Unsightly Mental Blemishes

Many media outlets, such as CNN, reported the execution of North Korea’s defense minister, Hyon Yong Chol, by anti-aircraft gun.  But just how of this story is true?  Vox Media‘s Max Fisher reports,

North Korea has reportedly executed a top official, Defense Minister Hyon Yong Chol, in a most North Korean manner: by shooting him to pieces with an anti-aircraft gun in front of a crowd of hundreds of other officials.

That’s according to South Korea’s intelligence service (NIS), which has a history of exaggerating reports about North Korea that make the country look bad. Indeed, while South Korean lawmakers at first described the NIS as categorically stating that Hyon had definitely been executed, the NIS later told the press that they were certain Hyon had been purged, and that they believed with confidence that he had been executed, but were still working to verify the latter.

HRNK.org claims to have pictures of the firing range:

Sometime on or about October 7th, 2014, some very unusual activity was noted on satellite imagery of the Kanggon small arms firing range. Instead of troops occupying the firing positions on the range there was a battery of six ZPU-4 anti-aircraft guns lined up between the firing positions and the range control/viewing gallery. The ZPU-4 is an anti-aircraft gun system consisting of four 14.5mm heavy machine guns (similar to a U.S. .50 caliber heavy machine gun) mounted on a towed wheeled chassis. It is neither safe nor practical to use such weapons on a small arms range, as the combined weight of fire from the six ZPU-4 (a total of 24 heavy machine guns) would quickly destroy the downrange backstop and necessitate reconstruction. A few meters behind the ZPU-4s there appears to be either a line of troops or equipment, while farther back are five trucks (of various sizes), one large trailer, and one bus. This suggests that senior officers or VIPs may have come to observe whatever activity was taking place. Most unusual in the image, perhaps, is what appears to be some sort of targets located only 30 meters downrange of the ZPU-4s.

You will have to follow the above link to see the pictures.  Meanwhile, Marcus Noland is not so sure:

The National Intelligence Service then got into the act, claiming in testimony in front of a South Korean National Assembly committee that the North Korean defense chief, General Hyon Yong-chol, had been purged and executed for dozing off during meetings and talking back to his boss. (Man, it’s a good thing that I’m not North Korean or I would have been offed years ago.) As in the case of the alleged Kim Kyong-hui poisoning, the report immediately attracted skeptical commentary, and now the NIS is backing away from its statement: they think that Hyon was purged, but may not have been executed by firing squad, either using conventional weapons or via the currently stylish use of anti-aircraft guns. Parenthetically, in a different interview with CNN, a North Korean official admitted that the regime executed subversives, but bristled at the notion that they used anti-aircraft guns.

DailyNK reports on the spread of the news amongst the North Korean public, assuming that it happened:

News of the execution of Hyon Yong Chol, North Korea’s defense minister, is traveling swiftly throughout the country, while lectures for military cadre have been propagating Hyon’s purge on account of “insubordinance to the country’s monolithic leadership,” Daily NK has learned.

Among ordinary members of the public, Kim Jong Un’s execution of high-level officials to consolidate his power has been dubbed a practice of “cannibalistic politics.”

The veracity of DailyNK is unclear – I don’t know how they source their stories.

The BBC reported earlier this year that 15 people, including high officials, had been executed by Kim Jong-un’s order:

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has ordered the execution of 15 people this year, including several top officials, South Korean intelligence says.

The agency told a parliamentary meeting on Wednesday that they were executed by firing squad on spying charges.

Those killed include two vice ministers who challenged Mr Kim over his policies and members of an orchestra, intelligence officials said.

Given that North Korea is a nuclear power, the apparent ruthlessness of the hereditary ruler makes for uncomfortable times, although one wonders if they’d actually ever try to use one on an enemy, given that sudden extinction is a possibility – although I don’t know that an American President would order a nuclear strike on North Korea if they struck South Korea or another regional power.  Of course, even if they just tried to strike the United States, the leadership would be obliterated.  I see opinions offered as to whether Kim is safe in his position, but virtually everyone admits it’s really all guesswork.

North Korea’s official web page is here.

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is a genuine workers’ state in which all the people are completely liberated from exploitation and oppression. The workers, peasants, soldiers and intellectuals are the true masters of their destiny and are in a unique position to defend their interests.

If you’re a techie, this site may be of interest.

(Update: added missing HRNK link 8/16/2015)

A reader manages to cross two threads, regarding animal rights and sentient machines, in a comment:

It’s amusing to think of the universe at large as deterministic and our exercise of free will as a sort of random number generator for the cosmos. But we’re not random; there are constraints. Free will that fails to take gravity into account quickly ceases to exist.

As long as free will must work within conditions required to maintain our physiology, we have at best constrained will. We can’t subvert basic physics.

And I don’t take free will to be quite the same as random will, but simply that, presented a choice, it is not predetermined which alternative we’ll select.

That said, the human range of choices is greater than chimps’ due to evolved physiology (with notable exceptions, i.e., American congressional representatives). Self awareness appears to be an emergent property of neural networks. We’ve learned enough about chimps to recognize they have preferences, make choices, vary in temperament and have some measure of self-awareness. Enough so they can behave in ways remarkably similar to urban street performers…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4s0jt8L5V_w

The development of AI will introduce some really interesting new perspectives on the question of self awareness, personhood, and free will. If AI grows to exceed human capabilities, we’d better set a good example in how we treat chimps.

Asked about personhood for chimps, Steven Wise clarifies (NewScientist 9 May 2015) (paywall):

We are looking for chimpanzee rights for chimpanzees, looking to understand what the most fundamental interests of chimpanzees are and giving them rights to protect those interests.

Why do chimps deserve legal personhood?
They have been studied for well over half a century, in the wild and in captivity. The findings only go one way – chimpanzees are extraordinarily complex cognitive beings with minds that are startlingly close to ours. More importantly for our argument, they are autonomous and self-determining, not just bound by instinct. It is also clear that they are autonomous in a way that is very familiar to us as human beings. Courts have shown the utmost respect for autonomy. For example, if someone rejects medical treatment, the court respects their right to autonomy, their right to die. Autonomy is of supreme value.

Which is an interesting statement from a magazine which has also published numerous articles arguing that free will is an illusion, such as this one (paywall):

As enticing as ‘t Hooft’s theory may be to physicists, it has an unexpected and potentially frightful consequence for the rest of us. Mathematicians John Conway and Simon Kochen, both at Princeton University, say that any deterministic theory underlying quantum mechanics robs us of our free will.

“When you choose to eat the chocolate cake or the plain one, are you really free to decide?” asks Conway. In other words, could someone who has been tracking all the particle interactions in the universe predict with perfect accuracy the cake you will pick? The answer, it seems, depends on whether quantum mechanics’ inherent uncertainty is the correct description of reality or ‘t Hooft is right in saying that beneath that uncertainty there is a deterministic order.

Which reminds me that I’ve been (slowly) reading Noson S. Yanofsky’s THE OUTER LIMITS OF REASON: WHAT SCIENCE, MATHEMATICS, AND LOGIC CANNOT TELL US.  In section 2.2 on language, he brings up a number of well-known self-referential paradox, with an example of the word heterological, which means an adjective that does not describe itself, as opposed to autological (or homological, if you prefer), which is an adjective that does describe itself (for example, pentasyllabic is autological).  The question is whether or not heterological is heterological.

He suggests (or perhaps he borrows from philosophy; he doesn’t say) that because language can talk about itself, is, in a sense, aware of itself, then irresolvable paradoxes may be expressed.  (If he has more to say about irresolvable paradoxes, I haven’t gotten to it just yet.)

So let me draw an analogy: If we can be aware of the question of free will, of the mechanistic view of the universe vs the stochastic view of the universe, and if we can discuss and research the question, then we have a self-referential system in which paradoxes may be expressed, and – intuitively, I’ll grant – I think free will must win out as it becomes a node of … I want to use the word chaos, but only because none other comes to mind.  Perhaps instability is better.  Although I grant that a proponent of the mechanistic view would probably view my suggestion with disdain; if the universe is mechanistic, what it contains doesn’t really matter so long as it rolls along according to the rules.

And I apologize to the folks who thought this would have something to do with animal-rights.  Welcome to my world.  OK, let me connect back to those rights … so, if we can make a credible argument for free will, then suggesting chimps have both autonomy and free will – that is, they are not ruled entirely by instinct – then I think you need to show self-awareness in those chimps, or at least a potential that is sometimes fulfilled.  Chimps have passed the mirror test, so Mr. Wise may have a case.

(6/8/2015: Updated with the entire title of Yanofsky’s book.)

Continuing this thread, a couple of days ago I saw EX MACHINA, a movie concerning the development of sentient machines, and while it certainly asked some of the right questions, what stood out for me is this axiom:

Don’t let a psychopath develop sentient machines.

(Updated May 21 with the link to the original post in the thread.)

Elora Hardy of Ibuku thinks your next house might be made of bamboo, according to Treehugger’s Derek Markham:

Bamboo has the compressive strength of concrete, the same strength-to-weight ratio of steel, and can regenerate itself in just a few short years. It’s also flexible, beautiful, and resilient, and serves as an effective carbon sequestration channel.

Sounds great, right? So why aren’t more buildings made from this wonder material? Because bamboo is a wild grass, it’s also round, hollow, and tapered, and presents unique challenges to those who build with it. The material lends itself more easily to bespoke homes than to conventional and mass-produced houses, which have a ready source of straight, square, and uniform wood, thanks to the well-established timber industry.

And there might be the rub – as Elora makes clear in her TED talk, houses from bamboo are not suitable for mass construction.  Each one requires a lot of work, a lot of careful selection of the proper bamboo shoot, which means this may be an expensive option .. piling up on already expensive land.

However, they have solved the problem of insects eating your house, according to Quartz:

Bamboo architecture has actually been extant since the 16th century in tropical areas of the world, and is an emerging architectural and interior design specialty in Asia. But until recent breakthroughs in insecticide treatment, bamboo buildings were considered temporary structures, because bugs and termites would eventually destroy them. “Untreated bamboo gets eaten to dust,” explained Hardy. Ibuku’s bamboo is treated with boron, in a low-toxicity solution that renders the bamboo indigestible to insects.

Boron appears to have low toxicity.

And the links include some gorgeous pictures.

ESPN reports on football quarterbacks changing colleges based on football opportunity:

This is the latest example of college football free agency. It’s also the latest example of what big-time college football is all about: football, not college.

“Free agency’s a little bit of the recruiting puzzle in college football now, whether we want to believe it or not,” said Terry Bowden, who has coached at every level of college football and is currently head coach at University of Akron. “The top 30 quarterbacks in the country always go to the same few schools every year. When one is passed by another one, he’s looking to transfer so he can play somewhere else.

(For those are wondering but are too lazy to read the story, there’s a rule that states a graduate with football eligibility still available may transfer without sitting out a year.)

I find the story arc interesting: from being a sport which students engaged in as a student past-time, to a sport which attracted the regulatory notice of the President (Theodore Roosevelt), to the sport that has become more important than the schools to which it’s attached, to an ongoing attempt to unionize the student-players:

What, I asked Kain Colter, to make of this glorious bacchanal?

We sit in his living room on a high plains ridge outside Boulder. A lean, athletic 22-year-old man, he has the Cowboys-Packers game on the television and workout equipment around him. He made the Vikings’ practice squad this season and hopes to join the team next season.

He also organized a players union movement at Northwestern, where he played quarterback for four years.

“I mean, as a fan, it’s great fun, I love the college game,” he said of college bowl madness. “But the incredible money underlines that we are truly the engines of a multibillion-dollar industry.

“Honestly, every guy in every college locker room in the nation talks about this.”

Where there’s money, those generating the value will look to maximize their take of it, and given the oodles of cash, the article cited at the beginning of this post is just another step on this path, as I foresee continued changes to the college game’s background – unless the concussion problem sinks it into the depths.

Really, justice demands it.

Although I’d prefer to see college football replaced with a minor league football setup.  It’d be more honest.

CMU developed an AI which was allowed to learn poker, and then scheduled to play against some pros.  It did OK:

The team of computer scientists behind Claudico said its matchup against four of the world’s top poker pros ended in a statistical tie.

But the human poker pros were $732,713 ahead of Claudico when they ended their 80,000 hands of no-limit hold’em against the computer. And poker aficionados are crying foul.

If this had been a real competition, one poker fan tweeted, CMU would have “one broke-a** robot” on its hands. Another said the claim of a “statistical tie” was  “disingenuous.”

At Part-Time Poker, freelance writer and game designer Alex Weldon writes the truth is somewhere in the middle:

“What’s actually going on here is the standard clash of cultures between academia and other walks of life …

“What the researchers mean when they call the results a ‘statistical tie’ is this: Assuming that Claudico was in fact equal to the human players, the results still would have come about by chance some percentage of the time. If that percentage is greater than the margin of error that the researchers set out in advance, then they can’t call the results meaningful. A standard margin of error is 5%, and I’ve confirmed with Carnegie Mellon that this is what the researchers were shooting for.

“Thus, when the researchers claim a statistical tie, what they really mean is that they can’t say with more than 95% confidence that the humans were actually better. The rest of us probably don’t need to feel quite that confident in order to be happy calling it a human win, and that’s all that this boils down to.”

NewScientist ( 7 May 2015 ) (paywall) notes:

Computers have a few edges over humans, says graduate student Noam Brown, part of the team behind Claudico. For example, a computer can switch randomly between various betting strategies, which may confuse human opponents.

On the other hand, Claudico is slow to pick up on and adapt to people’s playing styles – something that many pro players do with ease. “One of our big concerns is that the human will be able to identify weaknesses that Claudico has and exploit them,” says Brown.

Because Claudico taught itself to play, even the team that built it don’t quite know how it picks its moves. “We’re putting our faith in Claudico. It knows much better than we do what it’s doing.”

And the official scoreboard from the Rivers Casino is here.

Each of the four pros will play 1,500 hands per day against Claudico over 13 days, with extra hands played on the last day, Thursday, May 7, to achieve a total of 80,000 hands. The pros will play using standard laptop computers. Their laptops will be linked to a computer at Carnegie Mellon University which is running the Claudico program.

Two pros will play on the casino main floor and two will play in an isolation room on the second floor. To reduce the role of luck, the pros in the isolation room will play the opposite hole cards against Claudico from the ones being played by the pros and Claudico on the main floor. The players will rotate periodically between the main floor and isolation room.

Once again working on the demand side of the equation, EcoWatch reports on Pembient’s marketing of a reproduction of rhino horn … so well done that it may be indistinguishable from the real thing:

It’s unclear how exactly Pembient’s making the products, but as TechCrunch explained, “Rhino horns are composed of a specific kind of keratin protein. Pembient figured out the genetic code and was then able to reproduce the horns using the keratin in a 3D-printing technique.”

After Pembient CEO Matthew Markus showed a TechCrunch reporter one of their horn prototypes, Markus said, “You can’t physically tell the difference. No one looking at this could tell this wasn’t from a rhino. It’s the same thing. For all intents and purposes, this is a real rhino horn.”

The International Business Times notes:

Rhino-poaching figures from South Africa show 1,215 animals were killed in 2014. Demand for the product has increased over the past decade, an upward trend attributed to a rise in living standards in Asia, where the horns are used for traditional medicine.

William Ripple from Oregon State University, who recently led a study into herbivore extinction threats, told IBTimes UK the vast amounts of money involved in the poaching industry means it is difficult to curb. He said: “The rhino horns sell by weight more than the cost of diamonds, gold or cocaine. There’s huge amounts of money involved.

But will it work?  EcoWatch is not so sure:

However, conservationists have pointed out that the company’s plan doesn’t placate global demand for real rhino horns, especially in countries where it’s considered a status symbol to own one.

A Facebook correspondent comments about the state of education:

The Oklahoma teacher’s blog post was right on the money. High stakes testing is worthless for actual education, and all about enrichment for test manufacturers.

And then they don’t come through – witness the debacle in Minnesota with Pearson.  Which, being an old geezer, left me wondering whether it makes more sense to go back to paper tests – that’ll leave the hacker kiddies gasping for breath, along with the computerized testing companies.

While checking on the Atlanta cheating scandal, I ran across this recent article Ronald Lindsay, President & CEO, Center for Inquiry, which lays out the problems with standardized testing from the abstract point of view.

Conditioning a teacher’s employment or pay on their students’ performance on tests ignores a critical fact: Students’ educational attainment depends on many factors entirely outside an individual teacher’s control, not the least of which is the student’s home environment. Teachers have students for only a portion of each weekday. The “second shift” — to analogize to my hypothetical — namely, the parents and guardians of the students, have control over them for the other portion of each weekday and, typically, the entire weekend. Factors such as the education and socio-economic resources of the parents, as well as their interest in and support of their children’s education, have a significant influence on student achievement. A teacher cannot work miracles on a student who receives no educational reinforcement from the home environment.

Moreover, students are not identical in their natural abilities, nor have they all received the same educational preparation prior to entering the school system. If No Child Left Behind implies a commitment to strive to have each pupil perform to the best of their abilities, that’s a laudable objective. If it implies that we can realistically expect all students to perform well on standardized tests, that’s an impractical and unreasonable goal.

It makes me empathize with the Atlanta teachers who felt they were forced to cheat to hold on to their jobs.  This excellent post is partially by a former principal-in-the-trenches.

However, getting rid of testing does leave me wondering how to assess the qualities of the school.  True, we could simply wait to see how well the graduates of any given school do in the outside world – but that rather leaves the intervening classes in the lurch, as the saying goes.  How did they do it in the old days?  I confess I wasn’t really paying attention back when I was in high school – I was just trying to survive and didn’t really have time to wonder about how they assess, say, Mr. Smith the math teacher.  Did the principals do the assessments?  And if  you had a biased principal?  There is something to be said for objective measures.

The problem – like science – is doing the right easy thing is hardly ever easy.  If it’s easy, you’re not doing it right.

An idea from Chris Collaris.

(h/t Walter Einenkel @ The Daily Kos)

Continuing the China watch, Sami Grover on Treehugger waxes cautiously ecstatic over the latest analysis of data from China on fossil fuel usage:

Earlier this year, many of us who follow such things were astounded by news that global CO2 emissions might have actually stalled last year.

Now comes news via the Greenpeace Energy Desk that Chinese carbon emissions may have fallen 5% in the first four months of this year.

If true, this is very big news indeed. In fact, a drop of that magnitude would—according to Greenpeace—be the equivalent of the UK’s entire emissions output.

Greenpeace notes:

If the reduction continues until the end of the year, it will be the largest recorded year-on-year reduction in coal use and CO2 in any country.

Falling coal output in China has already had a big impact on global emissions with early data from the IEA suggesting that global emissions of carbon dioxide from the energy sector stalled in 2014, marking the first time in 40 years in which there was a halt or reduction in emissions of the greenhouse gas that was not tied to an economic downturn.

ChinaTopix observes:

China is indeed pursuing clean energy technology at a quick pace. The country has closed hundreds of coal plants as a response to their domestic air pollution problems and the growth in their use of solar energy can already compete with any other country. However, Think Progress says that the dramatic fall in emissions is likely due to the country’s current slow economy.

Though the decline in carbon gas emissions mean CO2 build up is also slower, it remains that there is a dire need for both rapid decline in emissions and restoring the Earth’s ecosystems in order to absorb more CO2 from the atmosphere, according to Treehugger.com.

Carbon Pulse has dug up only one expert to react to the data analysis, one Tim Buckley:

I think this is a permanent, long-term structural change in the Chinese electricity system, and current trends show that China is running well ahead of its commitments made in conjunction with President Obama in 2014.

Will Washington continue to be a comedic sideshow when it comes to important matters like this, more interested in futile symbolic gestures unconnected to existential threats, or will it finally grow up and apply itself to its duties?

More from Cristobal Serrano.

(h/t NewScientist 2 May 2015)

A rhetorical question, to be sure.  Still, given the flood of news coming out of North Carolina over the last few years, it’s certainly worth gathering it together, scratching one’s noggin, and muttering, “Hmmmmm!”

Onwards….

TOXIC

Care must taken to define the subject in order to reach a reasonable conclusion: for example, basing a definition upon the fringe personalities contained within the states would reveal most of the country as being toxic, as we’d find Palin from AK, Bachmann from MN, Walker from WI, Cruz from TX, and Warren from MA as just a few examples which would only enrage perhaps even the moderates.  As entertaining as I’d personally find this approach to be, it must be abandoned.

So a definition of “toxic”, designed to take the topic seriously, should be rather more objective and well-reasoned: I suggest an environment, enforced by the political powers-that-be, in which the youth in that jurisdiction are receiving educational and casual instruction which will result in adults deficient in knowledge of how the world works, and a defect when it comes to competition with other young adults.

SCIENCE

In our modern world, Science, the study of reality, has become the substratum upon we have built the institutions which render modern life a reality: vaccines, agricultural techniques, and telecommunications are just three of the technologies that are the result of the such scientific fields as quantum mechanics, evolutionary biology, and genetics.  Science is composed of, among other things, two concrete concepts: the process it uses to formulate hypotheses and test same; and the store of scientific facts, always contingent, upon which hypotheses are reasonably built and assessed.  Less tangible aspects include the creativity which gives the scientist insight and, in some cases, an awe commonly associated with those who study the divine.

In our context, the question is how is Science treated in the state by the powers that be?  Is it a useful, trusted source of information concerning reality?  Or is it ignored, cherry-picked, and even manipulated to provide answers acceptable to those asking the questions?

SCHOOLS

These are the institutions we use to convey the foundations of knowledge, and, later, science to our offspring.  These are the key institutions, from kindergarten to the production of PhD-level adults. It is these people who will ultimately farm the land, innovate the new medicines, and create the new technologies which we’ll learn to hold dear.  If the institutions of schooling are not sound, then their output will not be sound.

All that said, school evaluation is difficult.  Even those who compile relevant statistics ask they not be used to rank schools and states because of influencing factors: local affluence, environment, and teacher pay are just some of the factors which may interfere with a fair evaluation of an education system.  Evaluation of school performance, and possibly more important, evaluation of the support of a school system can be a tricky subject.

So statistics must be approached with caution.  Nationwide comparisons are nearly non-existent, so one must carefully select how one evaluates data.

GOVERNMENT

Government must be on the most solid of grounds, as it provides the rules, enforcement of the rules, and the glue to hold together a sometimes divisive society, providing help where needed against the inimical forces of Nature.  This calls for honor, ethics, integrity, and ultimately the proper utilization of the results of science.

HOW DOES NORTH CAROLINA STACK UP?

SCHOOLS
As noted, achievement is hard to meaningfully measure.  The State Board of Education claims

North Carolina’s…
…

four-year high school graduation rate is 83.9 percent, the highest in state history.

…

Career and Technical Education completers’ graduation rate is 94 percent.

…

annual dropout rate is 2.45 percent, the lowest in history.

North Carolina public schools are

»

Among the top 11 participating education systems in the

world for 4th & 8th grade math scores on the Trends

in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS)

»

16th

in the percentage of seniors who took at

least 1 Advanced Placement exam in high school

»

14th in the percentage of seniors scoring 3 or higher

on Advanced Placement exams in high school

»

18th in 4th grade math, according to the National

Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)

»

29th in 4th grade reading, according to NAEP

»

23rd in 8th grade math, according to NAEP

»

37th in 8th grade reading, according to NAEP

»

Among the bottom 10 states in per pupil funding

»

46th in teacher pay

Another measure of schooling in the K-12 system is the salaries of teachers, and at first blush it doesn’t look good.  NPR contributes this report on the sudden fall in salaries:

No state has seen a more dramatic decrease in teacher salary rankings in the past 10 years, and some of the other changes in public education are unprecedented. The state is being watched closely by education policymakers across the country, and teachers are suing the state.

Terry Stoops directs education studies at the conservative John Locke Foundation, a Raleigh, N.C.-based think tank.

“They did it all at once,” Stoops says. “They don’t get style points for it, but the number of reforms that were passed received some awe from some of my colleagues in other states that said ‘I can’t believe that North Carolina was able to do all that in one year.’ And in particular, the elimination of the master’s degree supplement.”

So conservatives are pleased, but then they’ve conducted a war on teachers and their unions for as far back as I can recall; no doubt they may have started with good reason, but one must be careful with an institution this important.  Especially disturbing is elimination of the master’s degree supplement: so you improve what you can offer to your students, and you don’t get rewarded for it?

How do teachers in North Carolina feel?  Also from the npr.org report:

“Morale is at the bottom of the barrel right now throughout this state,” [Rodney Ellis, president of the North Carolina Association of Educators] says. “Teachers are really questioning why they want to teach, why they want to teach here in North Carolina. They have to take care of their own families, and it’s difficult to do that when our salaries are as low as they are. We’ve got educators who right now qualify for government assistance.”

I can attest, from personal contacts, that this appears to be a true statement.

The local ABC affiliate WTVD provides the following truly disheartening summary:

Among the study’s findings, North Carolina ranked 51st in ten-year change in teacher salary; 48th in public school funding per student; 47th in median annual salary; 43rd in teachers’ wage disparity; and 40th in safest schools.

Wallethub provides similarly dismal data with North Carolina in plumb last.  Starting salaries do little better, although it’s not clear if the data has been adjusted for cost of living.

From personal report, teaching assistant positions are also under attack, which, if successful, would leave teachers with that much more to do.  This can also be seen in the above chart.

On top of the North Carolina-specific ills, the teachers must also put up with the nation-wide controversy of testing, as described in this recent New York Times article.  I hesitate to further pursue this topic in a post on North Carolina, so let me be brief, with a reference to a teacher’s viewpoint in Oklahoma (I am assured by teachers in North Carolina and Minnesota that the viewpoint applies nationwide):

For most of us parents, the first impression that we have of school is that it is a warm, welcoming place. It’s because that first impression comes from viewing the Kindergarten class on an occasional basis when our children first start school.

And for most of us, that impression continues on into the middle school years.

But for most of the teachers and administrators today, the elementary school turns into a hostile workplace during the Spring testing season.

The balance of the above link is worth a read.

And what of the college level schools?  The previous NPR report asserts without documentation:

But bigger problems loom for the future: Freshman enrollment in the state universities’ education schools is down between 20 and 40 percent.

Never mind the recently revealed athletics scandal at North Carolina – Chapel Hill, it’s really small beans.  If prospective students perceive your college level schools of education as undesirable, what does that say about the state as a whole?

GOVERNMENT

One of the keys to a placid society is the perception that fairness is at the foundation of the society; those who feel unfairly treated do not have as much of a stake in the continuance of society as constructed; those who construct such societies then must fear the fell end of their efforts.

SCIENCE & GOVERNMENT

North Carolina has become infamous, at least in science circles, for its outlawing of ‘climate change’.  Scott Huler at the Scientific American blog Plugged In provides a useful interpretation of the law in question:

That is, the meter or so of sea level rise predicted for the NC Coastal Resources Commission by a state-appointed board of scientists is extremely inconvenient for counties along the coast. So the NC-20 types have decided that we can escape sea level rise – in North Carolina, anyhow – by making it against the law. Or making MEASURING it against the law, anyhow.

Here’s a link to the circulated Replacement House Bill 819. The key language is in section 2, paragraph e, talking about rates of sea level rise: “These rates shall only be determined using historical data, and these data shall be limited to the time period following the year 1900. Rates of seas-level rise may be extrapolated linearly. …” It goes on, but there’s the core: North Carolina legislators have decided that the way to make exponential increases in sea level rise – caused by those inconvenient feedback loops we keep hearing about from scientists – go away is to make it against the law to extrapolate exponential; we can only extrapolate along a line predicted by previous sea level rises.

ABC News provides additional perspective on the personalities involved; suffice it to say a climate change denier with financial ties to projects on the coast of North Carolina is involved.  It is … disturbing to see a mix of financial dealings and ideology used to override good sense as provided by the best scientific findings.  Suppose the climate change hypothesis is true: what will become of the structures built under government assurances that flooding of the sort that could damage those structures is unlikely to occur?

They may be depending on Federal help in case they get in trouble, using the Federal Government’s National Flood Insurance Act of 1968.  This program offers flood insurance to coastal residents in partnership with private insurers; this program exists because otherwise private insurers declined to offer insurance, certainly a red flag.  A 2012 New York Times article stated that, at that time, the program was $18 billion in debt, and not expected to ever recover those costs through premiums. Total vulnerable assets insured?  $527 billion.  The article advocates for the abolition of the program on the grounds that those who wish to live near the coast should bear the costs when we can now predict that, if inputs to the atmosphere continue, that flooding is a near certainty.  This is a sensible, even conservative, position to take, since living on the coast is not a necessity of life, merely a preference – and flooding of the coast is now a predictable event.

Unless, of course, you’re North Carolina.  Confidence in government is low (roughly 24% in the Federal government, according to this nifty graph at Pew Research); imagine what will happen when the North Carolina government’s projections are found to be wrong, based on obsolete models mandated by the government.

GOVERNMENT FAIRNESS

And is North Carolina fair?  Democrats outnumber Republicans roughly 2.6 million to 1.9 million, with 1.7 million unaffiliated, yet 10 of 13 Congressional seats are currently Republican.  Perhaps the Independents went Republican in a big way in the last election.  Or perhaps not: SCOTUS has rebuffed the North Carolina’s Supreme Court decision that gerrymandering did not take place on the latest redrawing of district lines.

Next is the news of Republican attempts to gerrymander the state even at the local level.  This may be a traditional practice, but when the Republican Governor speaks out against these Republican plans, you know something out of the ordinary is being practiced.  Rigging election districts to this extent may be considered systemic corruption.

And, finally, there may be nefariousness hidden in the bowels of state government.  This report is still in the arena of speculation, but suggests that during the administration of Governor Pat McCrory there have been chronic shortfalls in the registration of new minority voters:

Finding 1: A systematic sharp decline in new voter registrations originating from Public Assistance (PA) programs began on or about January 2013 and continues to this day

Keep in mind, these are merely results from analysis of voter data, and have no legal existence at the moment; but they remain alarming, and the story is fast developing – this update notes that North Carolina’s Department of Health and Human Services may be in violation of Federal law when it comes to helping their clients register to vote.  This is all very unsettling.

To reiterate, one of the keys to a placid society is the perception that fairness is at the society’s foundation; those who feel unfairly treated do not have as much of a stake in the continuance of society as constructed; those who construct such societies then must fear the fell end of their efforts.  How do North Carolinians feel about their leaders?

(h/t Joan McCarter @ The Daily Kos)

SCIENCE & BUSINESS

If your state is not emphasizing solid science, then any business dependent on science must question whether they can prosper in such an environment.  We’ve seen the hostility of NC government to [that] science which their ideology finds unpalatable, but ideology is not the bedrock of our society.  Indeed, ideology not rooted in reality is nothing more than chalk waiting to be disintegrated by the waterfall.  And NC’s waterfall may be the sudden uprooting of such large businesses as Wells Fargo (it swallowed NC’s Wachovia during the Great Recession) from Charlotte, Bank of America, and BB&T.  These large financial corporations are dependent on technology, and technology is built on good science.  If they realize they are in a state hostile to science, they can – with some effort – pick up and leave.  And the NC legislature can try to make a law banning such moves …

CONCLUSION

Is North Carolina the most toxic state in the union?  It is a judgment best left to you, dear readers; for those who have a seat within the polity, who can see the dirty linen underneath the dancing skirts of the high kicking government officials; and for those of us whose domicile is without, where perhaps we see more of the whole without seeing the cracks in the gears of the great machine.

In “Critical Cartography” on berfrois, Rhiannon Firth makes  a strong case for maps having a moral component, in contrast to my views on moral components and man-made objects:

A critical cartography is the idea that maps – like other texts such as the written word, images or film – are not (and cannot be) value-free or neutral. Maps reflect and perpetuate relations of power, more often than not in the interests of dominant groups.

It is fairly easy to think of some ways in which maps embody power relations. One need not dig too deep within the history of mapping to see that they are intricately tied up in the history of nineteenth century colonialism and imperialism. Cartographers drew – and continue to draw – boundaries that separate people and resources. As another example, it is a fairly well-known fact that the commonly used Mercator projection of the globe is an inaccurate representation, because when cartographers ‘flatten out’ the spherical earth, they need to make certain choices: Size, shape and distances cannot all be maintained in the process. In the Mercator projection, the global North is vastly expanded at the expense of the South and Europe is placed squarely in the centre. As a further example, we may find it relatively easier – using an Ordinance Survey or Google Maps – to find a recently built supermarket than a longstanding squat, autonomous space, social centre or other radical space, or perhaps the site of the Battle of Hastings rather than the site of a historical radical struggle or riot. This does not just have practical implications for finding a space. Maps structure and limit our knowledge of the landscape, affecting our perception of what is important, the relative sizes and relationships between objects and spaces and where it is possible or safe to travel.

So I’ve been mulling this over.  I still don’t see how a bolt is a moral object.  A map is a different thing, if you permit it a tangible reality, which I think is inevitable; while digital maps may be more common, maps in physical media used to be dominant.  I am less than an amateur philosopher, which is to say I’ve not read formal philosophy in a decade or so.  I suspect we could place maps and bolts in different categories, but I don’t see the critical component of their existence; I tried to argue that a map is the result of a human intelligence, but the counter argument is too obvious.

Perhaps it’s more fruitful to change the argument from human intelligence to an expression of human opinion.  This is more interesting; while one may argue that a bolt is also the expression of human opinion, there is a critical difference.  Intelligence is a dubious term, as definitions for it differ from year to year.  Opinion is somewhat more definite:

a belief or judgment that rests on grounds insufficient to produce complete certainty.

I would add, an opinion need not conform to reality, nor even the true views of the expressing entity.  So let’s apply this to a map: the map may still prove useful, particularly if its false opinions do not lessen the efficacy of its purported purpose.  So if certain information is omitted, as Rhiannon suggests happens with great frequency, then the map is deficient in that knowledge vector, but if the map’s purported purpose is in another knowledge vector, then the map remains useful even as it obscures certain information which may prove important in other contexts.

But if a false opinion is expressed in the production of a bolt, it’s such a definite, single purpose object that it would definitely fail in its purpose.  So I’d have to say that the more an object may embody false opinions without damaging its fulfillment of a purpose, the more of a moral component may be said to be embodied in it.

So … tilting at minutiae?  Hard to say.  I also would like to say that I simply enjoyed Rhiannon’s piece.  In fact, this is why I blog – I run across something that makes me think, that reveals a new angle on something.  And then I get to share my thoughts on it.  I’d definitely recommend reading her piece.

My arts editor said, “But the skins themselves do have an artistic element, even if they ARE covered in poop.”  OK.  I like 3D printers.  But I’m not sure if this is art, only art, art with practical usage, or just another person who does odd things and calls it art.

You tell me.

S K I N

Today, Stratasys announced that Oxman has achieved her goal and unveiled her latest creation Mushtari on the stage of TED2015 in Vancouver. The pieces are created not only to allow for living organisms to inhabit them, but also to intentionally manipulate the functions of those organisms. Don’t worry, this isn’t the herald of some dystopian state in which human beings are called ‘organisms’ and enslaved by 3D printed suits. Instead, the occupants are microorganisms such as cyanobacteria and E. coli.

Responding to this post, a Facebook correspondent writes:

Not at all what I expected to read based on your intro above. Yes, I believe we are on a collision course with a dystopic future because of the unrelenting pursuit of nothing but more and more money by corporations and many of the wealthiest individuals. The quotes about the purpose of work and life, and the remark about the firewall between advertising and editorial say it all. The Star Tribune or NBC News may not know it, but breaking that wall down will guarantee their ultimate demise.

Only if the wall stays down.  The stubborn, hardcore money chasers will finish in collapse; the intelligent will realize the mistake and fix it.  In time?  Hard to say.

And it’s that flexibility which makes me wonder about a dystopic future, at least the sort based on a pathological society, because we do have the capacity to change as reality rubs our noses in the pig shit.  And that’s what worries me about the fundamentalists, because they’ve renounced any belief in reality, at least as I understand it, in favor of a full blown, literal belief in a fantasy.  It may be a fantasy full of good lessons, but a literal belief in a fantasy is, nonetheless, a recipe for disaster.

(And I do agree, the intro may have been misleading – but it was a hard to summarize review.  The writing was dense and a little left-academic, which annoys me, and the presentation itself needs to be reworked.  All that led me to scan more than read.  I even considered writing a blog post just on the writing style and presentation, but I decided that would be a waste of time.  I’ve never been impressed by how the Left learns.  They’ve always, always struck me as a bunch of know-it-alls, which is not only a hard way to run one’s life, but loses all the grandeur of the surprises of life.)  <shutting up now>

The New Left Review publishes Emilie Bickerton’s review of Astra Taylor’s The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age.  This in particular caught my eye.

AOL’s guidelines for the new-model Huffington Post suggest the orientation of the future: editors are to keep their eyes glued to social media and data streams to determine trending topics, pairing these with search-engine optimized titles—often barely literate, but no matter if they top results lists—and drawing on thousands of bloggers as well as staff writers to push out a non-stop stream of condensed, repurposed articles. Those determining the content of the magazine are already locked in a ‘most popular’ feedback loop. Meanwhile, the rapid-fire output of news agencies that run to a ‘hamster wheel’ tempo—wire-copy writers may be expected to churn out ten stories a day—is becoming the only source from on-the-ground reporters around the world. Agency journalists may be good reporters, but their remit is to stay faithful to the neutrality commitment of their employer and only say what someone else, usually in an official position, has said already.

It’s vivid – editors as computer sweatshop employees.  The journalists as desperately writing hacks, tinkering with new ways to make cats cute and Ted Cruz appealing.  I can see members of both professions coming home at the end of their workday, eyes glazed over.

It’s appalling – the free press may encompass such a vision of how to run a free press, but I’m wondering just how it serves my interests, because I see the press, or what are now called news organizations, at its best when it’s bringing to my attention important, unnoticed topics; new information about those topics; and some analysis of those topics.

The description here is of the monetization of the news cycle.  Of course, it’s old news (and I’ll just apologize right here for any more inadvertent puns) that the journalism profession is in deep trouble as the Web has taken away the function of the traditional news organizations and made geography irrelevant, thus making redundant many journalistic jobs, but it’s certainly worth re-stating a point that comes up more and more often in my mind:

Capitalism is not a religion, and not a goal; the same applies to money.  The application of oneself to doing a job well is what makes for a good life; the corruption of a good societal system for the sake of money will come out ill in the end.

This applies to journalists, teachers, and just about any other profession.  This is something I’ve covered before when Science magazine permitted itself to be corrupted by publishing an approving article about tired, disproven treatments for the old moolah.  Sullivan, cited in my prior article, was I think worried that readers would come to distrust the articles published by a magazine indulging in such corrupt practices, and that would gradually end the magazine.  The firewall between advertising and editorial exists for the good of the news organization.

Those who believe in karma will believe that doing a job well is not only its own reward, but will result in rewards for  you.  I’m not always so certain, but I think we can certainly hope so.

(h/t berfrois)

And using an app?

The Starbucks app lets you pay at checkout with your phone. It can also reload Starbucks gift cards by automatically drawing funds from your bank account, credit card or PayPal.

That’s how criminals are siphoning money away from victims. They break into a victim’s Starbucks account online, add a new gift card, transfer funds over — and repeat the process every time the original card reloads.

Just remember: COMPUTERS ARE MULTIPLIERS.

Elisa Veini stumbles across the virtues of boredom at a little guesthouse in Valbona, Albania, owned by Catherine Bohne:

Catherine and other local people who campaign for the conservation of nature and culture in the region, could easily add to their programme a third value to campaign for: doing actively nothing, or boredom. Later on, she sends me a quote from Joseph Brodsky’s lecture “Listening to Boredom”:

When hit by boredom, go for it. Let yourself be crushed by it: submerge, hit bottom (…) boredom is your window on time, your window on time’s infinity, which is to say your insignificance in it, the most valuable lesson in your life (…) Boredom is an invasion of time into your set of values. It puts your existence into its perspective, the net result of which is humility and precision.

It’s a lovely, rambling piece and reminds me there are other modes of existence than the one engulfing us now.  Rereading it, this passage catches my eye:

As Catherine describes the place on her website, “Valbona is the perfect destination for those who are good at amusing themselves. If your ideal getting-away-from-it-all involves a lot of lying around and reading, splashing around and flipping rocks, getting to know people who seem to live in a completely different reality (or do they?), or hurling yourself at the nearest impossible peak, then Valbona is for you.” A bigger difference from NYC would seem hardly possible. She admits this willingly: “I must be one of my only contemporaries who knows what it’s like to have months and months when you wake up in the morning and think ‘Hm. What shall I do today?’”

It makes me think, “To abandon doing, achievement, to let the mind run free of the constraint of bludgeoning my fellows half to death; is it heaven or hell?”

In an article published before the UK elections, NewScientist explored the newly popular strategy (paywall) for getting the vote out, pioneered by Team Obama, courtesy Jacob Aron:

WITH just one week to go until the most unpredictable UK general election in a generation, you’d think that every vote counts.

Not so. If you have already decided who to vote for, know when you’ll be going to the polling station, and plan to stay up all night to watch the results come in, the politicians don’t care about you. …

“There is a lot of opportunity to be increasingly clever,” says Andrew Whitehurst of Wess, a London-based firm that runs digital campaigns for all three major UK parties. His colleague watched both sides in the last US presidential campaign drumming up support on the same street. “The Romney camp knocked on every single door, and the Obama camp knocked on about seven.”

In essence, if you’re already committed to voting for a particular party or candidate, or if you’re completely apathetic, then the data teams want to identify you so they don’t spend any resources on you at all.

But if you’re undecided, or decided but perhaps not really inclined to vote, then you’ve a target on your backside.  If you use Facebook and have filled out enough of your profile, the next election could feature a lot of targeted advertising.

But perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this article is this:

“Winning elections nowadays is not really about convincing people, it’s about mobilising people,” says Whitehurst.

Which is to say, we’re no longer about the debate of ideas in the public square, but about tribalism, about student body right, as they used to say?  Have we really come to hate each other that much?  Or is this just a UK thing?

Continuing the theme, NewScientist (2 May 2015) (paywall) discusses yet another factor in climate change – microbes:

The Senate Republicans isn’t the only group unhappy about Iranian Nuclear Negotiations.  Arash Karami reports for AL Monitor on shady Iranian Parliament maneuverings:

A bill demanding that Iran suspend nuclear talks with the United States until US officials cease making military threats against Iran was presented to the Iranian parliament May 12. The bill has faced a backlash, however, with some members of parliament claiming that they were misled about the nature and content of the bill.

Javad Karimi-Ghodousi, a member of parliament from Mashhad and member of the hard-line Endurance Front, presented the bill to parliament’s board of directors. The bill, which received 80 signatures, was presented as a “triple-emergency bill,” requiring a representative from the Guardian Council to be present to give a response within 24 hours. Triple-emergency bills are typically presented when the country is actively under military attack. Mehdi Koochakzadeh, Hamid Rasaei, Esmail Kowsari and Morteza Agha-Tehrani, who signed the bill, have been some of the most vocal critics in parliament against the nuclear talks and the Iranian negotiation team. …

Mehdi Mousavi-Nejad, whose name appears on the bill also, said to Icana, “We never signed a triple-emergency bill. The bill that was put in front of me, and which I signed, was a double-emergency bill.” A double-emergency bill requires that the bill be presented to the parliament floor within 24 hours and bypasses normal committee hearings. Mousavi-Nejad said that he told the creators of the bill that he would only sign a double-emergency bill, and since they changed it his signature must be voided.

In another article, also by Karami, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is rather irate about the United States:

During his speech on May 6, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei responded to comments by US officials about the possibility of a military confrontation should the nuclear negotiations between Iran and members of the UN Security Council fail. The comments were some of the harshest yet by the supreme leader, who has the final say on the nuclear program.

“I’ve repeatedly spoken about the nuclear talks. What we’ve needed to say we’ve said, but everyone should pay attention — our Foreign Ministry officials, various officials, the elite of society: If a nation cannot defend its identity and greatness against foreigners, certainly it will be struck. There is no return; it has to know the value of its character,” Khamenei said.

He continued, “The enemy makes threats. In these last few days, two American officials made threats. We won’t even mention those who don’t have important posts; these are [top] officials.”

If negotiations lose his favor, then we could find ourselves back at square one.  And while the neocons may think war is both inevitable and good, the rest of us still remember the nightmare of Iraq, both past and present tense, and connect it to their foolishness.

NewScientist (29 April 2015) (paywall) explains the shortcomings of current vaccines used to stop H5N2, which has decimated chickens in Iowa and turkeys in Minnesota:

[V]accinated poultry transmit the virus without getting sick, making its spread “silent”. Vaccination has driven H5N1’s evolution as these viruses adapt to the birds. China is now trapped, say researchers: it wants to give up expensive vaccination, but if it did, ubiquitous, silent H5N1 infections would decimate unvaccinated birds.

Must make farmers feel helpless.   I hope they have insurance.

A Facebook correspondent likes Carson:

I like to listen to the man, but he is to nice to win.

Perhaps.  His speech at the National Prayer Breakfast was apparently not the nicest:

Dr. Ben Carson, former pediatric neurosurgeon and author of “You Have a Brain” declared that President Obama’s remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast “makes me feel that perhaps we’re [Christians] being betrayed” on Saturday’s “Fox & Friends” on the Fox News Channel.

Given what appears to be his level of ignorance on a number of subjects important in the political arena, I think he’ll either be out in a hurry, or he’ll be quite entertaining as he finds it very rough sledding in a field that he doesn’t own.

Which brings me to a somewhat startling result: sympathy.  I’ve noticed that as we become a more and more specialized society – an inevitability, given what we (for example, Dr. Carson’s specialty as a pediatric neurosurgeon) – our opinions on nearly anything outside of our specialty can be horrendous.  Dr. Carson thinks a President can ignore the Supreme Court; that the 2016 elections may be canceled; that our troops should be immune from war crimes prosecution … these are all positions that I would take to be from an unserious candidate.  Yet Dr. Carson’s indisputable accomplishments mark him as extremely serious, and being a surgeon who pioneered new surgeries marks him as a rung or two above your standard-issue doc (who I also admire for their memories and their intense work ethic – but recognize that’s what it’s all about).

So … what’s the deal?  My personal theory is simply a person can only do so much, no matter what their level of intelligence may be.  At some point, you have to turn off the info flow and rest; and if your information flow is tainted, well, GIGO.

We no longer have renaissance men or women.  We’re specialists, or we’re general laborers, working so many hours that being informed on much of anything is difficult; or we’re poverty-stricken and therefore even deeper in the hole, and sadly not well educated, either.  This all plays into a perpetual conundrum (& worry) for me: we keep on trying to govern using amateurs rules, yet moving to professional rules invites ruin.  So we keep running elections full of people who may, or may not, know what they’re doing.  It’s one of those hard questions…