Author Archives: Hue White

In North Carolina, educators win a victory, as noted in Indiana’s The Republic:

North Carolina lawmakers violated veteran teachers’ constitutional rights by passing a law that would remove job protections they’ve earned, the state’s Court of Appeals found Tuesday, but the court rejected efforts to restore newer teachers’ pathway to the protected job status.

Under the 2013 law, legislators sought to move away from a system that protected teachers from firing or demotion after they passed four years of probation and earned “career status.”

Veteran teachers argued that the law violated constitutional rights protecting contracts and preventing governments from taking a person’s property.

The NCAE fights back and wins a victory on a 2-1 ruling, but it’s not the state’s Supreme Court.

A joint statement from state House Speaker Tim Moore and Senate leader Phil Berger said legislative leaders are reviewing the opinion and considering their options.

“While we are disappointed with today’s ruling, we appreciate the thoughtful dissent,” they said.

The Charlotte Observer notes:

Six teachers and the Association of Educators sued, and last year Superior Court Judge Robert Hobgood ruled that taking tenure from teachers was an unconstitutional taking of property rights.

The decision did not apply to teachers who had not earned tenure. Supporters of phasing out tenure called the ruling “judicial activism.”

(h/t a North Carolina Educator)

In other news, other citizens of NC protest the dubious actions of their leaders, as the Charlotte Observer reports:

Critics of the Republican-controlled state legislature gathered Monday night to induct several North Carolina lawmakers into a different kind of hall of fame: the Moral Monday movement’s Hall of Shame. …

The group displayed posters with photos of Mecklenburg state representatives Bill Brawley, Rob Bryan, Charles Jeter, Jacqueline Schaffer, and Sens. Bob Rucho and Jeff Tarte.

Rucho was covered previously here.

Treehugger.com‘s Katherine Martinko reports on ADHD in France:

A shocking 9 percent of U.S. kids are diagnosed and medicated for ADHD, compared to 0.5 percent of French kids. What’s causing the big difference?

Several years ago, a fascinating book came out called Bringing Up Bébé. Written by an American woman named Pamela Druckerman who lives and raises her kids in France, the book explores the many ways in which the French, as a whole culture, parent differently than the Americans (and Canadians, since that’s where I live and see the many similarities in parenting styles).

The biggest difference between France and the United States is the approach to routine and structure in children’s lives. While the French implement a strict daily routine from the very beginning and expect their children to fit into a parent-determined lifestyle, American families are usually child-centric, with parents accommodating their children’s needs and desires.

This stereotypical American parenting style, however, may have a serious downside. An article in Psychology Today attributes the relatively low levels of ADHD in French children in part to the presence of structure in their lives. Because their parents insist that they learn self-control from an early age by enforcing limits and are supported in this by the education system, fewer French children develop behavioral problems that reach the point of requiring medication.

After reading Benen’s blog, I’m enjoying quite a bit of schadenfreude. What a bunch of hypocrites, and who is the one man still married to his first wife? Clinton. Hastert’s years of bribery to hide his “indiscretion” or crime (depending on the age of the high school student), plus breaking federal banking laws to keep those brides anonymous — well, that’s some serious icing on the schadenfreude cake. I can’t wait to see him do the perp walk.

Oh, I wish I was an editorial cartoonist … I’m seeing the Walk of Hypocrites: stone statues of hypocrites throughout the 90s.  Here’s Clinton, with a moderate sized statue, followed by Gingrich, Hastert, Livingston, and all the rest of them – with much larger statues.  And some Mom with her kid, trying to explain …

Politics of the Iran nuclear deal continue to swirl with a visit to Iran by the Taliban of Afghanistan.

Maybe. Abbas Qaidaari of AL Monitor reports:

On May 19, the Tasnim News Agency, which has ties to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), was the first to break the story: “A political delegation of the Taliban led by Tayyeb Agha has traveled to Tehran and held talks with certain Iranian security and military officials. They had also previously visited Iran during the Islamic Awakening Conference.”

 

In Iran and Afghanistan, media outlets quickly reported this news, which generated curious reactions. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman, Marzieh Afkham, said, “I am not aware of any such visit. We should follow up on this and find out which sources have published this news and based on what information.” The government spokesman, Mohammad-Bagher Nobakht, stated, “I am not aware of any such visit. It does not make any sense, and in any case I do not confirm that this visit has taken place.”

So the IRGC welcomes the Taliban while the main government is unaware of the visit?  According to the article, the Taliban murdered 9 Iranian diplomats in 1998, nearly triggering an invasion.  Indeed, Abbas claims,

In 2001, in the wake of 9/11, Iran provided logistical and intelligence support to the United States during the international coalition’s military campaign targeting the Taliban, al-Qaeda’s ally, in Afghanistan.

If true, I was not aware of that support.  This 2010 paper by a Dr. Sadat, a specialist in the region, and Lt. Col. James Hughes, USAF, hosted by the Middle East Policy Council, confirms:

Following the 9/11 attacks, Iran assisted the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and participated in international efforts to establish a new Afghan government. A senior Iranian diplomat describes the decision making in Iran immediately after the 9/11 attacks: “[W]e consciously decided not to qualify our cooperation on Afghanistan or make it contingent upon a change in U.S. policy, believing, erroneously, that the impact would be of such magnitude that it would automatically have altered the nature of Iran-U.S. relations.”⁹ U.S.-Iran cooperation was unprecedented, but in the years that followed, the George W. Bush administration chose not to continue substantive diplomatic dialogue with Tehran on Afghanistan unless Iran changed its behavior toward nuclear development.¹⁰ Perhaps in 2002, the United States could afford to ignore Iran’s interests in Afghanistan. Eight years later, however, as the first decade of the twenty-first century closes, the situation has changed. There are indications that rogue elements within the Iranian government, presumably the Revolutionary Guard Corps, are providing support to the Taliban in response to perceived threats from the United States.¹¹A U.S. strategy that fails to incorporate Iran’s constructive role in Afghanistan, while weakening its destructive role, may not succeed and could further jeopardize future relations. Although engaging Iran will not be easy, Afghanistan provides an opportunity for both countries to achieve some practical strategic objectives independent of other more entrenched foreign-policy disputes.

The remark about the Revolutionary Guard is interesting.

How does this affect the nuclear deal?  Abbas comments,

The outcome of this event could affect Tehran-Kabul relations and also cast a shadow over the nuclear negotiations between Iran and the five members of the UN Security Council plus Germany (P5+1). The Iranian government needs the nuclear agreement more than ever, so it also must keep tensions low with the P5+1. On the other hand, IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp] officials oppose the negotiations and are trying to raise obstacles. A visit from the Taliban just might be an obstacle meant to prevent Rouhani’s administration from moving forward with its regional and international policies.

I wonder if the IRGC takes its role of guardian of the Islamic Revolution so seriously that it would overthrow the elected government using charges of treachery.

Continuing the theme of short notes on my current computing project, and how I don’t have time to work on it, I can now report that I’ve achieved, in this iteration, what I’d achieved in the previous, which is to say the current code base passes the (slightly modified) auto-regression tests I’ve been writing.  Because I used the supplied EBNF to build the parser, it also means I’ve surpassed (theoretically – not verified) the parsing capability of the previous iteration.  It’d be nice if I could find a publicly available test suite.

The debugging approach described in my previous missive has also worked well.

The auto-regression test suite, however, needs a complete re-think.  The lesson there is one all coders should know: test suites need to be thought out as well as what they are testing.  And I didn’t do that.  Bad Hue, go lay down by your dish.

Next steps: Continue working on the “well-formedness” and validation parts of the processor; expand the auto-regression test suite.

All this for a compiler which may never be completed, nor ever be widely used.  Tilting at windmills entered a new age when open source software started up, all those years ago.

Steve Benen at MaddowBlog engages in more than a bit of schadenfreude following the recent indictment of Dennis Hastert, former Speaker of the House.  He references the work of Orin Kerr at The Volokh Conspiracy in summarizing the indiscretions of a number of Republican personalities who chose to vote for the impeachment of President Bill Clinton over his indiscretions with Monica Lewinsky, and then closes with this:

During the impeachment proceedings, I specifically remember testimony from Princeton scholar Sean Wilentz, who told House Republicans that, in the future, they would be seen as “zealots and fanatics,” adding, “History will hunt you down for your cravenness.”

If you, like myself, were not a Republican at the time, and found the uproar to be more than a bit puzzling, then perhaps you, too, glory a little in the schadenfreude over Gingrich (carrying on with an aide), Livingston (affair), Hyde (affair) and now Hastert (alleged sexual contact with a boy).

But you also have to wonder about the nature of these men, particularly if  you are interested in story-telling (and, about that, another post in another time).  Are they so obsessed with power that the hypocrisy of their actions isn’t apparent?  These guys are smart, surely they can see that.

I recall a story from, I believe, Senator Barbara Boxer, concerning another, very senior Senator from her freshman days in the Senate.  She described him as having a self-image of being right next to God.  Perhaps being at the center of government, these Representatives felt they could do no wrong?

Or, more prosaically, they simply hated Clinton?  President Clinton has a history of taking the issues of his political opponents and making them his, to the point where they become lethal weapons against his opponents.  Add in that he is undoubtedly one of the smartest politicians around, and perhaps it’s just raw envy and anger.

This was the time where ideology began to get the better of the GOP, where governing wisely became a secondary – or tertiary – activity, where being in power was the thing, and principle was optional (see the spending habits of Congress, vs what they proclaimed as ideology, 2000-2006).  This chart courtesy The Daily Kos:

Perhaps, even as I grind my teeth over what might have been, this is simply the result of amateurs running government.

Recalling Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s proclamation that Iranian military bases are off-limits with regard to nuclear installation inspections, Lawfare‘s Yishai Schwartz comments:

… some members of the P5+1 appear no less unyielding, with the French foreign minister telling his lawmakers, “France will not accept (a deal) if it is not clear that inspections can be done at all Iranian installations, including military sites.”

At first glance, Iran’s hesitation at allowing international inspectors access to its military sites might appear reasonable. But the history, law, and language of non-proliferation agreements lie squarely on the side of France. Concessions on this issue—even in the form of subjecting certain inspections to the approval of some kind of “joint commission”—would not only dramatically weaken any deal, but would actually constitute a major departure from long-standing principles of nuclear controls. …

Of course, no country liked the idea of foreign inspectors poking around their military bases. But each realized that the comprehensiveness of inspectors’ reach was crucial to the entire system. If there would be inspections-free zones, there could be no guarantee that states’ nuclear programs were peaceful. …

Throughout the years of sanctions and negotiations, Iran has chafed at restrictions and repeatedly demanded to be treated just like any other state. But in insisting on a special exemption denying IAEA access to military site, Iran is actually demanding special, privileged treatment. The fact that the p5+1 would even consider subjecting such visits to a “joint commission” of the IAEA represents a significant, and dangerous, departure from previous practice. The logic of the oversight system rests on the assumption that the IAEA Board of Governors holds ultimate authority to decide where its inspectors go, and that the Security Council serves as its enforcement mechanism. Playing with these details would gut the entire structure.

This is rather interesting in that last week Lawfare suggested the Iran deal could go off the rails without it being a disaster:

After a number of conversations with some of these critics, however, I’m increasingly convinced that there is an alternative, albeit a poorly articulated one. To be sure, it has question marks and uncertainties—and the deal currently being hammered out may yet offer the best balance of risks and benefits. But there is another side of the ledger. Here, then, is a roadmap to that alternative path.

First, American negotiators would have to allow the current round of negotiations to fail, but without blowing up or reneging on any already-made commitments. Doing so should not be too difficult. There are enough unresolved issues that adopting a hard (and reasonable) line on, say, the timing of sanctions relief or the reach of inspections would either force Iranian capitulation (good) or lead to an impasse—which from this perspective would be fine as well.

Perhaps Khamenei is paving that road for them.  Yishai Schwartz continues:

The competing interpretation (and this is something about which far too few of the deal’s critics speak concretely) is that Iran will make some noise, but will actually seek a temporary stop-gap accommodation. It may build a few more centrifuges and reduce inspections by a marginal amount, and in return, the White House and its allies would mildly tighten some existing sanctions. Kirk-Menendez will remain on the shelf and Iran’s breakout time will continue to hover near the three-month mark. There will be Iranian violations and American threats, but both sides will keep their provocations below a certain escalatory threshold, and diplomats will resume talks under an arrangement roughly similar to the JPOA.

And, basically, a status quo.  The important point to note is that Iran doesn’t have resources equivalent to the world’s, so status quo for us merely leaves us with irritating political questions (Obama doesn’t get the legacy he wants), while the Iranian government has more existential questions to consider, between this and its food and water problems.  Of course, one is tempted to say that the Iranian government will find a way to stay on top.  But then, I felt the same way about the East German government, as did just about everyone else – until they collapsed.

Helping me wander about left field, my Facebook correspondent responds:

By “recover from damage” I meant in such a way that mankind could continue to live comfortably and sustainably on this planet. We’re wrecking it for ourselves, and for millions of species we have and are exterminating. But life will go on, on this planet, with or without us. Many species will adapt. So it’s just self interest. I’d like to not have to worry if my grandkids are going to be wiped out by pestilence or war or hunger or thirst simply because current day peoples are too stupid and short-sighted. We are a part of nature, sure. But we’ve got more influence over our natural world than all the rest of the species put together.

Yes, I suppose so, although I can’t help but note the AntBlog, back in 2010, has made some notes concerning total biomasses:

Worldwide biomass estimates for individual species are very difficult to come by. The most rigorous estimates are for humans and domesticated animals. There are probably a little more than 6.7 billion humans alive right now, and together, we might weigh as much as 335,000,000,000 kg (or 737,000,000,000 lbs.) This figure is based on an average human weight of more than 100lbs, though (50kg, to be exact). I don’t know how accurate this estimate is, especially considering that about 1/3 of us are children. There are supposedly around 1.3 billion cattle in the world, and, put together, they may weigh almost twice as much as our species.

The only non-domestic, super-abundant species for which serious attempts have been made at estimating biomass is a type of shrimp that lives in the cold waters around Antarctica: the Antarctic krill, Euphausia superba,. They are the primary food for many fish and baleen whales (suborder Mysticeti). In a really interesting study (click here for more) Atkinson and colleagues (2009) calculated the world biomass of krill to be between 117 and 379,000,000,000 kg (note that the upper estimate is slightly above what people have suggested for the total human biomass). Truly, these organisms are successful. They might be the only wild species that could compete with Homo sapiens for the title of “species with the most biomass.”

However, we can’t forget that as much animal biomass as there is, there is even more plant and bacterial biomass. Probably at least ten times as much as the biomass of all animals put together. Scientists still argue about which has more biomass on earth: bacteria or plants. Worldwide, they both probably have about the same amount of Carbon, but Bacteria probably contain about 10 times more Nitrogen and Phosphorus (read more here ) Like ants, though, there are many many species of bacteria and plants, and I don’t know of any studies that attempt to estimate world-wide biomass for a single species of either.

But I’ll agree with you ahead of time, it’s not really relevant – just very interesting.  What are all those bacteria up to, anyways?

Continuing this topic, North Carolina legislators discover that business will, indeed, pay attention to legislation which appears to ignore scientific realities, as Sami Grover on Treehugger.com reports:

Does $20K buy you a Senator these days?  Or did their lobbyists simply make such a strong presentation that he felt that he had to break the rules?  From the News & Observer:

In light of the questions, Democratic Leader Dan Blue of Raleigh told Rucho he wanted a “division” of the vote, which would allow for an individual tally rather than just by voice. Rucho refused, and when Blue asked him by what rule he was refusing, Rucho said it was his prerogative as chairman and then called for the vote.

The rules the Senate adopted earlier this year say the presiding officer shall conduct a division if it is called for prior to the vote, which in this case it was.

After the meeting, Rucho emphasized to Blue that he had the authority not to allow a division.

I have no idea what sort of punishment can be meted out to a committee chairman who won’t follow the rules.  Removal from the chairmanship?  Kicked out of the legislature?  But if the Republicans are in control, would anyone even dare to bring up the idea?

NewScientist (23 May 2015, paywall) interviews Slawek Tulaczyk concerning how to stem the rising of sea levels:

Are you talking about geoengineering ice streams to control sea level rise?
Yes. When we talk about geoengineering we usually mean bringing down levels of carbon dioxide or controlling Earth’s reflectivity to sunlight. We haven’t yet considered putting the brakes on ice streams and glaciers, but we should be considering this possibility. Last month in Nature, new results corroborated previous evidence showing that the loss of mass from polar ice sheets accelerated in the last decade (DOI: 10.1038/nclimate2635). …

How might we slow down the flow of ice?
One mechanism has to do with decreasing the amount of water at the base of the ice stream, to increase the friction between the base and the bedrock. Basically, we’d need to remove water by increasing drainage. Paradoxically, that may require something counter-intuitive, like drilling a hole from the top of the ice stream to the base and injecting water. You would have to work out how the sliding of the ice would respond to the injection of additional water, but in certain scenarios, the excess water would create a new, bigger channel beneath the ice, and this would help drain the water that’s already there faster than before. Typically when you drive water out from beneath a glacier, you are making it harder for ice to flow.

There are other ways. One would be to prevent warming ocean waters from reaching the ice sheets.

What do you mean?
One reason why many ice streams and glaciers are flowing faster into the ocean is because warming waters are melting the floating ice shelves that surround them and normally act as buttresses. We think that warm water is channelled in through deep troughs in the continental shelf.

And you are saying we can prevent this warm water from reaching the ice?
That’s right. You should be able to build submarine barriers. I’m not suggesting huge concrete structures; you can build something that has the right density to float 300 to 400 metres underwater. You attach some kind of barrier to the floats. The currents in these troughs are not very strong and the barriers don’t have to stop the flow of water, just slow it down. And you could have openings in them to enable life to pass through.

Over at Glacier Hub, Dan Kandy considers how to build new glaciers:

How do you make a glacier? You can transport tens of thousands of tons of ice from a place where retreat is fast to a pre-prepared location where retreat is slower; you can set up barriers around an existing ice field, increasing snow accumulation and transforming the area into a small glacier; or you can cover an existing one with a “geotextile” sheet or rocky debris to slow ablution. A minimum of three years is required for some of these methods, according to [Cedomir] Marangunic, [sic]

While stimulating the growth of new glaciers or slowing the retreat of established ones sounds great, project must simulate a “natural process” and avoid damage to local ecosystems, according to Marangunic, who claims this as a priority for his projects.

Also at Glacier Hub, Tsechu Dolma reports on a conference concerning the shrinking glaciers of Mt. Hood:

That method was created by Chewang Norphel, a civil engineer in Ladakh, India, who pioneered a way to “grow” glaciers in the Himalayas. A short film about Norphel’s mission to create small glaciers in Nepal, “Beyond Prayer”, shows the retired engineer describing his technique, which relies on the redirection of streams in the winter to cool areas, and constructing breaks to slow the flow of water. The water freezes along the mountain slope at regular intervals. During the winter, an ice sheet covers these frozen pools, creating small, artificial glaciers.

“When it comes to Alzheimer’s, iron may not be good ferrous”

Augh!  NewScientist loves its headlines, but that one just makes me ITCH!

Anyways, it’s about a study in Australia:

Researchers at the University of Melbourne in Australia followed 144 older people who had mild cognitive impairment for seven years. To gauge how much iron was in their brains, they measured ferritin, a protein that binds to the metal, in their cerebrospinal fluid. For every nanogram per millilitre people had at the start of the study, they were diagnosed with Alzheimer’s on average three months earlier.

(NewScientist 23 May 2015, paywall, and the headline is only in the print edition.)

The Egyptian correspondence leads to an off-topic point on my part.  First, I’ll reiterate the correspondent’s innocent remark:

I was channeling Jared Diamond when I wrote that — a non-optimistic version of Jared, that is. Right — 100 years ago we were divinely (innocently?) naive and innocent. And the earth could recover from the damage we had done. Today, at 7 billion plus strong, it’s a far worse story — but we like to pretend it’s not there or not so bad. You should read Diamond’s “Collapse”. It’s long and wordy, but very informative.

… but the entire “recover from the damage” remark is interesting in its implication that there’s an ideal “natural” state which we humans have damaged.  I don’t  believe there’s ever an ideal natural state in isolation from humanity, nor do I generally feel we humans are somehow outside of Nature.  Until we re-insert the human viewpoint into the conversation (and I believe that it’s very important that the viewpoint be explicitly stated), there are simply states, which can be characterized in any number of ways – species diversity, population densities, mineral presence, etc.  Once we restate with the human viewpoint (or interest), then it’s possible to credibly say, “Well, it’s ruined for human occupation because of xyz …”

Perhaps it’s all a fine point, but to me there’s this confusion of the first statement implying that the Universe was made for humanity’s use – because we attach value statements to state perturbations of Nature – while, to me, the proper detached viewpoint requires not attaching a value statement to an observation until the proper interest – humanity’s – has been established.  The implicit – and unstated – assumptions can really twist a deductive series until the final conclusion doesn’t really bear any connection to the original set of observations, particularly if prescriptives are suggested.

The Egyptian correspondence continues:

I was channeling Jared Diamond when I wrote that — a non-optimistic version of Jared, that is. Right — 100 years ago we were divinely (innocently?) naive and innocent. And the earth could recover from the damage we had done. Today, at 7 billion plus strong, it’s a far worse story — but we like to pretend it’s not there or not so bad. You should read Diamond’s “Collapse”. It’s long and wordy, but very informative.

I’ll put it on the list.  My suspicion, however, is that either the peace movement or the epidemiologists are going to lose – and a lot of us will suddenly die.  As creatures of Nature, we may find ways to modify the rules of Nature, but outright breaking them may be beyond our capacities.

Back in 2011 NewScientist reported (24 October 2011, paywall) on an analysis of global capitalism and the rule of thumb that some firms are too large to fail:

The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York’s Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere (see photo). But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world’s transnational corporations (TNCs). …

Crucially, by identifying the architecture of global economic power, the analysis could help make it more stable. By finding the vulnerable aspects of the system, economists can suggest measures to prevent future collapses spreading through the entire economy. Glattfelder says we may need global anti-trust rules, which now exist only at national level, to limit over-connection among TNCs. Sugihara says the analysis suggests one possible solution: firms should be taxed for excess interconnectivity to discourage this risk.

NewScientist now presents an extension of the analysis (23 May 2015, paywall) that continues to suggest that interconnectedness may be the key:

NEVER again? The global financial crisis of 2008 saw banks around the world bailed out to the tune of billions by governments worried that the entire financial system was in meltdown. “Too big to fail”, the thinking went, and since then, efforts have been made to increase scrutiny of large institutions. But the latest research suggests a much more sophisticated analysis is needed to prevent another crisis.

We already know that firm size isn’t the only problem in a financial crisis. In 2011, New Scientist revealed that 147 interconnected entities – not all of them large financial institutions – control the network of global capitalism. A problem with any of them could have a significant effect on the system, demonstrating the ongoing potential for vulnerability. …

The Financial Stability Board was created in 2009 to attempt to understand and monitor the situation.  They’ve published a list of firms, based on their interconnectedness rather than their size, which, if one gets in trouble, could trouble others.  Those meeting the criteria must increase reserves, even at the expense of profitability. From NewScientist:

Most of the emphasis in SIFI designation is placed on this interconnectedness, which has been much studied by academics, along with size, which is easy to determine. To date, relatively little attention has been paid to the third part of the SIFI designation – complexity – says Robin Lumsdaine of American University in Washington DC.

To better understand complexity, Lumsdaine and her colleagues used tools from network science to analyse the corporate structure of a variety of financial institutions, including Goldman Sachs, Barclays and HSBC. The researchers anonymised the firms – identifying them only by their country – and used snapshots of data from 26 May 2011 and 25 February 2013 to see if the firms’ complexity had changed.

Their method involves mapping out a firm’s subsidiaries, and then each subsidiary’s subsidiaries and so on. These “control hierarchy” networks are then labelled according to the country or industry of each subsidiary (see diagram).

Sadly, the diagram is broken on the web page, but the print edition’s view is quite attractive and compares American and Japanese firms.  The former is unbalanced and difficult to understand, while the latter is almost pretty in that it appears the subsidiaries are carefully sized to match each other.  However, the US firm is characterized as “large”, while the Japanese firm is “small” – the complexity comes in the number of industries involved.

FSB’s work may be having an effect:

Across the board, country complexity seems to have fallen between 2011 and 2013, the researchers found. That’s in line with a recent report in The Economist showing that banks aren’t seeing the expected returns from globalising their operations and are starting to withdraw, says Stefano Battiston of the University of Zurich, Switzerland, who carried out the 2011 interconnectedness work.

Conclusions?

In other words, we may be over-emphasising the “too big to fail” mantra: even small companies can be complex in a way that could threaten financial stability if they failed.

“It speaks to the size threshold as being inadequate,” says Lumsdaine. Regulators already know this, she adds, but the team’s analysis highlights the need for change. “There should be greater focus on complexity and more metrics are needed.”

So Bernie Sanders (I/D – VT) may want to rethink his proposal in light of this fascinating article.

The associated academic article on measuring complexity is here.

Some brief poking at the The Financial Stability Board‘s website did not reveal a helpful list of SIFIs.  If I can find them – or a helpful reader provides them – I’ll post them.

A correspondent on the situation in Egypt:

Just another of the many coming ecological and societal disasters resulting from overpopulation and “mining” of what could have been renewable resources (actual mining takes, e.g, gold ore out of the ground and once it’s gone, it’s gone — in contrast to harvesting wood from a forest, which can be done sustainably such that the forest continues to produce wood for eternity). We have been “mining” fertile cropland soil, water resources, forest resources, ocean fisheries, etc. for decades upon decades — centuries in some more localized cases, foolishly imagining them to be endless or simply living in denial. There are simply far too many people on the face of the earth, consuming far too many resources. We are effectively borrowing — well, plundering — them all from the future. It’s all going to start coming home to roost very soon.

The Earth is a big place and we’re very small beings, comparatively speaking – so it might be a bit harsh to suggest that we were fools 100 years ago.  No, just ignorant of how many of us were going to be around now, and how much strain that implied.

But your primary point is also evident in this WorldPress.org article on Egypt from Joshua Goldfond:

To say that Egypt is a country on the edge of crisis should be a surprise to no one. As one of the richest, largest and most influential countries in the Middle East and North African (MENA) region, the state’s regression to military control four years after the Arab Spring has left many of the movement’s most hopeful advocates despairing. And yet, these ideological disappointments pale in comparison to the larger existential threat it now faces. Like much of the MENA region, Egypt’s failure to stem corruption, address economic inefficiency and directly address climate change is exacerbating its already acute problem with food security. A three-step plan involving subsidy reform, technological development and caloric diversification could ease some of this danger. …

The nation’s yearly shortfall of 7 billion cubic meters of water can be expected to skyrocket if rising levels of the Mediterranean Sea flood Egypt’s northern lakes, choking off fresh water sources and destroying its fish hatcheries.

A Facebook correspondent responds to my reaction to The New York Times:

While I agree that more more money chasing “product” tends to inflate the cost of that product, I think there are other large drivers of college tuition. Looking at a graph (which I don’t have at hand, sorry) of general inflation (e.g. CPI) over the past 4 decades versus the cost of health care versus the cost of tuition is rather revealing. Any personnel-intensive industry with well-compensated (i.e. including fully-insured) people is going to see its costs go up with the far steeper than inflation curve belonging to health care costs. (This problem is eating government, too.) But universities have managed to exceed even health care’s curve by as large a gap or scaling factor as it exceeds general inflation.

So I guess I’d say, I agree with you and I agree with the NYT at the same time — and throw in health care to boot.

I just see the excess funding provided by the cheap loans as the enabler of all of this.

The main water source for Egypt is the Nile, as graphically illustrated by this map from Lonely Planet:

Ayah Aman reports on the Nile’s condition for AL Monitor:

An intensive media and political momentum is taking place in Egypt in regard to the conflict with Nile headwaters countries over securing Egypt’s annual share of the Nile waters. At the same time, the pollution of the Nile River remains a pending issue that is being underscored in Egypt with every water poisoning incident caused by the dumping of hazardous waste in the river. The debate usually ends when the government reassures the public, and emphasizes that the water is safe and suitable for human consumption, without establishing long-term policies to resolve the crisis. …

Kareem Khaled, a water-quality researcher at the University of Duisburg-Essen, spoke to Al-Monitor about the water quality in Egypt. He said, “The absence of a single administrative body in charge of water management and quality improvement from the High Dam to the riverbed, and up to the point where it [water] is delivered to people’s homes, is the reason behind water pollution in Egypt.”

Khaled added, “The state of the Nile water still needs to be precisely and scientifically defined, and we need to find out what pollutants are in the water. The river is subject to all forms of pollution, the most dangerous of which is the untreated, solid industrial waste, which is causing an accumulation of heavy metals in the aquaculture and drinking water, and therefore causes many health problems.”

Problems are blamed on management and pollution:

… since it consumes far more water than it can replenish. In addition to other problems that weigh down on the country — such as population density and the dilapidated pipe network, which alone is behind 35% of wasted water every year — Egypt is the world’s largest wheat importer, because there is not enough water to grow the crops locally.

Earlier this year Mz Aman had reported on an agreement between Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia as the nations seek peaceful means to allocate the Nile:

Since the presidents of the Eastern Nile countries of Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia signed the Declaration of Principles of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on March 23, relative official and public acceptance have prevailed in Egypt. After a long historical feud over the Nile waters that Egypt considers part of its national security, Ethiopia and Egypt are trying to rebuild trust. …

The historical agreements giving Egypt an annual quota of the Nile waters, estimated at 55.5 billion cubic meters per year, remain the main issue for Egypt. The Egyptian Foreign Ministry asserted that these agreements will remain intact, particularly the 1959 water-sharing agreement signed with Sudan. Upstream countries have rejected the agreement, claiming that it gives the lion’s share of the water to Egypt. …

Sisi sent several messages in his impromptu statement during the signing of the Declaration of Principles in Khartoum.

“The Renaissance Dam still constitutes a concern for Egyptians, especially since the Nile is their only source of water,” he said, but asserted, “God commands water to flow into Egypt so that Egyptians can live and revive their civilization.” Sisi tried to break the ice with Ethiopia by saying, “We could have lived for years in dispute and doubt, but we have opted for cooperation and trust.”

FutureDirections International (referenced by Mz Aman, above) notes:

• The Entebbe Agreement has shifted control over the Nile away from Egypt and Sudan, who previously had a monopoly over the river’s resources as a result of colonial agreements.
• The food and water security situation in Egypt is extremely vulnerable, due to population growth and environmental factors that have raised deep concerns amongst the nation’s political leaders, already concerned about the geo-political shift in the Nile basin region.

And they agree concerning water availability:

These Nile Basin nations have a combined population of over 450 million people and estimates indicate that over 200 million of them rely directly on the Nile for their food and water security. The Nile is the only major reliable source of renewable water supplies in the region. The Nile Basin’s population is expected to double in the next twenty-five years.

Aljazeera America has a 15 month old opinion piece which is necessarily out of date, but does have an excellent interactive map of the Nile basin, including dam sites.  It is not embeddable, so I recommend you go to the site to see the map.

The New York Times claims to know the real reason for the rise in college tuition:

By contrast, a major factor driving increasing costs is the constant expansion of university administration. According to the Department of Education data, administrative positions at colleges and universities grew by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009, which Bloomberg reported was 10 times the rate of growth of tenured faculty positions.

I see this as a chicken and egg argument.  In my previous post on the subject, I argued that the flood of federal and private loans amounts to the printing and infiltration of money into a market, which, as well all (should) know, results in inflation.  The New York Times not only hides their great discovery at the bottom of the article, they commit a flagrant foul – they fail to ask WHY administration staff grew at a much higher rate.  And while there are no doubt contributing factors such as regulations and laws to be supported, to my mind the great flood of money is the great enabler: someone or something must absorb it.  Staff is it.

(h/t Kathy Melaas and Mary Newstrom)

In response to this, a Facebook correspondent responds:

I’m confused. Lomborg is a climate change skeptic, and yet he calls for removing fossil fuel subsidies to reduce their global warming effect?

Perhaps he’s simply offended by the concept of subsidies for fossil fuels.  I certainly am, but I’m not familiar with the current arguments in favor of subsidies.

But from what little I have read, he doesn’t seem to deny climate change so much as claim it’s not going to be as severe as claimed; or perhaps he just meant the change will happen at the specified magnitude, but the impact on human civilization won’t be as severe as predicted.

Hal Hodson reports on another approach to the water problem in California in NewScientist (16 May 2015, paywall):

The traditional method of storage is to create a reservoir by damming a river. But dam-building is expensive, can be environmentally damaging, and most of the good spots are already in use. An alternative is to push water underground using recharge ponds or injection wells. Recharge ponds are constructed surface basins that allow water to collect and seep through the soil; injection wells use high-pressure pumps to actively push water down into aquifers. …

Groundwater management has several advantages over other methods. It is generally cheaper than building dams or desalinating water. What’s more, aquifers lose no water through evaporation, do not flood ecosystems, and in California they have capacity for between 17 and 26 times as much water as all of the state’s reservoirs combined.

This can require removal of man-made structures such as levees which restrict flooding of floodplains – which is precisely the mechanism for feeding aquifers, in many cases.  Can man’s pride – and perverse economic incentives – be overcome to, basically, return an area to a semblance of its natural state?

The National Ground Water Association is here.

Continuing this developing story, the dailytarheel.com reports that 46 degree-granting programs within the University of North Carolina system are being discontinued:

Thursday morning, the Board of Governors educational planning committee voted to discontinue 46 degree programs across the UNC-System, including one at UNC-Chapel Hill: human biology. Some of the programs will be reformatted as concentrations or consolidated into other majors. The entire Board voted Friday to adopt the recommendations voted on by the committee Thursday.

Other schools saw more programs discontinued than UNC-CH. East Carolina University and UNC-Greensboro saw eight programs discontinued each. …

[Board member Steven] Long said he didn’t think the programs addressed by the report necessarily needed more scrutiny.

“We’re capitalists, and we have to look at what the demand is, and we have to respond to the demand.”

The report is relatively emotion free; the comments attached to the report are vitriolic.  Up until that last line about being capitalists, the report could be evaluated as simply some hard decisions being made by school administrators; however, Universities are not, or should not be run by capitalists.  Capitalists favor running corporations as the method for managing production.  While capitalists can run non-profits, most run for-profits.

Education is not an institution centered on the idea of profit, but rather an institute for equipping citizens for their participation in society.  Not all skills lead to directly to profit, and yet it is important to society that a fair proportion of the citizenry have those skills.  Attempting to run a full-blown university system based on the needs of the capitalist corporations that surround you – and, in some cases, no doubt having a poor understanding – or, to be blunt, letting your ideological sensibilities lead you off into the wilderness – is beneficial neither to society nor even those corporations you think you’re serving.

Equally as importantly, the research universities must support the researchers who are out in the intellectual wilderness, scouting for new knowledge, new ways of thinking – sometimes striking out, sometimes succeeding.  That’s the glory of the research university, but it’s not going to be directly profitable, and attempting to shape such research towards immediately profitable ends is a fool’s errand.  The businessman wants to know how much profit he’ll make in the next financial quarter; the researcher may pursue a plan that’ll last 20 years and perhaps fail in the end.  Who’s more important?

The researcher.

Some damage is easy to repair, but restarting degree-granting programs is probably a challenge.  Poor North Carolina.

(h/t LamontCranston @ The Daily Kos)

A reader works out a bit of frustration:

To reinforce their title of Scions of Entropy, one of the cats jumped on my laptop’s keyboard yesterday, jamming down the “p” key.  This pretty much locked the whole thing up, as all the machine had CPU room for was typing a “p” every half-second or so.  Of course I rebooted, then performed many other fruitless rituals over my computer.  No luck.  I even tried prying off the key and disassembling the rocker inside.  I basically took the keypad all the way down to its printed chip, and it was still happily “p”ing all over my display, to the exclusion of all else.

So, I took my laptop to Best Buy to talk to the Geek Squad:  Lug in the machine.  Wait in line for 20 minutes.  (Mind you, there was no line.  Just me waiting behind the “Wait here” sign.  About every 5 minutes or so, someone at the merchandise return window would lean over to tell me someone would be right with me.  That person had no line either.  He was just hangin’ around back there not going and looking for the Geek squad staff that would be helping me any minute now.)  Finally, a technician shows up and takes a look at my machine, which was happily “p”ing on his counter.  Breaks off stuff that wasn’t broken before.  (The P key and the two little plastic components under it were already off, but I figured with any luck they could be snapped back into place.  The Geeks at Best Buy ripped off the clear silicone pad that springs the key back up to a neutral position once you stop pressing it.  That’s a piece that definitely won’t snap back into place.  And I don’t have the piece any more.  They just threw it on the floor, then looked to see if I was watching.  I was.)

So, the Best Buy Geek has no idea how to fix anything.  Says the present keyboard can’t be disabled.  Says it’ll cost $200 to send the machine to Kentucky, where they’ll take 6-8 weeks to look at it, then they’ll call me with an estimate of how much additional cash and time it’ll take to fix it, if they even can.  Or, I can buy a new $500-$1500 laptop, and they’ll ONLY charge me $110 to transfer the data from the old laptop to the new one.  If they can figure out how to transfer the data without use of a keyboard, that is.

Oh yeah, and every last one of the non-apple machines that Best Buy sells has Windows 8 on it.  Because NO ONE still sells Windows 7, they say.  You just can’t get it anywhere, they say.  So you have to use the much, much crappier Win 8 interface, they say.

Compare that to Computer Revolution (formerly Computer Renaissance):  I took my laptop over to them the next morning.  In about 5 minutes, they unhooked the built-in keyboard so I can take it home and plug in a peripheral, and they ordered me a new keyboard component.  It should arrive in 5-7 days.  Then I’ll bring the laptop back to them and they’ll put it in while I wait.  Total bill:  $79.00.

Oh, and guess what?  They have computers for sale too, if your old one is just too far gone to salvage.  And if you buy from Computer Revolution, they’ll very happily install Windows 7 on any machine you choose, if it doesn’t already have it installed, which the vast majority of theirs do.

Did I mention that I’m never going back to Best Buy for computer stuff ever again?

It’s impossible to know if the front line folks are poorly trained or are trained to simply deny the truths as noted here, but someone somewhere is lying in the interests of increasing revenues and (presumably) profits.  Is this considered ethical by the Business Schools of our country?

Should it be?