Category Archives: Current Events

The Smartest Kids in the World

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smartest kidsAmanda Ripley has investigated the education mystery: why do some kids learn so much while others so little? From country to country? From school to school within America? The Smartest Kids in the World is really two books. One is an analysis of data, “education [is] suddenly awash in data.” The other presents the stories of three American exchange students who go abroad for a high school year in one of the world’s best school systems: Finland, South Korea, and Poland. (Poland? You may ask, but read on.)

While I appreciate that “narratives without statistics are blind, [and] statistics without narratives are empty,” personally I could have done with less detail on the three exchange students. I was anxious to learn how America can improve education and less interested in how a student raised money for her trip. For me, the book could be a third shorter, but at only 165 pages in the body, that’s not a significant problem.

Ripley uses an international testing system called PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) to compare schools. She explains its genesis and how it works to assess students’ ability to solve problems (not just memorize) in math, reading, and science. She makes a good case that PISA tests students’ “preparedness for life”, not just “for more schooling.”  To reinforce her point, Ripley interviews the CEO of Bama Companies (they make apple pies for McDonalds among other products). Bama opened a new factory in Poland because they “had trouble finding enough maintenance techs in Oklahoma… even filling their lowest-skilled line jobs, because even those workers had to be able to think and communicate… [they] couldn’t trust a high school diploma [in America]; graduates from different high schools… knew wildly different things.”  Continue reading →

Cut Off Your Nose to Spite Your Face

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Russia has reacted to sanctions from the West by banning imports from those Western countries. The action reminds me of today’s expression.

A snopes discussion offers Word Detective input: “it seems to have first appeared around 1200 as a Latin proverb cited by Peter of Blois, a French poet of the day.”

Another commenter says “According to Nigel Rees in A Word In Your Shell-Like: 6,000 Curious And Everyday Phrases Explained: The expression may have originated in 1593 when King Henry IV of France seemed willing to sacrifice the city of Paris because of its citizen’s objections to his being monarch. One of his own men had the temerity to suggest that destroying Paris would be like cutting off his nose to spite his face. The phrase seems not to have taken hold in English until the mid-19th Century.”  Without a written reference by “one of his own men”, this may be apocryphal.

It’s nice when Snopes does your work for you.

Either way, the phrase refers to an act that injures you more than it injures your opponent. While this phrase labels such acts as foolish, sometimes harming ourselves makes sense if it will punish a cheater. I guess, for every rule-of-thumb on one hand, there’s the other hand.

Costs of Fighting Global Warming

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I was inspired to weigh in again on the issue of global warming by an article titled “Post-coal Pueblo left out in the cold” by Lydia DePillis of the Washington Post. Under the headline there is a picture of Pueblo resident Sharon Garcia who “…doesn’t allow lights to be left on in rooms that aren’t being used.” She had her power shut off in 2010, and is constantly struggling to make ends meet running a day care center. She is struggling with paying her electricity bill because the residential rate per kilowatt hour has increased 26 percent since 2010.

The reasons for the increase are complex, and I suggest you read the entire article. The impact of regulatory requirements on utility companies is what attracted my attention. A big part of the problem is caused by “…coal plants shutting down as Colorado transitions to renewable energy.” Black Hills Energy provides power to Pueblo, and Colorado’s 2010 Clean Air—Clean Jobs act caused them to shutter three older plants that would have been too expensive to overhaul. Utility regulators guarantee Black Hills an 8.53 percent return, which gives it an incentive to close nearly all of its relatively inexpensive coal capacity, build new plants, and pass the costs to consumers. Continue reading →

The Power and Fun of Mathematical Thinking

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How Not To Be WrongHow Not To Be Wrong by Jordan Ellenberg is a fun book to read; perhaps surprising since the topic is mathematics. Ellenberg begins by saying the seemingly pointless drills primary school students complain of are akin to practice in sports. This hooked me immediately, since I think too many people believe you somehow “understand” math when you read a textbook and then can “do it”.  Ellenberg says “if you want to play soccer… you’re going to be spending lots of boring weekends on the practice field. There’s no other way.” It’s the same with math. An ability to perform basic operations is important to thinking since, as he observes, it would be hard to write a sonnet if you had to look up the spelling of each word as you worked.

Ellenberg does object to some of the way math is taught. Calculating “is something a computer can do quite effectively. Understanding whether the result makes sense – or deciding whether the method is the right one to use in the first place – requires a guiding human hand… A math course that fails to do so is essentially training the student to be a very slow, buggy version of Microsoft Excel.”

His engaging style is evident throughout the book. I laughed out loud several times, and I urge you to read the footnotes – they’re often funny. For example, when introducing Leonard Jimmy Savage, a pioneer of decision theory and Bayesian statistics, Ellenberg adds this footnote: “Savage… at one point spent six months living only on pemmican in order to prove a point about Arctic exploration. Just thought that was worth mentioning.” Continue reading →

Rocky Flats Benefit Changes – Another in a String of Reductions

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This blog was started to document the truth about the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Rocky Flats Plant, which purified and fabricated plutonium and other parts for nuclear weapons at a relatively small site sixteen miles northwest of Denver. Last week, RF_Alum posted on changes to retirement benefits for these “Cold War Warriors”. This week I will explain how I lost my retirement benefits, despite twenty-two years of service at the plant.

At the time, the retirement calculation used at DOE sites considered both years of service and age of the employee, so when I left in 2003 I would have qualified for a full retirement package except for one problem: Twenty months short of earning my retirement, I was laid off from the prime-contractor and shifted to a job with a subcontractor (or “third tier” company).  Time with such a subcontractor didn’t “count”.  The day I was laid off, the Human Resources representative handed me my twenty-year service award, thanked me for my loyalty, and held her breath hoping I wouldn’t explode.

I thanked the nice HR lady (it wasn’t her fault) and left her office shaking my head.  The next day I reported to my subcontractor job.  The DOE still wanted my labor, but they didn’t want to follow through on the promise of retirement benefits that had been part of my compensation package for twenty years.

The DOE had wanted to keep turn-over rates low. The promised retirement encouraged employees like me to stay at the Flats, and this benefited the nation since hiring, paying for security clearance investigations, and developing employee expertise cost a lot of money.

America’s needs changed when the Cold War fizzled out.  Continue reading →

Freakonomics Thinking

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FreakI quickly devoured this short book by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner.  Freakonomics “relies on data rather than hunch or ideology to understand how the world works.”  This appeals to me since I try to make decisions based on evidence, and get a kick out of discovering that what I think I know ain’t always so.  Readers should not feel alone in holding mistaken assumptions; Levitt and Dubner note that many of the “experts” we hear from in the media are more noteworthy for confidence than accuracy.

Think Like a Freak offers to teach anyone how to solve problems.  “Solving problems is hard. If a given problem still exists, you can bet that a lot of people have already come along and failed to solve it.” So we need more people who can find root causes of problems.

The book is easy to read, filled with delightful examples of their method, and only occasionally bumps into controversial issues that elicit strong emotions.

They concentrate on problems that are entertaining. For example:

  • Why a kicker in World Cup level play might choose a strategy that leads to fewer goals,
  • How they blew their chance to offer a future British Prime Minister advice,
  • Why medieval trial-by-ordeal often identified the guilty, and
  • Why demanding venues provide M&Ms with the brown candies removed was a practical move on the part of a rock band.

They emphasize that conventional wisdom is often wrong and correlation does not equal causality.  This leads to a controversial issue that they have addressed in greater detail before.  Continue reading →