Monthly Archives: August 2015

(Image: Landsat 7/GSFC/NASA)

(h/t NewScientist 8 August 2015, paywall)

Stanford ethicist Jerry Kaplan wonders aloud in The New York Times why Robot Weapons causes concern:

The authors of the letter liken A.I.-based weapons to chemical and biological munitions, space-based nuclear missiles and blinding lasers. But this comparison doesn’t stand up under scrutiny. However high-tech those systems are in design, in their application they are “dumb” — and, particularly in the case of chemical and biological weapons, impossible to control once deployed.

A.I.-based weapons, in contrast, offer the possibility of selectively sparing the lives of noncombatants, limiting their use to precise geographical boundaries or times, or ceasing operation upon command (or the lack of a command to continue).

Consider the lowly land mine. Those horrific and indiscriminate weapons detonate when stepped on, causing injury, death or damage to anyone or anything that happens upon them. They make a simple-minded “decision” whether to detonate by sensing their environment — and often continue to do so, long after the fighting has stopped.

A couple of problems here:

1. The unstated assumption is that A.I. weapons will remain under the control of their creators.  A fully capable AI, however, is implicitly its own agent, because an implication of the capabilities required in the field is the ability to recognize and choose.  The first of these, recognize, may only require a very limited AI (more of a Big Data application), but the second, choose, depends on both the first and an assessment of the situation; depending on signals from superiors implies both an uncompromised communications channel and an uncompromised loyalty to those superiors.

In general, he could argue that a very limited AI is only required, but the more limited your AI, the less capable it’ll be.  The less capable your weapon, well, most conventional war leaders will believe the less chance they’ll have of winning – or just discouraging the next war.  (The unconventional leaders, a la the Resistance, will, as always, depend on wit more than firepower, if only out of necessity.)  The arms race will inevitably ramp up the AI … and, at some point, it’ll become self-directing – and it may choose not to worship its makers.  He may believe,

Then there’s the question of whether a machine — say, an A.I.-enabled helicopter drone — might be more effective than a human at making targeting decisions. In the heat of battle, a soldier may be tempted to return fire indiscriminately, in part to save his or her own life. By contrast, a machine won’t grow impatient or scared, be swayed by prejudice or hate, willfully ignore orders or be motivated by an instinct for self-preservation.

I disagree, see this post, where I discuss the possible reactions of an A.I. robot facing combat.

2. It’s not clear he understands AI.  His next paragraph reads:

Now imagine such a weapon enhanced by an A.I. technology less sophisticated than what is found in most smartphones. An inexpensive camera, in conjunction with other sensors, could discriminate among adults, children and animals; observe whether a person in its vicinity is wearing a uniform or carrying a weapon; or target only military vehicles, instead of civilian cars.

He describes technology that I would not classify as AI; worse yet (for him, at least), this technology could be applied to the current weapons systems, in many cases, and realize safety gains comparable to his A.I. based systems.  So why develop a potentially dangerous (to its creators) A.I. system?

3. He is stumbling into morally ambiguous territory:

Neither human nor machine is perfect, but as the philosopher B. J. Strawser has recently argued, leaders who send soldiers into war “have a duty to protect an agent engaged in a justified act from harm to the greatest extent possible, so long as that protection does not interfere with the agent’s ability to act justly.” In other words, if an A.I. weapons system can get a dangerous job done in the place of a human, we have a moral obligation to use it.

If our A.I. weapons system is self-aware and thus a moral agent, do we have an obligation not to place it in a situation where it can be destroyed?  Do we have an obligation not to place it in a situation where it could destroy another human, or another self-aware A.I. weapons system?

Slime molds is a topic which I seem to revisit with dismaying regularity, as they appear to easily solve problems which computers find difficult:

Samir Patel of Archaeology Magazine writes a report on how the Romans might have designed their transportation network:

… Physarum polycephalum, consists of a single large membrane around many cell nuclei, and has drawn the attention of a wide range of scientists because of its uncanny ability to solve almost impossibly complex computational problems.

Now NewScientist, in “What if … We don’t need bodies?” (8 August 2015, paywall), brings up the idea of transferring minds to computers:

What if we could separate mind from body entirely? Many now believe that we will transfer our minds on to computers, whether in a matter of decades or hundreds of years. “I would say that it’s not only possible, it’s inevitable,” says Graziano.

What would life as an upload be like? We’d still need outside stimulation. Cut off entirely, a brain would suffer sensory deprivation, says Anders Sandberg at the University of Oxford. “It’s going to fall asleep, then hallucinate and probably gently go mad. You need to give it a way of interacting with the world, although it doesn’t have to be the real world.”

Which provokes me to wonder, what if we take a baby step here and upload a slime mold to the computer?  Could the slime mold, er, representation, still retain its “uncanny ability” to solve tough computational problems?  If so, could the computer then isolate the capability and incorporate it into its own repertoire of tools?

Or do the inherent limitations of computation apply to the uploaded creature?  I’m inclined to think the latter, at least with the current crop of computers.  Perhaps someday we’ll have widespread biological computing and then the upload would retain all the capabilities.

The Iran deal gathers another Republican, but non-Congressional, supporter – former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, courtesy The Washington Post:

“It’s somewhere in between naive and unrealistic to assume that after we’ve, the United States of America, has negotiated something like this with the five other, you know, parties and with the whole world community watching, that we could back away from that – and that the others would go with us, or even that our allies would go with us,” Paulson said during a forum sponsored by the Aspen Institute on Thursday night to discuss his new book on China.

“And unilateral sanctions don’t work, okay?” Paulson continued. “They really have to be multilateral.”

(h/t Steve Benen @ MaddowBlog)

So it seems if you’re not running for something, you can be rational, but if your job is on the line, then you have to play to the audience.  Not precisely the definition of leadership, not to my mind.

Not that this is an exclusively American illness, as the Israelis seem to have some version of it as well.  In contrast, the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) has released a strategic document, according to Ben Caspit at AL Monitor, which, as one might expect with an institution intimate with realities, handles the Iranian situation rather differently than the politicians:

Commentators have marveled that the Iranian nuclear threat is barely mentioned in the [IDF Strategic] document. According to the chief of staff, that threat is currently not sufficiently relevant to be included in the IDF’s strategy for the next five years. The threat can be shelved for a decade or two.

The document also confirms something published in Al-Monitor a few weeks ago: that the IDF top brass are far less melodramatic about the Iranian threat than Israel’s highest political echelons, i.e., Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and some of his ministers. Instead, the IDF is much more concerned about potential Iranian involvement in considerable proportions of terror acts against Israel along the length of its various borders.

However, the Israeli politicians may find more justification in this part of the IDF Strategic Document:

The military exercise signals to players in the field that Israel will not hold back, but will respond forcefully to any scenario. Simultaneously, Israeli security sources emphasize that so far, all the terror activities against Israel in the northern zone have been perpetrated by Hezbollah, under Iranian inspiration. Not a single bullet, not even a firecracker, has been fired against Israel by the various organizations rebelling against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Israel hopes that this situation will continue, and to be on the safe side, it tried to demonstrate what would happen if the situation changes.

Finally, and with whatever validity you wish to assign it, Arutz Sheva reports a number of Jewish rabbis are urging acceptance of the deal:

More than 300 liberal American rabbis wrote members of Congress Monday urging them to support the international nuclear deal with Iran, signaling the US Jewish community is split over the historic but controversial accord.

The religious leaders come from across the spectrum, but hail overwhelmingly from Judaism’s Conservative and Reform streams as well as other liberal, non-Orthodox Jewish movements, a spokesperson said.

“We encourage the members of the Senate and the House of Representatives to endorse this agreement,” the 340 rabbis wrote in a letter to Congress distributed by Ameinu, a liberal charitable Jewish organization.

“We are deeply concerned with the impression that the leadership of the American Jewish community is united in opposition to the agreement,” the rabbis added.

“We, along with many other Jewish leaders, fully support this historic nuclear accord.”

The general approach to the problem of racism, or the more general problem of supremacism, has been to characterize its effects on its victims, who may be enumerated as those who the supremacists denigrate, and the costs to society in general; more rarely to suggest that the perpetrators suffer damage from their own views; occasionally, to argue the philosophy as unjust and the victims undeserving of their treatment. I have realized recently that there is another approach, a less post-hoc, more a priori approach, which really attacks a central emotional tenet.  No doubt this has been discovered before, but it is not mentioned to any great extent, and it strikes me that those groups, still existing, that adhere to these repellent, damaging philosophies, might be best decomposed by exposing their members to these thoughts.

Consider the philosophy: Group A is superior to group B because of C.  Characterize C – what is C?  It is some immutable and inherent, or nearly so, characteristic of A, always in contrast to B.  Its best known example is skin color.  Thus the American Civil War, when the odious practice of slavery was rationalized by the Fire Eaters and the Secessionist declarations¹.  Sometimes it is country of origin, or ethnicity, or religion.  Only the last is not immutable, but, as we shall see, religion may be treated as a special case.

So the reader may shrug and wonder as to the importance of yet another abstraction, and so I will give it to you:

What, in all these cases, has the racist performed, has the racist achieved, to belong to the group?  Have they labored in the trenches, have they earned a PhD, did they lead a side to victory in a great battle?

None.

No, that’s right.  None of these things are necessary to be a supremacist.

For the supremacist, this is the essence: they are.  No missing word here.  A supremacist exists, and that is enough.  No labor, no achievement – and no threat to their theoretical position, even if they endure worldly fears.

To render it in the vulgar, a supremacist is a lazy bastard who depends, for his position, on his skin color, or his ethnicity, or his religion, or some other unearned, inherited characteristic, all merely random states of being with no connection to effort, to achievement – to earned worth.  A supremacist claims a short-cut to worth through a characteristic over which he has no control, and thus betrays his true colors to those who know to look: a hollow man, unbeholden to honor, impossible to trust, unlikely to ever achieve much.

This is the supremacist.  One might consider him superior despite oneself, if not for the fact that such a thing might, if renderable, appear in a Salvador Dali painting solely for its ribald effect.

As to the matter of religion, it is a near equivalent of the other examples in that most of humanity rarely changes its spots in this regard; and given that the basic foundation of religion, that of faith, is an explicit belief in something for which there is no objective proof, it is difficult to credit one religion over another, except, possibly, on results, and those are so much argued over on grounds of a dubious sort that the entire structure soon collapses as if it were a skyscraper made of Silly Putty … if I may state an absurdity.  Let there be no doubt: those for whom faith is a central tenet often lead the way against supremacism; but there is nothing within faith that battles intrinsically against this pernicious philosophy of supremacism, only that which lies in the hearts of men apart from faith.  Faith, that great leader into Heaven, that great leader into Hell, is a tool, and nothing more; it is rationality that reveals the supremacist for what he is.

¹My thanks to LaFeminista @ The Daily Kos for this useful list of secession declarations and how most of them uphold slavery.

I missed this, but KCNA Watch did not:

   It was on August 15 when President Kim Il Sung, benefactor of national resurrection and peerless patriot, crushed the brigandish Japanese imperialists by making long journeys of anti-Japanese bloody battles and liberated Korea. It was the day of historical significance as it put an end to the history of national sufferings and brought about a radical turn in carving out the destiny of the country and its people.

The wicked Japanese imperialists committed such unpardonable crimes as depriving Korea of even its standard time while mercilessly trampling down its land with 5 000 year-long history and culture and pursuing the unheard-of policy of obliterating the Korean nation.

And the masses were devastated at the loss of Korean Standard Time, I suppose.

(h/t Marcus Noland)

My reader disagrees violently:

Yes, I agree the Republican party has been hijacked. But there are millions of people who continue to vote Republican, because they have always been Republican, and either don’t know or don’t care that the party is run by uncompromising, ignorant, extremists. And they keep electing these idiotic wing-nut extremists and therefore are part of the problem! I refuse to give them a pass by calling the group of them something other than Republicans. They either need to clean house or break ranks. I’m sick of it.

As is half of America.  Coincidentally, stonedoubt @ The Daily Kos addressed this topic back in 2012:

I am tired of letting Republicans and Tea Party supporters co-opt the term “conservative”. Republicans are not conservatives… they are radical fundamentalists and we should be referring to them as such.

He then goes on to use Republican and conservative sources to point out that they are not, by their own definitions, conservatives, but radical fundamentalists.  He ends with:

I want to make it clear that I am not generalizing individuals who call themselves Republican. I am framing the Republican Party… which continues a platform of radical fundamentalism. The Republican mainstream ideology is radical fundamentalism, currently. It is not just the leadership. Pretty much every issue poll and candidacy poll in recent memory paints a picture of majority support for radical fundamentalism within the party.

I realize that you can’t put everyone in that box… Andrew Sullivan and David Frum are a couple of “conservative” pundits that come to mind that I wouldn’t necessarily paint as radical fundamentalists. I am sure that there are many people who call themselves Republican that share their moderate views about conservatism in general.

I think Andrew would be in full agreement with stonedoubt.

The clandestine war on Russia seems to be continuing, as CNN/Money reports:

It keeps getting worse for Russia.

The combination of Western sanctions and tumbling oil prices is pushing it deeper into recession. Russia’s economy shrunk 4.6% in the second quarter, the biggest drop since the global financial crisis in 2009.

The ruble has plunged 22% against the dollar in the past three months. Inflation soared nearly 16% in July.

Russia is heavily dependent on its oil riches — around half of its government revenue comes from oil and gas exports. Oil prices slumped from $107 a barrel last June to $44 right now, forcing Moscow to cut spending across the board.

How are oil prices doing?  NASDAQ provides this short-term history (chart unembeddable) of oil prices here, indicating a 26% drop in prices since July 1.  MacroTrends takes a longer view with a nifty interactive chart indicating oil prices dropping back to 2009 levels.

And CNN/Money doesn’t even mention the primary long-term problem: oil is a fossil-fuel and will become less and less valuable as human-friendly energy sources (also known as carbon-neutral) become more cost-effective and wide-spread – and concern about climate change comes to the forefront as weather patterns become more erratic.  Assuming this drop in oil prices is the work of the Obama Administration, they may be forcing Russia into second or third tier status for an entire generation.  The Russians may have to choose between having nuclear weapons, or taking care of its citizens – and once it walks away from nuclear weapons, it’s a hard slog back because nuclear weapons and their delivery systems deteriorate over time.

And what might be these carbon-neutral energy sources?  Algae might be one of them, oilprice.com notes:

Although other crops, such as corn and soybeans, have been used to produce biofuel in the past, algae offer several advantages over them. According to the US Department of Energy, algae yields are between 10 and 100 times as high as those of traditional biofuels. What’s more, algae can grow in marginal or brackish agricultural areas, meaning that production can be ramped up significantly without competing with food crops for land and other resources.

The global market for biofuel was estimated at about $100 billion in 2013. Many believe that the size of this market could almost double within the next few decades. According to scientist and entrepreneur Craig Venter, it would take a land area three times the size of the United States to replace all the fuel used in transportation in the U.S. with corn-derived biofuel. By contrast, it would only take an area the size of Maryland to do so using algae.

Regarding moderate Republicans, a reader writes:

“Only if the believers stop believing, are willing to realize that their faith is taking them down the wrong road, will the Republicans begin to recover their sanity.”

Well said. Religious ideologues have no motivation to compromise, ever, on anything as they are convinced of their moral and intellectual rightness.

Perhaps only by providing good education to young people (to learn critical thinking skills), so that they can question the “teachings” and conventional thoughts of their religious elders, and then waiting a couple of generations, will enough conservatives ever be swayed from this falsely “superior” position. In the meantime, the country will continue to flounder, instead of solving its problems. Most Republicans are just too ignorant, short-sightend or close-minded to actually do the right thing to save the country from further difficulties.

Perhaps not Republicans, perhaps fundamentalists might be a better descriptor.  I know moderate Republicans – including friends of mine – who were ejected from the Party over the last thirty years.  Very sane, good people – told they no longer belonged.  It really has been a takeover of a major party, as Goldwater feared.

Experts in diplomacy, international relations, and monitoring continue to weigh in on the Iran deal, also known as Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).  First up are mass endorsement letters released by The Iran Project, the first by ambassadors:

The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran stands as a landmark agreement in deterring the proliferation of nuclear weapons. If properly implemented, this comprehensive and rigorously negotiated agreement can be an effective instrument in arresting Iran’s nuclear program and preventing the spread of nuclear weapons in the volatile and vitally important region of the Middle East. Without your determination and the admirable work of Secretary of State Kerry and his team, this agreement would never have been reached.

As former American diplomats, we have devoted much of our lives to ensuring that the President had available the best possible diplomatic approaches to dealing with challenges to our nation’s security, even while recognizing that a strong military is essential to help the President and the Congress to carry out their duties to protect the nation and its people. Effective diplomacy backed by credible defense will be critically important now, during the period of inspection and verification of Iran’s compliance with the agreement.

This is signed by a large number of retired ambassadors, from both American political parties.  The Iran Project also presents a similar letter signed by national security experts:

We applaud the announcement that a Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) has been reached with Iran to limit its nuclear program. We congratulate President Obama and all the negotiators for a landmark agreement unprecedented in its importance for preventing the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran.

Though primarily a nonproliferation agreement, the JCPOA has significant implications for some of America’s most important national objectives: regional stability in the Middle East, Israel’s security,dealing with an untrustworthy and hostile nation, and U.S. leadership on major global challenges.

The signees include names such as Albright, Brzezinski, Lugar, and many more who’ve dealt with the foreign arena all their careers.  Now AL Monitor reports the endorsement of Brent Snowcroft, National Security Advisor to Bush I, as well as that of former Republican Senator John Warner:

In a draft op-ed that was shared in part with Al-Monitor on Aug. 13, Brent Scowcroft, former national security adviser to President George H.W. Bush and a trusted confident [sic] of many of Bush’s successors, said that in his view the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran “meets the key objective, shared by recent administrations of both parties, that Iran limit itself to a strictly civilian nuclear program with unprecedented verification and monitoring by the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] and the UN Security Council.”

“To turn our back on [the JCPOA] would be an abdication of America’s unique role and responsibility, incurring justified dismay among our allies and friends,” Scowcroft wrote.

Earlier, on Aug. 13, former Sen. John Warner (R-Va.) published an op-ed with another former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Carl Levin (D-Mich.), supporting the deal reached between Iran and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany on July 14.

Taking a different tack than Scowcroft, Warner and Levin argued that US failure to implement the JCPOA would undercut any potential US military deterrent against Iran.

Meanwhile, the American public doesn’t think Obama’s approach is a winner, according to Gallup:

Only one in three Americans approve of President Barack Obama’s handling of the situation in Iran — his lowest rating of eight issues measured in a new Gallup survey. The president’s policy toward Iran has been a major focus as he tries to drum up support for the multi-national agreement to limit Iran’s nuclear capabilities that Secretary of State John Kerry helped broker. Obama earns his highest marks on race relations, education and climate change, though he does not receive majority approval on any.

Historically, the American public has never done well in the foreign relation arena – and that’s really OK, once you think about it.  We hire and train people to become experts for us so we don’t have to be those experts while we go about our everyday lives.  So a poll like this, while perhaps interesting, is really rather irrelevant.  If you’re an expert, great – weigh in.  Honest, well-reasoned opposition is important.  And that’s where the Republican opposition, which lacks the reasoning and just seems to react poorly to anything done by the Obama and the Democrats, is failing the United States, because we’re not getting the important critiques, we’re just getting opposition, fear, and manipulation.  That’s just failure, and would be helpful if the American people replaced the obstructionists with someone else – just moderate, thinking Republicans would be just fine.

AL Monitor‘s Laura Rozen presents an interesting history of the secret meetings of the Iran Deal here.

Bruce Bartlett is a well known moderate Republican, serving in the Reagan and Bush I administrations, as well as multiple Congressional staffs.  In this piece he penned for Politico, he gives  a short history of recent Republican factions (which recalls this Internet meme from Barry Goldwater), and then he speaks for Donald Trump – for political purposes, of course:

As a moderate Republican who voted for Obama, I should be Donald Trump’s natural enemy. Instead, I’m rooting for him.

The Republican establishment foresees a defeat of Barry Goldwater proportions in the unlikely event Trump wins the Republican presidential nomination. As Trump’s lead in the polls grows, so too does their panic. Yet, for moderate Republicans, a Trump nomination is not something to be feared but welcomed. It is only after a landslide loss by Trump that the GOP can win the White House again.

Trump’s nomination would give what’s left of the sane wing of the GOP a chance to reassert control in the wake of his inevitable defeat, because it would prove beyond doubt that the existing conservative coalition cannot win the presidency. A historic thrashing of the know-nothings would verify that compromise and reform are essential to recapture the White House and attract new voters, such as Latinos, who are now alienated from the Republican Party.

There is a certain logic here, but it depends on an assumption: that the ‘know-nothings’, to use his term, are capable of learning, adaptation, and compromise.  The entire Obama Administration contretemps with Republicans in Congress, illustrative of Republican conservatives’ refusal to compromise, is a counter-argument which he doesn’t address.  Along the same lines, while Goldwater’s observation is from maybe 50 years ago, I think it’s just as applicable today:

Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they’re sure trying to do so, it’s going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can’t and won’t compromise. I know, I’ve tried to deal with them.

And they still exist and sent Ted Cruz & many others to Congress.  The refusal to compromise, to grow, and to understand that sometimes your ideology is simply wrong is symptomatic of the fundamentalism that has taken over the Republicans, and, because it’s religion based, will not change in itself.  Only if the believers stop believing, are willing to realize that their faith is taking them down the wrong road, will the Republicans begin to recover their sanity.

I think it’ll be Trump, then Cruz, and then maybe Rubio, all running for President, before the conservatives simply begin to die off and the new generations, rumored to be far more reasonable, begin to assert themselves.

(h/t Egberto Willies @ The Daily Kos)

A reader writes concerning American society:

WRT:  The Human Enterprise and Measuring the Parts

 About the broad definition of Excellence:

Since the measure of excellence is defined and shaped by those within each group, it is constantly in flux, just as the members of the group are constantly in flux.  So really, how meaningful can this measurement be, over time?

I think I would hope that excellence wouldn’t so much change direction or definition, as it were, as raise the bar defining excellence.  This would definitely be true for those sectors involved in reality; so, for the (forgotten) health sector, the efficacy of the treatments would find the definition of excellence becoming more stringent, but not changing in basic definition: the treatment of the human creature towards relieving it of torment and extending its life.

It is meaningful in that it permits us to compare the sectors of different cultures, presumably employing different operationalities, as to what is the better set of methods and metrics to adapt.

Family sector:

On a broader scale, this would include all of your community.  It’s who you live with.  It’s who you learn your most important things from.  Your family is who makes you into the person you are; those whose attitudes and beliefs seep into your pores and stay with you your entire life.  Family teaches you who to be without you even knowing that you’re learning to be part of the group.  This is perhaps the most powerful of all the sectors discussed.

The metric here should really be the security of the community, and excellence would be defined as a happy, harmonious group that is free to feed itself, reproduce and care for its young and elderly members without undue anxiety or difficulty.

I agree heartily, and would only add care for the disabled as well – at least for prosperous communities.

Public sector:

Your definition states:

“The metrics in this area include incidence of crime (although this may also be applicable to other sectors), recidivism rates, resolution rates, civil disturbance rates, standard public health measures…”

All of the aforementioned are closed loops:  the group creates the law or standard, then measures the rates of infraction of those created laws within the same group.  What keeps the group from writing laws solely to “game” the system?  If we write laws we know will be highly broken, then we are causing our metrics to reflect a high percentage of infraction.  If we write laws that are nonsensical, unneeded or that no one would logically want to break (i.e.–  “do as you wish, regardless of consequence), then we measure a very low percentage of infraction.  Either way, if those who make the laws also make the metrics to suit themselves, then the system is intrinsically flawed.

An excellent and highly relevant point; I’m surprised that the concept of justice was not brought up, since that’s where I think a claim for objectivity could be made.  However, I am not necessarily thinking the sector is measuring itself; I could see this being the subject of an NGO or think-tank, or the dedicated individual, and would be an extremely involved piece of work, because certainly gaming of the system would occur.  We’ve seen this recently in the attempts of bureaucrats at the Veteran’s Administration to game the system, sometimes through outright fraud, sometimes in manipulating the system to meet goals of dubious merit.  The application of the concept of justice might be the pivotal piece for developing meaningful metrics and definitions of excellence.

“… and incidence of foreign invasions; whether measuring foreign adventuring is relevant is problematic.”

This last is a different animal altogether.  It reaches outside of the group and attempts to enforce internal laws & standards on an external group.  Never advisable, and usually doesn’t end well for anyone.

The conclusion I was reaching myself, although it’s also difficult to defend the Isolationists of bygone eras, as we are an interconnected system and must admit to influence from around the world.  Still, there is a difference in the attempts to influence foreign affairs to better advantage your own society, and the more aggressive foreign adventuring.

Private sector:

“While it is tempting to use money as a metric – and often, it is, in the form of GNP, GDP, and allied metrics – the general economic health of a country is perhaps not entirely captured simply by these metrics, for the metric should also indicate the probable future indicated by various sub-measures…”

These metrics generally rely on averages or mean values.  I would add a ratio of instance of poverty to instance of obscene wealth as well.  Often, that’s more telling than an average.

“… Excellence: a prosperous citizenry is the traditional sentiment, and, if taken literally to mean everyone, it suffices for a statement.”

Rather than prosperity in the traditional sense, I would say:  health, comfort, security and personal happiness.  Isn’t that what prosperity is supposed to buy?

Indeed!

Educational sector:

“The educational sector’s responsibility is straightforward.  It should prepare students with facts and the ability to make reasoned judgments, and to this mission it should adhere to a study of reality; strictly religious sensibilities should be excluded as they are entirely subjective, and will lead to civil strife in a public setting.  Philosophy, while subsumed under religion in some ways, is of educational interest since it asks important questions about reality and the study thereof…”

Maybe that’s what it should do, but since “facts” are defined by the larger society and “truth” is written by the socio-political victor, in reality, the educational sector of any society devolves into a device solely constructed to socialize its members.  All “facts” and “truths” are subjective.  So whoever prevails within the society gets to define the truths of the day and then impose them on other members of the group.  Of course, there are certain practical, mechanical “how-to” courses of study that may prove useful, but in modern societies, these courses of study are still riddled with general opinion and attempts at pure socialization into the general society.

I cannot agree that all facts and truths are defined by a larger society; at least in the physical sciences, a “fact” that fails to correlate with the underlying reality¹ will, sooner or later, will be exposed as a falsehood.  Naturally, physical sciences are the easy subjects; more difficult are the social sciences, where facts become contingent on states of mentality, which are notoriously difficult to pin down in humans; and when we transition to the religious sector, a “fact” should be, yet rarely is, asserted with the greatest of trepidation: it is the most congruent with your assertion.

“…Metrics should cover the knowledge base and reasoning capabilities of students and citizens.

Excellence is indicated by the continual progression in the efficiencies of everyday activities.”

This is also a closed loop.  Those who define the “facts” also define what’s efficient and desirable in a society.

Conclusion:

I agree with your conclusion, so far as it goes.  The defined factions are being treated as separate, but they truly cannot be separated.  An individual within any society must deal with, and is influenced by, all these factions (and many sub-factions) in a very intricate tangle of imposed beliefs and social behaviors.  That influence reaches into the deepest part of a person’s psyche, until the individual ceases to realize that his core truths have been imposed upon him, and only knows that what he perceives his world to be is what it must be.  Therein lies the difficulty of defining what “is” and what “is not”.  But I guess that’s a discussion for a different time.

If I understand the thrust of the conclusion, I think what I began this thread to explore was just how to best understand these sectors (or factions) by definitions of goals and metrics – all totally ad hoc, as per my usual intellectual methods².  An important element, totally neglected (for reasons of length and impatience), has to do with how these sectors are tangled together, involving questions of hierarchy, dependence, and fuzzy boundaries.

And, of course, the health sector has been completely neglected, not even named!  But an exploration of that sector is for another time and place.  And, perhaps, writer.

¹My apologies to quantum physicists who do not believe in an underlying, objective reality, but without the concept the very idea of science is rather laughable.
²Yes, in case the reader is wondering, my intellectual methods are usually rather laughable.

… you might find this fascinating.

Perhaps someday we can all be as mature as this family.

Previously we saw Michael LePage reporting that any success with coal reduction would result in a reduction in the price of coal, thus encouraging new coal-fired power plants and thus a curtailment of success at removing coal as a viable power source.  Sami Grover @ TreeHugger.com now reports on more agitation in the coal sector:

When I wrote about New Zealand shutting down its last remaining coal mines and aiming for 90% renewables within the decade, some commenters asked an important question:

Will the country continue to mine coal?

The answer, it seems, is maybe not. Or, more accurately, not as much as it once did. As reported over at The Guardian, the government-owned coal miner Solid Energy has announced it is entering managed bankruptcy, amid a crash in coal prices and increasing signs that the world may finally be getting serious about cutting coal use.

Earlier this month, he noted another country in that part of the world was seeing changes in coal mining:

I was already pretty astounded when Australia’s biggest utility carbon polluter turned its back on coal. Still, when the Australian Labor Party’s plans for 50% renewable electricity by 2030 were announced last month, I was by no means prepared for who was going to be backing it—namely, the country’s largest coal mining and energy union.

As reported over at ABC, the CFMEU appears to know which way the energy sector is headed. And the miners’ union representatives are showing their support for clean energy, in exchange for a promise of significant support for adapting to the clean energy economy.

Perhaps coal is really on a downward plunge.  The scientists in NewScientist may have assumed that producers would simply lower prices as demand fell, thus luring new buyers, but if the producers go bankrupt, then supplies shrink, which may end up reducing the carrot for coal.

A key step, as I noted earlier, is extending a helping hand to those dependent on fossil fuels for their living, for it’s important to remember that amidst all the demonization of the fossil fuels industry, their goal was never to destroy the world, but to provide energy.  Their methods may have been sloppy, foolish, and evidence of greed – but they are humans and now they’ll be needing help in some form.  Sami points at the LA Times article for information on Hillary’s plan:

It’s important that we help them transition to a new economy,” she said. “I want to do more to help people in coal country and other parts of our nation that are not enjoying the kind of growth and development and prosperity we’re seeing in a place like Story County,” where the rally was taking place.

Some environmentalists are uneasy with Clinton’s approach so far to climate change. They would like to have seen her work as secretary of State to scuttle the Keystone project. Her relationships with donors and advisors connected to large fossil fuel companies make them anxious. And her support during her 2008 presidential run for “clean coal” as a viable, green alternative has not been forgotten.

Just a slick politician leaping on the express?

While the focus appears to be on solar, fusion research continues apace.  Christine Lepisto @ TreeHugger.com reports that a new design may bring fusion power to us in five years.  From an MIT report:

Advances in magnet technology have enabled researchers at MIT to propose a new design for a practical compact tokamak fusion reactor — and it’s one that might be realized in as little as a decade, they say. The era of practical fusion power, which could offer a nearly inexhaustible energy resource, may be coming near.

Using these new commercially available superconductors, rare-earth barium copper oxide (REBCO) superconducting tapes, to produce high-magnetic field coils “just ripples through the whole design,” says Dennis Whyte, a professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering and director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center. “It changes the whole thing.”

The stronger magnetic field makes it possible to produce the required magnetic confinement of the superhot plasma — that is, the working material of a fusion reaction — but in a much smaller device than those previously envisioned. The reduction in size, in turn, makes the whole system less expensive and faster to build, and also allows for some ingenious new features in the power plant design. The proposed reactor, using a tokamak (donut-shaped) geometry that is widely studied, is described in a paper in the journal Fusion Engineering and Design, co-authored by Whyte, PhD candidate Brandon Sorbom, and 11 others at MIT. The paper started as a design class taught by Whyte and became a student-led project after the class ended.

Fusion is touted as the energy system that keeps on giving.  While such a power source would certainly be comforting in that we would retain the central power system to which we’re accustomed, I have to wonder about the inevitable problems of decommissioning the installation, given the problems we’ve seen with systems just now going out of service, as the UK’s The Guardian reports:

The public body charged with overseeing the dismantling of Britain’s network of atomic power and research stations will reveal on Monday that its estimates for the lifetime cost of the programme has risen by billions of pounds.

Despite this, the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) will say in its annual report that it is getting to grips with the clean-up problem because the rate of cost growth is slowing year-on-year.

Yet the soaring costs will alarm industry critics at a time when the government is trying to encourage construction of a new generation of atomic power plants while plans to construct a permanent home for high-level radioactive waste are stalled.

In the NDA’s 2011 annual report the provisional cost of dealing with the UK’s nuclear legacy was put at £53bn, compared with a 2010 figure of £49bn. The new number in the 2012 set of accounts is expected to be around £55bn. But under previous accounting methods, the figure historically used has risen to well over £80bn with some predicting the final bill could exceed £100bn.

Cost may, I think, be taken as a proxy for difficulty.

Concerning speedy novels ‘r’ us, a reader writes:

3 days? I don’t know how one could even type the necessary number of words in that time. Typing 24 words per minute (not a fast typist, but a touch typist) would get you 86,400 words over 3 times 24 = 72 hours. That’s a short novel — and no breaks for eating, sleeping, etc.

While definitions are somewhat arbitrary, novels generally begin around 45,000 words, according to this Wikipedia article.  In our sole entry, I wrote the first draft while Deb edited my fine convoluted sentences into staccato bursts, and we achieved around 32,000 words.  With more time it would have been longer – there were facets that needed more exploration.  Actually, having just looked it over, maybe trashing it would be the better part of discretion, or words to that effect.  As I seem to recall, the Contest expects works to be around 30,000 words, so we made the expectation in terms of sheer volume.  Certainly there are longer entries, of course – some folks can really fly.  With a little bit of preparation, both in terms of plot and in terms of managing your family & friends, it’s possible to hit way more.

But if you feel like you have a story inside of you, it might be worth taking a shot at it.  Sitting at your desk on Sunday with a warm wind blowing in at your back, wondering just how the hell John, who was left to rot in a hole in South America, has appeared at your main character’s wedding in Seattle, makes for some interesting contortions – and frantic typing.

And then when the damn program EATS your sex scene … which happened to Deb, not to me.  Thank goodness.

A reader comments on Lake Mead:

I was at the Hoover Dam when the lake was at its fullest. So seeing photos of it now, it’s just appalling how much water has “disappeared” — primarily into the desert to support sprawling subdivisions, and thence into the air as evaporation, I suspect. Foolish mankind.

Or at least sprawling lawns.  Time for us to get competitive about using native materials, not imported grass from somewhere else.

As a software engineer, particularly as an object-oriented programmer, I classify things: I suspect this is an endemic behavior in the profession; certainly it is a key activity for scientists.

Once classification occurs, then those characteristics which differentiate one thing, tangible or not, from another may be examined and used for constructing hypotheses.  The classification is important, among many reasons, for clarifying how a thing differs from other things in a possibly more general classification.

Measurement is critical to science.  While theoreticians may construct theories that explain observed laws, it is the measurement (of reality, in this case) that falsifies (or fails to falsify) the theory; I write this sentence with extreme care only to satisfy the professional proponents of science and logic who prefer that hypotheses are never proven, but merely that they are or are not falsified.  The selection of one or more metrics is a matter of meticulous and continual concern, for otherwise there is a risk of having one be labeled ‘a damn statistic.’

(At this juncture, we should note that human constructs modeling nature are merely that: constructs, representations, even simplifications.  So, in confusion, below I will omit an artistic sector as it may fit within another sector, it may overlap several, and it is not without an element of mystery: to borrow the hoary old phrase, I may not be able to define art, but I know it when I see it.)

So, with no academic preparation in the subject area, and no doubt adding to the amusement of true experts in the area, I propose to apply the above to the general subject of human culture, with, being of the nationality, an emphasis on American culture.

First, the objects in our culture and their classifications.  I observe the following: public sector, private sector, religious sector, educational sector, family sector.  More familiarly, government, business, religion, schools.  As a citizen, no matter of what culture, excellence should be a key goal in each sector.

So the definition of excellence must be clarified.  I suggest it will depend on the sector, and thus will postpone any exact declaration until then.  But I will immediately require that excellence be measurable in some sense; and that measurement will help define the uniqueness of the cultural sector such that using another sector’s metric will be considered with suspicion.

Public sector

The public sector is responsible for the creation and application of the law, both civil and criminal, to which all, including the public sector, is subject; national defense; public health; management of monetary supply; creation of a civil society conducive to peaceful interactions both internally and externally.  The final clause justifies the public sector conducting basic research necessary for military products, as does the national defense clause.

The metrics in this area include incidence of crime (although this may also be applicable to other sectors), recidivism rates, resolution rates, civil disturbance rates, standard public health measures, and incidence of foreign invasions; whether measuring foreign adventuring is relevant is problematic.

Excellence: low or lowering rates of crime, peaceful society not dependent on force; lack of war without loss of interests in the greater world; improving public health.

Private sector

The private sector is responsible for general production of things of value to the citizenry, tangible and intangible.

While it is tempting to use money as a metric – and often, it is, in the form of GNP, GDP, and allied metrics – the general economic health of a country is perhaps not entirely captured simply by these metrics, for the metric should also indicate the probable future indicated by various sub-measures.

Excellence: a prosperous citizenry is the traditional sentiment, and, if taken literally to mean everyone, it suffices for a statement.

Constraints: the public sector neither has a moral code nor should it have a moral code specific to it; the moral codes generated by other sectors should apply to this for reasons of public peacefulness, since citizens participate in all sectors and may interact in many modes and contexts.  A changing moral code is an invitation to strife and confusion.

Religious sector

The religious sector (which may be considered the philosophical sector by agnostics & atheists) can provoke emotions as it is, indeed, concerned with emotions, the hard questions of why are we here, what should we be doing.  For our purposes, we may state that the task of religion is to inculcate a generally acceptable moral code which controls behavior, a code recognizable and respected by the enormous majority of citizens.  Moral codes which negatively impact the goals of the public sector are unacceptable, as are those which negatively impact the individual citizen, keeping in mind that contributions need not have direct consequences, but indirect may be more valuable.  It should not be necessary to state that a religion or philosophy that results in the premature deaths of its adherents is an inferior system.

Since religion is expected to modify the behavior of the great mass of citizens, thus a meter is obvious: frequency of inimical or anti-social behavior.  While crime rate may have some applicability, the range seems wider.

Excellence seems best defined as a low rate of inimical behaviors in the general population; perhaps a certain individual industry should also be measured, although the current American tendency towards overwork makes such a specification suspect.

Educational sector

The educational sector’s responsibility is straightforward.  It should prepare students with facts and the ability to make reasoned judgments, and to this mission it should adhere to a study of reality; strictly religious sensibilities should be excluded as they are entirely subjective, and will lead to civil strife in a public setting.  Philosophy, while subsumed under religion in some ways, is of educational interest since it asks important questions about reality and the study thereof.

Metrics should cover the knowledge base and reasoning capabilities of students and citizens.

Excellence is indicated by the continual progression in the efficiencies of everday activities.

Family Sector

Here I am hesitant.  My Arts Editor suggests a healthy, happy family is the metric and the excellence; family wealth not an applicable metric.  Children are raised, yes; but a stable society requires other duties, such as establishing roles for those not interested in children which they find rewarding.  This is a sector that requires books; I shan’t assay it here.

So what?

A careful understanding of the purposes, relationships, and operationality (most importantly) of societal sectors will give us the opportunity to properly evaluate proposals and performance, giving proper weight to the various facets of same.  Relationships could be an entire post (or book), but we can summarize: the public sector, as administrator of the law, is paramount, but is required to show great leniency towards the other sectors.  The others have various influences on the others: moral code should influence the conduct of the citizenry in the other spheres; the currency administered by the public sphere and used by the private sphere is also used to compensate those working in all the sectors; etc, open to discussion.  But keeping these distinctions, these separate metrics, shines new lights on old topics.

For example, this recent discussion of the North Carolina educational system by James Hogan is interesting.  First, and superficially, Hogan states that the Legislature was correct in claiming …

Republicans defended these austerity measures by saying that lower taxes would eventually yield fiscal growth. And they were right. This year, the government is enjoying a $445 million surplus–a clear victory in light of those multi-billion dollar deficits of yore–but still a statistically small number in light of the state’s $21 billion budget (about two percent), especially after considering that our state budget is still smaller than it was in 2011.

So the educational sector, dependent on the public sector for funding, finds its metrics of excellence discarded, while the Legislature permits the (suspect) metrics of the private sector to drive its priorities.  This misguided sense of priorities, in which the sector most responsible for the future of society is most drained of necessary funding merely to satisfy the metrics of today’s societies – which should only apply minimally to other sectors.  The foreign metrics twist the educational sector until this most important of sectors is in distress.  And this is not a hypothesis or a forecast – it’s happening in real time for all to see.

But more interestingly, from the quoted article:

But the legislature has also weakened oversight at public charters–introducing legislation this year to remove them from the Department of Public Instruction’s management altogether. The result is a diminished accountability for tax payer dollars spent in schools–the exact opposite of what the legislature said was important when it came to public schools originally.

(And aren’t you curious why the legislature has been so kind to charters? It isn’t hard to figure out when you follow the money. Apparently if you have a lobbyist group that isn’t a teacher’s “union,” nothing is impossible in Raleigh.)

Follow the money.  We’re talking about the educational sector, while chanting the metric of the private sector – this should be a clue: when one sector’s jargon becomes common in another, something’s gone wrong.

And the application of one sector’s operationality to another sector’s goals … this is a sentence we can write with confidence once we classify and characterize. The motivations and methods of one sector, no matter their success within the sector, have little native applicability within another.  Today we see the educational sector struggling on multiple fronts: schools in trouble are not flagged for help, but deprived of vital nutrients.  Invading ‘charter schools’, if religious in nature are siphoning off resources from the professionals, and if otherwise, they operate in an environment where success is measured by dollars, not by student attainment.  And the beliefs of the religious sector, lacking any evidence, and, in the best-known case, facing convincing counter-evidence, still continues to attempt to inject its beliefs into a system that vitally must present reality – not arbitrary beliefs.

Once we understand that different sectors have different goals and methods, then we can discuss the cross-applicability of one sector’s to another – or better understand why they will not work.

A handy website in case you’re wondering about the Blitz.

In less than a month, those of you who wish they had the time and gumption to write a novel can compete in the 3 Day Novel Contest.  First prize is to get published!

But you only have three days to write that world-beater.

My Arts Editor and I competed in this, just once.  Our effort had some good writing in it, and some atrocious writing.  Perhaps most importantly, though, it managed to get a rather mediocre idea out of my brain and onto paper – and now it doesn’t bother me anymore.

Instead, a new one does.  Gah.  Maybe – once again – I shan’t have time to do it.

Continuing the thread on the lake that supplies several states, CNN covers the town that used to be drowned: St. Thomas. The Las Vegas Sun contributes this from a couple of years ago:

Residents fought the federal government to no avail and complained about what they said was the government’s low payments for their properties. Nearly all of the residents left well before the lake flooded the town, but there were a few people who denied that the lake would rise that high.

The last of those was Hugh Lord, who woke to water at the foot of his bed one morning. He gathered his things and before climbing into his rowboat, set fire to his house. Why? The histories don’t say, but it seems like a fitting Nevada way out — one last shake of the fist at the federal government, which might force him out but couldn’t take everything he had.

Back in 2008, the Las Vegas Sun had a bit more:

“What I find interesting about it,” says Aaron McArthur, a UNLV doctoral student who is writing the history of St. Thomas for the National Park Service, “is that in 1945, in 1963, the times it emerged from the water before, there were always reunions here. Reunions in the real sense that, ‘We might have been pushed out, but this is our home.’ ”

“Now most of the people are dead … Now the lessons that people seem to be drawing from it have less to do with matters of faith and ‘grow where you’re planted,’ and more with a cautionary kind of thing about what happens when we’re not responsible stewards of water.”

A little further back in time:

Thousands of years before, the Anasazi, an ancient Pueblo people, knew all too well that life in this area was impossible without plenty of water.

Eva Jensen, an archaeologist with the Lost City Museum in Overton, thinks about them every time she turns on her faucet.

“Everybody should think about that,” she says. “Just what is the capacity of the land and the resources that we have?”

Unable to grow crops to feed a population that had grown too fast to support their nearly 1,000 people, the Anasazi abandoned the dry valley about 1150, after living here for 1,000 years.

“The question we should be asking is: How were they able to survive here for as long as they did?” Jensen says. “Our current community hasn’t been here that long, so we haven’t really been tested. We’ll see how we handle this latest drought.”

And Americans, in the form of the National Park Service, are trying to make lemonade out of this lemon:

Once the town was flooded higher than 60 feet above the tallest structure, now visitors can roam the ghost remains of a true western town. St. Thomas lies in the northern part of the park near the Overton Arm along the Muddy River, which feeds into Lake Mead. The access road is dirt and sometimes bumpy so visitors with low riding vehicles may want to be careful. However most vehicles should be able to handle the approximately three mile dirt road. There is a dirt trail leading to the town site from the parking area.

It’s a tough squeeze, I fear.

In the 1 August 2015 edition of NewScientist (paywall), Martin Rees, the UK’s Astronomer Royal, suggests we’re more likely to encounter a species of Artificial Intelligence than a, well, biological species:

Many people now believe that machine intelligence will eventually surpass human capabilities. Even if this is centuries away on Earth, it is clear that technology advances in an instant compared with the Darwinian selection that led to us.

We should accept that the era of organic intelligence is relatively short, and will be followed by a much longer era dominated by inorganic intelligences. Humans and our intellectual achievements will be a mere precursor to the deeper cogitations of a machine-dominated culture.

Doom & gloom, and, at first glance, it just seems so … inevitable.

Abstract thinking by biological brains has underpinned all culture and science on Earth. But this activity, spanning tens of millennia at most, will be a brief prelude to the more powerful intellects of the inorganic, post-human era. Evolution on other worlds orbiting stars older than the sun could have had a head start. If so, then ET is likely to have long ago transitioned beyond the organic stage. So it won’t be human-like minds that we are most likely to encounter, but machine intelligences.

It honestly gives me a sense of ennui.  But something rings false here – at least enough of a ring where we may still have a fighting chance.  And it all begins with … slime molds.  Remember them?

Samir Patel of Archaeology Magazine writes a report on how the Romans might have designed their transportation network:

… Physarum polycephalum, consists of a single large membrane around many cell nuclei, and has drawn the attention of a wide range of scientists because of its uncanny ability to solve almost impossibly complex computational problems.

Now, to review: Computers are logic machines, which is to say, computer scientists and mathematicians are well aware of problems which are not really susceptible to … computers.  We’ve discussed this before in connection with Yanofsky’s THE OUTER LIMITS OF REASON: WHAT SCIENCE, MATHEMATICS, AND LOGIC CANNOT TELL US, or you can buy and read his book, or you can look up the P=NP problem.  Assuming someone resolves the P=NP problem to mean that such problems cannot be solved, this defines a class of problems, some quite important, that a computer cannot solve.

AIs are, and most probably will remain, here and in outer space, computer-based.  If a slime mold can solve problems a computer finds, at best, difficult, well, what problems are resolvable by biological intelligence of human magnitude, whilst opaque to AIs?  This includes problems which might be key in a competition between biologicals and AIs.

I think Dr. Rees hasn’t really thought about the limitations of AI; after all, the potential is the exciting part to discuss.  But fundamental limitations imposed by the basic hardware gets less attention – but will undoubtedly shape the potential and ambition of the AI.

That is not to say we won’t encounter cyborgs, which is a melding of biological with technological.  The same issue of NewScientist includes an article (paywall) from Hugh Herr, a prosthetics pioneer:

Tell me about your bionic legs…
I have a company that produces what I’m wearing: the BiOM Ankle System. For the first time in history we’ve normalised walking speed and its energy cost. In other words, if you simply measure a user’s speed and metabolic energy expenditure, you can’t tell whether they have bionic legs or biological legs. That’s especially important because conventional technology used on people with leg amputation makes them limp, which causes musculoskeletal stresses that lead to joint disease and many other secondary conditions. True limb bionics eliminate limping and solve these very costly secondary conditions. Typically when we fit the BiOM prosthesis to a person, if they have hip pain, knee pain or back pain it is reduced in days.

Could such bionics benefit people in general?
Actually, we have developed bionic technology for people with complete biological limbs. Last year, we were the first research group to build an autonomous leg exoskeleton that significantly reduces the metabolic cost of walking to a person without a leg condition. It’s an artificial calf muscle, which supplies about 80 per cent of the power to walk. So a person with a normal physiology could put on these exoskeletons and walk using substantially less energy. …

This sounds incredibly futuristic…
Bionics is just getting started. What I’m wearing here is going to be laughable 20 years from now – absolutely laughable. So if you think stuff is cool now, it will become extraordinary – and disability will end, I’d say, by the end of this century. And I think that’s a very conservative statement. At the rate technology is progressing, most disability will be gone in 50 years.

But these are repairs and assists to the biological, not replacements for the intelligence – and thus not threatening to the biological.

The Washington Post has published a piece on the disaster of the North Carolina legislature’s handling of the their education system, written by a former NC educator, James Hogan.  A few points:

When North Carolina Republicans took control of the state government in 2012, they quickly set into motion a sweeping agenda to enact conservative social reforms and vastly change how the state spends its money. It was the first time in more than a century that Republicans enjoyed such political dominance in our state.

What brought them all to town? A good reason: in the 2011-12 budget year, North Carolina projected a multi-billion dollar deficit, enough to rank the state among the worst budget offenders in the country and bring a new slate of elected legislators to Raleigh. So Republicans, with a clear mandate to clean up the fiscal mess in November 2012, set to work righting the ship.

So some might argue this to be the fault of the Democrats; others would suggest neither is competent.  I lean towards the continuing conundrum of amateur lawmakers – primed with ideology and tactics and strategies long-discarded by the professionals of years gone by, they rampage about, certain in their righteousness, while the rest of us groan at the mess to be cleaned up.

Education being a third of the state budget, it does make sense that legislators might make it a target.

 Later in the 2013 session, though, the most radical changes in state financing fell into place. Republicans reconstructed the state’s tax code, relieving the burden on corporations and wealthy residents. They continued to take aim at other parts of the education budget, cutting More at Four program dollars and decreasing accessibility for poor families. The state lost thousands more teacher and teacher assistant positions. The bloodletting was fierce. …

Republicans defended these austerity measures by saying that lower taxes would eventually yield fiscal growth. And they were right. This year, the government is enjoying a $445 million surplus–a clear victory in light of those multi-billion dollar deficits of yore–but still a statistically small number in light of the state’s $21 billion budget (about two percent), especially after considering that our state budget is still smaller than it was in 2011.

It’s always dangerous to come to such a casual conclusion in an environment with many variables: Post hoc ergo propter hoc.  It’s unjustified.

Curiously, the Republican-held capital didn’t stop at defunding education. They also took aim at teachers.

The Republicans and their libertarian allies have long disliked the teachers’ unions, the latter due to the difficulties in discharging incompetent teachers – the libertarians value economic efficiency, being who they are, and protecting the incompetent is deeply frictional.  The drive of unions to protect all of their members, so logical from the inside, is one of the features of unions that drives outsiders nuts.   (In the vein of economic efficiency, the tendency of unions to drive up salaries is also an irritant to the libertarians.)

And here’s the goal:

First, weaken schools. Then print parents a ticket out–and into for-profit schools

North Carolina schools were dealt another blow when the legislature re-ordered how schools are evaluated in 2012. The new evaluations, which used an A-F grading system, were intended to provide an easier to understand metric for school effectiveness.

The result? More than 700 of the state’s public schools (nearly thirty percent) received a score of D or F. Many parents struggled to understand how so many schools could so quickly fail. …

 No matter, though. It was perfect timing for the legislature’s next move: with this new “evidence” that North Carolina schools were failing in their mission, the state could move forward with its plan to grant parents options–freedom of choice was how the Republicans phrased it–and built a tuition voucher plan that sent tax dollars to parents who opted out of public schools and into private or religious schools.

Hogan blames this on lobbyist groups at the capitol, but the legislators are no doubt ideologically predisposed towards a scheme like this: these are the words and concepts played for the 30 years or more throughout the conservative.  But the confusion of the metrics of the economic sector with the metrics of the educational sector is provocative and deserves a post of its own, if only so I can work out what I think I’m talking about.

At least of killing megafauna in prehistory, according to Michael Slezak in NewScientist (1 August 2015, paywall):

HUMANS were not to blame for the extinction of prehistoric giant mammals after all – global warming was the real culprit, according to new evidence.

Ever since a giant sloth was uncovered more than 200 years ago, hinting at the existence of an ancient menagerie of megafauna, our ancestors have been on trial for their extinction.

“The overwhelming evidence is that the megafauna extinctions occur around the world whenever humans turn up,” says Alan Cooper, who researches ancient DNA at the University of Adelaide in Australia. But that’s not the whole story. Look closer and the pattern emerging is that climate change is linked to extinctions, regardless of whether humans were there or not, he says.

DNA was used to find extinctions and check whether the rate changed when humans appears on the scene:

Two strands of evidence allowed the team to figure this out. First, they compiled 10 years of work on ancient DNA that had uncovered a series of “invisible” extinctions. These are events involving two or more lineages with identical skeletons but different genomes – two species of bison, say. That means if both species lived in the same area, we could not tell just from the bones that a species had gone extinct.

Secondly, they created a new ancient climate record spanning the same time period that could be reliably linked with the carbon dates from bones to show when particular extinctions happened. Usually, timelines for climate change and carbon dating are independent and difficult to link. But Cooper’s team found a marine sediment that contains a record of both past climates and microfossils, allowing them to link climate and carbon dating.

However, there are still lessons for today.  Some species can shift their ranges in response to global warming – and some cannot:

While humans probably did not hunt species to extinction, farming would have disrupted landscapes and prevented species fleeing to escape the effects of climate change.

Cooper’s findings also provide a stark warning for the future, according to Brian Huntley from Durham University, UK. “Human alteration or destruction of ecosystems is so pervasive that it is clear that many species are unable to shift their ranges sufficiently rapidly to match current anthropogenic climatic changes,” he says.

The Australian Museum gives a digest of Australian megafauna here; Medical Daily covered the Australian megafauna question in a little more detail more than a year ago:

An extensive review of available evidence suggests that the enormous megafauna wandering the Australian outback thousands of years ago were wiped out by climate change, long before Aboriginal humans arrived on the continent.

“The interpretation that humans drove the extinction rests on assumptions that increasingly have been shown to be incorrect,” said lead author Stephen Wroe, an associate professor at the University of New South Wales, in a statement.

Wroe argues that most of the 88 giant animal species that once existed on the continent of Sahul, which encompassed Australia, New Guinea, and Tasmania, went extinct long before humans arrived between 45,000 and 50,000 years ago.

While humans may have been involved in the extinction of the ones that remained after their arrival, his team finds no conclusive proof.