Fox News, Crichton, and other reality-challenged folk

Yes, I'm so easy I'll even blog myself. Today I saw an ABC article about Global Warming and better yet, Michael Crichton! You aren't to the self serving part yet, just read on.

Michael Crichton's 2004 book "State of Fear" is what started me off on this blog. The original post is Fox News Science Expert is *way * off base. in which I criticise them for quoting a lunatic-fringe-conservative-blogger called "Junk Science" and not paying enough attention to the CDC and WHO.

Originally, my wife gave me the book to shut me up because she knows I used to love Science Fiction. "State of Fear" is a thriller that uses environmental terrorists as its bad guys. I thought it was fun although the science was a bit funky. But when I got to the end of the book - (yes I am slow on the uptake) - I saw that Crichton was evidently serious about his science. Here is a moderate and reasoned criticism of the book.

I'm not a real scientist. Certainly not an earth science person who comprehends the calculations involving gigatons of this or that and how vegetation, solar radiation, planktonic uptake of carbon, subduction currents, ice packs, and manure (methane) work together with anthropogenic contributions to make the earth change its average temperature.

I am however, interested in malaria. When I saw remarks in the book about the number of children who die each year from malaria and the odd remarks about DDT not being dangerous, I got curious. So I visited the CDC and WHO websites and did a search at the Science (sciencemag.org) website. What I came up with was quite a different story than the one Crichton told.

I went searching for quotes using literal strings from the book and found junkscience.com, a site authored by a man who works for a foundation that has accepted money from Exxon-Mobil. His mortality numbers are incorrect and the information on DDT is incorrect. Both Crichton and Fox news use him without reservation. That means they consider him such a genius that it is unnecessary to use other sources.

You may have noticed that I did not quote any numbers or facts of my own. The reason is that the people who make up this garbage will argue all day about what should or should not be considered part of a particular fact. Do you remember the conversation a few weeks ago on the news where the President of Iran was asked why he doesn't accept the Holocaust as a historic event? His answer was that there were lots of other people killed by the Fascists, so the Jews didn't deserve any special recognition.

As I said, I'm not a real scientist. I do know that a real scientist would not say that DDT is safe. He or she might say that DDT is probably safer than not having any pesticide at all. There are, however 12 alternative pesticides most of which degrade in less than 6 months.

This posting is here for the purpose of saying that ignorance is not a point of view. You don't have to accept it. You don't have to argue with it. Just turn your back. If you think something is worth knowing then read up on it. You won't find references at Fox News though. Just links to what they feel is their most powerful argumentation.

Fox News is once again carrying out the old FUD. DDT is probably carcinogenic. The WHO never outlawed it, but they did discourage the use of DDT for that reason. Countries with malaria problems were encouraged to find a suitable solution all along.

CDC DDT FAQ doesn't say DDT is carcinogenic. They should.
WHO DDT FAQ
More details from CDC see the quote below from this source:

How likely are DDT, DDE, and DDD to cause cancer?
Studies in DDT-exposed workers did not show increases in cancer. Studies in animals given DDT with the food have shown that DDT can cause liver cancer.

The Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) determined that DDT may reasonable be anticipated to be a human carcinogen. The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) determined that DDT may possibly cause cancer in humans. The EPA determined that DDT, DDE, and DDD are probable human carcinogens."

Low lactation causes mortality study.

Pro-DDT letter saying that the deaths are worth it.

Fox news article on DDT and how the CDC says it is OK now and isn't "illegal." Please note the pejorative nature of the attack on the Audubon Society! OMG the amount of money they must have. Well, actually their assets include lots of land that birds can poop on. Same with the Sierra Club. And their donations are not a drop in the bucket compared to Exxon-Mobil's contribution to things like the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institute. BTW, Jeb Bush used to sit on the board of Hoover with Scaife and Coors. Scaife (Tribune media) and Coors fund some of the more colorful organizations.

Why Schools Shouldn't Have Police Powers

Have you ever been apalled at how schools have this bizarre "I'm-a-law-unto-myself-and-I'm-always-right" attitude?
They build their buildings and aren't responsible to governmental oversight with regard to safety. Plus they have their own police force and decide who has been bad or good. The security cheif can be told what to do by the principal. As in, "I can handle this kid." What in the world makes them tick? Is it just arrogance?

The Education Schools Project recently released a report (funded by Annenberg, Ford, Ewing, and Kaufmann foundations. It is critical of the programs that grant degrees to Education managers such as Principals and superintendents. One of the things they do not criticise is the security training of these people.

This week, in CAZENOVIA, Wisconsin a 9th grader (3rd former) shot and killed his nemisis, the principal.

The complaint also said Hainstock had told a friend a few days earlier that Klang would not "make it through homecoming," referring to festivities planned for the school's homecoming weekend.

On Thursday, the principal had given Hainstock a disciplinary warning for having tobacco on school grounds, which was likely to mean an in-school suspension.

One student told a local reporter that Hainstock had recently been suspended for throwing a stapler at a teacher and for throwing a chair at the principal.

"I never thought [he] was capable of shooting anybody," she said.

Do you know any other place where you can committ two assaults and get to fetch your Daddy's shotgun to school and even up the odds against you?

Expressing Yourself in a Search

OR

How I Learned to Avoid Being Affected by Drooling Morons

Do a search at google.com and you can’t find anything - for a reason. A search for anything that is not a “key word” but is rather the expression of an idea gets only 25% accuracy. This is called a full text search, but is something a bit different conceptually.

Try “can’t get my car started” - there are probably 1500 reasons you can't start your car when it actually happens. In English there are single words with 15 meanings. Is it surprising? No, and it doesn't keep one from being a functioning human being. But when you have to search for something on the Internet, it's another kettle of fish.

There are strategies you can adopt that have to do with the way you orient yourself (Thus the term wayfinding) on the Web. To add to the problem, if you search for evolution, 50% of the returns are retards talking about how Natural Selection is “fatally flawed.” The 50% figure is because their idiotic drooling babble is being hit constantly by other morons. This runs up the popularity factor and their admittedly small population of publications are promoted by the search engine.

There. I know it won’t make anybody happy. But it is true as true can be. Just like the car. If you don’t know how it works, you probably can’t fix it. So if you live here online like so many of us, you have to study the map. Wandering around won’t cut it anymore for the simple reason that it is bigger than it used to be.

Remember 1991 and 1992? The Whole Web book? That seems like such a conceit now.

One night I found my way to a Los Alamos server. The only thing they had to keep me out was a notice saying ”Keep out!” and I took it seriously.

A Numbers Game - What will things look like later on?

NCLB will be successful. Here's why. Actually it depends a lot on the economy.

Our motto:

"We are transforming education one student a time."

It will, however take a while.
At the historic rate of one student a day, it will take 1,666 years based on a 180 day school year.

With 300,000 students, it's huge (actually 262,000.) It's overwhelming if you stop and think about it even after you take my exaggeration into account. The 1,666 was just too good to miss.

I should change the motto to something more in keeping with the numbers:

"We are transforming education three hundred students at a time." Is more realistic.

The student population in Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach has been going up like a rocket for years. School boards have historically failed to cope with the increase. Of course the general population's need for underfunding education by chopping the tax base in half in the late 1970s wasn't helpful. Neither was the senior double exemption. Now Charlie Crist wants to raise the homestead exemption if we elect him governor.

Here are our student counts:

k-5 population is 109,000 this year (2006-2007)
6-8 population is 55,955
9-12 population 72,633
Special kids ( behavior issues ) 5,000
Charters ( not broken out by grade ) 16,000

The dropout and attrition rates from year to year account for a reduction in population. The elementary count has declined from 117,000 to 109,000 so you don't see the numbers going back up in the figure above.

K-12 totals by year:
1997 223,000
2004 272,691
2006 262,616

I just took the ends and the high point to display the trend. Up, then down.

Nobody has said where the reduction is happening. However, the cost of a house is now more than $100,000 more than the average income can support. That is, if you can afford a mortgage on a 350,000 house in your home town, the same house will cost 450,000 in South Florida. An article in the South Florida Business Journal quoted a family that bought a 541 sq. ft house for 250,000 in Miami-Dade. If the population continues to decline due to reduction in the poverty level population, we are going to hit our educational objectives. Just increase taxes, raise rents, raise the average dwelling unit cost and watch education improve.

There is research on how the mix of family income corresponds to a school population's achievement on tests. In general, if you can lower the population of poverty level families to twenty percent of the school's total, you raise the school's overall achievement level without spending money on actual education. Frankly I think some busloads of poor kids going to suburban schools isn't such a bad idea. But there is another problem. Jobs.

Globalization affects the job market here too. Although large employers would like to move here, the region is too expensive. Only white collar businesses like Tyco (LOL), and biotechs can afford to locate here because of community overhead. Agriculture is being either eliminated or automated. Construction jobs moved to growth areas. Retail jobs are being sucked up by low income senior citizens. Manufacturing is just as absent here as it is in any other part of the United States except Mississippi and Alabama.

There is another regional artifact that job and income people don't take into account but Real Estate people do. Arable or buildable land in Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach is now absent for purposes of expansion. We are now redeveloping existing neighborhoods. Growth is like a wave in a way people seldom appreciate. When it hits a wall, it splashes back.

When you buy up a block, you don't buy the most expensive houses in town. The new projects are in previously low income housing neighborhoods. Condos on the railroad tracks, high rises along highways, and townhouses in minority areas.

The only slowdown you will see, and it is already happening, is the housing bust. How bad it will be and how long it will last is how long the "improvement of education" will be held back. We could of course just improve schools by improving communication and the school's ability to change rapidly to changing conditions. This wold include having more direct communication with parents, having more contact time with students, having more teachers so the contact time has appreciable quality, having a curriculum that is directed toward university and that it change quickly in response to university demands, not those of local businesses. We could fund public schools at the rate of the average decent private school (not the indecent ones) which would be in the neighborhood of twelve to fifteen thousand dollars a child. This would mean an increase on the order of 400 to 500 percent. OW!


Here's my favorite quote:

"We were planning to stay here. We had no intention of moving," said Sbuttoni, 30, a mental health worker who earns $11 an hour working the night shift at a nonprofit. Had she chosen to remain in South Florida, her salary would have gone up $2 an hour because she completed a master's degree.

A measly two bucks an hour. Talk about OW.

Inhofe Blasts Global Warming - can you say nuts?

Or "How I learned to love right wing think tanks and hate the Wayback machine"

Here is a link to the summary page: Inhofe's bizarre rant in the United States Senate this week.

The speech given on the Senate floor involves attacking the media first then redirecting toward global warming advocates and alarmists like Al Gore then ridiculing energy conservation. A thoroughly unsatisfying bit of recycled garbage. Full of pejorative remarks like "climate porn." And quoting from some thoroughly discredited Exxon suck-ups.

Now read this:
Guardian article.
and this:

Guardian archive of letter to Exxon from British science establishment.

This is a very good reasoned response to a letter to the Guardian from one of the so-called scientists:
Editorial on Unspeak blog.

Now tell me what you think.

My thought is that Gary Inhoef is going to hate the Wayback Machine until he dies. Of course the people who work for the various foundations will be followed from job to job. They won't be able to get work unless it includes large-scale ass kissing. Oops, I guess they *will* get jobs.

suspended disbelief

This takes off from the last post. I hope you are familiar with Berube's NYT article on the dangerous professors. Essentially he says there is proof positive that the number and dangerousness of professors is a gross exaggeration at best.

In the previous post I mentioned a joke I made that a student took seriously.

Over at the Concerned Professor's blog, he is worried about students who cheat on their homework. The students who post in response to his article are adamant in their insistence that it is his style of teaching and the content of his course that are at fault.

Take the three things above.
1. Failure to listen carefully and distinguish between course content with authority and opinion with no authority.
2. Failure to listen carefully and detect a joke made using a recent news story.
3. Failure to make the connection between the course title and the purpose of the assignment, leading to disinterest and a desire to get credit for not working.

If I have to write ANYTHING to explain this, you're one of them. Go ask your Mom.

9/11 conspiracy

I told a student that we were all lucky that the aircraft did not hit the floor of the Trade Tower that was used to store the nuclear weapons.

His eyes got round and he said "Really?"

Just then I realized I had gone too far. Oops.

My kids are so gullible. Sometimes no more so than when I'm trying to teach them critical thinking skills and they apparently suspend disbelief as if they were watching Batman Returns.

Just imagine . . . Elevator operator: "One Hundredth Floor! Men's Garments, Oppenheimer Fund, Nuclear Arsenal!"

Transgenetic Education

I was just reading an article at The American School Board Journal site by Victor Rivero called The Future is Flat. It's a bit long and quotes from several sources. Some of which are influential and others perhaps shouldn't be quite so much so.

Anyway, the original premise is that globalizatin is making it necessary to alter education outcomes. My point is that globalization is making it necessary to alter the education beast. To make it trans-genetic by doing some of the things Tom Friedman and Paul Ormerod talk about when they examine how globalization has forced companies to adapt in order to survive.

I then go off topic and follow the original article around a bit, finally arriving at the starting point. The Internet enables global commerce, global communications, and global social networking on a scale that few people appreciate. It can help change the face of education if it will only let go and let it happen.

Here is what I wrote to Mr. Rivero:

I thought your comments about Friedman were interesting since I haven't seen any comments from the NCLB debates that talk about globalization. I keep trying to get people to recognize another point from the book that I think is very important as well.

I recently read Paul Ormerod's "Why Things Fail and connected it to Tom Friedman's explanation of how the surviving major corporations became agile to survive. It occurred to me that competitive pressures don't exist when it comes to governments and their institutions (except armies.) So NCLB is the school system's competitor. Unfortunately, shaping communication and the ability to measure and change quickly practices isn't on the agenda.

If people think that a particular quantity of scientists is what we are after, it's a little difficult to produce that quantity of genius students when China has more honors students than we have students. My school's honors students comprise about ten percent of the school population. Obviously post secondary admission is the goal we should be using instead of tenth grade competency. If turning the communications structure and authority structure upside down is what Bob Hughes means, then by all means! If he means there is a progressive model to follow, it won't work.

Students have always left school unprepared for the workplace. Asking employers who have always had to incur expenses related to that if they think students should be better prepared is somewhat pointless.

When you say that the keys to change aren't complicated, it bothers me. If you can accept Ormerod's premise on complexity, a simple model can't be true. Of course if you improve metrics on ALL input methods, then the model will improve. Unfortunately, there are parts that are important to the model that have been judged to be irrelevant like how much money per pupil goes into a good school. Top drawer private day schools run from fifteen to twenty two thousand dollars. The church subsidized schools run as low as six thousand dollars a year. The average is eight thousand - which is around twice what the average public school budgets. Again, top drawer private schools have a faculty that runs in excess of fifty percent masters and doctorate level education in specialties. What is more, they don't move out of their specialty to teach other courses.

The Gates Foundation school has a budget of ten thousand dollars a student. The facility cost fifteen million dollars and there are only one thousand students. I honestly think anybody could do a credible job running it using any mediocre management model. They wouldn't get over eighty percent of the students into anything better than state universities, but what the hell.

Improving public school funding by 100% will only bring funding up to the level of loony bin conservative schools and doing remedial teacher training simply pales in comparison. It may be depressing, but you can't make the National League perform the same as the Yankees and Red Sox without giving them similar resources.

Julie Evans statement about "digital natives" couldn't be more odd. Maybe she means they are like the dummies in the WorldComm commercial skating around the office and not working. I teach in an emergent technology magnet school. The ability to flip a light switch didn't make their parents electrical engineers. Computers are tools that are being used for limited purposes rather than the full range of use that would be appropriate. She is right that students realize they are losing out compared to their wealthy contemporaries. The skills are being created in the home however, not schools. My most advanced students come to school with better computer skills than the majority have after completing the school's computer training courses.

Finally I think the 21st Century Skills group is trying to frame the debate in an incorrect semantic arena. They should keep it simple and just call it education. I had a conversation with the head of the Philosophy Department at FSU this summer about teaching Boolean Logic. He told me the freshmen don't know it anymore. So I asked our math coach at school and she told me they dropped it because it was not in the tests. You are presumably familiar with the calculus debate regarding proofs which has the effect of universities not accepting AP calculus credit.

This points up examples of the effect of high stakes testing. High stakes testing shouldn't affect a school that has a full and correct curriculum with good teachers. It does though. If we were to compare it to a manufacturing process, then producing a product that should cost fifty thousand dollars for twelve thousand would mean trading off in just about every important component.

Finally, implementing one to one computing on a campus won't do anything unless the faculty is ready to use the tool. We have had computing in schools for twenty years and still haven't implemented decent administrative integration. Education is such a cash cow for software companies it isn't any wonder. However, the open source community has offered solutions to the problem when it comes to helping students that are awesome.

My lessons on globalization both scare and energize my students. They should be scared because the people in charge of their lives have no idea of how the networked society will function. Schools all have a network, but they don't have a Network. I am lucky in that I have been allowed to create a good electronic delivery system that uses web services and open source products and information so that I can rapidly alter things to suit the needs of my students depending on the composition of any class. The funny thing is that I have used it for five years and I know that people like it but don't really know what is going on in it. They know my students talk about critical thinking and the history of science and how the Internet allows the globalization of information resources, but I'm not sure anybody thinks it is important.

Why is a child's education like a car?

Why is a child's education like a car?
And
What's No Child Left Behind Worth to You?

Let's say that school vouchers are given for $4,000.00 which is about what public school education districts cost per student per year. Let's say school privatization is going great guns and you're going to send your child to one of them instead of the local public school that is just average.

Are you going to believe that a private school is a private school, is a private school? A rose by any other name? Perhaps it would be a good idea to use your critical thinking skills first. What do you think that 4,000 dollars is going to buy?

The Federal Department of Education recently (Summer 2006) reported that although private schools had better scores on recent evaluations, after adjusting for several factors a substantial number of the private schools did not do as good a job as public schools. This is a copy of a USA Today article by Greg Toppo. Does that mean ALL public schools? Of course not. It's like buying a car. No, really. An actual car every year.

Everybody is talking about Bill and Melinda Gates and their designs on education. The Gates Foundation has a high performing school that spends $10,000 per student per year and is supposed to get good results. The facility cost 15 million. But in terms of private schools that are high performers, that isn't really high. Here are some examples from the Florida Council of Independent Schools:

High Ranked Private Schools:
16,000 American Heritage
17,810 Miami Country Day
21,450 Vanguard
16,750 Benjamin School
18,400 St Andrew's - top of the heap
16,900 Pine Crest - top of the heap
19,100 Ransom/Everglades
22,000 Guliver
13,500 University School Nova University
161,919 total /9= 17,991 or about 18,000 The national average cost per student is a little over 16,434 (NAIS 05-06)

Christian Schools:
8,000 Catholic Schools (supported by church revenues)
6,900 Bayshore Christian
11,550 Academy of the Palm Beaches
9,350 Arthur Meyer Jewish Academy
6,182 Bethany Christian - 36% Higher than public
7,660 Boca Raton Christian - 64% Higher than public
49,642 total /6=8,273 or about 8,000 which is twice the cost of public school. Many private schools have sources of revenue that make their tuitions artificially low.

Public Schools:
4,000 dollars per student per year.

Here are some private school statistics:
NAIS scholarship students percentage under 20%
The Median class size is 15
85% attend selective universities.
NAIS graduates were almost twice as likely to have “asked a teacher for advice after class” (46 percent for NAIS students, 25 percent for all students) or to have “been a guest in a teacher’s home” (52 percent for NAIS students, 28 percent for all students)

The scholarship percentage means that no more than 20% of the student body is from a high poverty environment. Presumably this is an indicator of attitude toward school and reading. For instance, over seventy percent of these students read for pleasure. Peer pressure directed against sound learning practice such as doing homework may be lessened as a result.

Now, there's no proof that you have to spend lots of money to get a good education. So what I have shown you should be viewed with skepticism. The teacher's pay is not disclosed, so I can't tell what it is. However one of the schools I looked at claims that 62% of its instructional staff has either a Masters or Doctorate education. This means that these teachers are not teaching in the public school system. They may be teaching where they do because they are paid more or because they have classes of only 15 students.

I can tell you they invite students into their homes. I can tell you their students regularly speak to them out of class.

Private schools do not use exit exams. Private schools do not use any measurement for success other than college admission and alumni financial support. Yet the high performers have college entrance numbers of 85%.

It may be that as tuition goes down, college admissions go down too. It may be that as tuition goes down, SAT scores go down. It may be that as tuition goes down, teacher's salaries go down. And it may be that as tuition goes down, so does the amount of time students dedicate to homework. In fact it may be that although there is no direct link between a school's budget and the quality of education, the fact is that the most expensive schools are consistently more successful than less expensive schools.

What's Wrong With Standards

May I suggest a way we have gone astray?

Corporations were dying at an increasing rate from the seventies onward, the pace of change was picking up, and human knowledge was expanding exponentially. Everybody saw this long ago and understood that our system of public education appeared to be falling behind other nations in key areas.

Unfortunately, the changes made in the last twenty years have not been modeled on how the corporate survivors adapted. While it may not be entirely true to say that, it is true that successfully re-born corporations have been few and vastly different from one another.

Agility, or the ability to adapt rapidly to change in the environment is one characteristic of their success. A second is valuing knowledge as a core asset at levels other than management.

I think our quest should be examining the public management of education on the part of government.

My observation leads me to think that the style of management is what needs to change. There are plenty of works on the new corporation and how it works. There are not too many books on failure. The assumption is that when things become unstable, a business has the option to collapse and die. A public school, on the other hand, will continue to live in a state of turmoil.

As far as I can tell, all attempts to reform the public sector of K12 education are managed in a way that ensures failure. As standards are imposed, they cause greater rigidity. I believe this is one subject of Ken Bernstein's concern.

The other subject of concern is clarifying the goals of K12 education itself. I believe that NCLB is a de facto clarifying statement. The act is telling us that the Nation's fathers want a manufacturing paradigm to continue to produce "workers" of some undefined sort. In order that this be effective and that crime should be reduced, it is imperative that high school graduation rates be raised. In fact the Act can be viewed as a national dropout prevention program. But because the definition of worker is not clear, standards will merely cement a basic and self-limiting curriculum in place.

Private schools that have traditionally had the purpose of grooming the privileged experience no disorientation. In fact the disorientation period for them ran from the mid-seventies through the late eighties. Their goal is clear and inexpensive to gauge because it is understood by the student body and the parents to be higher education. (Aren't you glad I didn't say stakeholder and buy-in or *shudder* "own the process"?) Admission to an appropriate university and involvement in alumni activities is almost a spectator sport at those schools. It can be a desperate and bloody competition, but let me stress that it is a well defined goal.

John Adams' third generation is safe in their hands. But what of the children of the increasingly marginalized non-wealthy classes? NCLB seems to be designed to limit their horizons. Proponents will say that nothing could be further from the truth. However an unfunded NCLB guarantees it.

Who is surprised that the Gates' schools prosper with a budget of ten thousand dollars per pupil? Who is surprised that a private school is successful with a budget of over twenty thousand dollars per pupil? Finally who is surprised that high poverty schools fail with a budget of less than five thousand dollars per pupil?

So I leave you with two things. Agility and funding.

Funding is obvious except that the legislative bodies insist that an unsuccessful system that funds at a rate one fifth that of the most successful institutions is in fact adequately funded.

Agility is what comes from rapid, effective communication and rapid deployment of systems in such a way that explicit goals are achieved in a dynamic system. As evidenced by the rapid die-off of corporations, this is difficult to achieve. We will not achieve it by creating a system of activities that stipulate the level of professional behavior teachers must exhibit. It is not because this would be bad. It is because this is just a small part of a complex part of life.


Analysts are proposing that we fix piece here, and a piece there. The nation is asking that we gather up all these scraps and create a whole and healthy student.


Frankly I do not see that the civic will exists for such a venture.