Author Archives: Hue White

The Ultra-Orthodox of Israel are a close-knit community which values a good wedding, but often doesn’t appear to be able to afford it.  How do they achieve a good wedding?  AL Monitor’s Mordechai Goldman explains:

In most basic terms, there are two components to how the ultra-Orthodox manage to marry off their children: a system of interest-free loans and restrained consumption (especially compared with the broader society). …

One type of charitable institution actually lends money. Dozens of such banks operate in the ultra-Orthodox community, lending sums large and small, at 0% interest and without commissions or other costs, to anyone who asks. Smaller loan societies deal with amounts up to $1,000, while the larger ones might lend as much as $15,000 to individuals. Charitable wealthy individuals provide the funding for these institutions, hoping to help individuals in need.

Less-familiar charitable institutions for personal savings operate alongside the free-loan societies. When the time comes for depositors to withdraw their money, they also have an opportunity to obtain a loan under extremely favorable terms. For example, the main savings society in the ultra-Orthodox town of Beitar Illit allows families to open a savings account for each child when the baby is born. The monthly deposit is limited to about $30 per child. Twenty years later, when the “child” is ready to marry, the accumulated sum ($7,200) is returned, and the depositor is eligible for a loan double the accumulated amount, at 0% interest and paid back in 80 to 160 monthly installments.

So this informal banking system works to ensure the cohesiveness of the culture – not just make money.  In fact,

The main loan society in Beitar Illit explained that deposits are limited to just $30 per month for fear that if people saved more, they would have more money to withdraw, and the weddings they arranged would become too extravagant. A source at the society who requested anonymity told Al-Monitor, “We reached the conclusion that 120,000 shekels — savings of 40,000 shekels and an 80,000-shekel loan — is a reasonable amount for marrying off a child, including the cost of the wedding and dowry. If we were to allow people to deposit more, they would only waste more. This would be detrimental to our guiding principles of saving money and avoiding unchecked consumption.”

Good?  Bad?  That judgment will pivot on your view of unbridled individualism, which I’ve certainly explored over the years, but have come to distrust bit by bit as the costs – especially those unloaded on the environment, which can neither fight back nor send a bill – become more apparent.  But it’s fascinating to see how various segments of society, as focused by a religious order, pull together to ensure certain customs remain active and vital.

NPR broadcast a story this morning concerning the fairness of forcing non public union members to pay some share of union fees to unions in their workplaces:

It’s the showdown at the Supreme Court Corral on Monday for public employee unions and their opponents.

Union opponents are seeking to reverse a 1977 Supreme Court decision that allows public employee unions to collect so-called “fair share fees.”

Twenty-three states authorize collecting these fees from those who don’t join the union but benefit from a contract that covers them.

The decision later this year will have profound consequences not just for the California teachers in Monday’s case, but for police, firefighters, health care workers and other government workers across the country.

And I thought to myself,

Fine, if you have some objection to the union which you think is fundamental to your very being, then let’s find a way to accommodate you which is fair to all sides.

Since you object to paying a fair share for the work of the union, we’ll eliminate that requirement.

And since the union objects to representing you for free, we’ll eliminate that requirement.

My suggested resolution is that your salary, benefits, and workplace conditions will be based on the lowest offer from the employer.  So if the union negotiates a salary 15% over the lowest offer of the employer, then your salary will be … ah, you understand.

Or you can negotiate for yourself.

I think this is undeniably a very fair approach to the problem for those who think unions are un-American, and for those who simply don’t want to try to reform the union.

Further along in the NPR offering, I see this:

In the Supreme Court on Monday, lawyer Michael Carvin, representing the challengers, will tell the justices that what are technically called “agency fees” are unconstitutional.

“You’re forcing the employee to subsidize somebody else’s speech,” Carvin said. Negotiating a public employee union contract, he maintains, is different from negotiating one for workers in the private sector.

I disagree.  Just as companies lobby, quite often against the philosophical beliefs of their employers, without accusations of violating free speech rights, unions should as well.  And while I played with the notion of permitting the objectors to only pay the costs of the immediate contract negotiation, a good union’s activities should be constrained to those benefiting the union members; differentiation is a fool’s task.

That, of course, is an ideal union; but a good member should be reforming the bad union, not running away from it.

Mr. Carvin then moves along with an emotionally appealing, but basically, idiotic argument:

“When we’re talking about public unions,” he said, “everything they do is inherently a matter of public concern, because every time they get pension, health care and salary benefits, that comes out of the public fisc … so every dollar you spend on health care or salary is a dollar you can’t spend on roads or children.”

You bump up the taxes a trifle and pay the folks educating your kids without stealing from the other chores.  And, oddly enough, paying the teachers better means your ARE spending more on children.

All that said, I’ve never been a union member and probably never will be.  Probably won’t join AARP, either.  Not a joiner at heart.  But, given the disgraceful behavior of employers in the private sector, I do not deny the need for unions, for their ability to bring the viewpoint of the line worker to the table, with regards to safety, salary, and many other matters.  Face it: the workplace is not an easy matter, and leaving it to management, with an overriding interest in profit (in most places), leaves the matter greatly unbalanced.  The smart places embrace unions, in my view.  Unions, for all their flaws, are a valuable addition to the workplace, private or public.

Jon White writes about the sociology of tipping in NewScientist (19 December 2015, paywall) and has a surprising fact:

There are also worrying similarities between tipping and bribery. In a comparison of 32 countries, Magnus Torfason at the University of Iceland found that countries where tipping was most prevalent also tended to have more corruption. “My intuition is that if you don’t have tipping, you don’t have a population that is experienced in informal exchange. That makes bribery difficult,” he says. His native Iceland is a case in point, with little tipping and a strong cultural bias for transactions to be very transparent.

But I’m not sure I’d equate “informal exchange” with bribery; they seem to be rather different.  (I’m also a trifle suspicious of such a small sample size, and wonder about cherry-picking – but that’s not really a worthy thought, hopefully the journal publishing these studies had good reviewers who looked at basic questions like these.)

From the same article comes this:

Tipping divides economists too. Why would you pay more for something when you don’t have to? That’s irrational. Even if a tip is designed to encourage good service, surely the most logical time for cash to change hands is up front. Paying extra after the event makes little sense, especially if you’re a one-time customer in a restaurant or a passenger in a cab whose driver you will probably never see again. What’s going on?

I’ve run across similar statements from and about economists, which has puzzled me a little bit.  In particular, I remember a reference to some classic experiment in which someone is given some money and told they can give some other person any amount that they wish, and keep the rest.   The expected behavior is to give the minimum and keep the rest, yet this does not typically occur; instead, an average of about 25% is given.  Or something like: I cannot remember exactly, nor have I been able to find my reference, or any other good, dependable description.  To me, it seems like these surprised economists (a visual out of FAMILY GUY) should consult with anthropologists – or evolutionary psychologists.  In any case, economists think we’re just calculating machines…

Wondering about world wide corruption?  Here’s Transparency International.  Juicy fact: Afghanistan, ranked 172nd/175, has a score of -1.620813904.  Perhaps a little rounding is in order.

… and not trying to get back into the swing of things just yet.

We’re binge watching HEROES REBORN, actually.

Robert Macfarlane, author of recent book Landmarks, remarks in NewScientist (19 December 2015) on the castoffs of the Anthropocene’s dominant species:

The [potash] mining is done by £3.2 million machines, which – at least to my zoomorphic eye – resemble Komodo dragons, low-slung and sharp-toothed. These machines are taken down the main shaft in six or seven sections, then assembled in bays a kilometre below the surface. Once complete, they take three days to trundle out to the production district, where they begin work.

Years later, when a machine has been exhausted by the demands of its labour, it’s just too expensive to bring it back to the surface, for this would mean suspending the transport of the profitable potash itself. So instead it is driven into a worked-out tunnel of rock salt, and abandoned.

Slowly, the pressure of depth squeezes the tunnel, and translucent salt flows around the machine, encasing it. Thus we lay down a future fossil of the Anthropocene: a machine-relic in a halite cocoon.

Great visual.

The Fiscal Times reports on efforts in the US Congress to defeat the market:

The combination of regulatory oversight and class-action litigation can keep companies in line. But a bill in Congress consisting of a little more than 100 words would not only prevent Kaplan from seeking justice but also cripple virtually all class-action lawsuits against corporations. It’s known as the “Fairness in Class Action Litigation Act,” but lawyers and advocates call it the “VW Bailout Bill.”

The bill, which will get a vote on the House floor in the first week of January, follows a series of steps by the judiciary to block the courthouse door on behalf of corporations. “There’s no question the Supreme Court has ben moving in that direction to limit access to courts,” said Joanne Doroshow, executive director of the Center for Justice and Democracy. “But Congress has never done something like this, trying to step in and wipe out class-actions.”

It’s always interesting how the greatest beneficiaries of market economics – corporations – often hide from the darker results of the market when it doesn’t suit them.  The natural place to run is the closest thing to a manager, the government, and attempt to find some way to ameliorate their misstep.  Removing class action suits continues an approach we’ve already discussed once here, where small-print agreements with consumers contain unbreakable requirements that disputes will always be handled via mediation, rather than the judicial system.

But I have to wonder if the members of Congress involved in this action have considered the long term problems this action may provoke.  The most important will be the market backlash: the American public, accepting that we have something resembling a free market, may be enraged that a company competing in the free market will be artificially protected from its misdeeds by an Act of Congress (will the President go along?).  Remember when the Bush Administration decided to support the “too big to fail” banks?  A lot of folks were really angry.

Second, changing the rules of the game is never a good philosophy.  Even business leaders will not be happy, as predictability, so prized by managers, goes out the window when Congress thinks it should be protecting one company from its own mistakes.

Third, an entity which doesn’t suffer for its mistakes will never learn from them.  Any parent knows this, and it applies to corporate critters as much as it does to singletons.

Fourth, if VW doesn’t have to deliver honest products to customers, why should anyone else?  The free market system excels when good product is delivered at an honest price, and that’s not what we’re seeing here – and it may be discouraged if this legislation becomes law.

To take one more quote from the Fiscal Times article:

The simplicity of the VW Bailout Bill belies the chaos it would create. Proponents like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the bill’s leading lobbyist, say they merely want to get rid of “non-injury” class-action cases, based on potential damages from defective consumer products or corporate actions that have yet to result in harm. Lawyers for class-action litigants argue that defective products deserve compensation even if the consumer hasn’t yet been injured.

This ignores the concept of irremediable harm.  There are some actions that can result in injury or death that cannot truly be remediated (despite legal attachments of value to human life, it’s little more than a gesture to the needs of the survivors).  By prohibiting such actions before they occur, damages can actually be less; by prohibiting class action suits referencing such actions, such as those resulting in climate change, we put more people at risk of preventable injury, and in that way the government fails to fulfill one of its key functions.

Finally, it’s interesting how we seem to be moving back to mercantilism, the economic system preceding free markets, in the sense that certain firms prosper because of governmental protectionism, while others no doubt will never survive because they lack the favor of the government.

Sometimes, in order to preserve something, we have to destroy it – a phrase with a delightful double meaning in this case.

But it’s really important that the US government dispense its favor in the commercial world as it does in the religious world – that is, not at all.

If California continues to dry out, inhabitants may face more occurrences of valley fever reports NewScientist (19/26 December 2015):

The Coccidioides fungus lives in the desert soil of the Southwest US and Mexico, but on dry, windy days it can get kicked up into the air. Inhaling a single spore can cause pneumonia – or worse. A drone designed at the University of California, Merced, aims to be a nose in the sky, searching for the airborne fungus to warn people when levels are high.

The fungus infects an estimated 150,000 people a year, causing a flu-like condition called valley fever. If properly diagnosed, valley fever can be treated with antifungal drugs, but little is known about how the spores spread through the environment, or how to stop this happening. The goal of the Merced project is to find out. The team wants to test for spores in flight, mapping their flow and potentially warning communities to stay indoors or wear masks on the most dangerous days.

Their initial approach is to use drones that can sample the air in real time.  The vision of warnings of high risk of catching pneumonia, depending on weather conditions, may be only the first as climate change moves our ecological niche in ways that make our adaptations less advantageous due to the release of more dangerous substances – both natural and unnatural.

In the same issue I was surprised to read that golden eagles will, when starving, kill adult reindeer by striking the large veins in their necks and waiting for them to bleed out.  Now I’m seeing other large creatures going after another large herd creature … humans ….

From NewScientist’s (12 December 2015, paywall) article on the research of Antarctica’s bedrock comes the word chemoautotrophic, referring to creatures (in this case bacteria) which leach energy from bedrock, so that they have neither a direct nor indirect dependence on energy from the sun.

Chemoautotrophic.  Remember it.  Use it.

Previous posts on this thread referred to identifying good human governments, but even elephant government appears to feature stability, as noted on Discover Magazine‘s D-brief blog:

Wittemyer and Goldenberg were particularly interested in how elephant social networks responded if a matriarch was killed. What happens when a matriarch’s wisdom and social skills suddenly vanish from a group? To see how elephants responded to dramatic changes, they combed through data collected from roughly 100 elephants during a 16-year period between 1998 and 2014 .

All four matriarchs that Wittemyer started watching nearly two decades ago were killed during that time period. In fact, just 30 percent of the elephants that were alive in 1998 were still alive in 2014, due to the impacts of poaching and a devastating drought. Surprisingly, the elephants’ social structures remained intact, and here’s why: After matriarchs were killed, their daughters stepped up to maintain the extended relationships their mothers had formed with other elephants.

Additionally, the daughters reached out to old acquaintances from their bond and clan groups to renew relationships and reconstruct their core and bond groups. Ultimately, the daughters reconfigured their social networks until they reflected the structure that was in place prior to a matriarch’s death. In other words, younger female elephants kept their mothers’ legacies alive, and, more importantly, prevented social collapse.

I wonder if we could learn from their example sometimes.

A list of words deemed unworthy of use on the Internet, courtesy Lake Superior State University: Physicality, Vape, Manspreading …

As a measure of my disconnectedness, I had never heard of that last one; on the other hand, I am a guilty party in the one most often asked to be stricken, that being the use of So to start a sentence.

(h/t various friends 🙂

One sector so far undiscussed is the free press.  This sector has difficulties, for while everyone is guaranteed free speech, there are no guarantees of free access to the necessary machinery of a free press.  Thus, there is a required intrusion of the private sector, which is the constructor of things, into the sector of news.

First, we should give a purpose for the sector of the press, and that is the delivery of news to the citizenry for its use in the everyday and long term conduct of lives.  Necessarily, fees are charged, but because of the achievement of scale in the collection and dispersal of the news, the prices are rarely onerous; audiences of specialized publications may find their pocketbooks taxed, but for the general consumer, the price of information is almost free in this age.

But the achievement of scale comes via the use of things, prosaic and specialized: vehicles, printing presses, journalistic skills, the Internet.  These are necessary and thus we cannot preclude the intrusion of the private sector into the free press sector.

The vigor of the free press can be said to correlate with the perception of veracity, and can apply to various players within the sector as well as the whole.  Consider the interests of the consumer: false information used as input for decision-making processes will, more often than not, lead to suboptimal solutions.  This dry, academic phrase can imply actions like driving off cliffs, losing retirement accounts to shysters, and even worse results.  Don’t blow it off: false information is a negative survival strategy.  Therefore, if the free press – or some segment of it – is providing false information on a systematic basis, then public trust in that institution will weaken, and that impacts both the organization and the sector¹.  The currency of the free press sector is the trust the public places in it, and nothing else.

The private sector does not necessarily hold veracity as a highest ideal, neither theoretically (all they want to do is produce and sell goods and services, and honesty is not necessary to make that sale to the consumer) nor in practice (consider the moral outrage of the denial of the tobacco-lung cancer connection by Big Tobacco): the goal is to make and trade things to others.  This is not the goal of the free press.   Thus, the private sector processes must be considered to be inappropriate until proven otherwise.

It’s worth explicating a little further: while pursuing private sector (or other sector) objectives in the free press sector isn’t necessarily impossible, using inappropriate processes such as disseminating false information will lead to short-term success but, as the consumers learn to distrust the compromised institutions, long-term weakness and even failure as consumers abandon the institution(s) in question.

Given the requirement of some private sector intrusion, how do we currently attempt to firewall that operationality to only positive uses in terms of the robustness of the free press sector?  In a phrase, journalistic ethics.  Wikipedia provides a useful summary:

While various existing codes have some differences, most share common elements including the principles of—truthfulness, accuracy, objectivity, impartiality, fairness and public accountability—as these apply to the acquisition of newsworthy information and its subsequent dissemination to the public.

An explicit acknowledgement of the importance of previously noted requirements for the sector to flourish.  Through an implementation of these requirements, both on an individual level and through the concept of “editorial independence”, wherein the advertising section of the organization is asserted to have no influence over the news and editorial sections of the organization, the influence of private sector preferences is obviated and the attentive consumer of the free press’ offerings, that being information, can have a better hope of receiving information congruent with reality. Contrariwise, the breaching of this wall is the private sector leaching beyond prudency into the purview of the free press.

A marvelous example of this (h/t Steve Yelvington) is discussed in this Facebook post by Steve Majerus-Collins.  Steve, explaining why he is quitting his job, puts it best:

I work for a man, Michael Schroeder, who in 2009 bought the small daily that has employed me for two decades at a time when the future of The Bristol Press looked dim. He came in promising to shatter old ways and to help push the financially troubled paper to new heights. As is so frequently the case with newspaper publishers, his rhetoric didn’t mean much. By 2011, my wife – a superb fellow reporter who’d been at my side the whole time – quit in disgust after Mr. Schroeder cut a deal with a major advertiser, the local hospital, to keep a damaging news story under wraps. Because she could not let the community know the local hospital had fired all of its emergency room physicians, my wife, Jackie Majerus, handed in her resignation. It means very little to be a reporter if you cannot report the news. I stayed on, though, continuing to write about government and politics, because we could not get by without any paycheck. …

I have watched in recent days as Mr. Schroeder has emerged as a spokesman for a billionaire with a penchant for politics who secretly purchased a Las Vegas newspaper and is already moving to gut it. I have learned with horror that my boss shoveled a story into my newspaper – a terrible, plagiarized piece of garbage about the court system – and then stuck his own fake byline on it. I admit I never saw the piece until recently, but when I did, I knew it had Mr. Schroeder’s fingerprints all over it. Yet when enterprising reporters asked my boss about it, he claimed to know nothing or told them he had no comment. Yesterday, they blew the lid off this idiocy completely, proving that Mr. Schroeder lied, that he submitted a plagiarized story, bypassed what editing exists and basically used the pages of my newspaper, secretly, to further the political agenda of his master out in Las Vegas. In sum, the owner of my paper is guilty of journalistic misconduct of epic proportions.

There is no excusing this behavior. A newspaper editor cannot be allowed to stamp on the most basic rules of journalism and pay no price. He should be shunned by my colleagues, cut off by professional organizations and told to pound sand by anyone working for him who has integrity.

So I quit.

Note that his boss probably thinks he did nothing wrong.  Unfortunately, his goal is not consonant with the free press sector goals.  He should not be permitted to own the newspaper, as he has violated, in gross fashion, the primary rule for a robust free press.  My hope is that the more robust institutions will proceed to take subscribers away until the paper which he bought goes under.  Steve’s salutation is admirable but incomplete:

Whatever happens, I am going to hold my head high and face the future with resolve. Journalism is nothing if we reporters falter and fade. We are doing something important and men such Mr. Schroeder and Mr. Adelson – no matter how much money they can toss around – cannot have their way with us.

I would suggest that an American society lacking a robust free press would be unstable and, ultimately, fail.

So that brings us to Bruce Bartlett (with a h/t to Sydney Sweitzer).  Mr. Bartlett is a conservative historian who worked for the Reagan and Bush I administrations in the area of economics.  His recent release of an article summarizing a collection of studies of Fox News is instructive not only for the information – but for the fact that, as a conservative, he has little use for Fox News.  This article gives a handy history and psychological warfare insight into how the angry conservative movement, fragmentary at the start, was co-opted by Fox News and some collaborators.  For example:

Limbaugh’s move was fortuitous. At the exact moment he launched his show, the AM band on the radio dial was essentially dying. Since the late 1960s, music programming and listeners had deserted AM radio in droves. The FM dial provided a better signal and could broadcast in stereo, which became increasingly important as musical styles changed. Unable to compete by broadcasting music, AM stations searched for alternative programming. Talk proved to be very viable. Soon there were talkers across the AM dial, many expressing a conservative viewpoint.

There are many reasons why conservative talk radio worked so well. One is that conservatives finally had a news source that fed their philosophy. Another is that conservatives viewed themselves as outsiders and were attracted not only to the philosophy of conservative talk radio, but its tone and articulation of outrage toward liberals that many listeners themselves had long felt.

But hard results?  Here’s one:

A follow-up study in 2010 questioned people about misperceptions related to domestic issues.

Again, Fox viewers were more likely to be misinformed and hold incorrect views than those primarily getting their information elsewhere. As the study found:

Those who watched Fox News almost daily were significantly more likely than those who never watched it to believe that:

• most economists estimate the stimulus caused job losses (8 points more likely)
• most economists have estimated the health care law will worsen the deficit (31 points)
• the economy is getting worse (26 points)
• most scientists do not agree that climate change is occurring (30 points)
• the stimulus legislation did not include any tax cuts (14 points)
• their own income taxes have gone up (14 points)
• the auto bailout only occurred under Obama (13 points)
• when TARP came up for a vote most Republicans opposed it (12 points)
• and that it is not clear that Obama was born in the United States (31 points)

These effects increased incrementally with increasing levels of exposure and all were statistically significant. The effect was also not simply a function of partisan bias, as people who voted Democratic and watched Fox News were also more likely to have such misinformation than those who did not watch it – though by a lesser margin than those who voted Republican.

There’s more, which I’ll forebear quoting as Mr. Bartlett’s paper deserves to be read in full by the interested reader.  I’ll simply note that Republican shock at losing the last two Presidential elections was widespread and should have led to hard questions being asked about the veracity of their sources of information.  Instead, reportedly questions were raised about the purity of the various candidates, and the GOP moved further right.

At this juncture, it’s fair to wonder: what are the goals of those in control of the Fox News organization?  Why, in a society which must, in the end, value honesty over ideology, is this organization permitted to indulge in a style of reporting which cripples its audience, while its allies work hard to ensure the audience never double checks the information and uses its critical faculties? Does it commit suicide purposefully?

More generally, the intrusion of private sector methodologies into the sector of the free press, which is a long running tension, is a matter for constant monitoring and management.  It’s quite one thing for manufacturers of printing presses to compete to build cheaper, better presses; it’s quite another for the more devious strategies of the private sector to be employed in the free press sector to achieve goals peculiar to the private sector – or even the political sector.

¹ The use of the financial position of a free press organization as a measure of its health is an intellectual error in that this would be the use of a private sector operationality to evaluate a free press organization (or the whole sector).  William Randolph Hearst may have been a very rich man, but his publications are notorious, rather than famous, and are worthy of study only for his pioneering efforts in manipulation of public opinion – not for his honorable intentions.

Rachel E. Gross at Slate references a Science Magazine article discussing how legislative bills attacking the teaching of evolution have, ummm, evolved:

But how did creationists think of such a perfect way to frame their anti-science agenda? You might think that such a bill came into this world fully formed, like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. But actually, it had a predecessor. An ancestor, you might even call it.

In what is almost a too-clever illustration of how evolution works, a scientist at Australian National University has created a chart to show us the evolution of anti-evolution bills. The study was published last week in Science, on the 10th anniversary of the historic Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial, which struck down the teaching of intelligent design, an attempt to mask creationism with pseudo-scientific language. Evolutionary biologist Nick Matzke revealed how these bills have evolved over time to avoid potential predators such as the pesky Constitution and public outcry.

However, the fact that it passed a state legislature (two, actually, the other being Tennessee) while explicitly denying that it violates the Constitution does not mean it’ll not fall victim to the Great White of the political landscape, SCOTUS.

It might, however, be better classed as a transitional evolutionary form.

Usufruct: “the right to enjoy the use and advantages of another’s property short of the destruction or waste of its substance.”

I ran across its use here, as in

Another problem is that the people of South Sinai are unable to own land in Sinai and are only allowed to have usufruct rights.

Louis Friedman, executive director emeritus of The Planetary Society, has a new book out and gives Discover Magazine‘s The Crux blog an interview in support of it, where he suggests Mars is the outer limit for the next 10,000 years:

[Discover]: Even so, do you think that will be enough for everybody? Wouldn’t some daredevil take a human mission to points beyond at some point, just to show that they could do it? Is it so unrealistic to think that China, India, Brazil, Russia, the United States, the United Nations, or for that matter a government that has yet to exist on Mars, could find itself in a new space race where the goal is to get people — live people — where no one has gone before, for that prestige factor?

Wanting to do these things just seems to be part of human nature, we always produce people who want to visit new places, even if there’s no logical reason, don’t you agree? Do you think artificial intelligence and other technologies will change something about us, so that nobody will ever take a distant, dangerous space voyage that has no practical value?

[Friedman]: You have raised several questions here. You are right about the possibility that if we can do something, someone might just want to. We have all kinds of extreme sports here on Earth. I don’t rule out some daredevils or tourist extremists from our Earth-Mars home trying a daring mission to the asteroid belt or Ganymede. But it won’t be very relevant or even as much a part of our Society as those extreme trips to Mt. Everest.

Somebody jumped out of a balloon from the edge of space a year or so again, interesting, but not relevant to human development. Humans will already feel present on Ganymede (and lots of other places) and the development of human life support to engage in those extreme efforts will be expensive and pointless – if even possible…I think NASA has it right now. Their Journey to Mars puts into context why we have human spaceflight. In my opinion, there is no other purpose to human spaceflight.

In his answer he’s referencing a previous answer where he suggests advanced telepresence will replace actual human presence beyond Mars.  What caught my attention was his suggestion there’s only a single purpose to spaceflight.  Surely this contradicts all of human history in which a multitude of purposes coincide into single – if composite – actions. He’s not suggesting there’s a physical barrier that cannot be overcome, but almost a bureaucratic decision not to go.

My suspicion is that commercial interests will find use for telepresence and limited artificial intelligence¹ in such exploration, but there will be various limits imposed by simple physical requirements², and that eventually those folks not interested in adapting to (or terraforming) Mars will make a go of it – for their reasons.

Not for Louis’.

¹By “limited artificial intelligence” I mean an artificial intelligence lacking a survival drive, as I see a mission of this sort probably not returning – and you can’t send something with a survival drive on a suicide mission.  Yet, without the survival drive, there is a lack of motivation to solve problems….

²I exclude the breaking of the laws of physics.   Instantaneous communications would mean rethinking all the current concepts.

Saw PEANUTS today.  Voices & artwork were spot-on, wherein the latter was new but, I thought, very appropriate.  There were many references to the classic Peanuts tropes, perhaps too many, Snoopy was marvelous and a great way to cut the tension.  In the end, the story was slightly un-Peanuts, but fit well within the scope of a story that teaches good behavior of Western tradition, so it didn’t make me as uncomfortable as it did my Arts Editor.

I enjoyed it!

A couple of nights ago we enjoyed a movie that rather brought home the timelessness of the conundrums of crime and redemption: KISS OF DEATH (1947), with Victor Mature and Richard Widmark.  Mature plays Bianco, a man with a criminal past, a wife, and children to support.  Unable to find a job, he returns to his roots and knocks over a jewelry store; the silent alarm is rung and, as the store is on an upper floor of a skyscraper, Bianco (but not his assistants) is caught and convicted.

Initially, he refuses to give up the names of the other criminals, but a few months later, word comes that his wife, despondent over finances, has committed suicide, and the children are consigned to an orphanage.  All this despite the promises of an elder in the criminal hierarchy, and it dawns on Bianco that loyalty to the criminal subculture has brought him heartbreak, his dreams to naught.

Betrayal becomes the name of the game, as Bianco gives evidence that Tommy Udo (Widmark) is involved in a murder, as well as a babysitter who sees Bianco as the man of her dreams (and now it occurs to me that maybe she knocked off the wife!) and marries him.  Out on parole, his children retrieved and a home bought, Bianco must now testify against Udo to make sure he goes away forever.

Juries can be such dicks.

Udo is completely psycho, and Widmark makes it believable, as the writers give him the task of pushing an old woman in a wheelchair (a little gem herself, evidencing a bit of humor in what could have been a colorless role) down a flight of stairs.  He feeds off that initial bit of insanity to evidence narcissism and arrogance certain to color the memories of viewers.

However, I find it hard to agree with the categorization of this movie as noir, because it’s usually such a personal thing; in this movie, the noir may be considered to refer to the situation of ex-cons in general, rather than the poor decisions of Bianco.  In noir, no angel descends to save the hero from their bad decisions, but rather they die in their cars, maybe in the midst of evil, perhaps even as they grasp after the good (as in RIFIFI).

But if you enjoy the old movies, this is certainly worth a gander.  The dialogue doesn’t dance like that in the THE THIN MAN, or have the charisma of THE CRIME DOCTOR series, but the nitty-gritty may be more important than those two facets – the grind of the everyday life for a convict trying to make good.

Iran appears to be making progress in the nuclear arms protocol signed with the Western powers, reports the Arms Control Association using information from the Institute for Science and International Security in mid November:

According to the Nov. 18 International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) quarterly report, Iran has dismantled 4,530 centrifuges since the July 14 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was adopted last month.

Action by Iran to fulfill its commitments under the agreement is a positive sign. Completing the dismantlement of 1/3 of the ~13,500 centrifuges that must be removed under the terms of the deal is tangible evidence that the agreement is working to stringently restrict Iran’s nuclear program. …

However, Iran has considerable work left to do before it receives sanctions relief under the agreement—for example Iran as yet to decrease the numbers of centrifuges enriching uranium to the 5,060 permitted under the deal. If Iran continues at last month’s rate of dismantlement, it will take an additional six weeks to dismantle the first generation IR-1s and over 3 months to dismantle the IR-2Ms. The IAEA will need to certify that Iran has completed all of its commitments in other areas of its nuclear program.

Michael Singh of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and Simond de Galbert, a French diplomat, are not entirely happy with progress:

A recent International Atomic Energy Agency report confirmed what the U.S. and its allies have long maintained: that, contrary to its denials, Iran had an organized nuclear weapons program until 2003 and continued elements of this work through at least 2009.

This revelation was not unexpected; Western officials have long accused Iran of seeking nuclear weapons. The Obama administration and its allies intend to move ahead with implementation of the deal on Iran’s nuclear program, having pledged in the agreement that Iran did not have to disclose its past nuclear weapons’ work or fully cooperate with the IAEA investigation to receive sanctions relief. …

By protecting its nuclear secrets, accepting only temporary constraints on fuel-cycle work, and advancing its missile program, Iran is keeping its nuclear options open for the future.

The National Iranian American Council has some insight into Iranian leadership motivations:

If Iran continues at its present pace, some experts predict that Iran could finish its work by early to mid-January, enabling the relief of sanctions before February 26 elections for Iran’s next parliament and Assembly of Experts — the body that appoints the country’s Supreme Leader. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and other moderates will want to move quickly in order to point to the lifting of sanctions prior to the February elections, a key electoral promise that helped sweep Rouhani into office in 2013. Even if it takes the Iranian economy more time to reap the benefits of relief, such a key step would be an important symbolic victory that could provide a boost for moderates at the polls. However, Iranian hardliners are unlikely to sit still with moderates poised to gain an advantage in elections that will help determine the direction of Iran for years to come. Already, hardliners have overseen an internal crackdown and sought to throw up roadblocks to stall the lifting of sanctions until after the elections.

Steve Benen @ MaddowBlog is positive:

The New York Times’ Jonathan Weisman noted that as recently as a year ago, many officials – inside the Obama administration and out – believed Iran would never actually part with its nuclear fuel. And yet, yesterday, that’s exactly what happened. …

As of yesterday, that first major benchmark is cleared, and as the Times added, for the first time in nearly a decade, Iran now appears to have “too little fuel to manufacture a nuclear weapon,” even if it wanted to.

The first baby steps towards another victory for President Obama?  An ongoing drama.

The Washington Post reports on a change to the Federal civil forfeiture program:

The Department of Justice announced this week that it’s suspending a controversial program that allows local police departments to keep a large portion of assets seized from citizens under federal law and funnel it into their own coffers.

The “equitable-sharing” program gives police the option of prosecuting asset forfeiture cases under federal instead of state law. Federal forfeiture policies are more permissive than many state policies, allowing police to keep up to 80 percent of assets they seize — even if the people they took from are never charged with a crime.

The DOJ is suspending payments under this program due to budget cuts included in the recent spending bill.

Steve Benen @ MaddowBlog takes excited note:

Nearly a year ago, then-Attorney General Eric Holder took some initial steps to curtail civil-forfeiture programs, but this latest move was less the result of policy preferences and more a result of fiscal concerns: Congress cut the Justice Department’s budget.

Nevertheless, we’re talking about a status quo in which law enforcement takes and often keeps “cash and property from people who are never convicted – and in many cases, never charged – with wrongdoing.” And at least for now, this practice will be less common.

The Institute of Justice‘s Lee McGrath notes:

“Many police, sheriffs and prosecutors want to circumvent state laws because outsourcing forfeiture litigation to the federal government is lucrative” said Lee McGrath, Legislative Counsel at the Institute for Justice, “State lawmakers should enact an anti-circumvention provision that respects federalism and refocuses law enforcement’s attention on stopping crime by allowing only seizures greater than $50,000 to be forfeited under federal law.”

Some police are not happy.  From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

“This is going to have a huge impact on police departments not only in St. Louis but around the country,” St. Louis Chief Sam Dotson said Wednesday. “It is an inconsistent message from the president whose focus is on 21st Century Policing, and yet this happened without having a serious conversation about how this will impact local law enforcement.”

I’m not excited, as this change in forfeiture policy is not motivated by principle, but by a random unfortunate reality.  Until elected officials take up the idea that forfeiture is nothing more than judging a suspect to be guilty without trial, it’s very difficult to see this as nothing more than a temporary stop to one program amongst a suite of programs clearly built on a notion at odds with a basic principle of our country.  Let either party decide to fund the program properly and the injustice returns.

Mr. McGrath suggests a lower limit before forfeiture can be invoked, which is interesting, but I would suggest that simply the knowledge that the funds exist at the time of the arrest should be enough that a law could be written indicating the funds must be available for forfeiture IF the trial is lost.

And for all those police agencies who depend on forfeiture for funding?  They should go to the proper taxing authorities and tell them to stop living off the poor and others who cannot afford to sue for the return of their funds, and raise taxes appropriately.  If it’s a choice between legalized theft from those who cannot defend themselves, and raising taxes, stop wetting yourselves and do what’s necessary – raise taxes on those who have been benefiting and can afford to pay them.

The struggle over the waters of the Nile continues, according to AL Monitor‘s Ayah Aman:

Negotiations between Cairo, Addis Ababa and Khartoum have entered a decisive stage in which the parties must express their final stance concerning the controversy and disagreement caused by Ethiopia’s Grand Renaissance Dam, which threatens Egypt’s annual share of the Nile waters. Meetings involving the parties’ foreign affairs and water ministers have intensified, as Ethiopia and Egypt are preparing by finding alternatives that speed up the implementation of the studies should the feud deepen and the negotiations fall through.

Egypt blames Ethiopia, and vice versa:

He added, “The Ethiopians’ intransigence and bias toward the French consultancy BRL so that it carries the studies alone without the participation of the Dutch Deltares leave us with many doubts. We are also skeptical about the acceleration of the dam’s construction, which makes us believe that Ethiopia is not serious about acting the results of the studies.”

Meanwhile, the Ethiopian side seemed to take a different view. The country’s ministers of foreign affairs and water were keen to highlight the political commitment announced by Ethiopia, consisting of avoiding damage and working to solve all the technical issues within the tripartite technical committee through finding alternatives that speed up the implementation of the studies. And since the Egyptian side voiced its rejection of the process, the Ethiopian foreign affairs minister asked to postpone the meeting for two weeks until an answer to the Egyptian demands is reached.

Leading to:

Although the stakeholders are waiting for the next meeting’s results, refusing to release any statement regarding the success or failure of the negotiations, a new line of accusations has appeared in the Egyptian and Ethiopian media, especially after Oromo minorities intensified their demonstrations last week and Egypt was accused of supporting opposition movements to weaken the Ethiopian government’s development efforts. And as no Egyptian officials have responded to these accusations, discussion has been animated in the Egyptian media about this issue and on holding the Ethiopian government responsible for the deaths of the protesters.

How a demonstration in Cairo will pressure the Ethiopians is unclear.  The Oromo are

… an ethnic group inhabiting Ethiopia, northern Kenya, and parts of Somalia.[4] With around 25 million members, they constitute the single largest ethnicity in Ethiopia and the wider Horn of Africa, at approximately 35% of Ethiopia’s population according to the 2007 census.[1][5][6] Oromos speak the Oromo language as a mother tongue (also called Afaan Oromoo and Oromiffa), which is part of the Cushitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic family. The name was given as Ilm’ Orma (“Sons of Men” or an eponymous ‘Orma’) in the 19th century;[7] the present form is probably an obsolete plural of the same word orma (“person, stranger”). [Wikipedia]

A blog dedicated to the Oromo is here.

Don Peppers in a LinkedIn article pursues an old libertarian dream:

State-sponsored public education in almost every country in the world is unsatisfactory and inept, a scandal we’ve tolerated far too long. …

In Matt Ridley’s ambitious book The Evolution of Everything, he dedicates a full chapter to a sweeping story of how people educate themselves, when left to their own devices. If you look at how schools develop “in the wild” today, outside of government programs, you’ll be amazed at the kind of systems that evolve on their own – simply because parents want to educate their children, and they’re willing to spend money to do so, especially when they see that a state-sponsored system is dysfunctional.

I’ll freely grant I’ve not read Mr. Ridley’s book, Mr. Pepper’s inspiration.  Perhaps I should.  But simply based on Mr. Pepper’s column and the material concerning American societal sectors developed elsewhere in this blog, beginning here with relevant additions here, here, and here, as well as some random observations and thoughts, I think we can induce some doubts as to the apocalypse of public education.

Categorization

Readers must be familiar with the material previously noted concerning societal categorization, in particular this one, in order to understand my point of view in this section.  To return to Mr. Pepper, he then steps in a hole:

And why not? After all, no one thinks a government monopoly is necessary to ensure an adequate supply of fitness centers, or hotels, or grocery stores, right? But just like hotels and groceries, non-government schools maintain their quality because they compete with each other; state schools do not.

He freely skips over the character of the goods to be delivered, to use the argot of the private sector, and this is quite important.  In the private sector, the chief deliverables are goods (tangible items, if software can be regarded as tangible) and services.  Is an education either one of these?  As noted in the link, it is not.  So when we’re asked to compare an education to a fitness center (possibly one of the best comparisons), it doesn’t hold up: oranges and apples.

The entire point is conflicting goals.  The purpose of the business sector is production of goods and services in order to trade for other goods and services; the goal of the education sector is to inculcate an education in the student, where education is about both facts and thought processes (effective thinking, if you will).  Consideration of the requirements of education reveal it to be a different beast from the purposes of the private sector.

As I’ve discussed in the above links, the operationality of a sector is naturally optimized to achieve the goals of the sector in which it is embedded; moving it into another sector raises the dangers of unexpected consequences and subpar performance.  Some say that if we bring private sector methods into the educational sector then schools will compete and improve, with hardly a nod at the real purpose of most of the private sector: to generate profits.

Repeat that in your mind: to generate profits.  While the best businesses concentrate on quality and even love what they do, a disconcerting number of businessmen have learned that the private sector is all about making money.  So get that into your frontal cortex: this is about generating profits.

The general, implicit understanding is that a profitable school will take on more students to generate more profit.  This is an incomplete, and in some cases incorrect, appraisal of the situation.  After all, to select a perfectly applicable example, a manufacturer generates a profit by delivering product at a lower cost than his competitors, particularly in an industry where differentiation on quality is not a salient factor.  How does this translate when moving a businessman into the educational sector?

What is a large expense in the educational sector?

Salary.

So, you have some options.  You can cut salaries of the teachers which will attract, on average, a lesser quality teacher (and perhaps drive the better teachers out of the profession entirely), or you can fire the high earning teachers at the outset.  These are typically the highly experienced teachers.  You know, those who know how to teach.

Think this wouldn’t happen?  Already has.  The Curmudjucation blog has a post on this behavior, derived from a scholarly report.

This is but a single example.  Here’s another: think about the fact that the educational sector usually owns its real estate, which can be quite valuable.  Some private school efforts are little more than attempts to acquire the real estate, with a vague wave at schooling.

Remember, in the world of the private sector this isn’t even immoral behavior.  Bad businesses schools fail.  But assets are left behind for salvage.  That’s just how it goes.  Right?

So – parents – how do you feel about throwing your kid into a school where this may happen to them? Where the teachers are second rate?  Where the best teachers may simply be forced from the profession?

For a biased, but inside, view of charter schools see this Daily Kos diary.

Standards & Cherry Picking

Another aspect of concern is standards.  I know, I know, private schools can be subject to academic standards – but remember that generating profit is the name of the game, not meeting standards.  An allied concern are the fields studied – often a matter of contention in schools even today, occasionally making trips to SCOTUS over such concerns as Creationism.  But Pepper envisions a more radical future:

[Sugata] Mitra’s research suggests that the schooling system itself may soon become obsolete, replaced by what he calls the self-organized learning environment, or “SOLE.” His plan is to have three to five children share a computer with internet access, then propel their learning simply by giving them questions to answer on their own, like figuring out puzzles. Can trees think? Why do we dream? How does an iPad know where it is? Why do humans breathe, and what happens to the air we breathe?

This has a couple of problems.  First, let’s turn this example inside out and view it through the lens of a rational question: Would you let a 10 year old choose his course of study?

I shan’t even ask you to think about it, because the answer is NO.  I know when I was 10 I wouldn’t have gone to half my classes, given the option.  Most boys wouldn’t.  Indeed, the suggestion that they should negates the very intent of education: to become smarter about the world.

Secondly, the use of CAE (Computer Assisted Education) has its limits that are starting to become visible.  My impression is that this is still an active field of research, but I’ve noted at least one study (here) indicating there are limits to how much the Internet can enhance education:

But while PISA [Programme for International Student Assessment] results suggest that limited use of computers at school may be better than not using computers at all, using them more intensively than the current OECD average tends to be associated with significantly poorer student performance. ICT [Information and Computer Technology] is linked to better student performance only in certain contexts, such as when computer software and Internet connections help to increase study time and practice.

By “cherry picking”, I’m referring to the practice of selecting which students to admit with an eye towards enhancing performance by having only the best students admitted to your charter school.  This has a couple of problems.

Intellectual Segregation

There are undeniably positives to grouping high performing students together, such as the phenomenon I call laddering, in which the intense competition between students serves to inspire them to better performance.  I often see this in fencing, as new students join the club in groups, become quite competitive with each other, and end up reaching national competition levels simply because of their friendly desire to outdo each other.

However, the flip side of such segregation is a lack of exposure to the slower students.  This can cut both ways, as the superior students lose the valuable experience of working, or even just interacting, with the slower students, and the slower students may not receive the tutoring the superior students could have provided.  This may lead to resentment and other negative social consequences.

In the end, this division works against one of the most important aspects of society: we’re all in this together.  The social cohesivity and inclusiveness of American society has been one of our greatest strengths (and thus the resentment towards those who could buy their way out of the draft during wartime).  As much as it pains me, as an engineer, to suggest that peak efficiency is not as important as other factors, this may be one of those situations.

Ghettos

And then what will happen to the slowest, the disabled?  Today we try to mainstream them, making them part of our classes and part of our world, rather than pushing them off into a group home where we wait for them to die.  How many charter schools will take them?  Especially since many of those parents may not have the financial wherewithal to select a favorite school – such schools may not exist as the population of such students will be small.

As painful as it is, we do have a solution today: they become part of the general school population.  They are, if you like, a reminder that we do have a shared ideal and heritage.

Cost

The end of public education implies, as well, the end of general taxation support for those public schools.   In other words, parents will have to pay for the education of their children.

Is this good?  I put it this way because too often we wish to suggest there is not enough personal responsibility in the world, and it would certainly be a better world if we were better at it.  I certainly am as guilty of that as anyone, from getting vaccinations to getting the proper physical exercise.

But consider this: an educated populace is a superior populace.  I should hope this is not a controversial statement.  We are, in the end, a collective, a collection of people whose lots are thrown together, voluntarily or otherwise, and our individual fortunes depend to a large extent on the capabilities of our fellows as well as ourselves.  It is to our mutual benefit to make sure everyone is educated to a level which permits productive functioning in today’s society while enabling advanced education as appropriate.

Furthermore, there is a matter of justice.  Mr Peppers points to research showing some students can educate themselves.  For those of us who like multisyllabic words, these are autodidacts.  Not all kids can do this, and probably not even half of them.  When an adult has a child and cannot pay for that child’s education, then I have to ask: what has the CHILD done to deserve the punishment of losing an education?  This is simply a matter of justice – that a child, not responsible for the situation into which they are born, not be asked to pay for the inability of the unprepared or uncaring parent.

As a society, we collectively benefit from the education of all children, and therefore we should collectively pay for that education, and not saddle unprepared adults with that burden.  While we could then return to taxation and distributing the taxes to the private schools using a voucher scheme, or any other scheme, we’re now in the dangerous territory of taxing the populace and redistributing the funds to private businesses; not that this is unprecedented, but the opportunities for corruption at the intersection of disparate sectors (private to government, in this case) are well documented and, sadly, rife.

Pepper’s Examples

I did find it interesting how the examples of private schooling outdoing public schooling comes exclusively from third world countries: India, Ghana and Somaliland (where the metric is simply the number of operating schools!): countries where corruption is not only rampant, but customary.  To use these examples to condemn public schooling is rather like suggesting that Little League baseball’s failure to make it on ESPN 1 means that Major League Baseball hasn’t a chance against the National Football League.  Is Denmark, Sweden, Germany in similar straits?  Do their public schools produce illliterates?

And he doesn’t really seem to be aware of the United States educational system:

But unfortunately the public schools, saddled with bureaucracy and undisciplined by any real feedback from customers (i.e. students) will simply not be up to this task. No top-down, take-it-or-leave-it process ever could be.

There is plenty of feedback: in certain circumstances, we may replace members of the school board. We may attend PTA meetings.  We may volunteer at the schools.  The US system of educational dispersion (recently impinged on by the Republican’s testing regime of No Child Left Behind; it’s not clear to me if the recently passed Every Student Succeeds Act removes that impingement) permits plenty of feedback at the local level; sometimes, given local prejudices, it seems like too much.

Conundrums

OK, all this said, I make no claims that what we have is all that great.  My suspicion, based on some limited conversations with teachers, is that it’s a management problem.  From a verbal discussion:

Hue, I don’t even care what style of teaching they want us to do.  Just Stop Changing It!

In other words, the State legislature periodically changes how teaching should happen, and the hapless teachers have to fall into line by law – throw out what’s been developed because the latest fad caught some legislator’s attention, and now we’re a-heading thataway.  Whether this applies to all States is beyond my ken, but it does seem likely.

Add to that a drought of funding, a malicious changing of rules so that the charter schools can take over, and you can see why public schools can seem to be worthless.

Conclusion

All that said, all of my pessimism about the efficacy of private sector methods in the education sector, doesn’t amount to a hill of beans as to the future of public education, because that will be set by the attitude of the populace.  Continued superficial discussions of education such as this one, if they dominate and are unchallenged, may indeed result in the death of the public education, and the loss of its role in uniting the populace behind the ideas that make the United States a cohesive entity, and may in fact result in the dislocation of the country.

But that’s another rant.

Timothy Revell in “Bugged Out” (NewScientist, 5 December 2015, paywall) reports on new designs for software fault tolerance:

For a growing number of researchers, it’s time to admit defeat. If we can’t beat bugs, we need to learn to live with them – switching from damage prevention to damage limitation. Making computers more resilient to things going wrong could mean an end to computer crashes altogether – buggy code or not. “The idea here is immortal software,” says Martin Rinard at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

I didn’t feel particularly convinced by the article, but it’s interesting.  Rinard’s work:

All this means that companies may know that their software contains glitches, but it is too expensive and time-consuming to attempt to find them. Some companies get round this by offering rewards to users who report bugs once software is released (see “Bug bounties“). But increasingly, researchers are shifting their attention away from removing bugs to simply removing their effects. A bug might lead to a software crash, but it is often the crash itself that causes problems. To address this, Rinard has developed a technique called failure-oblivious computing, which aims to avoid programs crashing at all costs.

When a computer program crashes, it has usually encountered an error that it doesn’t know how to handle. In such situations, Rinard thinks the program should just do the easiest thing it can. This might not be the correct solution and might even cause the software to do something wrong, but the result is often better than a full-scale crash.

An example is made of the Ariane 5 launch failure of two decades ago in which a memory corruption cost the ESA a cargo worth $370 million.  Rinard continues:

“Here’s the kicker,” says Rinard. “That number was never actually used. Any number whatsoever could have been used instead and the rocket still flies.” If Ariane 5 had been equipped with failure-oblivious computing, it would have been a successful launch.

Which strikes me a irrelevant cherry picking.  Is this how all launch failures occur?  Can they be characterised this way?  I’ll hazard a guess: it’s NO.  And if that problem had not been present, another one not susceptible to this approach might have taken the flight down.

Without apparent irony the idea of using automated software generation to eliminate such bugs is brought up and discarded; such an approach would have removed the Ariane 5 problem.  Automated software generation encompasses a lot of subjects, from the most basic of assemblers to advanced compilers to application generators (generally, each is built on top of the prior example), and I tend to think of them as proven knowledge, even (in a narrowly construed context) wisdom, encapsulated and consulted when certain well-understood implementation problems are encountered.  The extension covered here is called program synthesis:

Kwiatkowska suggests that we get software to do things for us by writing programs that write programs. The idea, known as program synthesis, is that programmers describe what they want their code to do in precise but relatively simple terms and then have that code automatically generated. To ensure the program that generates the program is itself bug-free would require NASA’s level of effort [to prove their launch code], but this would only have to be done once. Kwiatkowska and others have shown that the technique works for small pieces of code, but it will be some time before whole systems can be built in this way.

More puzzling is the complete omission of formal methods from consideration.  These are mathematically derived methodologies for verifying software (and hardware) does what’s desired without crashing.  Cut from the article?  Mr. Revell is listed as a mathematician, so hopefully he’s aware of the field.  I do have to wonder if the methods are just too onerous to use with complex systems – I have not kept up with the field.

But perhaps the most dismaying lack in this article is the failure to consider the knock-on effects of implementing such systems.  Will engineers then ease-off, thinking this semi-magical program that monitors their program will save their ass thirty seconds into launch?  While I applaud taking the least used fork in the road, and I think these folks are doing some interesting work, I’m not sure it’d ever be healthy to deliver such systems and bring them into long term use.  Let me pull one more quote:

Emery Berger at the University of Massachusetts Amherst is taking the opposite tack. He is deliberately injecting a little randomness to get software to crash less.

He’s targeting bugs that crash a program in the same way each time. These are sometimes known as “bohrbugs” after the physicist Niels Bohr, whose model of the atom has electrons that orbit a nucleus in a very predictable fashion. For users, bohrbugs are the worst. If you keep doing the same thing on your computer, you will keep getting the same result. Perhaps viewing a particular picture always causes your computer to freeze, or pasting some text always causes your text editor to crash.

But there is another type of bug, known as the “heisenbug”. Heisenbugs seem to change when you attempt to observe them and are less predictable than bohrbugs, like the particles in quantum mechanics described by physicist Werner Heisenberg. This means that if you try to reproduce a bug, it often miraculously disappears. You might have lost some work, but at least the same crash is unlikely to happen twice.

Berger’s system, DieHard, turns bohrbugs into heisenbugs automatically. This means that if you hit a problem, the next time you try, DieHard will randomly select a slightly different way of running the software that will often avoid the bug. “By making it so that things become a bit more like a roll of a dice, the chances of you having the program work correctly increase,” says Berger.

So a program works in one system state but not another.  This sounds like a nightmare to me for fixing the problem, since changing a system state may involve changing many variables, only one of which may be causing the problem.  The cost of tracking down bugs in THAT class sounds a little nightmarish.might be higher than they anticipate – and waving it off as only failing occasionally may not be acceptable to the customer.

And that lets me transition to motivations, which are not explicated very well but seem to be commercial, given the costs cited.  While commercial interests provide the funding for software engineering,since the engineering provides so many benefits, this also strikes me as giving obeisance to a business requirement that has never sat well with engineering departments: schedules.  Asking engineers doing, essentially, research in developing new products to provide a schedule is often an exercise in futility that business finds nearly as frustrating as do engineers. While the idea is to deliver stable systems to users, I worry that this is really just another way for businesses to get more product out the door without concern for quality: money, money, money.

Our Christmas Eve fare was the venerable, sometimes risible, THE BRAIN THAT WOULDN’T DIE (1959/1962), a movie populated by people you’ve never heard of, and pursues the lessons to be learned of monomania, and/or the fickle female, or possibly an abortive tale of Oedipus, with Dad gaining a virtual vengeance – get drunk and let us know what you think.  The plot holes would gratify Peterbilt in their size and lack of grace, whilst the actors lack the horsies required to move said Peterbilts.  Naaaaay!  I say!  Naaaaaaay!  This is to be seen only with a large pail of beer (not the good sort), and, if possible, in the company of Joel Hodgson.

The organization ALEC has come up before for its conservative, pro-business views.  So why are businesses beginning to flee membership?  Google may be understandable as it’s a very young organization mired deep in an arena not known for its conservative views, and top management certainly believes the scientists are correct regarding climate change.  But now, as Nick Surgey @ The Daily Kos reports, a power company – a redoubt of conservatism – is now moving away:

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has suffered the loss of another major corporate sponsor, the Guardian reported Tuesday, with the electric utility American Electric Power (AEP) announcing it will no longer provide the climate change denial group with funding from 2016.

AEP becomes the 107th identified corporation to have withdrawn funding since the Center for Media and Democracy launched the ALEC Exposed project in 2011, joining others such as Shell, BP, Google, Microsoft and Facebook.

EcoWatch notes:

If that wasn’t bad enough for ALEC, AEP said in it’s announcement it will be shifting its focus to working with states to comply with the Obama Administration’s landmark climate rule, the Clean Power Plan.

The Clean Power Plan has been a bugaboo for ALEC, since the plan is meant to mitigate climate change.  This is interesting, as AEP is not exactly an angelic corporation, accused of attacking solar power generators using legislation in Indiana (see this CleanTechnica article from Feb 2015) and West Virginia (MorganCountyUSA.org‘s article)¹.  I have no idea what really motivated their leavetaking; the official quote from Nick’s article is bland:

“We let (ALEC) know that we won’t be renewing our membership in 2016,” an AEP spokesperson told the Guardian. “We are reallocating our resources as we focus on our work with the states around the Clean Power Plan.”

I’ve speculated a little bit on how this might be a negative.  Is ALEC an organization dedicated to business objectives, or to a conservative agenda?  There is a difference which is becoming more and more apparent, because the conservative agenda is currently dominated by certain religious precepts and magical thinking about how the world should be, not how it is.  Many religious organizations and personalities (as distinct from normal people) operate in a world of their own making and sometimes believe that the real world is the same way; however, business leaders who’ve banged into the real world hard enough are likely to balk at the poor intellectual quality of climate deniers, recognizing that as a danger to the survival of their business – not to mention their homes, families, and selves.

In the end, my exploration of the negatives really comes to naught.  Another source of funding moves away from an organization not dedicated to reality; another muscle is stripped away from a skeleton.  The problem is that the organization is not discredited in the eyes of its primary audience, conservative state legislators.  In that respect, it might be slightly hobbled, but those controlling and directing ALEC’s efforts will remain effective – and I continue to worry about an organization that engages in magical thinking in a world that doesn’t easily tolerate the same.

¹Both of these found via Wikipedia‘s article on AEP).

With regard to my current programming project, the XML parser in Mythryl, I’ve been rather stalled out as of late, partly for mundane reasons (it’s Christmas), but also because of this:

The markup declarations may be made up in whole or in part of the replacement text of parameter entities. The productions later in this specification for individual nonterminals (elementdecl, AttlistDecl, and so on) describe the declarations after all the parameter entities have been included.

The relevant productions:

[28] doctypedecl   ::= '<!DOCTYPE' S Name (S ExternalID)? S? ('[' intSubset ']' S?)? '>'

[28a] DeclSep   ::= PEReference | S

[28b] intSubset   ::= (markupdecl | DeclSep)*

[29] markupdecl   ::= elementdecl | AttlistDecl | EntityDecl | NotationDecl | PI | Comment

[30] extSubset   ::= TextDecl? extSubsetDecl

[31] extSubsetDecl  ::= ( markupdecl | conditionalSect | DeclSep)*

The XML BNF does not encompass this remark, so it’s something I’ll need to handle myself.  The extSubset production will be handled via a callback function that can then build a new recursive descent parser that knows about parameter entity references and generate a new string with all the replacements accomplished.  I have not made a decision about intSubset, or perhaps markupdecl – a solution is not readily apparent.

In other news, a new release of Mythryl occurred.  I shan’t link to it because my attempt to compile it failed.  Turns out Cynbe, the developer, didn’t notice some supporting third party libraries went through a major versioning while he was busy with development and chemotherapy.  I tried to compile with the latest and failed.  If I had lots of time, I could learn about the component in question (it has to do with OpenGL) and fix it up – but I haven’t that much time, nor interest (graphics has never been an interest of mine).