As one can surmise from the previous test posts, I've been trying (after three quarters of a year) to fix the problems with my Movable Type installation.
I went to one of the providers listed at MT as consultants, to try to get some help (unnamed, to protect the guilty). They have been somewhat helpful, in that they have eliminated possibilities of what the problem might be, but they haven't actually determined what the problem is ($150 later, and asking for more).
But that's not the point. The point is the (to me) user hostility of their system.
When I get an email from them, it comes in the following form:
====== WHEN REPLYING DELETE THIS LINE AND EVERYTHING BELOW IT ======
[message from unnamed service...]
In my first response, I ignored it, and just replied below (as I always do, since as a long-time emailer, I bottom post to response).
The response was:
====== WHEN REPLYING DELETE THIS LINE AND EVERYTHING BELOW IT ======
HiYour reply was blank. I'm assuming this is because you were trying to quote
me instead of deleting everything and then replying. Please give it a try
again by deleting all the original text.
Oh. OK.
They were serious.
They were determined to allow nothing that they emailed me to be quoted in my response. And moreover, even if I top posted, they didn't want to see their response in my response.
Is it just me, or are they nuts?
Here was my second email in response to this absurd and deliberate policy (the first was minimal, and unreplied to):
One other point. Do you realize how annoying it is to:
1) not include my response in your response and2) make me jump through hoops to include your response in mine?
Not to mention top posting (though in this case, it's almost meaningless to distinguish between top and bottom posting).
WHY DO YOU DO THIS?
Do you think that it enhances the customer relationship?
This alone is almost enough to make me want to write off my current investment in you as a bad one, and find someone who can help me without being such an email PITA.
The response?
Please help us understand why you feel like you should always include our response with ours? Our web based desk records everything, including our responses so we don't need to see it multiple times. This creates duplicate records.
We work with thousands of customers and didn't see this as a problem before.
Here is my response:
Please help us understand why you feel like you should always include our response with ours? Our web based desk records everything, including our responses so we don't need to see it multiple times. This creates duplicate records. ==========================================================Yes, because bandwidth for a few lines of text is so expensive...
It is important because I would like to have some context for what I'm responding to, and you should have some context for what you're responding to, in the email to which you're responding. If I want to find out what we're talking about, I have to go back and dig into my outbox, to figure out WTF we're talking about. If you don't find this annoying, I don't frankly understand why. If you don't want excessive repetition, just delete the older stuff. That's how it worked on Usenet for years.
===========================================================
We work with thousands of customers and didn't see this as a problem before.
===========================================================Then you must have worked with thousands of top-posting morons raised on Outlook and AOL, and who only know how to upload to blogs with FTP, thus opening themselves to attack. It drives old-timers like me, familiar with old-school email and Usenet, NUTS.
I have never before run into a system that MADE IT DIFFICULT (AND ATTEMPTED TO MAKE IT IMPOSSIBLE, EVEN WARNED RESPONDENTS NOT TO DO IT) TO QUOTE AN EMAIL IN RESPONSE. This is a new, and infuriating system to me.Can you point me to anyone else who has deliberately and maliciously set up their email responses this way, because it is a novel and off-putting approach, that has been making me angry with each exchange? I've been sort of happy with you, in that you seem to be attempting to help, even though you have made no progress whatsoever in solving my problem, other than telling me what it isn't, but you can't imagine how frustrating this is. Deliberately attempting (in futility, obviously) to make it impossible to include context of email responses is, to me, insane.
That's where it stands at this point. Who is nuts?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:20 PMRemember that civics test? Well, this should inspire confidence in our political "leadership":
US elected officials scored abysmally on a test measuring their civic knowledge, with an average grade of just 44 percent, the group that organized the exam said Thursday.Ordinary citizens did not fare much better, scoring just 49 percent correct on the 33 exam questions compiled by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI).
But they did fare better. What does this say about our so-called "elites"? Forget about a literacy test for voters. How about one for candidates?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:14 AMI scored 32 out of 33 on this test (I missed the last one--Doh!). Unfortunately, most people don't do that well.
I really think that we should bring back literacy tests for voting. They shouldn't have gotten rid of them because they were being used to racially discriminate--they should have just ended the racial discrimination.
[Friday evening update]
I have to say that readers of my blog, even the non-USians (or at least the ones commenting), are way ahead of the curve. Nice to know.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:11 AM...to the charlatans like Jim Hansen. Here are two useful books. First, Cool It
Yup. As many reviewers note, "climate change" isn't really about science--it's just the latest ideology to come along for the collectivists to use in their latest attempt to bend us to their will.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:42 AMI have thoughts on "Change!" and free markets this morning, over at PJM.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:14 AMNever before have so many been so proud of so little:
The findings, published in the November issue of Psychological Science, support the idea that the "self-esteem" movement popular among today's parents and teachers may have gone too far, the study's co-author said.
"What this shows is that confidence has crossed over into overconfidence," said Jean Twenge, an associate professor of psychology at San Diego State University.She believes that decades of relentless, uncritical boosterism by parents and school systems may be producing a generation of kids with expectations that are out of sync with the challenges of the real world.
"High school students' responses have crossed over into a really unrealistic realm, with three-fourths of them expecting performance that's effectively in the top 20 percent," Twenge said.
Don't they realize that half of them are below median intelligence? Probably not, because they got an "A" in math, even though they didn't understand it.
One of the perverse and tragic problems with incompetence is that it generally includes an inability to recognize it.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:16 AMI don't generally think much of Chris Hedges, and the comments are nutty, but I largely agree with this piece:
The illiterate and semi-literate, once the campaigns are over, remain powerless. They still cannot protect their children from dysfunctional public schools. They still cannot understand predatory loan deals, the intricacies of mortgage papers, credit card agreements and equity lines of credit that drive them into foreclosures and bankruptcies. They still struggle with the most basic chores of daily life from reading instructions on medicine bottles to filling out bank forms, car loan documents and unemployment benefit and insurance papers. They watch helplessly and without comprehension as hundreds of thousands of jobs are shed. They are hostages to brands. Brands come with images and slogans. Images and slogans are all they understand. Many eat at fast food restaurants not only because it is cheap but because they can order from pictures rather than menus. And those who serve them, also semi-literate or illiterate, punch in orders on cash registers whose keys are marked with symbols and pictures. This is our brave new world.
Can democracy survive for long, with such an electorate? Of course, he doesn't finger the primary culprit--our fascist public school system which manufactures exactly the sort of people who will keep it in power.
[Late afternoon update]
Are individualists losing the IQ war with the left?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:04 AMThe Obama campaign has been lying about its donor base:
If, as Obama says, most donations are grassroots and in small amounts, the numbers do not match up. If this many people donated to his campaign he would be polling at well over 50%.
In a grassroots movement, you smell the green. He's raised $600 million, as you say, in small donations. So divide it by ten bucks apiece and there's 60 million donors. If 120 million people vote on Tuesday, and he gets 50% that equals ...60 million voters! Honestly, you cynical rightwing losers, what's so suspicious about that math?
On Fox Newswatch on Saturday, Jane Hall said that many of her (journalism) students couldn't even calculate a percent. Of course, in this case, they're not motivated to figure it out, even if they know how.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:59 AMSarah Palin is righteously demanding that the LA Times release the tape, but look at this transcript:
...she saved her hardest criticism for the newspaper that currently holds the tape, saying they was refusing to release it to aid Obama.
"It must be nice for a candidate to have major news organizations looking after his best interests like that," Palin said. "In this case, we have a newspaper willing to throw aside even the public's right to know in order to protect a candidate that its own editorial board has endorsed. And if there's a Pulitzer Prize category for excelling in cow-towing, then the L.A. Times, you're winning."
I'm pretty sure that the paper has never towed a cow. And she didn't say that it did. She said that they kowtowed. But I guess neither the writer or editor (if there was one) knew what that word meant or at least how it was spelled.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:55 AMThat's what a bachelors degree has become.
I'd like to see those statistics broken down by major, though.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:36 AMTo get past the gatekeepers.
I put up a(n admittedly semi-snarky) comment at Keith Cowing's place yesterday, and he chose not to publish it (his comments section is moderated) for whatever reason. His blog, his call.
It was in response to "NASAAstronomer's" comment that:
...if McCain and Palin win, we'll be teaching creationism in our science classes, so how likely is it that space science will get funded?
My (unpublished until now) response:
Yes.
Right. I'm sure that will be one of their first acts, to mandate the teaching of creationism in science classes.Can you explain to me how that works exactly? Will it be an executive order, or what?
This kind of Palin derangement is amazing. Lileks noticed it, too:
Here's your Sarah Palin overreaction of the day. Presumably she took out the entrails, dried them, and used them to lynch librarians. It's really obvious, isn't it? She wants to kill Lady Liberty and all she represents. The plane is included in the picture because she personally shoots polar bears from above, like she's GOD OR SOMETHING. The comments have the usual reasoned evaluations - she's a PSYCHO, a LUNATIC. That picture is so sad and so true.
I don't know if anyone's stated the obvious yet, but this might be the first time people have become unhinged in advance over a vice-presidential candidate. Not to say some aren't painting McCain as something the devil blurted out in a distracted moment during his daily conference call with Cheney, but a Veep? It took a while for people to believe that Cheney commissioned private snuff films with runaways dressed up to resemble a portion of the Bill of Rights, but Palin is She-Wolf of the Tundra right off the bat. And god help us she can use email, which means she will control the government. The most Spy ever did with Quayle was stick him in a dunce hat. By the time we reach the election Oliphant will probably draw Palin sodomizing by an oil derrick with guns for arms. I have to confess: I think Palin is an interesting politician, but the people she's driving batty are much more fascinating.Imagine twelve years of this.
Yes.
Well, we've survived eight years of BDS. I suspect that we'll pull through a swamp of PDS.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:07 AMGeorge Will has more on economic ignorance:
The indignant student, who had first gone to Home Depot for a flashlight, says it "didn't try to rip us off." It was, however, out of flashlights. Ruth suggests that the reason Big Box had flashlights was that its prices were high. If prices were left at regular levels, the people who would have got the flashlights would have been those who got to the store first. With the higher prices, "someone who had candles at home decided to do without the flashlight and left it there for you on the shelf." Neither Home Depot nor the student who was angry at Big Box had benefited from Home Depot's price restraint.
Capitalism, Ruth reminds him, is a profit and loss system.Corfam--Du Pont's fake leather that made awful shoes in the 1960s--and the Edsel quickly vanished. But, Ruth notes, "the post office and ethanol subsidies and agricultural price supports and mediocre public schools live forever." They are insulated from market forces; they are created, in defiance of those forces, by government, which can disregard prices, which means disregarding the rational allocation of resources. To disrupt markets is to tamper with the unseen source of the harmony that is all around us.The spontaneous emergence of social cooperation--the emergence of a system vastly more complex, responsive and efficient than any government could organize--is not universally acknowledged or appreciated. It discomforts a certain political sensibility, the one that exaggerates the importance of government and the competence of the political class.
Yes, an exaggeration that is reinforced by the propaganda inculcated into people by government schools.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:08 PMGeorge Bush's announcement this morning that the administration was concerned about "gouging" reminded me of why I wish that we'd had better options in the last two elections (and still do). I expect that kind of nonsense from Democrats, but you'd think that someone who was supposedly a businessman would know better. Or perhaps he does, and is just pandering. I'm not sure which is worse.
Every time we have a natural disaster like this, this idiotic topic comes up, and we once again have to explain Econ 101 to the products of our public school system, probably in futility. This time, it's Rich Hailey's turn.
Here's what I wrote about it a three years ago, in the wake of Katrina.
[Update late morning]
Jeez, I thought that David Asman was smarter than that. Now he's telling Fox viewers to take pictures of stations with high gas prices so that they can be reported to authorities. It's hard for me to believe that Neal Cavuto would do that.
[Another update a minute or so later]
You know, I think that this is an explanation for socialism and collectivism's continuing grip on the public mind, despite its long history of unending failure. There's just something in human psychology to which it naturally appeals, and rationality just can't break through. It just "feels" unfair for prices to go up in an emergency, regardless of the demonstrably bad consequences of attempting to legislate them.
[Late afternoon update]
Shannon Love explains how the gas station business works:
I'll say it one more time for those who can't be bothered to actually ask someone who owns a gas station. Gas stations set prices for the gas they sell today based on the wholesale price of the gas they will have to buy to replace it. Get it? The price you pay for a gallon today is the cost of the gallon the station will have buy to replace the one you just bought.
Gas stations sell gas at or near cost, so if they did not use replacement pricing any sudden spike in gas prices would shut them down and you couldn't get any gas. I simply do not know why our public and private talking heads cannot understand and communicate this simple fact.
Because either they don't know it, or they think that people don't want to hear it. They operate on razor-thin margins, and can't afford to hand out subsidized gas as charity, even if that wouldn't screw up the market. And note, for those who say it's "big oil" that is "maximizing profits" in the face of a national emergency, even if that were true (it's not) "big oil" isn't threatened with jail for "gouging." It's the gas station owner, who has no control over his wholesale gas costs. So people who demand that we crack down on gougers are essentially demanding that the station operators either operate at a loss, or pay fines, or go to jail. I don't know why anyone would want to be in that business in the face of so much public ignorance about it.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:47 AM(Democrat) Sandra Tsing Lo writes that the Obamas should have been more supportive of their local school system:
it is with huge grief-filled disappointment that I discovered that the Obamas send their children to the University of Chicago Laboratory School (by 5th grade, tuition equals $20,286 a year). The school's Web site quotes all that ridiculous John Dewey nonsense about developing character while, of course, isolating your children from the poor. A pox on them and, while we're at it, a pox on John Dewey! I'm sick to death of those inspirational Dewey quotes littering the Web sites of $20,000-plus-a-year private schools, all those gentle duo-tone-photographed murmurings about "building critical thinking and fostering democratic citizenship" in their cherished students, living large on their $20,000-a-year island.
Meanwhile, Joseph Biden, the Amtrak senator, standing up boldly for the right to be a Roman Catholic, appears to have sent all three children to the lovely looking Archmere Academy in Delaware. Archmere's Web site notes some public school districts allow Archmere students to use public school buses. Well, isn't that great -- your tax dollars at work in the great state of Delaware because with $18,000 a year in tuition, they can't afford their own buses.
Public schools are for the little people, to be run as the teachers' unions desire, and according to John Dewey's toxic design.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:30 AMPeter Wood has an essay on the effects of our culture on science education.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:00 PMThe (modern) difference between science and the humanities.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:25 AMIs the Internet changing the way we think?
Over the past few years I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn't going--so far as I can tell--but it's changing. I'm not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I'm reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I'd spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That's rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
It's anecdotal, but I've noticed the same thing. I used to read many more books (and magazines, such as The Economist) than I do now. Almost all of my reading occurs on line, and I am much less able to focus than I used to be. But it's not clear whether this is an effect of aging, or new habits. More the latter, I suspect.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:38 AM"Messrs. Obama and McCain both reveal a disturbing animus toward free markets and success."
Indeed.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:22 AMHere's a depressing piece on people who shouldn't be in college but, due to various societal pressures, are.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:19 AMI hadn't thought about it before until I saw this post by Kate Woodbury, but it's because blog posts contain a lot of the words "I" and "me."
Since "no first-person" inevitably results in bad writing (an overabundance of passive voice; the use of "one" or "student" instead of "I"), I always tell my students, "You may use first-person in my class. In other classes, check with the instructor."
I never thought much about WHY teachers were telling students this. I vaguely remember someone telling me not to use first-person, and I vaguely remember ignoring that someone; other than that, it didn't seem like an important issue.However, I recently discovered at least one reason teachers ban first-person: prevented from using first-person, students will set aside me-centered thinking and use credible evidence; that is, rather than saying, "I think this, thus it is true," students will write, "According to expert X . . ."
I don't buy this argument; in fact, I think banning first-person usage ends up doing more damage than good. If the problem is the lack of expert/credible sources in students' writing, not using first-person doesn't solve the problem; it just covers it up. After all, a first-person's account could be more credible than an "expert's" account. I'd much rather read a student's personal/eyewitness account of 9/11 than a thousand third-person conspiracy theories.
The key is in the first sentence. Being forced to write in third person often results in stilted, boring prose. Unfortunately, the modern journalistic ethos, probably hammered into them in J-School, is that "objective" news stories must be written third person. This is why good bloggers (even taking away the bias) write far better and more readable pieces, than most conventional journalists. They don't have to do it with one "I" tied behind their back.
[Via her post on liberal fascism and Calvinism]
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:10 AMA travelogue by Lileks:
The plot was hugely ironical: Timon and Roomba or whatever the warthog is named were building a resort in the jungle, and damning a stream to create a water feature. Simba showed up to demonstrate the error of their ways. The hilarity of any manifestation of the Disneyverse criticizing an artificial lake to build a resort goes without saying. And it did go without saying, of course. Simba said that Timon and Roomba or whatever were acting like another creature that did not behave in tune with nature, and that creature was . . . man.
BOO HISS, I guess. Jaysus, I tire of this. Big evil stupid man had done many stupid evil bad things, like pile abandoned cars in the river, dump chemicals into blue streams, and build factories that vomited great dark clouds into the sky. Like the People's State Lead Paint and Licensed Mickey Merchandise Factory in Shanghai Province, perhaps? Simba gave us a lecture about materialism and how it hurt the earth - cue the shot of trees actually being chopped down, and I'm surprised the sap didn't spurt like blood in a Peckinpah movie - and other horrors, like forests on fire because . . . well, because it was National Toss Glowing Coals Out the Car Window Month, I guess. I swear the footage all came from the mid-70s; it was grainy and cracked and the cars were all late-60s models. Because I'm pretty sure we're not dumping cars into the rivers as a matter of course any more. You're welcome to try to leave your car on the riverbank and see how that turns out for you.At the end Timon and Phoomba decided to open a green resort, and everything's hakuna Montana.
Follow the link for the rest of the story.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:13 AMNot much, apparently.
It really does make it hard to justify their tuition. They should be giving out, and paying for a lot more scholarships.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:37 PMIn his Senate testimony, Frederick Tarantino, head of USRA, made the following interesting recommendation:
I also want to bring to the subcommittee's attention an exciting new way in which university-led experiments with hands-on training could be boosted by NASA involvement. Within the next few years, suborbital commercial vehicles being developed by such companies as Virgin Galactic, XCOR Aerospace, Armadillo Aerospace, and Blue Origin, will provide a unique way to engage scientists and researchers. NASA has already taken the first step by issuing a request for information to help in the formulation of a Suborbital Scientist Participant Pilot Program.
By providing the opportunity for researchers and even undergraduate students to fly into space along with their experiments, not only can new experiments be conducted, but the opportunity can inspire students to engage in the math, science, and engineering. The participatory approach of the personal spaceflight industry means each suborbital launch can be experienced by thousands of people, with young people able to tune in and watch live video from space as their professors and fellow students conduct experiments in real time and experience weightlessness and the life-changing view of the earth from space. The hands-on experience will create a new generation of Principal Investigators who will be prepared to lead the flagship science and human exploration missions, later in their careers.These new vehicles will provide low-cost access to the space environment for scientific experiments and research. The market rate for these services has already been set by the space tourist market at $100,000-$200,000 per seat, a much lower cost than existing sounding rockets.
We believe the commercial potential here could be energized by the participation of our space agency. USRA requests the subcommittee authorize NASA to follow through on the request for information by establishing the Suborbital Scientist Participant Pilot Program and issuing a NASA Research Announcement soliciting investigations. This will create a university research payloads market for these emerging commercial operations, provide a new way for university researchers to conduct experiments with student involvement and hands-on-training, and bring the involvement of NASA, and its imprimatur, to an exciting new U.S. industry.
Let's hope that the staffers were paying attention.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:54 AMThere were some shots fired at Florida Atlantic University (two or three miles from my house) at a party last night. In what's obviously a ridiculous and gross overreaction to the Virginia Tech massacre, classes have been cancelled, the entire campus has been locked down, and twenty-five hundred students are now essentially prisoners in their dorms.
How long will this go on? Who knows? It could be days before they find the perp (no one was killed, and one person was wounded, and it's not even clear that the wound was from the gun), and they may never do so.
Florida is a shall-issue state, but I suspect that the school (like most) foolishly bans guns on campus (which obviously worked so well last night). Unfortunately, despite the fact that all the students are adults, and there's no reason to think that the shooter has any intention to shoot people on campus, they are being treated like children, deprived of the means to defend themselves, and locked away in their rooms. It's a continuation of the infantilization of society, and the growth of the nanny state. Obviously, the authorities are worried about being accused of not being sufficiently solicitous of the safety of the students, but apparently they don't believe that their liberty has any value. They need to understand that they have to have some balance. If I were one of those students, I'd bring suit for false imprisonment.
[Update an hour or so later]
I just heard that the police are "searching Boca Raton" for the gunman. So they're not restricting their search to campus? I'm only three miles or so from campus. Why haven't they come down my street and locked us in our houses? He could be anywhere. Why restrict it to campus?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:43 AMDerb has some thoughts:
As so often with creationist material, I'm not sure what the point is. Darwin's great contribution to human knowledge, his theory of the origin of species, is either true, or it's not. Is David saying: "When taken up by evil people, the theory had evil consequences. Therefore the theory must be false"? Is he asserting, in other words, that a true theory about the world could not possibly have evil consequence, no matter who picked it up and played with it, with no matter how little real understanding? Does David think that true facts cannot possibly be used for malign purposes? If that is what David is asserting, it seems to me an awfully hard proposition to defend. It is a true fact that E = mc2, and the Iranians are right at this moment using that true fact to construct nuclear weapons. If they succeed, and use their weapons for horrible purposes, will that invalidate the Special Theory of Relativity?
If David does not think that Darwin's explanation for the origin of species is correct, let him give us his reasons; or better yet, an alternative explanation that we can test by observation. That a wicked man invoked Darwin's name as an excuse to do wicked things tells us nothing, nada, zero, zippo, zilch about the truth content of Darwin's ideas.
I always have to scratch my head at conservatives who are perfectly comfortable with Adam Smith's invisible hand when it comes to markets, but can't get their heads around the concept of emergent properties in the development of life. And of course, the opposite is true for liberalsfascists.
[Evening update]
Jonah Goldberg has more defense of Darwin (and Einstein). Bottom line, with which I agree:
Nazism was reactionary in that it sought to repackage tribal values under the guise of modern concepts. So was Communism. So are all the statist and collectivism isms. The only truly new and radical political revolution is the Lockean one. But, hey, I've got a book on all this stuff.
He does indeed
I've been very disappointed in my alma mater, in its continuing racist efforts to give preferences to students not on the content of their character or quality of their academics, but purely on the color of their skin, not to mention its defiance of the law and Supreme Court rulings against this egregious behavior. It now turns out that, in an ongoing effort to continue to illegally discriminate, it has been withholding data and lying to the courts:
Before the UM clamped down on CIR's request for data, Sander was able to confirm his earlier finding that the undergraduate system may have produced fewer harms than the law school system. For one thing, the newly-produced data showed that a substantial number of minorities with strong credentials attend the UM undergraduate college. These students could have been admitted without any consideration of race and presumably resisted offers from more competitive schools to attend the UM. It was thus possible for Sander to compare, for the first time, the academic records of UM undergraduate minorities who did not receive a racial preference with those who undoubtedly did.
According to Sander, there were dramatic differences between the two groups. Undergraduate blacks at the UM who were admitted without a preference had a graduation rate of 93% -- higher than the rate for comparable white students, and far higher than the graduation rate of the school as a whole. In stark contrast, UM undergraduate blacks who received a preference had a graduation rate of 47%. If Sander is right, it raises a real question whether this latter group benefited from the UM's heavy use of race or whether they would not have had better academic outcomes at less prestigious schools.While Judge Lawson now has dismissed the case, the reason probably has less to do with the law and more to do with the what the evidence was starting to show about the real harms of the preferential admissions policies followed for years by the UM and other schools. For the time being, Judge Lawson has sidelined the effort to get a full decade's worth of data as part of this litigation. But given what even three years worth of data seems to show, schools like Michigan will find it increasingly difficult to keep this data secret. If even the "holistic" use of race makes it difficult for minority students to compete academically, the moral and legal imperative to publicize and analyze this information becomes great.
This has done a real, damaging disservice to the minorities in whose supposed interest these misguided programs were designed. Instead of going to a school better suited to their abilities and succeeding, many of them flunk out in the face of the stiff competition in Ann Arbor or, if they make it through, fail the bar, when they may have been successful lawyers going to a second-tier law school. Of course, I suspect that the response of the geniuses who came up with this scheme would be to insist that they be given additional bar scores for their skin color to level the field...
In any event...
All of this is a far cry from last January when Mary Sue Coleman, Governor Granholm and the rest of the political establishment said they would keep Prop. 2 tied up in legal knots for years. While BAMN's decision to sue seemed like a good idea last year, it's a good idea that turned into their worst nightmare. Too bad for them.
Don't look for any boo hoos from me. This seems like poetic justice.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:53 AMAcademia has already been greatly damaged by post-modernists and an extreme leftist bias over the past few decades, but fortunately math and science have been spared, to date. Those days may be coming to an end, though, as Christina Hoff Sommers warns about the potential Title IXing of science, based (ironically) on shoddy science (similar to the "comparable worth" myth).
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:03 AMLet's hope so. A key point that the author misses, though, is that one doesn't really learn anything in them, other than how to report things. It's a metadegree, like a degree in education (though not quite as bad).
One of the reasons that much reporting is so bad, and that many bloggers can run circles around so-called journalists, is that they actually have knowledge to impart, and they can usefully analyze events in a way that a generalist, or "journalist," simply can't.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:11 AMLiterally. There are icebergs in Lake Michigan. Must be global warming.
Hope they aren't a problem for the whales.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:43 PMLileks has some thoughts:
Of course, home-schooling Bolsheviks will have less reason to complain soon. "This bill would delete provisions that prohibit a teacher giving instruction in a school from teaching communism with the intent to indoctrinate or to inculcate in the mind of any pupil a preference for communism." Apparently the teacher's right to teach Communism trumps your right to school your kid yourself.
What a world. Sometimes, when I look at the educational system here--primary, secondary, college--I wonder if we really won the Cold War.
[Update mid morning]
Apparently the LA Times got the story wrong (What! Say it ain't so!) about not allowing unaccredited parents to home school, so the situation in California is not as dire as originally thought in regard to home schoolers.
Maybe it was just wishful thinking on the part of the Times' reporter and editor, since that paper has long been in the tank for the teachers' union.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:48 AMScientists now have a plausible, and likely theory for what created the Burgess Shale:
By looking over hundreds of micro-thin slices of rock taken from the famous shales, the researchers have reconstructed the series of catastrophic underwater landslides of "mud-rich slurry" that killed tens of thousands of marine animals representing hundreds of species, then sealed them instantly - and enduringly - in a deep-sea tomb.The mass death was "not a nice way to go, perhaps, but a swift one - and one that guaranteed immortality (of a sort) for these strange creatures," said University of Leicester geochemist Sarah Gabbott, lead author of a study published in the U.K.-based Journal of the Geological Society.
I use the scare quote because that's the word used in the headline. This kind of language, I think, is (at least partly) what bothers people who continue to rebel against evolution, and science. It is a certainty of language (like "fact," rather than "theory") that they consider hubristic, and arrogant. After all, when Sherlock Holmes "solved" a case, it generally was the last word, case closed.
In this case, what the word means is that scientists have come up with a plausible explanation for an event for which they'd been struggling to come up with one for a long time, and it is sufficiently plausible that there are few scientists who argue against it, thus presenting a consensus. Does it mean that they have "proven" that this is what happened? No. As I've written many times, science is not about proving things--scientists leave that to the mathematicians. What scientists do (ideally) is to posit theories that are both reasonable and disprovable, yet remain undisproved.
There may be some other explanation for what happened up in what is now Yoho National Park that corresponds better to what really happened, but until someone comes up with one that makes more sense, or comes up with some inconvenient indisputable fact that knocks this one down, it (like evolution itself) is what most scientists, particularly the ones who study such things for a living, will believe.
And of course, I won't even get started on how upset some anti-science (and yes, that's what they are, even if they don't recognize it) types will get over the statement that one of the ancestors of humans is in that shale.
[Update a few minutes later]
Oh, the main point about which I put up this post. This is an excellent illustration of how rare are the circumstances in which we find the keys to our biological past. Those that demand that we cannot know the history of life until every creature has died on the body of its parents, perfectly preserved, are being unreasonable. To paraphrase Don Rumsfeld, we do science with the (rare) evidence that we have, not the evidence we'd like to have. There will always be many huge holes in the fabric of the evidence, barring the development of a time machine to the past. We simply do the best we can with what we have, and put together theories that best conform to it. To say that God (or whoever) did it isn't science--it's just a cop out. And that is true completely independently from the existence (or not) of God (or whoever).
Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:11 PMIn light of the decision of my current home state, Florida, to teach evolution as "only a theory" (as though there's something wrong with that), I thought that I'd repost a post from early on in the blog. You can no longer comment on it there, but you can here, if anyone is inclined. Here is the repost:
========================
The Jury Is In
In a post last week, amidst a lot of discussion of evolution, Orrin Judd made the mistaken claim that evolution is not a falsifiable theory (in the Popperian sense), and that (even more bizarrely and egregiously) defenders of it thought that this strengthened it.
On a related note, he also added to his list of questions about evolution a twelfth one: What would it take to persuade me that evolution was not the best theory to explain life? What evidence, to me, would disprove it? I told him that it was a good question, and that I'd ponder it.
Well, I did ponder it, and here is my response.
First of all, the theory is certainly falsifiable (again, in the theoretical Popperian formulation). If I were coming to the problem fresh, with no data, and someone proposed the theory of evolution to me, I would ask things like:
Does all life seem to be related at some level?
Is there a mechanism by which small changes can occur in reproduction?
Does this mechanism allow beneficial changes?
Can these changes in turn be passed on to the offspring?
Is there sufficient time for such changes to result in the variety of phenotypes that we see today?
There are other questions that could be asked as well, but a "No" answer to any of the above would constitute a falsification of the theory. Thus the theory is indeed falsifiable, as any useful scientific theory must be.
The problem is not that the theory isn't falsifiable, but that people opposed to evolution imagine that the answer to some or all of the above questions is "No," and that the theory is indeed false.
But to answer Orrin's question, at this point, knowing the overwhelming nature of the existing evidentiary record, no, I can't imagine any new evidence that would change my mind at this point. Any anomalies are viewed as that, and an explanation for them is to be looked for within the prevailing theory.
And lest you think me close minded, consider an analogy. An ex-football player's wife is brutally murdered, with a friend. All of the evidence points to his guilt, including the DNA evidence. There is little/no evidence that points to anyone else's guilt. Had I been on the jury that decided that case, it would have at least hung. I might have even persuaded a different verdict, but that's unlikely, because I'm sure that the jury had members who were a) predisposed to acquit regardless of the evidence and/or b) incapable of critical thinking and logic, as evidenced by post-trial interviews with them.
But for me to believe that ex-football player innocent, I would have to accept the following (which was in fact the defense strategy):
"I know that some of the evidence looks bad for my client, but he was framed. And I can show that some of the evidence is faulty, therefore you should throw all of it out as suspect. I don't have an alternate theory as to who did the murders, but that's not my job--I'm just showing that there's insufficient evidence to prove that my client did it. Someone else did it--no one knows who--it doesn't matter. And that someone else, or some other someone else, also planted evidence to make it look like my client did it. It might be the most logical conclusion to believe that my client did it, but that would be wrong--the real conclusion is that it is a plot to confuse, and it just looks like he did it. Therefore you shouldn't believe the evidence."
Is this a compelling argument? It was to some of the jury members. And it apparently is to people who don't want to believe that life could evolve as a random, undirected process.
The only way that I could believe that OJ Simpson is innocent at this point would be for someone else to come forward, admit to the crime, and explain how he planted all of the abundant evidence that indicated Orenthal's guilt.
The equivalent for evolution, I guess, would be for God (or whoever) to reveal himself to me in some clear, unambiguous, and convincing fashion, and to tell me that he planted the evidence. At which point, of course, science goes right out the window.
But absent that, the evidence compels me to believe that OJ Simpson murdered his wife (as it did a later jury in the civil suit), and the evidence compels me to believe that evolution is as valid a theory as is universal gravitation.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:40 PMHere we have something that might happen more often than you think: a retired teacher who was illiterate until the age of forty eight:
"When I was a child I was just sort of just moved along when I got to high school I wanted to participate in athletics. At that time in high school I went underground. I decided to behave myself and do what it took. I started cheating by turning in other peoples' paper, dated the valedictorian, and ran around with college prep kids," said Corcoran."I couldn't read words but I could read the system and I could read people," adds Corcoran.
He stole tests and pursuaded friends to complete his assignments. Corcoran earned an athletic scholarship to Texas Western College. He said his cheating intensified, claiming he cheated in every class.
"I passed a bluebook out the window to a friend I painstakingly copied four essay questions off the board in U.S. government class that was required, and hoped my friend would get it back to me with the right answers," Corcoran said.
In 1961, Corcoran graduated with a bachelor's degree in education, while still illiterate he contends. He then went on to become a teacher during a teacher shortage.
"When I graduated from the university, the school district in El Paso, where I went to school, gave almost all the college education graduates a job," said Corcoran.
What does this say about:
He isn't impressed:
In retrospect, Corcoran said, his deceit took him a long time to accept."As a teacher it really made me sick to think that I was a teacher who couldn't read. It is embarrassing for me, and it's embarrassing for this nation and it's embarrassing for schools that we're failing to teach our children how to read, write and spell!"
No kidding.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:02 AMI know that no one knows or cares any more, with that abomination known as "Presidents Day" (we're supposed to honor Millard Fillmore and Franklin Pierce along with Washington and Lincoln?), but today is Lincoln's birthday, something that we actually observed when I was a kid.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:44 AMI have to agree with Derb:
I've always liked Ben's stuff -- used to read his diary in The American Spectator way back in the 1970s. Smart, funny, worldly guy, with just that endearing streak of eccentricity. I'm sorry to see he's lost his marbles.
Me, too. Some conservatives have this very strange blind spot when it comes to evolution.
[Update a few minutes later]
Derb eviscerates Stein's thesis. As is usually the case, his attack on evolution (or as he calls it, "Darwinism") is founded on a profound ignorance of the subject.
[Late afternoon update]
Well, this is a heck of a way to celebrate the old man's 199th birthday:
Florida's department of education will vote next week on a new science curriculum that could be in jeopardy, because some conservative counties oppose it.Nine of Florida's 64 counties have passed resolutions over the last two months condemning the new curriculum that explicitly calls for teaching evolution. The resolutions, passed in heavily Christian counties in the state's northern reaches, demand that evolution be "balanced" with alternative theories, mainly creationist.
That's not really Florida. It's more like deep southern Georgia, culturally...
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:01 AMI'd been wondering about this. Apparently, computer "science" degrees are no longer teaching computer science. There's no doubt that there isn't as much demand for actual CS types as there is for programmers, but if that's the case, they should shrink the CS departments and start up a different one, perhaps called computer applications, to teach the programmers. As it is now, I'd consider it academic fraud.
This is a generic problem, to me. The word "science" has gotten too watered down, even (especially?) in academia. Of course, it all started when someone came up with the oxymoronic major, political science...
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:22 AMIt's not as bad as "lose"/"loose," but I see quite a few people, including people who write for a living, mistakenly hyphenating "no one," as in "No-one believes that." It looks very strange to my eye, and irritates me. Where does that come from?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:36 AMPerry de Havilland discusses the real issue in the creation-evolution wars, that never gets discussed, because it's taken as a given that the government will fund education:
I have no problem with people believing whatever wacko things they want (and for me that includes all religion), but the evolution vs. creationism debate should be a non political one and the only way that can ever be true is when the state is no longer involved in education.I think creationism is nuts and it makes me think less of Ron Paul that he has a religious objection to the theory of evolution. But frankly this should not be a matter for political concern and he at least is highly unlikely to force state schools to teach it (or anything else for that matter). The fact that it is a political matter shows something it very wrong and the correct 'something' that needs debating is not evolution, it is state schooling. Return all schooling to the private sector and the whole issue goes away from the political sphere. Let the market decide if there is demand for schools that teach creationism, I have no problem with that at all.
Nor do I.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:09 AMJonah Goldberg on the sad state of the American educational system:
A study earlier this year titled "Egos Inflating Over Time," led by Jean Twenge of San Diego State University, found that — you guessed it (Good for you!) — egos are inflating over time. They concluded that America's youth are the most self-absorbed since we began testing.Confirmation of Twenge's findings abound. CBS' 60 Minutes profiled the so-called Generation Y, which is so fond of itself that employers cannot keep up. These new employees demand to be told how wonderful they are. They want to hear that nobody has ever photocopied better. They want a gold star for getting coffee. This demonstrates that our new educational regimen is showing real-world results. Teach a kid that merely having a pulse is a major accomplishment, and he'll carry that lesson for the rest of his life. Teach him how to do trigonometry, and he'll forget it before his Xbox even warms up.
I think that this post is relevant in that regard.
True self esteem has to come from accomplishment, and from yourself. You can't get it from other people. That's why they call it "self" esteem.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:00 AMI was going to just link something, but after quite a Google search, I couldn't find a good explanation on line that focused on just this issue (I found lots of hits, but none of them satisfied). It's been bugging me for decades now (ever since I first went on line, and found so much misuse of the words). I don't know if it's a new phenomenon, or if we just see a lot more of it because we see a lot more people's written material. I also don't understand why it's so hard for some people to get right, though perhaps because of the "oo" sound in "lose." Anyway:
"Lose" = "to not win, or to misplace."
"Loose" = "not tight, or not bound."
"Loser" = "someone who has lost."
"Looser" = "making less tight (or more loose)."
"Losing" = "in the process of achieving a loss, of a sporting event, or political race, or valuable assets."
"Loosing" = "to set free (e.g., loosing the horses to let them run free, or loosing the dogs to chase a criminal)."
[Sunday update]
Behold, a blog devoted to needless quotation marks.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:48 PM
Not sure whether this is good, or bad (or even valid). Volokh's place is rated as Junior High.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:24 AMApparently academia is no longer satisfied with marinating students in a politically correct on-campus environment. Now they're being sent to the reeducation camps.
[Evening update]
John Leo has further thoughts:
The indoctrination program pushes students to accept the university's ideas on politics, race, sex, sociology, moral philosophy and environmentalism. The training is run by Kathleen Kerr, director of residential life, who reportedly considers it a "cutting-edge" program that can be exported to other universities around the country. Residential assistants usually provide services to residents and have light duties, such as settling squabbles among students. Kerr and her program are more ambitious. She has been quoted as saying that the job of RAs is to educate the whole human being with a "curricular approach to residential education." In this curricular approach, students are required to report their thoughts and opinions. One professor says: "You have to confess what you believe to the RA." The RAs write reports to their superiors on student progress in cooperating with the "treatment."The basic question about the program is how did they think they could ever get away with this?
Good question. But maybe, given the history of the past thirty years or so, it's not really surprising that they thought they could. And the depressing thing is that they still may.
The deeper follow-on question is: where are the parents, who are paying the bills for these atrocities against the Enlightenment? Maybe if the word gets out, they'll show up...
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:24 AMI hope so. I've alway thought it was a highly overrated degree.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:38 PMI just got an email. I don't in fact have time to answer all these questions, but perhaps some of my readers do. I think that the nation needs more engineers. I also think that it's sad that the nation doesn't seem to value them as much as it should, and that they're often treated particularly shabbily by the aerospace industry:
Hello,Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:39 PMMy name is Harley Wilkinson. I'm a student at Camdenton High School in Camdenton MO. I'm in a Project Lead The Way class and am writing a paper about a field of engineering. I was wondering if you would have the time to answer a few questions for me about your job and the training/education you needed.
1) What is an average day's work routine is like.
2) What is your particular job duties.
3) What were some of the more helpful college courses you took to prepare you.
4) Do you have any regrets of things you wished you would have done diffrently education wise.
5) As someone straight out of college what is the average starting salary.
6) What high school classes do you believe helped you the most.
If you would be able to take the time to answer these questions it would be greatly appreciated. If not I understand that your time is valuable.Thank You,
Harley Wilkinson
I'm not a conservative (but then, neither is Glenn Reynolds) and I've never been a big fan of Erwin Chemerinski (or at least his political views--I know nothing about him as a person), but I do agree that he was treated shabbily. Regardless of what Bill Quick thinks.
I think that non-"liberals" can sympathize with this kind of academic McCarthyism in a way that "liberals" cannot, because they rarely experience it.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:11 PMPeter Berkowitz has a proposal.
Unfortunately, with our current educational system, the problem starts long before students get to college.
[Mid-morning update]
Are we sending too many kids to college?
...the needless pressure to get educational credentials draws a large number of academically weak and intellectually disengaged students into college. All they want is the piece of paper that gets them past the screening. Most schools have quietly lowered their academic standards so that such students will stay happy and remain enrolled. Consequently, they seldom learn much — many employers complain that college graduates they hire can’t even write a coherent sentence — but most eventually get their degrees.
I think that this problem is related to the one above.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:37 AMCharles Murray thinks so. I don't have a strong opinion on it--I never took it.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:33 AMSome thoughts on writing, good and bad, from John Leo.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:49 AMHenry Cate notes in email that the latest Carnival of Homeschooling is the largest one yet, with over sixty links. Which makes me wonder--are homeschooling parents (and home schoolers) more likely to be bloggists?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:52 AMFrank Tipler says that not only are English majors no longer required to know Shakespeare, but physics majors are no longer required to know general relativity:
The basic reasons why modern physics is not covered in required courses are identical to the basic reasons why Shakespeare is not covered: (1) the faculty in both cases want to teach their narrow specialty rather than the basic courses in their field, (2) the faculty members in both cases no longer understand the basic material in their own field, (3) the faculty no longer believe there are fundamental truths in their own disciplines. I'm sure that many members of typical university’s English faculty no longer have a basic understanding of Shakespeare. How could they, if they themselves have never taken a course on Shakespeare? A degree in English is no longer a guarantee that the degree holder has a basic knowledge of Shakespeare or other great writers.Similarly, a degree in physics from an American university is no guarantee that the student with this degree understands basic physics. The physics faculty’s increasing ignorance of basic physics is starting to show up in their research, as I describe at length in my recent book, The Physics of Christianity (Doubleday, 2007). I show that, across all disciplines, a collapse of belief in Christianity over the past several decades among university faculty has been accompanied by a collapse in the belief that there is fundamental truth which should be imparted to students.
While I agree with him that there are some facets of any discipline that should be considered essential to it (for instance, I've long railed against the fact that it's possible to get a degree in aerospace engineering without knowing any orbital mechanics), I think that the problem that he's describing is a separate issue. Even if General Relativity is taught, it shouldn't be taught as a "fundamental truth." It's simply the best theory so far to explain observed gravitational phenomena. So I don't think that Christianity is the answer, but I agree that postmodernism in general is a corrosive influence in academia, apparently having afflicted even the hardest of hard sciences.
[Update at 5 PM EDT]
I should note for those who may not know, that Frank Tipler has been attempting for a while to develop a religion and teleology based on physics. I haven't read his books on the subject, so I can't say to what degree it is rooted in Christianity. I'd always assumed zero, so I actually found this editorial a little surprising.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:07 PMMy long-time (which is a better phrase than "old," as in, "known since college") friend Lynne Wainfan is trying to sell her children's middle school on upgrading their technology. She made a video.
I don't know about the New York Times comparison, though. Yeah, it may be more info than Jefferson got in his lifetime, but a lot of it's probably wrong or misleading.
Also, it's a little exaggerated--I don't think that half (or even a tiny fraction) of basic physics knowledge and math will go obsolete in two years, and that's what kids in technical majors in college spend most of their time learning. But the point remains that things are accelerating at a frightening pace, and the educational system is going to have to do things differently, or the future will be very scary. Of course, it may be anyway, for other reasons. But either way, it's where we're going to be spending the rest of our lives (yes, I know it's trite, but it's true).
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:06 AMAt least the boys (though perhaps the girls as well). Horrible History.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:18 AM...and idiots. Univeristy [sic] idiots.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:57 AMThe wonderland that is Durham continues. I have the same question as the commenters--what kind of a university would hire a loon like this to teach young people? Is this a problem unique to Duke, or does every university have such creatures among its professoriate? I fear the answer.
I hope that they take the pro bono offer in comments and sue him for slander.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:30 AMMove along, folks, no suppression of dissent to see here.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:11 PMI've seen stories that the killer had been diagnosed as autistic at age eight. Assuming that's true, while he clearly was functioning at a fairly high level, when you hear the stories of his academic behavior at college, one has to wonder--how did he get into VPI? What kind of high-school record did he have?
Was there some affirmative action going on here? (Kind of strange, if so, because usually Asians are disadvantaged by it.)
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:43 AMHow did this guy acquire such a hatred of "rich people"?
Surely it couldn't have had anything to do with the fact that he was under the tutelage of the English Department?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:06 PMHuh? Why would someone go to a polytechnic university to get a degree in English?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:33 AMThis looks like a good book for kids
I think I'll get it for my niece and nephew--I'd like them to understand what their grandparents went through. And I'm afraid they'll be too busy learning rain-forest algebra to pick up any actual history in public school.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:10 PMSomehow, I think that (too frequent) commenter Brian Swiderski would do quite well on the new SAT essay section.
[Via Jeff Goldstein]
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:12 AMIs that what the public school system is?
Today, schools promote anti-bullying strategies which encourage the goons to talk to their victims. They attach no blame to the perpetrators. Predictably, they are failing, according to the British children's charity Kidscape.Using this strategy the school forces the victim to provide a written statement describing how distressed he feels about the way he's been treated. He is then expected to read the statement to the good little boys who have derived pleasure from inflicting pain. This approach gives the thugs all the information they need to torture their victims even more.
One exasperated mother described the dismal results:
"They found out about my son's weaknesses, his feelings and his lack of confidence and had a field day bullying him and telling others. The bullying increased because the bullies knew he would not tell again after this devastating result."
In another instance a school principal refused to exclude a boy who had set fire to a young girl's hair. He was reluctant, he said, to single out a youngster who had "problems." Describing this junior arsonist as a youngster with problems is like saying that Jeffrey Dahmer had an eating disorder.
Maybe the girl with the flaming hair can resolve her feelings about being set on fire. Would anyone like to suggest that she talk to the psychological social worker?
Sure sounds like it to me.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:34 PMIncidents like this make me very glad that I don't teach at a university. There apparently really is no free speech on campus, any more, unless you hew to the postmodern PC platitudes.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:57 AMDavid Horowitz writes about the two Universities of Texas:
Graduate students in an Introduction to Women's and Gender Studies course, for example, are provided with a reading list that includes scores of texts written from a radical viewpoint. Only one text blatantly criticizes the radical feminist perspective. This is a book written by two founders of women's studies who subsequently left the field, because they felt it had become totally devoted to a political ideology to the point that its practitioners regularly denied scientific findings that conflicted with their political agendas.This is the way the course syllabus for the introductory class refers to the book: "Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge, professing feminism, passim (note that this represents anti-women's studies - prepare to refute it)." This is the instruction of a political ideologue, not an academic scholar.
This is one example, but a glance at other curricular offerings in this and related programs reveals similarly unprofessional agendas. Many of the professors who teach these courses are neither trained historians nor sociologists nor economists, yet the subject matter they teach will often be, such as courses on the history of radical movements, globalization, race or all three.
Communications and Social Change, taught by a professor of communications studies, is such a course. It has no academic rationale except to recruit students to the causes favored by its Marxist instructor: "After the historical survey of social movements, the second part of the course asks you to become involved as an observer and/or as a participant in a local social movement."
The course requires only two texts, naturally by two Marxists (Howard Zinn and UT's own Robert Jensen), both situated on the far left of the political spectrum. There's no harm in reading Zinn or Jensen, but a properly academic course would include their critics on the right and left.
There are enough such courses at the University of Texas that students can enroll in a degree-granting curriculum which has no academic component, but is a comprehensive training program in the theory and practice of radical politics.
How many parents are unwittingly contributing to their offspring's maleducation, and enabling the continuation of such nonsense, by paying the outrageous tuitions at institutions like this?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:04 AMThat's been my position for years, and Andrew Ferguson agrees, in this piece on the miserable state of math education in the US:
Mr. Levine's research shows that even the students themselves know how weak their programs are. Sixty-two percent of ed-school alumni say their training didn't prepare them to "cope with the realities of today's classrooms." Surveys show that school principals agree.What's to be done? A constructive fellow, Mr. Levine spends considerable time showing what works in the nation's exemplary education schools. There are some. The examples are so compelling they just might shame other universities into following their lead, removing a major obstacle to educational improvement in America.
Education schools, for example, shouldn't treat "education" as a major in itself. Good education schools, Mr. Levine finds, require their students to master a given subject — English or math — the way a normal English or math major would. Beyond this standard four-year course, good schools then add another year of instruction in how to teach the subject.
Yes. It's crazy to give people degrees in "teaching" that provide them with no actual knowledge to impart. I think that the same is true of a "journalism" degree. As I've proposed in the past, a huge federal education reform would be to simply cut off all funding for schools of "education."
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:25 AMNot only the public school system, but universities are failing to teach American history and civics.
Among college seniors, less than half--47.9%--correctly concluded that "We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal" was from the Declaration of Independence. More than half did not know that the Bill of Rights prohibits the governmental establishment of an official religion, and "55.4 percent could not recognize Yorktown as the battle that brought the American Revolution to an end" (more than one quarter believing that it was the Civil War battle of Gettysburg that had ended the Revolution).
Of course, a lot of these things they should have been taught in high school, but weren't.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:11 AMBy Arabs:
Arabism flies in the face of historical fact. Ethnic minorities in Lebanon, as throughout the Middle East, have suffered at the hands of Arabs since the Arab-Islamic invasions in the early Muslim period. Of the efforts of Arab regimes and their ideological supporters in the West to de-legitimize regional identities other than Arab, Walid Phares, a well-known professor of Middle East studies, has written: "[The] denial of identity of millions of indigenous non-Arab nations can be equated to an organized ethnic cleansing on a politico-cultural level." This tradition of culturally suppressing minorities is the wellspring of the linguistic imperialism regnant at Middlebury's Arabic Summer School.Yet healthier models for language instruction are easy to find. In the Anglophone world, Americans, Irish, Scots, New Zealanders, Australians, Nigerians, Kenyans, and others are native English-speakers, but not English. Can anyone imagine an English language class in which students are assumed to be Anglican cricket fans who sing "Rule Britannia," post maps showing Her Majesty's empire at its pre-war height, and prefer shepherd's pie and mushy peas? Yet according to the hyper-nationalists who run Middlebury's Arabic language programs, all speakers of Arabic are Arabs--case closed.
A leading Arabic language program shouldn't imbue language instruction with political philosophy. It should instead concentrate on teaching a difficult language well--on promoting linguistic ability, not ideological conformity. Academics should never intellectualize their politics and then peddle them to students under the guise of scholarship. Those who do may force a temporary dhimmitude on their student subjects, but in the end they only marginalize their field and themselves.
This is, in some ways, even more egregious than that loon up at Wisconsin who wanted to teach 9/11 conspiracy theories in a class on Islam, because it's actually much more insidious.
[Via Jonah Goldberg, who also writes today about the Swastika and the Scimitar]
President Bush undoubtedly didn’t have any of this in mind when he dubbed our enemies in the war on terror “Islamic fascists.” But his comments — analytically flawed as they may be — added some much-needed moral clarity to our current struggle. They also helped to illuminate a much-overlooked point: Islamic fundamentalism and Nazism are historically and intellectually linked. (When the Israelis caught Adolf Eichmann, an architect of the Final Solution, a leading Saudi Arabian newspaper read: “Arrest of Eichmann, who had the honor of killing 6 million Jews.”) Perhaps unsurprisingly, Bush’s remarks seem to have struck a nerve.Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:03 AM
Glenn notes an article about how the obesity wars have moved into the schools.
...like other misguided public health campaigns (remember "Just Say No"?), putting children on de facto diets at school just doesn't work. In a 2003 experiment involving 41 schools, more than 1,700 children — many of them American Indian — were served lower-calorie and lower-fat lunches and were taught about healthy eating and lifestyles.While the children took in fewer calories from fat at school, they experienced no significant reduction in their percentage of body fat.
Another study, in rural Nebraska in the mid-1990's, put one group of elementary school students on lower-fat and lower-sodium lunches, increased their physical activity at school and offered more education about nutrition. Compared with students having no special program, the active, lower-fat group showed no differences in body weight or fat, or in levels of total cholesterol, insulin or glucose after two years.
Note that, it's not only like health campaigns in that regard. As is usual in new fads and trends in public education, this is not only not backed up by any credible research, but the available research indicates that it's nonsense. It reminds me of the old joke about Marxism from the Soviet Union:
Student: Teacher, is it true that Marx was a scientist?
Teacher: Of course! Comrade Marx was the greatest scientist of all time!
Student: Then how come he didn't try this cr@p out on rats first?
[Update in the afternoon]
For those who want to avoid this stuff, the latest Carnival of Homeschooling is up.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:08 AMKeith Cowing notes a useful cause, if you're interested in interesting kids in space.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:44 PMMalcolm Kline says that politicians' efforts to steer even more money into the black hole of college education is misguided:
In a recent conference call on the plan, both lawmakers rebuffed three attempts to get them on record explaining why college and university administrators have nothing to do with the exploding cost of higher education. It’s a valid question: Economist Richard Vedder finds that the ratio of college administrators to students is at least three-to-one. That gives collegians more bureaucrats per capita than they have biological parents.Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:27 PMAnd what of the service that American colleges and universities deliver? “Over half of students graduating from four-year colleges in the U. S. lack the literacy to deal with such ‘real life’ tasks as understanding newspaper editorials, comparing credit card offers, or summarizing the results of a survey,” reads a quote from David Schaefer in the latest issue of The American Enterprise. “Nor do they have the math skills needed to balance their checkbooks, according to a new study by the Pew Charitable Trusts.”
At this point, I'd like to think that teaching Marxism in an economics course is the academic equivalent of teaching Biblical literalist creationism in a biology class. But nutball academics don't agree, of course:
Siddique plans on filing a complaint with the USG regarding an introductory economics course, because it ignores "Marxist economic viewpoints, privileging capitalist ones exclusively."
Just a little blowback from the recent efforts to get a little balance into the college classrooms.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:56 AMThere is such a thing as a stupid question:
Saying that there are no stupid questions devalues the process of inquiry. Questions are the engines that power the growth of knowledge, and we cannot rely solely on a random interrogatory process. Although unstructured strategies such as brainstorming and free association have their uses, we need to balance them with a disciplined approach to questioning. Students must learn to expand on initial answers as they ask new questions.
I think that this subject relates to this one, at least remotely.
[Via Geek Press]
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:46 AMThis is an issue that I think deserves more attention than it's getting:
A recent survey of eight-to 18-year-olds, she says, suggests they are spending 6.5 hours a day using electronic media, and multi-tasking (using different de-vices in parallel) is rocketing. Could this be having an impact on thinking and learning?She begins by analysing the process of traditional book-reading, which involves following an author through a series of interconnected steps in a logical fashion. We read other narratives and compare them, and so "build up a conceptual framework that enables us to evaluate further journeys... One might argue that this is the basis of education ... It is the building up of a personalised conceptual framework, where we can relate incoming information to what we know already. We can place an isolated fact in a context that gives it significance." Traditional education, she says, enables us to "turn information into knowledge."
Put like that, it is obvious where her worries lie. The flickering up and flashing away again of multimedia images do not allow those connections, and therefore the context, to build up. Instant yuk or wow factors take over. Memory, once built up in a verbal and reading culture, matters less when everything can be summoned at the touch of a button (or, soon, with voice recognition, by merely speaking). In a short attention-span world, fed with pictures, the habit of contemplation and the patient acquisition of knowledge are in retreat.
This is a plausible thesis, though a lot of research needs to be done to validate it. Certainly, judging by Usenet (and even the comments section here), rational argument may be becoming a lost art (though the implication of this article is that it's a problem for the current generation of children, not necessarily, or at least as much, past ones). On the other hand, logical fallacies and inability to argue logically are hardly new, or they wouldn't have been named and described for such a long time (going in fact back to ancient Greece). But that only means that it's a quantitative issue--that it's becoming more of a problem, particularly with more opportunities for discourse.
I don't know whether not this is a serious problem, but it's worth giving some thought to. I also don't have any obvious easy solutions if it is, other than a retail one. Parents have to make sure that their kids learn to read and write, and spend a significant amount of time doing it, rather than just playing with electronic de-vices and icons.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:30 AMHere's an interesting interview by a student who became a conservative as a backlash against the pervasive miasma of leftist dogma at Brown University:
I was a junior by the time I finally decided to criticize particular segments of the campus. Again, I was a football player, and that took up a lot of my time. So rather than immediately join some leftist student-group, I was forced to be a spectator of campus activism at first. There was always a lot of controversy on Brown's campus, and I spent a lot of time observing the behavior of my classmates. I had an immediate repulsion to them for a lot of reasons. It wasn't that I was pro-life, and they were pro-choice. Or that I was against affirmative action, and they were in favor of it. Those weren't even opinions that I had formed or cared about. My objection to liberal activism was more about my classmates' zealotry, and the fact that I knew I was forbidden to disagree or disapprove of them. In other words, I had a negative reaction to the ethic and demeanor of liberals before I even disagreed with liberal thought. I found Brown's leading liberal forces to be deviant, oppressive, and improper before I reached any other conclusions. Ironically, they were viciously labeling everyone but themselves as mean, dumb, and racist. But I saw it in reverse. In fact, Out of Ivy documents the campus left's hypocrisy, and their readiness to lie, smear, stereotype, and discriminate--all accompanied by their assertion that they were the fluffy-hearted champions of tolerance and understanding.Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:45 AM
For people tired of idiocy like this, here's another home schooling carnival.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:38 AMOnce again, "zero tolerance" equals "zero intelligence":
Elliot Voge, 14, told Stoneybrook Middle School principal Jimmy Meadows he forgot that he had left the Swiss Army knife in his pocket after using it to whittle wood last month. The next day, just after he was dropped off at school by a classmate's mother, he said he discovered the knife in his coat and immediately went to the office.Nevertheless, Meadows suspended him and recommended expulsion.
I would have liked to hear the moronprincipal's side of the story, but I suspect it's the same old, mindless "rules are rules, and they must be enforced."
And they wonder why people home school.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:39 AMI haven't commented on the Cornel West circus much, leaving it to Instantman and others. But they had a piece on NPR this morning about it. Of course, the tone of the piece took it pretty much as a given that this was a major blow to Harvard. There was no questioning of the value of his work or performance. The closest they came was to find one guy who basically said that West made a fool of himself by feigning victimhood and making accusations of covert racism on Summers' part, when the criticisms were legitimate, and had nothing to do with race.
They interviewed several Harvard students, some of whom were proclaiming doom. The closest they could come to the other side was one student who said it was a loss, but that Harvard would survive.
They didn't bother to look for anyone, apparently (at least I assume that's the reason, because I can't believe that they don't exist), who would say (as I would have), "Our gain is Princeton's loss. Hope the doorknob doesn't make a dent in his butt on the way out."
[9:43 AM PDT Update]
John McWhorter has a piece in today's Journal on the subject (link for paid subscribers only):
...he has implied that a CD and support for Mr. Sharpton are legitimate substitutes for academic work--a "visionary" paradigm of inquiry. Here is a coded wink to black people that Mr. Summers' failure to understand this is racism.
I see a different subtext here: that serious academic work is optional for black intellectuals, and that to require it of a black scholar beyond a certain point is a racist insult. But can Prof. West not see that this only reinforces the stereotype of black mental dimness that feeds the very racism he is so quick to sniff out? Visionary or not, rap is not scholarship. Nor is putting one's arm around a hustler like the Rev. Sharpton "speaking truth to power."
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:17 AMAccording to Iowahawk, the academic fraud epidemic is approaching critical mass.
Consider:
...the ongoing feud between Harvard President Lawrence O'Neill and star African-American Studies professor Cornell West. Last year West threatened to lead an exodus of Harvard's black faculty to Princeton after O'Neill obliquely criticized West's recording of a hip hop album.
According to sources, O'Neill accused West of being a "punkass newjack sucka MC," having "whack flow" and "not representin.'"
West angrily defended his rapping skills, retorting that "Tha C-dog be rollin' hard and gots his shizit on point" and that he was a "Ninja on the mic." He accused O'Neill of jealousy and sexual impotence, noting that "old punk fool can't get no fly hos like the C-dog."
The bitterness over the incident has subsided, but tempers flared briefly when West, O'Neill and their posses crossed paths in Harvard Square after a faculty hydraulic car-bouncing competition.
and
"Unlike that old adage about doers-versus-teachers, I have marketable skills outside academics," says Agee.
"If worst comes to worst," he explains, "there's always journalism."
Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:23 PM