Industrial Ed.

The gatekeepers at the higher education industry hawk tickets to the future. They promise new rungs on the professional ladder, access to bigger and finer business meeting rooms. Success is rare without their help. And theirs is a monopoly.

Strangely, education is not much of their agenda. Theirs is a practical, useful vision with not much room for the abstract. And, of course, such a vision requires management. According to Benjamin Ginsberg, a Hopkins professor of political science, “administrators and staffers actually outnumber full-time faculty members.” While the ranks of full-time professors have paralleled the rate of university enrollment generally since 1975—which is to say, about 50 percent—administrations have expanded at an amazing pace. Administrators proper are up 85 percent, Ginsberg reports, while the number of “other professionals” employed by universities has grown 240 percent.

How the U.S. ranks in education in the world is hard to quantify but some aspects certainly can be measured. In 2010, Auburn University won the National football Championship. Their net income from the football program that year was $37 Million. The National Football League Champion that year, The Green Bay Packers, made $43 Million.

Now that is success that can make us confident.

 

Cab Thought 11/13/13

"A change in our climate is taking place very sensibly." [Snowfall has become]..."less frequent and less deep." [Rivers that once]... "seldom failed to freeze over in the course of the winter, scarcely ever do so now."--"Notes on the State of Virginia" by Thomas Jefferson, published in 1785.

 

The Holocene is our current geological epoch. It began after Earth’s last Ice age ended some 11,700 years ago.

 

Obama suggested that people whose insurance plans were disqualified by the ACA "go shopping" on the ACA exchanges for new ones. Isn't that what they did when they bought their original plans, shopped for what they wanted?

 

The direction of health care, whether they say it or not: "In CBO’s estimates, the increase in spending for Medicare and Medicaid will account for 80 percent of spending increases for the three entitlement programs between now and 2035 and 90 percent of spending growth between now and 2080. Thus, reducing overall government spending relative to what would occur under current fiscal policy would require fundamental changes in the trajectory of federal health spending. Slowing the growth rate of outlays for Medicare and Medicaid is the central long-term challenge for fiscal policy."--From the CBO Chairman's Blog. This is the reason for the ACA.

 

Of the 270 Apollo 11 Moon Rocks and Apollo 17 "Goodwill Moon Rocks" that were given to the nations of the world by the Nixon Administration approximately 180 are currently unaccounted for.

 

The letter "H" has been a source of conflict; to pronounce or not? In ancient Rome, they were snooty not about people who dropped their Hs but about those who picked up extra ones. Catullus wrote a nasty little poem about Arrius (H'arrius he called him), who littered his sentences with Hs because he wanted to sound more Greek. Originally in Britain, "H" was pronounced but, by 1858, it changed so if one wanted to speak correctly, he would say "erb", "ospital" and "umble". (These people dropping their h's were described in the Times as "h-less socialists.") Is it "a hotel" or "an otel"; is it "a historian" or "an historian"? Now there is no single correct version.

"H" owes its name to the Normans, who brought their letter "hache" with them in 1066. Hache is the source of our word "hatchet," probably because a lower-case H looks a lot like an axe. Leave it to the Normans to see a weapon everywhere.

 

India has launched a rocket containing an orbiter probe with the aim of being the first Asian nation to reach Mars.

Israel is angry the Obama administration has identified them as the source of an attack on a military base near the Syrian port city of Latakia on Wednesday. Israel has not acknowledged carrying out the strike, one of half a dozen such attacks widely ascribed to Israel in recent months, but an Obama administration official told CNN on Thursday that Israeli warplanes had indeed attacked the Syrian base, and that the target was “missiles and related equipment” set for delivery to Hezbollah in Lebanon.

 

Third World Exploitation: The 19 Billion dollar case involving Chevron and their Texaco unit in Ecuador is really enlightening. Bribery, coercion, and made up scientific research all contributed to a massive fraud using the Ecuador courts as enforcer. Thieves and the Third World courts are a great combination for future exploitation of the rest of us.

 

Golden Oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2011/05/what-was-volunteered-is-now-demanded.html

 

An unparalleled archive of shipwreck images will be presented for sale at Sotheby’s London auction on 12th November 2013. Taken by four generations of the Gibson family of photographers over nearly 130 years, the 1000 negatives record the wrecks of over 200 ships and the fate of their passengers, crew and cargo as they travelled from across the world through the notoriously treacherous seas around Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly between 1869 and 1997. The archive will be sold as a single lot in Sotheby's Travel, Atlases, Maps and Natural History sale, and is estimated to achieve between £100,000 and £150,000.

"This is the greatest archive of the drama and mechanics of shipwreck we will ever see--a thousand images stretching over 130 years, of such power, insight and nostalgia that even the most passive observer cannot fail to feel the excitement or pathos of the events they depict."--Rex Cowan, shipwreck hunter and author

 

Average wages in China have quadrupled since 2000. U.S. wages are going up 2 to 3% per year – Chinese 10% to 15%.

 

From an article in GreenTechGrid that collected interviews with energy storage CEOs: "The cost of regulatory intervention at the federal legislative and FERC levels is seen as highly prohibitive. CEOs are avoiding direct engagement at those levels, and most want their industry associations to pick up the burden of FERC-level regulatory intervention."

Who was....Erik Weisz?

 

"If you want to be an optimist about America, stand on your head. Our country looks so much better from the bottom up, than from the top down. What you see if you look at the country from the bottom up is that it is full of people who just didn't get the word. They did not get the word that China is going to eat our lunch or that Germany is going to eat our breakfast and so they just go out and start stuff, and invent stuff and collaborate on stuff. If I were to draw a picture of America today it would be the Space Shuttle taking off. You've seen that picture -- all that thrust coming from below. That's all those people who didn't get the word. But in our case, our booster rocket – Washington, DC – is cracked and leaking energy. And the pilots in the cockpit are fighting over the flight plan."--Tom Friedman

 

The average heavy truck consumes as much fuel as 40 sedans in a year. Such vehicles make up just 1% of the U.S. vehicle fleet, but consume 20% of the fuel.

 

Tom Noguchi, the famous pathologist, has a book describing the wounds suffered by Robert Kennedy. Soot was found in Kennedy's hair; soot in the scalp hair meant the gun had been triggered within inches of his head, Noguchi wrote in the book. But none of the witnesses could explain the position of the wound behind the ear--Sirhan shot from the front right--and none of the technology or experts could prove the bullets were from Sirhan's gun despite the overwhelming and obvious witness evidence.

 

Only 3% of people who are engaged or married have a prenuptial agreement, according to a 2010 survey by Harris Interactive.

 

Oil production in the US has jumped by 2.5 million barrels per day since 2007 and is still growing. But analysis shows that the growth is slowing. Currently, the net increase from new oil wells drilled minus decline from existing oil wells in the Bakken and Eagle Ford oil shales is 50,000 barrels per day. Tom Whipple, using EIA data, suggests oil production will peak by 2015, without an investment surge in drilling rigs.

Kepler-78b is a planet only slightly larger than the Earth, the most similar in size to the Earth of any exoplanet yet directly discovered. Its orbit, however, is extraordinary in the sense that it circles a Sun-like star 40 times closer than planet Mercury does to our Sun. At such a scathing distance, even rock is liquid. More, its orbit should degrade and it should be sucked into its sun. Maybe it already has been.

 

AAAAAAaaaaaaaddddddd...........a picture of ghostly towers of steam and gas venting from fumaroles in the geothermal area in Hverir, Iceland against an aurora background that looks like "Alien."

Electricity and Sushi

Storage is what takes place between availability and demand. And creativity is what is necessary before availability, usually--but not always--stimulated by demand.

10 years before the iPod, the portable media player business--portable music storage--totaled 715 million dollars a year. After the iPod it was $34 billion.

The global electricity market is a $2 trillion business, over 100 times the size of the music industry, yet Apple sells 25X more music storage than every battery manufacturer combined sells grid storage. The electrical market is the largest supply chain in the world and has very little storage capacity. According to Eos, a storage company, "Even sushi, which like electricity basically needs to be consumed as soon as it is produced, has storage in its supply chain."

The energy storage market in 2010 was 1.1 billion dollars. Piper Jaffray estimates the market at 600 billion. Why the difference? The same as the portable media storage business: A great need unfilled by the right product at the right price.

Mother Nature and Child Abuse

The typhoon that hit the Philippines is estimated to have killed 10,000 people. This is an incredible toll from a natural disaster and should stimulate reflection in us all. We are, despite our knowledge and arrogance, in essence the sorcerer's apprentice. Some other natural events:

In March, 11, 2011, an earthquake, Richter 9, occurred in the sea 231 miles northeast of Tokyo and resulted in a tsunami with 30 foot waves and the confirmed deaths of 15,883.
28,000 people were killed in 1902 in St. Pierre, Martinique when Mt. Pelee erupted. There was warning but the people stayed in town to participate in an election--one of democracy's bad moments.
23,000 people were killed in Columbia in the eruption of Nevado del Ruiz on November 12, 1985. The explosion melted a glacier and most victims were drowned.
The Minoan civilization was destroyed in 1648 B.C.  by a tsunami.
The best documented is the Krakatoa explosion starting August 26, 1883. The volcanic cloud was 17 miles high, the waves 100 feet. The fourth and greatest of its explosions was heard 3000 miles away on Rodriguez Island. The particles sent into the air caused red reflections throughout the world that stayed for three years and were included in American landscape paintings of the period. 36,000 people were killed by thermal injury and tsunami.
In 1815, April 10, Tambora on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa put 11 cubic miles(!) of rock, ash and dust in the air (versus Krakatoa's 6 cubic miles) killed 50,000 people, extinguished the language of Tambra, lowered the world temperature by one degree centigrade, caused crop failures all over the world and created the year known as "the year without a summer."
The largest explosion ever? Mount Toba, 72,000 B.C..

Sunday Sermon 11/10/13

Today's readings discuss the resurrection of the dead. The first reading is in Maccabees where the widow and her sons are tortured to death as they defy the sadistic king with their confidence of an afterlife. In the New Testament reading Christ is challenged by the Sadducee (who deny the concept of resurrection) who ask who is husband in the afterlife of a widow who, over her life, has had multiple husbands. This is a crucial question that most religions face. How are the righteous rewarded? What is the motive for action in a secular world? More, why would a god care? Investigation into these questions have not resulted in good cheer. At the best, modern life sees itself, without revelation, as multiple drifting canoes without a unifying theme, each one trying to be consistent within itself. Strangely, this results in an intense individualism that superficially mirrors the responsibility demanded by Christianity.

Christ uses the question to reemphasize the distinction between the spiritual and the corporeal. Children of the next world do not marry but, of course, they do not die either. Different laws apply.

(Later in the chapter Christ says "Beware of the scribes...Who devour the houses of widows..." He really did not like the hypocrisy and the arrogance of these people. It wasn't questions He disliked, it was insincerity. What He demanded in us was truth.)

This is a difficult distinction for many. Mormonism has a lot of problem with this concept and has included the idea of family in the resurrection in their canon. They have a gigantic data base for families and, like their interest in the archeology of Central America, this has stimulated tremendous interest in genealogy. Also, Maccabees is not universally accepted in all Christian canon. It is part of the Apocrypha and is accepted in the Catholic Church, some eastern Christian churches but not most  western Protestant churches. Nor is it in the Torah.

Cab Thoughts 11/9/13

The White House has issued a clarification. When the president said if you like your insurance plan you can keep it, what he meant was you can keep it if he likes it.--Holman Jenkins

35,000 megawatts of solar will be built around the world in 2013, a new record for annual installation. That is the equivalent of 9 medium sized nuclear plants being built in one year. Deutsche Bank projects that the world will install as much as 50,000 megawatts next year or the equivalent of 12.5 nuclear plants.

In the beginnings of baseball, foul balls caught on the bounce were outs. The pitching mound was only fifty feet from home plate and the pitcher had a small 6x4 rectangle marked off on the ground in which he could get a running start to pitch.

Who is....Arundhati Roy?

Two married women were discussing their dating histories when they were in their twenties. Both were attractive women with accomplishments. Both said they had a lot of marriage proposals, more than they thought their friends had. Both thought the reason was that they did not drink. Drinking, the two thought independently, raised suspicions of instability in women.

The Syrian Electronic Army, a group that supports the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, hacked links on President Barack Obama’s official Twitter and Facebook accounts, redirecting users to a propaganda video about terrorism in Syria.

Al Gore has a fascinating article in the WSJ about the risks of investing in "carbon assets," i.e. oil, gas, coal and other carbon-based energy sources. He believes that global warming anxiety, alternative fuels and political righteousness will "strand" such carbon assets and isolate them as nonproductive and, for the investor, non-yielding. The problem with this logic is that it denies two basics. One, it denies the existing technological gap. There are no storage systems capable of smoothing out the current alternative energy irregular cycles. Nor does it accept any growth curve where such a technology gradually emerges. Second, it denies the appeal of cheap carbon to poor nations who, with good reason, want to catch up with the wealth that cheap carbon has generated in the rich countries.

Mrs. Clinton said of the new federal health plan, "We just think people will be too focused on saving money and they won't get the care for their children and themselves that they need . . . The money has to go to the federal government because the federal government will spend that money better." That, ladies and gentleman, is an honest look at the future of the West.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) report on the Senate's immigration bill predicts that the legislation would drive down the wages of American workers and make it difficult for Americans to find jobs in an already-damaged economy.

phrenology \fri-NOL-uh-jee, fre-\, noun: a psychological theory or analytical method based on the belief that certain mental faculties and character traits are indicated by the configurations of the skull. This was, for years, taken very seriously. ety: The phren- in phrenology comes from the Greek phreno- referring to the diaphragm and the abdomen. This sense was extended in the writings of Homer to refer to the area around the heart as well as the mind.

For over a thousand years villagers in remote parts of Wales have called an adulteress 'a regular Guinevere.' Lancelot probably never existed, though..

Golden oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2011/04/striking-note-but-not-chord.html

The phrase "American Dream" was coined by writer and historian James Truslow Adams in the 1930s. He wrote that in America “life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement.”

There are some certainties in this post-modern world. If you are a rich and famous guy with a felony, you go to rehab, not prison; if you are a struggling business, you start a charity. And apologies in politics, like kissing the boo-boo, seem to make it aaalll better.

In freestyle chess, teams include a computer and a human counterpart. Excelling at freestyle does not require profound skill in chess per se, but rather expertise in working with the computer. The best players are the ones who recognize their limitations and are willing to accept the advice of the computer; those who win most are the ones who design or run the best programs. This is being offered as the template for industry growth and computer/human interaction in America. (Tyler Cowen’s Average Is Over).

The Leidenfrost effect is a phenomenon in which a liquid, in near contact with a mass significantly hotter than the liquid's boiling point, produces an insulating vapor layer which keeps that liquid from boiling rapidly.

AAAAAaaaaaaannnnnddddd.....a picture (a drawing by one of Charles Darwin's kids on his original manuscript of "Origin")

Macbeth: A Review

Kenneth Branagh has a new "Macbeth" for the Manchester International Shakespeare Festival. Done on the stage, it was sent as film to several American cities and shown with limited engagements. Here it was shown twice.

This is an unusual play for Shakespeare; it almost comes off as an experiment. While set in feudal Scotland--perhaps appropriately primitive in English eyes--it is meant to play much older. It is as close to Greek as Shakespeare gets. Prophecies, witches, and brooding Fate all hang on the stage like a fog as Macbeth and his wife encounter a single challenge, murderous ambition, accept it and are relentlessly destroyed by it. It is a high schooler's dream: A clean flaw with personifications of Fate floating around. The only thing missing is the chorus. Some think Coriolanus is the prototype Shakespearean tragedy but, if it is, this is a close second. This version is played with an emphasis on Macbeth and his wife as a fated couple rather than the usual tension between them. (I confess I prefer the latter.)

This production, while very good, has a number of problems. It opens with Lady Macbeth praying at an alter with a huge crucifix above. This is at least a surprising image. Macbeth is as pagan a play as Shakespeare could write. Indeed it is self-consciously so. While Macbeth and his wife are rightly condemned for their errors, their fate is really out of their hands. The witches do not give advise about how he could become king, they predict it. None of the old "The fault...... is not in our stars, But in ourselves" stuff here. Macbeth and his wife do not have a chance, no more than Oedipus does. While the wife is certainly more prone to failings, hate her or not, she is doomed by her stars. Only the most militant of Calvinists could put Lady Macbeth on her knees before the cross at the beginning of the play.

The stage is unusual and generally works. It is reminiscent of a horse paddock, a long strip of soft ground between two tiers of audience. While one worries about the footing through the play, it is not a terrible distraction. The proximity of the audience, especially in this intense, violent play, is distracting and I think was a bad idea. There are constant efforts to connect Shakespeare with modern society--intermingled audiences and actors, women playing men, racial-blind casting, updating scenes and props and costumes--but the failure for the genius of Shakespeare to be popular is probably "not in our presentation but in ourselves."

The casting is terrific. Branagh is simply wonderful and there is not a weak player among the rest. The witches (although I wish their enunciation had been allowed to be better), Banquo, Macduff's child and especially Macduff, are particularly good. Lady Macbeth is wonderful but an error; she is simply too old a choice for a king planning a dynasty. The comedic scene with the porter was shockingly--and revealingly--inadequate; without an intermission in the play, efforts at comic relief seemed an afterthought or a sop. It was as if, for a moment, someone who had been screaming for an hour suddenly stopped.

This is a relentless, intense, harrowing play. It is hard to imagine it being acceptable entertainment to a casual society used to passive, short distractions. One worries that this high level of art may have a limited future; like opera or the symphony, it might be supported as a charity by a few, patronized by fewer and become, museum-like, an interesting example of a high quality period in the gradual waning of our aesthetic achievements. That said, one can only hope that Branagh continues to do this, if only to stock the museum with high quality so that those of us who care about this dying art can visit it occasionally.