Unsightly Mental Blemishes

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).

I originally ran across this in the Winter 2015-2016 print edition of American Archaeology, but the article, a book review, doesn’t appear to be online.  A little search online turned up The Ancient Earthworks Project to confirm:

The Adena and Hopewell aligned many of their earthworks to celestial events such as solstices. They also built many earthworks in geometric shapes and used standard units of measurement (Hively and Horn 1982; Romain 2000). One of these units of measurement is equal to 1,054 feet. For convenience, we can call this the Hopewell Measurement Unit, or HMU. Thus 1 HMU = 1,054 feet. This unit of length is based on the diameter of the Newark Observatory Circle (Thomas 1894:16). This unit of length or its sub-multiples (e.g., 527 ft., 263.5 ft., 131.7 ft.) are found in the dimensions of every Hopewell earthwork assessed thus far, as well as most Adena earthworks. – William F. Romain, Ph.D.

Links added by myself.

So there you have it.  The Hopewell Measurement Unit is 1054 feet.

Often pop-sci articles will talk about machine learning, particularly in the context of Big Data, as well as genetic algorithms, which are algorithms generated by creating a set of algorithms, testing them for solving some problem, and cross-breeding the most successful algorithms to create new, hopefully better algorithms.  (I don’t understand how to structure algorithms so they can be crossed, but that’s neither here nor there.)  But something not mentioned – perhaps because it’s too obscure – is the reward system.  Not survival as a reward, but simply the reward for getting something right: resources.

So when the D-brief blog on Discover Magazine pointed me at Pigeons working as pathologists, my first reaction was how cool is this?

To train pigeon pathologists, a team led by Richard Levenson from the University of California Davis Medical Center and Edward Wasserman from the University of Iowa placed pigeons in a conditioning chamber fitted with a touch-screen monitor. Eight pigeons were shown 144 images of benign or malignant tissue samples at three levels of magnification, at different orientations and at different brightness levels. The birds made a diagnosis by pecking on a blue or yellow rectangle on the screen, and they received a tasty treat for each tissue sample they correctly identified.

And then I wondered.  Do we reward algorithms when they get something right?  And take the anti-thesis – suppose we have some N algorithms competing to get a “right answer”, and some M, less than N, get it right and are so rewarded – are the losing algorithms given the knowledge that they failed?  Are these algorithms – and we might as well call them entities at this point – aware of this failure and begin to employ more scarce resources to secure proper resources?  And do the winners do the computer thing and immediately deploy the resources, or do they conserve them for later use?  How do you conserve computer resources?

Just how much do we emulate Nature?  And, to the extent that we don’t emulate Nature, what are we losing in our computerized emulations of Nature?  Is it important to understand that an organism which succeeds at some test is then not pressured to develop a new way to solve the puzzle, unlike the loser that survives long enough for try #2?

I think I’ve done little more here than expose my ignorance of artificial intelligence and/or biological simulations.

Is it wrong to categorize pigeons with algorithms?

A user remarks upon snoods:

Also a type of hair net. There are snoods for beards, too

Apparently for use in professional situations.  With a little promotion, though, I wonder if they could become a fashion accoutrement. Especially for beards…

From NewScientist (28 November 2015, paywall):

The pendulous flesh hanging down over a male [wild turkey]’s beak is called a snood.

Following a near-death experience for the various subspecies of American wild turkeys, a program for protection and return to their normal range was formulated.  Initial failures taught the researchers that entire flocks had to be relocated – en masse.

By 1960, most wild turkey breeding had been ditched. Instead, wildlife agencies used spring-loaded rocket nets to capture whole flocks and relocate them to a suitable turkey-free habitat. Bingo! Turkeys began spreading like wildfire. Able to adapt to new settings before potential predators had learned to hunt them, they enjoyed a honeymoon period in many places that enabled populations to establish and thrive, says Hughes.

Sure would like to see the netting of an entire flock like that.

As other Minnesotans know, this is an unusual winter in these parts: nary a particle of snow on the ground, unreasonably warm sentiments expressed to each other as the warm weather makes us all sunny, irradiating each other with good cheer and all that rot.  The barren ground presents little barrier to the winds, and little matter what direction said winds howl from: they are cold, and while I may have referenced warm weather a moment ago, the close reader will realize that a relative description will still mean the temperature outside is such that a leisurely stroll around the neighborhood is replaced by driving the car, instead, slowly as we admire the Christmas travesties; but the lack of precipitation means I am not spending time shoveling snow from walk and ‘way.

This is by way of excusing what may seem like an avalanche of Belated Movie Reviews: too cold to do anything outside but shovel snow, and a paucity of same means we either go out to shopping malls or stay inside and watch movies.  So, to the latter we devolve, and last night we saw PLATINUM BLONDE (1931), starring Robert Williams and Jean Harlow, a movie full of non-doctrinaire dialog from the lead character, a newspaper reporter who falls for his subject, a lady of a supremely rich family (we don’t know why) (and that applies to both statements).  Alas, being from different social strata, soon strains appear in the marriage, the lust wears off, and a party running wild, populated by characters from the news world, come together to spark the lead’s literary ambitions, not to mention his feelings for an old pal.

The dialog is snappy and interesting, the lead both self-aware and, yet, helpless in the face of his emotional urges, and while the newspaperfolks surrounding him can be quite amusing, those characters most responsible for supporting him are somewhat flat and depressing.  And the title could easily have been something else: Bird in a Cage, Ignoring the Blindingly Obvious, Who’s Chumping Who? are just a few that come to mind.

It’s a good midnight movie if you have insomnia and don’t have a reason to get up early the next morning.  Some of it will make you laugh, a little will make you cringe.

Prior to the recent Paris summit on climate change, NewScientist (28 November 2015, paywall) covered the topic from the optimist and pessimist viewpoints.  So, despite the positive publicity generated by the closing of the talks last week, here’s the pessimist viewpoint:

Global temperatures could rise 4 °C even if the Paris Protocol is wildly successful

By failing to cut emissions, we are taking a huge gamble. Even if we somehow stick to the target budget of 1000 gigatonnes of CO₂, computer models suggest the resulting warming in 2100 could range from 1.3 °C to 3.9 °C – and keep climbing to 6 °C by 2200 in the worst case. And the models could be underestimating the range of outcomes because they do not fully factor in all the sources of feedback that could cause warming.

So when you read about limiting warming to 2 °C, remember this is far from guaranteed: it is just the most likely out of a range of possible outcomes. Worse still, it now seems certain that we will bust the carbon budget, and many scientists think plan B – sucking lots of CO₂ out of the atmosphere – will prove impossible. Maybe we’ll get lucky, but some very scary scenarios cannot be ruled out.

It’s certainly a little sobering.  Even more sobering has been the drop in car fuel prices over the last year as the United States and Saudi Arabia pump more fuel oil, possibly as a means to attack enemies (USA vs Russia, Saudi Arabia vs Venezuela):

(Courtesy AAA)

And how much of greenhouse gas emissions are from vehicles?  In the U.S., back in 2013, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said 27%:

I worry that lower gas prices lessens demand for electric vehicles, hybrids, and bicycles.  It will be interesting to get the travel report for this season’s holiday traveling.  New records?

The unexpected subtleties of VICKI (1953) graced the screen tonight.  This noir-tinged film concerning the machinations surrounding the death of newly discovered glamour girl Vicki Lane (Jean Peters), as her promotion man, Christopher, is accused of her murder.  It could easily have been gauche and vulgar, but instead plays with the sensibilities of the players, leaving the promotional man incredulous, then motivated to discover the true killer.  Yet, in the end, it’s surprisingly less about the killer, who deserves little notice, but another who heedlessly complicates the entire scheme to satisfy his own little fetishes.

Will the promotions man survive the contretemps?  Will Vicki’s sister ever learn to respect Vicki’s ambitions?

Ketogenic is a new word for me, as NewScientist‘s Clare Wilson explains (28 November 2015, paywall):

But the high-fat “ketogenic” diet can be an effective last resort method of reducing seizures in people with epilepsy that doesn’t respond to drugs, and may even help a range of other brain conditions. Now researchers may have figured out how it works — and how to make the method more palatable. …

Two-thirds of those who try it see their number of seizures fall by half or more. In some cases, as happened for Matthew, children can later be weaned off the diet without their epilepsy becoming worse again.

Until now, the mechanism behind these effects had been a mystery. Now researchers have discovered that one of the breakdown products of fat binds to molecules on the surface of brain cells, calming the storm of electrical activity that can cause epileptic seizures.

The critical component may be decanoic acid:

Now laboratory tests using frog cells have shown that decanoic acid directly binds to a molecule that is found on the surface of brain cells and is known to be involved in spreading electrical impulses between different neurons. When decanoic acid binds to it, it reduces the flow of electrical current into the cell via this molecule. “It reduces the chance of a neuron firing,” says Robin Williams of Royal Holloway, University of London.

Given this effect that a high fat diet can have on the brain, I have to wonder about other cognitive effects – and how the long running recommendations for a diet low in fat has affected cognitive function.  EurekAlert! (ugh) recently published an article on how fats in the diet affect rats:

High-fat feeding can cause impairments in the functioning of the mesolimbic dopamine system, says Stephanie Fulton of the University of Montreal and the CHUM Research Centre (CRCHUM.) This system is a critical brain pathway controlling motivation. Fulton’s findings, published today in Neuropsychopharmacology, may have great health implications. “Our research shows that independent of weight gain and obesity, high-fat feeding can cause impairments in the functioning of the brain circuitry profoundly implicated in mood disorders, drug addiction, and overeating – several states and pathologies that impinge on motivation and hedonia,” Fulton explained. Hedonia relates to a mental state of wellbeing. “Another key finding is that the effects of prolonged high-fat feeding to dampen the sensitivity of this brain reward system are specific to saturated fats – palm oil used in this study – but not monounsaturated fat such as the olive oil used in this study.”

An interesting finding, if it holds.  Of course, animal model translation to human models is always a little tricky.  In a related finding from the University of Oxford, high fat diets may also lower overall body performance.  The summary?

High-fat diet consumption also increased subjects’ simple reaction times (P<0.01) and decreased power of attention (P<0.01). Thus, we have shown that a high-fat diet blunts whole-body efficiency and cognition in sedentary men. We suggest that this effect may be due to increased respiratory uncoupling.

Power of attention?  Something akin to ADD, perhaps.  Although the ADHD (ADD + Hyperactivity) lady I once dated was quite slender…. perhaps burning off the fat through her hyperactivity.  But as I recall, she was not a big eater.

In this ongoing series inquiring into the recognition of the division of human (or at least American) society into sectors and the impact that the reality of these divisions, defined by their goals, have on the practices indigenous to that society, I’d now like to discuss the related problem of import of technical terms.

A technical term can range from a Latin name for a life form to a simple word connoting a practice common to a sector.  By importing a technical term, I mean using a technical term, common in one sector, in another sector’s purview.  I am interested in how this practice can confuse the operationality and confound the goals of a sector.

The example I have in mind is the idea that an education can be bought.  The idea of buying and selling is indigenous to the private sector, where things are made and traded for other things (at its most basic; often currency is used to facilitate transactions, among other purposes).  The point is to make a living by providing things and services of use to other people, who in turn are willing to provide other things to you.

The educational sector is about imparting an education to students, the overwhelming majority of which are children.  Children are the future of society, and general opinion holds that highly knowledgeable and creative citizens are a keystone to a successful society.

It has recently been suggested that students are clients of the educational institutes.  Clients are, again, a private sector technical term: the person who is buying a thing or service from another.  The importation of this term into the educational establishment has an interesting effect on the expectations of the student: That something, an education, will be delivered to them.

But those of us who’ve successfully conquered the education mountain, whether it’s just surviving high school, or acquiring the right to place Ph.D. after their name, is well aware of a simple fact: unlike a car, which you can pay for and drive off the car lot with only the effort necessary to acquire the money desired by the car salesman, an education, for most of us, requires hours of effort and study, the acquisition of mental models which systematize knowledge and make it amenable to use for calculation and prediction, and many other facets which need not be mentioned here.

In other words, the educator does not present an “education” in gift wrapped box to the student who has dutifully put down a pile of currency on the educators desk.  There is neither thing nor service bought.

An educator, to my mind, is a guide into the knowledge and processes of the field in which the educator professes to hold some expertise.  They open the door and give advice, but the student must also contribute: native intelligence, a motivation to master the material, the resources to do the work necessary for mastering the material, and a payment sufficient to the educator’s time.

In these terms, the differences between the educational sector and the private sector are stark, and not to be glossed over.  The educational sector presents knowledge, of facts and processes, as available to the avid learner, requiring their attention and energy in order to acquire them; the customer in the private sector must provide the currency or other product desired by the seller, but may otherwise be relatively indifferent to the transaction, perhaps even neglecting maintenance and matters of that sort.  In these differences lie the heart of the argument that sectors are not only different in goals, but in practices, and this differentiation in practices is key when analyzing problems plaguing the educational sector.

The intrusion of private sector technical terms into the educational establishment has contributed in some small part, I suspect, to the problem of grade inflation.  The demands of student who’ve paid full freight and not received the grades they believed they deserved will cause vociferous complaints, and for those educators, be they front line or administrative, who do not fully understand the implications of the operationality of the educational sector, these complaints will indeed move those educators to attempt to placate their tormentors, however ill-advised this may be.  Thus the sector loses its traction in its Sisyphean (and I do mean never-ending) task of educating those who are ignorant and must be made less so.

Another symptom is losing the focus on the long-held, hard learned lessons of education in favor of the latest fashion.  From this post concerning North Carolina’s educational establishment, desperately struggling against a political system dead-set against public education, comes this:

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

– Steven Long, member of the Board of Governors for the University of North Carolina system.  He identifies not as an educator, but as a member of the private sector, and, that being his provincial experience, attempts to manage education as if it’s a private business.  It’s not difficult to predict disaster for the educational establishment and accomplishment of its goal, which is to increase the knowledge and ability of the citizenry for the benefit of society – not just the benefit of the private sector.  The concept of the well-rounded citizen dates back millenia, a fact that seems to have escaped Mr. Long.

Over the last thirty years we’ve seen various experiments with the privatization of education.  Private universities have always been a part of the American educational establishment, often with great success.  It’s beyond my expertise to comment on how a private institute corresponds to the private sector (an unfortunate correspondence of words without guarantee of any inherent relationship); many private institutes are of a religious, rather than private sector, nature, while others are uncertain in my experience.

But we do know there are two recent types of intrusion of private sector into educational sector in the form of institutes: charter schools and for-profit universities.  Both are coming under a shadow.  Charter schools were the subject of a study by the National Education Policy Center (NEPC) at the University of Colorado.  Rather than quote the report, as I’m in a hurry here, I’ll quote from an associated blog, Curmuducation by Peter Greene:

1) Much of the money intended for educating children never makes it to the classroom. Instead, somebody is making money.

Charters can only make more money by increasing revenue or cutting costs. Revenue enhancement techniques include private donations and in-kind “donations” from parents. Revenue can also be enhanced by paying special attention to enrollment and watching things like enrolling students who are labeled special needs, but whose needs are not that large (aka costly to take care of). Chester Upland in PA is a great example of a school that actually earned negative state support because charters were draining them with large payments for low-cost students with special needs. Baker and Miron also note that one reason not to take new students in January is that students added mid-year don’t count toward the money the charter gets from the state.

Charters can cut costs by hiring low-cost inexperienced teachers and not keeping them long.

But all that money the charter “finds” doesn’t end up in classrooms. Instead, charters pump the money into big administrative costs, including hiring both personnel and services. Charters also invest heavily in capital assets. And all of this expense is hugely inefficient as it duplicates work. IOW, when ten charter students leave a hundred-student public school, we end up with two principals and two buildings where one was previously enough.

This is just one of his points culled from the report.  I do intend to read the report; my purpose here is to point out that charter schools are coming under increasing scrutiny, and not holding up well.  Unfortunately, studies like this are not the sort that hit proponents (or detractors) in the nose with their results.  The for-profit university scene, on the other hand, has had some recent results that do.  Consider, for example, now-bankrupt Corinthian College, Inc.  Daily Kos diarist Walter Einenkel has a lovely incendiary post on the matter:

Over the past 10 years it has come to light—through numerous lawsuits and state and federal investigations—that untold billions of dollars has been swindled out of student and taxpayers’ pockets by this private educational company. Earlier this year the Obama administration forgave almost half a billion dollars in federal student loans that were fraudulently acquired and today it’s being reported that further cancelations of federal student loans are coming.

Money is often mistaken as the primary goal in the private sector.  While swindle and fraud is not unknown in the educational sector, a criminal act of this magnitude would be very difficult to pull off.  Walter also helpfully points at another prosecution:

The criticisms of the administration are far from unwarranted as just last month another private educational organization, Educational Management Corporation, settled with the Justice Department for a reported $95.5 million dollars—a far cry from the billions they ripped off.

But enrollment is falling as students discover for-profit institutions do not deliver the same value as traditional institutions.  Inside Higher Ed has the facts from the National Center for Education Statistics:

The data show that postsecondary enrollment over all dropped by 4.2 percent over two years, with undergraduate enrollment falling by 4.8 percent and graduate enrollment by 1.6 percent.

The overall numbers were skewed heavily by declines in the for-profit sector, at all degree levels, and by a 7.5 percent drop in community college enrollment from 2011-12 to 2013-14, as seen in the table below.

I will skip copying the table, as it wasn’t amenable – but private enrollment dropped 16% for four year colleges.  With anecdotal reports of students finding their education from for-profit institutes not receiving the same respect as traditional institutes, this is not unexplainable.  The New Yorker reported in November 2015 that

Enrollment at the University of Phoenix has fallen by more than half since 2010; a few weeks ago, the Department of Defense said that it wouldn’t fund troops who enrolled there. Other institutions have experienced similar declines.

Although U.S News & World Report reported in Feb 2015 that

What’s startling is that for-profit universities have halted their enrollment declines. They’re both recruiting more new students and hanging on to more of the ones they have. According to the same National Student Clearinghouse data, the number of enrolled students at for-profits dropped only 0.4 percent in the fall of 2014, compared to a year earlier. That’s a dramatic improvement from the previous year’s decline of 9.7 percent.

Perhaps the signal from students is not unequivocal, but I think, based on the insights from categorization, I would expect a jagged line in terms of a signal from students as they are enticed to use the for-profit schools as the lower-income students search for a usable education, and then discover the practices optimized for the private sector are not suitable for use in the educational sector.  For example, Mr. Greene’s report, cited above, that charter schools often cut costs by utilizing only inexperienced teachers is really an indictment of this entire approach to education, as one would expect an experienced teacher to be more effective at guiding the student to properly absorbing the desired education.  This should starkly illuminate the paradox at the heart of the matter – the purpose of many in the private sector is to make money, while the purpose of the educational sector is to produce knowledgeable citizens.  These goals are at odds with each other, and for this reason the practices of the private sector are inappropriate to the educational sector.

The first post in this series is here.

Discover Magazine‘s Neuroskeptic blog reports on another failure on the front of psychology studies:

There have been many published studies of romantic priming (43 experiments across 15 papers, according to Shanks et al.) and the vast majority have found statistically significant effects. The effect would appear to be reproducible! But in the new paper, Shanks et al. report that they tried to replicate these effects in eight experiments, with a total of over 1600 participants, and they came up with nothing. Romantic priming had no effect.

Apparently the urge to find something has led to optimistic evaluation of the results:

Shanks et al. say that this is evidence of the existence of “either p-hacking in previously published studies or selective publication of results (or both).” These two forms of bias go hand in hand, so the answer is probably both. Publication bias is the tendency of scientists (including peer reviewers and editors) to prefer positive results over negative ones. P-hacking is a process by which scientists can maximize their chances of finding positive results.

Tonight, almost by accident, we saw the entirety of THE BITTER TEA OF GENERAL YEN (1933), with Barbara Stanwick as the earnest young missionary faced with the horrors of the Chinese Civil War and Nils Asther as warlord General Yen.  This was an interesting movie, not only for its subject matter, but also for the reactions it elicited in me – is this an accurate movie?  Are these really the morals followed by the Chinese?  I don’t know Confucianism, but they don’t really seem to be that way; they’re more machiavellian.  And when Stanwick shouts “yellow swine”, it really gives a bit of a shock to see some racism lit up in lights…

And yet, in her dreams, she fantasizes being saved from a stereotypical ‘yellow devil’ by a man wearing a Western business suit – and General Yen’s face.  So there’s more subtlety to this movie than, perhaps, you’d think from a simple-minded summary such as mine.  Yet, given the lack of idealism implied by Yen’s speech concerning the loyalty of his troops, I wonder at the duplicity of his servant – her position being so dangerous, why would she betray him?  Simply love over the other hostage, a Captain Li who is the only son of a rich family?  Loyalty to her people?  Perhaps an implication that the Chinese of the period were not all alike, that some believed in ideals?  And, yet, with Stanwick’s life in her hands, she happily betrays her as well to what could easily be Stanwick’s death.

So the movie is more than it seems.  Even as the stereotypes come flooding in the front door, nuance and thoughtfulness beckon from the parlor.  Contemporary audiences thought little of the movie, unfortunately.  From Wikipedia:

Barbara Stanwyck blamed its poor box-office showing on racist backlash. Miscegenation, so soon to become taboo in Hollywood, is made palatable and attractive as a natural outcome of passions molded by tumultuous times. McBride quotes her as saying, “The women’s clubs came out very strongly against it … I was so shocked. [Such a reaction] never occurred to me, and I don’t think it occurred to Mr. Capra when we were doing it.”^[

Lawfare‘s Andrew Keane Woods worries about the legal future of what is basically an extra-legal entity:

States are increasingly asserting territorial control over the Internet—often because doing so is the only way to get access to data in which the state has a legitimate interest—and this has a number of troubling consequences.  For example, if law enforcement in one country cannot get access to criminal evidence held by American Internet companies, they might: 1) demand that data be held on local servers, where it can more easily be accessed (and surveilled); 2) deploy covert surveillance efforts to access the data (and perhaps demand a way around the service provider’s encryption); and/or 3) assert extraterritorial jurisdiction over the foreign-held data, throwing Internet companies in an unfortunate conflict of laws. …

In my view, privacy advocates and Internet companies should be pushing hard — much harder then they are currently pushing – to address this larger crisis. States must be allowed to exercise local regulatory control over the Internet in ways that are consistent with their legitimate government interests – like getting access to data critical to a criminal investigation – but without compromising the Internet’s ability to act as a global platform for communication, commerce, and speech.

Jurisdiction is key, of course, and jurisdiction depends on physicality – that is, the tangible location of some chunk of data key to an investigation.  If a crime is committed in one country and the key chunk of data is in another, well, alacrity is not a populous member of this literary landscape.  From Woods’ New York Times editorial piece:

This cross-border process is notoriously slow. Requests take an average of 10 months — an eon in a criminal investigation — and many languish for years.

This leads to some alarming trends, again from Woods:

I recently attended a conference for purveyors of surveillance software — an event unofficially known as the “Wiretappers’ Ball.” I asked one vendor if he was aware of law enforcement’s frustrations with American tech firms. The salesman grinned and told me that police departments now buy his malware precisely because they’re tired of waiting for evidence through established diplomatic channels. This is alarming: Making it harder for the police to get criminal evidence lawfully may actually incentivize them to seek that data by snooping.¹

This aside, though, there’s a hidden assumption – that data is atomic.  It’s not.  It’s often treated that way, of course, even when it’s replicated for such things as Internet management.  Data can be distributed, such that any particular chunk is not usable, but only in combination with the rest does it become useful.  A careful, intelligent criminal could partition critical data and save it in 100 countries – if he knew the server physical locations.  And then the police would have a nightmarish administrative problem.

I’m not familiar with the dark net, so it’s certainly possible that just such a service already exists, just like sales of credit cards and other critical data.  And while I doubt the technical expertise of most criminals, the Internet means it only takes one morally challenged programmer …

¹ As an aside, SF author Jack Vance described, purely as background, an analogous situation having to do with the essence of outer space and how travel times would affect policing efforts, resulting in the creation of the Interworld Police Coordinating Company (IPCC), an entity not necessarily under the control of any local government, almost a private entity

University of Minnesota researchers add the ingredient of humans think to models of crowd behavior … and get this unearthly image.

WorldPress.org‘s Alaina Navarez reports on the wealth gap in Latin America:

According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, inequality has increased sevenfold, and the average income of the richest 10 percent of the population is now nine times the average of the poorest. The richest 1 percent of the population in Latin America already own 41 percent of the region’s wealth. By 2022, the top 1 percent are projected to have more wealth than the remaining 99 percent. If this trend continues, will recent progress slip away? The labor market, education, healthcare and technology help shed light on the issue.

While the point here is that most of the population is being left behind, I’m projecting a little larger to the competition between nations.  Today, the wealth of a nation isn’t its gold or equivalent, or most anything else – but the intelligence of the citizenry, gender and ethnic background be damned.  That’s why ethnic cleansing is the mark of a failed country.

And in the competition of nations, the country with the highest average productive training is the country who will “win”, while those who permit the greed of the top percentile to run rampant – they risk being left far behind, as usual, at the very least; violence is always a possibility if those countrymen being left behind perceive they have been treated unfairly and the government is unwilling to step in.

Of course, competition between nations is an interesting topic.  What does winning mean?  We used to fight wars almost as a matter of course, but amongst First World countries we now avoid it, only venting our violence on smaller countries which then adapt new strategies to strike back.  Now we persist in measuring countries against each other, with the unspoken subtext: We’re better than them.  From life expectancy to the distribution of wealth, we strive to be the best.

And why?

Because that’s what we’ve always done.  We can call it an old evolutionary strategy, but it’s still a vibrant part of our lives, and so we strive to be better, by some measure, than the guy across the street, the city across the river, the country over in Europe.

And these days, we talk about technological progress and how that betters our lives.  It’s more civilized; the fruits of one country can be easily shared to others; they may or may not find it psychologically oppressive even as they use their smartphones just as we do.  So it does leave me to wonder – if the bread & circuses are provided in sufficient quantity, will it really matter that some 1% control more wealth than the 99%?  Will the control that the 1% can buy with that wealth so offend the 99% that rioting will break out?

Or will the callousness of the rich be such that the bread & circuses will not be provided until it’s too late to mollify the 99%?

Wondering about building tall with wood?  Lloyd Alter @ Treehugger.com has some answers as readers at The Guardian have negative reactions to a news story:

You can’t replace trees as fast as they are being cut down, so the argument that they will grow back is not an acceptable excuse for cutting down the forest. Do your research before you spout off about things you don’t know. Deforestation is one of THE leading contributors to climate change. PERIOD! We need MORE trees on the planet, not fewer!

The harvesting of trees in the Pacific Northwest and in Canada is not the deforestation that is contributing to climate change; that is the tropical deforestation where forests are cleared for farmland and palm oil plantations. In fact, thanks to the mountain pine beetle infestation that is killing so many trees, cutting them while still alive and turning them into CLT would be a very good thing for the climate; we should be harvesting more, not less. The wood is sustainably harvested and trees are replanted which have a net positive effect on sequestering carbon, and leads to more trees, not fewer.

We’ve been hearing about El Niño, the band of warm Pacific water that can affect weather patterns – but what of the sibling, La Niña?  NewScientist (paywall) relays a warning for Australia:

Queensland could face devastating floods rivalling those seen in 2010-11 in just a year’s time, as the effects of climate change and an impending La Niña weather event combine.

La Niña brings warm water to the ocean around Queensland, and with it comes rain. Fresh research now shows that the effects of climate change made the flood-causing rains three times more likely that year. …

Queensland might not have to wait to get a taste of this future. The world is in the grip of one of the strongest El Niños on record. And extreme El Niños usually flip within a year to become their opposites, La Niñas – which are then often extreme themselves.

“I would predict an extreme La Niña developing by next year this time,” says [Wenju] Cai [of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Canberra, Australia]. “It is highly likely that January 2017 could see floods similar to those in 2011.”

[Caroline] Ummenhofer [of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts] says that predicting La Niña is difficult, but agrees it’s a worrying possibility that one might happen next year and bring a repeat of the devastating floods.

La Niña is, according to the Wikipedia article,

During a period of La Niña, the sea surface temperature across the equatorial Eastern Central Pacific Ocean will be lower than normal by 3–5 °C.

According to Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology, rainfall was a little slow in 2014:

Queensland experienced its equal-third-warmest year on record in 2014, with below-average rainfall recorded across the southeast, southwest and parts of the northern interior of the State.

Downpours are rarely usful, however. Just for fun, here’s a map Australian rainfall:

Following a good meal at the Mediterranean Cruise Cafe, my Arts Editor and I attended a performance of Turn of the Screw, a play by Jeffrey Hatcher based on a story by Henry James, as performed by The Chameleon Theatre Circle at the Ames Center in Burnsville, MN.  This is an excellent production featuring, as specified in the script, two performers and a minimal stage, although one might argue that the lighting designer might be due a performing credit because of how well lighting enhances the performance of the actors.

The story concerns a governess, in 1870s England, hired to manage two children, the niece and nephew of the governess’ employer.  Who is he?  Why does he wish to have no interactions?  What happened to previous employees?

And why are madhouses reputed to be populated by … governesses?

The gentleman actor, Mark L. Mattison, plays the mysterious employer, his nephew, and the cook with equal facility, allowing our imaginations out of their pens; but this is not to belittle the efforts of the lady,Laura Hoover,  who while only playing the single role of the governess, has a presence equal to that of Mr. Mattison.  They play off each other through the medley of relationships with a fine fettle, more or less successfully diverting our attention, like any fine magician, from the inevitable plot holes and questionable omissions that exist in every … ghost story.

And how do I know it was fine?  Because I began to make up one of my own …