Teaching science - how to improve

I have children in public schools in grades 3 through 8. This isn't surprising ...

Minn. science proficiency results called a shock | StarTribune.com

... national tests given in 2009, showed that 40 percent of Minnesota eighth-graders and 43 percent of fourth-graders were either 'proficient' or 'advanced' in science."...

In other words, 60% failed.

I'm not concerned about science teaching in grades 1 to 4. Maybe someday, but not today. We do have a problem with teaching science in Minnesota's public schools between grades 5 and 8.

So what should we do about it?

We need old, cynical, hard bitten teachers nearing retirement to tell us what needs to change. I can only suggest a solution based on what I know about doctors. Since doctors and teachers have a lot in common, this may be relevant.

I was a real family doc once. I switched careers about fifteen years ago, but my wife still sees patients. There are a lot of superb family physicians, particularly in rural America but also in urban settings. On the other hand, radiologists make far more money for less work. The gap has grown over the past decades. Since most radiologists would be lousy family physicians, and most family physicians would die of boredom doing radiology, the impact isn't as large as it might be. Still, it's real. If you want to get more quality family physicians (or pediatricians, internists, etc), the cheapest solution is to pay radiologists less [1].

I suspect the same is true in teaching. Science teachers and reading teachers draw from somewhat similar candidate pools. The quality of science teaching will depend on the relative prestige and rewards between one domain and the other. If we want better science teaching in America, we need to make teaching science relatively more attractive than the alternatives.

Any comments from those who teach young students?

[1] You'll know you're paying too little when it becomes hard to read MRIs or get an interventional procedure performed. I suspect that would take a vast reduction in income.

Administrivia: return of the captcha

Google's spam comment detection isn't good enough. After a one month test I've given up and restored a captcha function (yech) for Gordon's Notes comments.

Sorry.

Turbulent world, rigid software

One of the fringe benefits of playing professor is that I can insert my idiosyncratic observations into relatively innocent minds.

Last night, during a health informatics lecture, I described the remarkable rigidities in an intersecting set of vertical software systems I know well. Some of the applications are older than the younger students, others are just maturing. They're all strung together by a rickety set of interfaces and interdependencies; even routine data configuration is problematic. It's an interlocking and rigid system of brittleware. When business conditions change, brittleware breaks.

That's not unusual. We see it even on solitary desktop applications. PowerPoint 2007 is clearly senile; it needs a long cruise on a railing-free ship. Brittleware is everywhere.

Problem is, the world changes. Of course that's not new; the 20th century was packed with change. For most of that time, however, we used people and paper. People and paper are relatively easy to change. Even hardware is easy to change. Software though, software is hard.

So what impact does rigid software have on the ability of businesses to adopt to changing conditions? Does it become a true impediment to adaptation?

Things that stopped progressing: medicine and theoretical physics

I'm surprised more people haven't noticed that medical progress slowed way down after 1984.

It's not just medical science that's hit a wall. Lee Smolin's 2004 The Trouble With Physics claims physics has been frozen for decades. (At least physics has a book on this. I think physicians are in denial.)

What other sciences have stopped making progress? Biology seems to be very healthy ...

School segregation - by class

Americans are used to schools being by race. It seems we accept it and expect it...

Marginal Revolution: U.S. fact of the day

... American schools are more segregated by race and class today than they were on the day Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed, 43 years ago. The average white child in America attends a school that is 77 percent white, and where just 32 percent of the student body lives in poverty. The average black child attends a school that is 59 percent poor but only 29 percent white. The typical Latino kid is similarly segregated; his school is 57 percent poor and 27 percent white. Overall, a third of all black and Latino children sit every day in classrooms that are 90 to 100 percent black and Latino...

I'm interested in how segregated schools are by class -- including private schools. I'm not sure how to measure it, but my suspicion is that the kids of the top 5% no longer mix with the bottom 95%.

In a related vein, one of the great scandals of American society is that most public schools are funded by local taxation. It's appalling, but Americans seems to accept it without question.

Unemployment and the new American economy - with some fixes

The thinkers I follow [2] have been struggling to understand why America's unemployment is so high. Productivity is rising, the economy is growing, but workers are not in demand. Obama has hired Jeffrey Immelt to help, which is either clever politics or a sign that Obama's not as smart as I thought he was.

There's too much to say here. So I'll drop seven bullet points and a set of the best links. This is what I think is happening ...

• The Great Recession has exposed structural unemployment that otherwise would have become evident around 2015.
• The digital economy (IT) impacts predicted in the 1970s have come about thirty years later than expected. [3]
• The extremely rapid industrialization and post-industrialization of about 3 billion people is incredibly destabilizing. It is a testament to the power of civilization that we're not yet living in caves.
• In a virtualized economy workers with average analytic and social IQ less than 125 are increasingly disabled. Since this average falls with age the rate of disability is rising as the we boomers accumulate entropy. Experience counts for less.
• America is the world's most virtualized economy. We have invested more intellectual capital in Finance, entertainment and software than any other nation. We are also aging, though less quickly than many. We are the harbinger.
• China is going to hit the wall between 2011 and 2012.
• Peak Oil is here, soon and then later. Oil prices will rise until China's 2012 recession, then fall, then rise again.

Here is what I think we need to do ...

• Institute a Carbon Tax with a component that drops as supply decreases to both decrease carbon emissions and stabilize energy prices. We need a predictable rise to help us with extensive adaptations. Whether this is revenue neutral or not depends on politics. Global warming is real.
• Prepare for China's coming recession. The world needs a health, wealthy China. There are things we can say and do that will help China pass through these times and recover.
• Slow the progress of economic virtualization over the next five years[4]. I think this is going to happen anyway, but we need to encourage and support diversion to an economy with more employment niches. Throwing sand in the gears of Finance is a good idea. One way to do that would be to give Goldman Sachs more competition. Regulation, taxation, and, paradoxically, reducing barriers to entry into the Finance market are all important.
• Start applying the lessons learned from providing employment to cognitively impaired adults to the entire US population. The US is a world leader (yes, this shocks me [1]) in the integration and support of adults with disabilities. Might as well learn something.

See also

What I've been reading lately ...

• Why is the U.S. so awful at job creation? - How the World Works - Andrew Leonard, 1/18/2011. The US is unusual - in a bad way.
• The Age-Income Profile Is Less Steeply Sloped than I Had Thought It Was - DeLong 1/21/2011. Income basically peaks at 35, flatlines to 54, then falls quickly. This is important.
• Why Might There Be High Unemployment? DeLong commenting on WCI's ZMP post. Zero Marginal Product (ZMP) is the economic term for disability. WCI writes: "It is possible that some potential workers, perhaps because of severe disabilities, simply cannot produce anything useful, even in a perfectly functioning economy... They have a Zero Value Marginal Product. There's no coordination failure. The problem simply can't be solved, given existing technology, tastes, and resources.". This is what I call "mass disability". Disability, remember, is a relative term. I would be disabled in much of pre-industrial history.
• Nancy Folbre: Borderless Economy, Jobless Prosperity - Nancy Folbre, NYT 1/2011. Corporate incentives, and the incentives of the investors (I claim these aren't the same thing), no long align with American society. She includes a wide review of recent discussions.
• What Have We Unlearned from Our Great Recession? DeLong 1/15/2011
• William PFAFF-Are We Committing Economic Suicide?: This isn't terribly useful, but it's a common meme. Our problem isn't money. We are doing well by skimming the wealth of India and China. The problem is that we're now living in Goldman Sachs plantation.
• A radical pessimist's guide to the next 10 years - The Globe and Mail 10/8/2010. He makes me seem like a bundle of cheer. I admit though, we could be kin.

Some relevant old posts of mine

• Causes of the Great Recession: China, GPSII and RCIIIT. Now for Act III. IT and the rise of the world means whitewater economics.
• Mass disability and Great Depression 2.0 3/2008
• Post-industrial employment: adjusting to a new world 5/2010
• Civilization is stronger than we think: Structural deficits and complex adaptive systems 5/2010
• Why your daughters should be roofers -- not architects 3/2004
• Krugman on globalization: how to manage the losers 12/2007 - I think he still believes this, but it's not politic to say it
• 2011: The year American life changes: 7/2007. I predicted then that gas prices would hit $5/gallon in the US in 2011. I didn't expect the Great Recession, but I'll stand by this prediction. Note gas hit $3.60 in Chicago in 5/2007, we're heading back to that this May.
• Deficits, climate, BP and immigration: Saving America is suspiciously easy. 7/2007. Our problems are fixable. And ... American crisis – imagining a way out 2/2010.
• Retiring at 70? Don't legalize marijuana. 7/2010. Raising the retirement age is spitting in the hurricane.
• What would make Krugman wrong about spending? 6/2010. Not entirely successful post, but there's something there.
• Gasoline prices: refining or secular trend - the 11 year chart: 5/2007. I need to redo this now.
• Employment in the Great Stagnation: 8/2010. Remembering the Zero Sum Society.
• Peak Oil? Hell, yes. 10/2008, after pump prices cratered in the Great Recession. See also The three meanings of peak light sweet oil and praise for rational speculation and Oil price speculation: is it rational investment or a bubble? 3/2008
• My Peak Oil Call 8/2008. I make my call. Then the Great Recession hit and prices fell. Funny.
• When the market is your deity, there is no such thing as corruption 7/2009 - why the GOP can't help
• Welcome to the wild times... 5/2010. Don't believe in predictions, including these.

- fn --

[1] The ADA was enacted in 1990 under Bush I (!).
[2] Beyond my own stuff, I'm a DeLongian. DeLongian's are closely aligned with Krumanians, but are less constrained by the conventions of polemical discourse. I suspect, for example, that, in his heart, Krugman believes a lot of what I've written above. It's just not something he dares to say just now.
[3] Gibson's Neuromancer, written in 1984 and influenced by the memes of the late 70s and early 80s deserves a re-read.
[4] I'm being terse by necessity. The thesis is that virtual economies are winner-take-all; effectively, they create mass disability. We need to shift to an economy that has more diverse employment niches -- effectively lowering disability.

Update 1/30/11: Gordon's Notes: Unemployment and the great stagnation - this meme is in the air.

Suzhou

A student of mine grew up in Suzhou, China; she left about six years ago. It was, she said, an  hour west of Shanghai, and had a population of about 1 million.

Today it has a population of about 6 million. By way of comparison, Chicago has a population of about 2.9 million.

Google Earth still shows a gap of green between Suzhou and Shanghai, but that will not last long.

When I asked how her home differed from a city like Houston, she said it was much more compact, and that it was a continuous landscape of towers - "downtown" everywhere. I imagined something like downtown Chicago, but more widespread.

I imagined wrong. This is a random grab from Google Earth ...

"Downtown everywhere" was probably a language limitation. From Google Earth photos I see that each building brick is a multi-story apartment building. Many thousands of them, each holding hundreds to thousands of people. Much of Suzhou is now a continuous landscape of identical residential multi-story housing units.

Dog 2.0

A randomly selected purebred border collie associates sounds with objects, and perhaps sound permutations with objects and actions.

There are mid-sized dog breeds that live as long as 25 years. Given low cost whole genome sequencing, we could create a dog breed a 25 year lifespan and enhanced communication skills.

To develop greater language skills within a short time period would probably take some germline engineering. Maybe in 10 years we'll be able to do the germline engineering.

So does dog 2.0 get to vote in 2060?

See also:

• Gordon's Notes: What will be unacceptable in 50 years?
• Gordon's Notes: Dogs

Beyond America - Google world editions with Google Reader and Google Share

This morning, thinking of Brazil I wrote ...

I just wish I, and we, had a better way to share and understand the fascinating and terrible world that we live in. We see only slices and shards of it. My hope is that even though today's machine translation only works  for very closely related languages (ex: English, French, German) that it will improve dramatically in the next decade. When that time comes Google News (or the future equivalent) may reveal the invisible world. Maybe, one day, even Chicago.

This morning, reading the NYT on my iPhone's NYT.app, I was again annoyed by my inability to easily share my thoughts on what I read there. I want to create Google Reader Shared item notes on my shared item page/feed (and twitter reflection [2]), but that's not a NYT option. [1]. Google News gave me the same feeling a bit later. I wished I could read and share using Reeder.app with superb new "readability" integration.

This afternoon I realized I can take a step now towards all of these objectives.

Most of the NYT articles I'm interested in show up in Google News. Google News has editions for many nations (left). Each Google news edition or section has a unique feed.

So I've added a representative sample of Google News English language editions to my Google Reader feeds. Certainly Canada (my birthplace) and the US, but also India (english version) and Southeast Asia. I've grouped them in a single "folder" so I can easily mark the entire collection as read (this is a high volume collection).

I'll be tweaking the set, and sharing from this set.

Of course what I really want is integrated machine translation for Chinese sources, but we're not there yet. Machine translation barely works for closely related languages and it's computationally intensive.

-- fn -

[1] I've tried workarounds such as email to a hidden blog that I follow in Reeder, and sharing from there, but it's too tedious. There might be something I could do using Yahoo! Pipes, but, frankly, I'd forgotten about them.
[2] I'm seriously tired of Twitter's string length limits. It's darkly funny that some consider this a feature.

See also:

• Gordon's Tech: Filtering my Google Reader Share with Yahoo Pipes
• Gordon's Tech: How do I share my Google Reader Shared Items Feed and process it via Yahoo Pipes?
• Gordon's Tech: Social wrestling: Google Reader, Twitterfeed, Blogger and Facebook
• Gordon's Tech: Tweeting Google Reader Shares and Notes via feedburner
• Gordon's Tech: FreeMyFeed - Getting Twitter feed to Google Reader
• Gordon's Notes: How I discover people to follow - on Google Reader
• Gordon's Notes: My Google Reader bundles - November 2011

Brazil

Chicago is the invisible city. Massive. Wealthy. Complex. But invisible. Chicago is America's third most populous city and third largest metropolitan area, but we read far more about puny, dying Detroit. Even Obama's Presidency hasn't exposed Chicago. [1]

Brazil is, for Americans, the invisible nation. There are 190 million Brazilians; it's the world's fifth largest country and, by GDP, eight largest economy and growing fast. I'd love to visit Brazil [2].

Brazil is also nation where survivors of mudslides are walking out from a natural disaster ...

In Brazil, Mudslide Survivors Walk Miles for Aid - NYTimes.com

Thousands of traumatized mudslide survivors navigated steep, slippery jungle paths Saturday to find food, water and medicine as they slowly gave up hope that government rescuers would reach them anytime soon.

Those who escaped the slides that killed nearly 600 people over four days ferried bottles of water and sacks of groceries on their backs after trekking five miles to the center of this mountain town north of Rio de Janeiro.

Wanderson Ferreira de Carvalho, 27, lost 23 members of his family, including his father, his wife and 2-year-old son. He trudged up a path to his neighborhood, carrying supplies.

“We have to help those who are alive,” he said. “I’ve cried a lot and sometimes my mind goes blank, and I almost forget what happened. But we have to do what we must to help the living.”

Local and state fire departments said they had deployed 2,500 rescuers, while 225 federal policeman were in the area to maintain order. The federal government has been trying to fly in 11 helicopters to remote areas, but has found it hard because of poor weather conditions.

That's the full text of the entire NYT article.

Terosopolis isn't, on a map, that far from Rio ...

Rio is to the left of the great bay, Teresopolis is the A icon. Terosopolis is within 250 (spectacular looking) kilometers of the city.

I'm not moralizing about Brazil. America is far wealthier than Brazil, but we struggled to manage Katrina. (The stories of the Coast Guard response to Katrina, incidentally, are awe inspiring).

I just wish I, and we, had a better way to share and understand the fascinating and terrible world that we live in. We see only slices and shards of it. My hope is that even though today's machine translation only works  for very closely related languages (ex: English, French, German) that it will improve dramatically in the next decade. When that time comes Google News (or the future equivalent) may reveal the invisible world. Maybe, one day, even Chicago.

[1] Of course, it may also be that Chicago is grumpily dull. It's a corrupt old city, but it's been more corrupt in the past. It mostly seems to work. The weather is miserable, worse in its own way than Minneapolis, but the regional population is stable. Of course if it turns into Detroit then it will get a bit of attention.
[2] I roamed once. That was a prior life. I hope to have a few more lives yet.

What will be unacceptable in 50 years?

Ta-Nehisi Coates has been trying to imagine how, about 150 years ago, an American culture could celebrate the ownership of humans. That is unacceptable in America today. Times change.

Assuming we continued the historic trends of the past hundred years [1], what will be unacceptable fifty years from now?

I listed three ideas in a comment ...

Grappling With Genosha - Ta-Nehisi Coates - Personal - The Atlantic

.... What things do we love that will be despised in fifty years?

I eat pigs. I think that will be unacceptable in fifty years.

Coates loves football, a sport where brain damage is a normal outcome. I think that will be unacceptable sooner than fifty years from now.

We imprison and kill people with disabled brains. I think that will be unacceptable fifty years from now...

Any others?

[1] Of course this is simply a thought experiment. If the trends of the past century continue, humans will not be defining acceptability.

What China's rulers fear today

Blood and Treasure, one of my favorite blogs, suggests a leaked document as a guide to the current fears of China's leadership --  A General Notice from the Central Propaganda Bureau Regarding News and Propaganda in 2011. In bullet form, they are (emphases mine):

• income distribution, the stock and real-estate markets, employment and social security, education and health, and safety in manufacturing.
• reports on disasters and extreme incidents.  They "cannot include interviews or supervision from non-local areas".
• reports on the requisition of land and forcible demolition, especially report on incidents of violent demolition or “suicides, self-mutilation, or collective action”
• public selection of news, people, or events [jg: I think this refers to social reporting, public selection of topics]
• incidents of collective action ... prevent reports on collective action from pointing towards and focusing on the party and the government.
• anti-corruption cases ... Do not use the term “civil society” (gongmin shehui).
• Do not conduct questionnaires or on-line surveys on housing prices.
• instances of using a residential construction foundation to change a residential permit
• problems related to Spring Festival travel, such as “difficulties in obtaining even one ticket.”

For China in 2011 it's all about real estate and land seizures. Yes, they have a housing bubble too, and it's going to blow soon. I am really tired of "interesting times".

Extreme parenting

There's a book in play about "extreme parenting", which is apparently a Chinese thing (Koreans would disagree). It's gotten a lot of attention.

It's silly. Extreme parenting requires special needs children. Parenting bright kids without disability is recreational parenting.

The rise and fall of recreational clubs

From the Jan 2011 MN North Star Ski Club newsletter (emphases mine) ...

“Ted Wirth’s hiking club is on its last legs” This was a Star & Trib article on October 26, 2010 describing the decline and demise of a 90-year old Minneapolis Municipal Hiking Club. It peaked at about 500 members and apparently had a full program of 88 hikes in 1928, for example. One member described her first hike in 1934 as starting at West 54th Street and Penn Avenue South (where Settergrin’s Hardware has been for 100 years), going into the “countryside” and ending at Lake Calhoun.

Currently, the average age of its Board is 84. The article summarizes that the club is victim of aging membership and changing exercise habits. Is this pertinent to our North Star’s with our aging membership and gradually declining numbers? Along with the two previous NS Presidents, I wonder what we can do about this?

The "Ted Wirth" referenced in the Strib article lent his name to one of the best of many excellent MSP parks. Ninety years is an impressive record; most of the recreational clubs I've known had lifespans in the 10-30 year range.

I wonder what they the MMHC did right. Google didn't turn up any tips on what makes for a long-lived club. A lot of people would like to know the answer, not least the evidently shrinking North Star (nordic) Ski Club.

Maybe The Atlantic or The New Yorker will assign someone to survey long lived clubs and ask them how they both recruit new members and retain the faithful core (excluding university associated organizations of course. It's easy for them!). I'd buy that issue ...

Unloading the post queue

There are many things I'd like to write about, but only a bit of time to do it. So here's a quick list. I'll probably get back to most of these topics sooner or later ...

• 21st century America is 19th century South Carolina. Instead of plantations we have the titans of Finance. They don't have employees making cars, or slaves picking cotton, they have software moving money. The rest of us are the freemen of the Old South. It's quite stable until the software gets a bit smarter.
• William Pfaff (like Andy Grove) says America is committing economic suicide by (unlike Germany) abandoning manufacturing. Actually the problem isn't money. We are doing well by skimming the wealth of India and China. The problem is that we're now living in Goldman Sachs plantation.
• The first golden age of personal computing was multipolar. We had Lotus, Microsoft, WordPerfect, AshtonTate, Apple, Amiga, IBM, Intel, Atari and so on. Then we were bipolar - Microsoft and Apple. Then, for a time, we were monopolar. Now we're multipolar again; we have Apple, Microsoft, Google, Adobe, Facebook, Intel, ARM and so on. In the 1980s we had dueling document formats. In the 10s we have dueling video formats. Multipolar is better for people like me.
• It took 15 years to defeat email spam. Now we have Demand Media and GoogleFail. Demand Media isn't a parasite like email spammers, it's a Google symbiote. We knew funding the web through marketing was a Faustian bargain, but we didn't know what the price would be. Unintended consequences again.
• Google's Demand Media problem feels somewhat like the problems of democracy. America's founders tried, with limited success, to tackle these problems by mixing in some aristocracy and autocracy, and avoiding direct voting (government by referendum - ex: 2010 California).
• xkcd made wikipedia's list of common misconceptions famous. There is a small universe of these lists, including lists of categories of lists (meta-lists and list taxonomies). Geek heaven, and very Aspie.
• All the interesting business models for healthcare delivery are disruptive. That's true for most businesses, but especially true for American healthcare in 2010.
• There is a high cost to being #1, but it's a deferred price. There's some level in a hierarchy that has the best tradeoff between personal power and happiness. It's neither the top nor bottom ...
• Human evolution drove symbol manipulation, but not arithmetic skills. We are much better at math than mosquitofish, but only somewhat better at arithmetic. This explains much of the modern world.
• The Verizon iPhone will slow US iPad sales. Many iPad users bought them because they didn't have an iPhone, and they didn't have an iPhone because they were Verizon customers.