is something inherently good about Diversity, but there don’t seem to be any valid studies showing that you learn algebra better if your class includes someone who never will learn it.

It should be clear that mere exposure to high quality education does not inevitably produce positive results. Actually, trying to teach a high level of understanding to a class that includes low intelligence students is a grueling task, and impossible for all but the best teachers. Yet that is what we seem to be insisting on.

Counting input as a measure of output can be useful if you know the relationship between the input and the output, which is to say, if you have an accurate and testable and tested theory. But in education we don’t generally have that.

And yet. Just about every study yet conducted finds that simply eliminating the worst 10% of teachers in a school – chosen by almost any rational common sense definition of ‘worst’ – results in a great rise in ‘output’ under nearly any rational definition of educational success. I put it that way because many of the studies aren’t meticulous; they’re case histories and observations, not carefully designed experiments.

More another time.

I will note that the main requirement for getting an education is the ability to read. An astonishing number of children reach fourth grade unable to read.  They pass the tests for ‘reading at grade level’ but the ‘grade level’ is itself a clue.  If you can only read ‘at grade level’ then you can’t read.  There’s a simple test. If your fourth grade child has any trouble at all with “big words’ like Constantinople and Timbuktu, or polyethylene, it is likely he can’t read.  That is:  if he can read he can ‘sound out’ those words, and he is likely to have heard them before.  Of course if you can read you can also read words you have never heard before like diethyltrinitroethylene, but you will have trouble with the word, because never having heard it before you not only have to sound it out but get past some ambiguities of pronunciation.  And you certainly won’t know what it means since it’s not a real word.  But you can read it.

For more on this go to Mrs. Pournelle’s reading program, which you can find under The Literacy Connection. http://www.readingtlc.com/

Los Angeles is under a state of siege but it may end soon. We are learning on a very small scale and over a brief period of time something of what the people of Iraq learned during the US occupation. The LA Police are under threat from a terrorist – a former LAPD officer with a grievance – who has already killed the daughter of one former LAPD captain and her fiancé, and has shot three other police officers. He has fired at others. He is a trained sniper.

As a result LAPD officers on protective detail guarding someone believed to be a potential victim of the former policeman turned terrorist fired without warning at two elderly Asian women in a pickup truck resembling the truck believed to be owned by the suspect. They slowed down in front of the house, and they were driving a pickup truck resembling that of the terrorist, and the police opened fire wounding both of the women – who were delivering newspapers including to the house under watch.

Other news reports are that police are questioning traffic stop suspects with drawn weapons.

We now know how people in occupied territories feel although in our case it won’t last long.

Now of course the police (or the US soldiers in Iraq) are concerned and want to protect themselves. They are afraid. They are nervous. They are targets, and specifically targeted by the terrorist – as were the soldiers in Iraq.

The news says that a truck resembling that wanted is on fire high in the mountains. No one knows how it got there or whether it is really the truck. More later. Meanwhile, we enjoy a tiny taste of Civil War in Los Angeles County although only one armed man has declared war on the authorities here. Interestingly the response has been to turn out every officer, without regard to cost or overtime obligations or much else. A bigger response than to riots in which shopkeepers were beaten, burned out, or even killed. He rioters didn’t declare war. They merely burned out stores and shops and looted anything in sight. But this chap declared war on the police.

I am not as unsympathetic to the police as the above may seem; but there are some obvious inferences here. One does not protect a population by putting one’s personal safety first.  That’s a harsh truth, but good cops have always known it.

With luck the chap has been driven to ground in the snow topped mountains above LA and this will end. The skies above Big Bear are filled with aircraft (it’s pretty high for helicopters so fixed wing craft are up there too) and hundreds – literally hundreds – of police, sheriff, Highway Patrol, FBI, BATF, and other vehicles. SWAT teams cover every crossroad. K9 units are on the way. Thousands of police. To hunt down one man who declared war on the police.  I suspect that petty criminals all over the county are rejoicing and smart ones make hay while the sun shines, but I may be presuming too much intelligence on their part.

In any even our terrorist is supposed to be up there in the mountains. Of course that would be a rather stupid thing for him to have done to himself, but when you are one man it is difficult to conduct a civil war.

It’s lunch time.

View 761 Wednesday, February 06, 2013

I’ll be doing a Triangulation interview with Leo Laporte at 1530 today, so I am not up in the monk’s cell working on Anvil. Actually that is the only reason. I seem to have got over a month and more of pure funk that kept me from doing much work on fiction and for that matter on much else. I’ve been doing a lot of good work lately.

It may be just recovery from a long term winter bronchitis. I used to get that every winter and it was an effort to keep working. Hardly matters. I’ve done a few thousand words in the last few days, and I know where I want to go next and which character I want to develop and how to advance the plot as I do, so I’m sure I’ll be able to start again without problems.

The secret to success in writing is what Elizabeth George calls ‘bum glue’. Ms. George is an American writer of British mysteries – the Inspector Lynley series – who says she got the phrase from Australian fans. My own phrase was butt in chair, but bum glue is pithy and quite exact.

I’m still working on a reaction to Bill Gates’s article on fixing all the world’s problems by measuring them.

Bill Gates: My Plan to Fix The World’s Biggest Problems

From the fight against polio to fixing education, what’s missing is often good measurement and a commitment to follow the data. We can do better. We have the tools at hand.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323539804578261780648285770.html

I’ve mentioned It before, and I thought I’d have been able to write something more about it, but it turns out to be worth more than a few words. A lot more than a few words. There’s nothing much new in what Gates says. The essence of it is

We can learn a lot about improving the 21st-century world from an icon of the industrial era: the steam engine.

Harnessing steam power required many innovations, as William Rosen chronicles in the book "The Most Powerful Idea in the World." Among the most important were a new way to measure the energy output of engines and a micrometer dubbed the "Lord Chancellor" that could gauge tiny distances.

Such measuring tools, Mr. Rosen writes, allowed inventors to see if their incremental design changes led to the improvements—such as higher power and less coal consumption—needed to build better engines. There’s a larger lesson here: Without feedback from precise measurement, Mr. Rosen writes, invention is "doomed to be rare and erratic." With it, invention becomes "commonplace."

In the past year, I have been struck by how important measurement is to improving the human condition. You can achieve incredible progress if you set a clear goal and find a measure that will drive progress toward that goal—in a feedback loop similar to the one Mr. Rosen describes.

This may seem basic, but it is amazing how often it is not done and how hard it is to get right.

In The Strategy of Technology (by Stefan Possony, Jerry Pournelle, and Francis X. Kane) we tried to explain how to create and develop new technology as part of a systematic military strategy. The book was intended for military systems developers and tried to explain a process called Systems Analysis by Herman Kahn, but which was very similar to what had long been known as operations research. If I can be said to have had a specialty skill in aerospace it would have to be that I was an OR man, as operations research people were known in those days, and for a while when I was at Boeing I was among a very small group whose job title was Systems Analyst. It was said that unlike specialists who tended to know more and more about less and less until they knew everything about nothing at all, OR people and Systems Analysts knew less and less about more and more until they knew nothing about everything. Think of those statements as vectors rather than quantitative estimates and they’re not far off the mark. The main tool of the OR people was an ability to tool up to where you could understand the experts well enough to come up with some models of what they were doing. The idea was to quantify operations, then figure out what moves you might make to maximize results.

And the problem there – particularly before the development of large scale integrated circuit architecture leading to small computers – was that if you couldn’t measure something you couldn’t do much about it. This led to the temptation to study what you could quantify and measure. Often that was a good way to go, but sometimes it led to exactly the opposite result of what you wanted – if you chose to optimize on the wrong objective. This was known in the trade as sub-optimization, and one case of that nearly led to disaster.

In the early days of World War II, the OR boffins were aimed at the problem of the Battle of the Atlantic. England’s survival depended on getting convoys through to the island nation. The Germans rightly believed that England could be blockaded and starved into submission. After all, Britain had done that to France in the Napoleonic wars. Germany had no surface fleet to challenge the British – and later American – fleets, but they did have submarines, and some very effective submarine tactics.

The OR boffins studied the situation and came up with optimum techniques for the escorts to use to sink submarines. In particular the trick was not to attack too early after an air sighting of a surfaces sub. Hang on until you vector an escort ship to the scene then have a coordinate air-sea attack. That gave the best probability for sinking the sub. It worked, too. The number of subs sunk went up. The problem was that the number of cargo ships sunk by the subs went up, too.

The problem was that they had chosen the wrong measure to optimize. After all, the goal was not to sink subs. The real goal was to get cargo ships through the submarine wolf packs.

That, as it turned out, required entirely different tactics. The best tactic to get the convoy through was to attack immediately, and once the enemy sub was submerged forget about it and look for others. Make them stay under water, because by far the most effective attacks were done from the surface, particularly at night. A sub firing a torpedo from the surface had a far higher chance of hitting the target than it did from a submerged release.

And once the boffins figured this out and applied the new strategy, the number of submarines sunk went down and down, but the tonnage of cargo that got through grew. And the battle was won.

I

It’s getting towards time when I have to do the Triangulation interview with Leo so I’ll continue this another time. My point is that we need to choose the proper goals for education before we start changing the system. If the goal is to expose the maximum number of young people to a curriculum you get one result. If the goal is, as Gates once thought, to give every young person in America “a world class university prep education” you get a different result, and indeed, since achieving the goal is demonstrably impossible no matter how many severely challenged children you “mainstream”, you may in fact achieve the result of fewer people receiving a world class university prep education, and fewer receiving a world class college prep education, and fewer learning any skills they can actually use to do jobs they are capable of doing, and — but you get the idea.

The magic of measurement and small feed back loops must not be neglected. It’s terribly important. But what you measure and what you optimize depends on many factors. Taken as a call to find real measures of progress in the education system Gates’s essay is important; but it is all to easy to suboptimize and sometimes suboptimization can be disastrous.