I found my way over to Watts Up With That while following the leaked leaked-global-warming-files thing. More about the leaked info later, when I've had a chance to look at and think about it more. In the meantime, though, go to this post and check out a picture from Al Gore's new super-science-y global warming book. It's a photo illustration that's meant to show you what Science! thinks will happen to the Earth if we fail to accede to Al Gore's political program. Among other things, it shows a north Atlantic hurricane rotating clockwise. Sweet! But, be warned: before you get all excited thinking your toilet is going to flush backwards, you should know that the same illustration shows a north Pacific hurricane rotating counterclockwise. Did someone on Gore's staff intentionally produce an image of the Earth in the instant before it spins off its axis and violently twists itself apart? Or do they just --- ahem --- have no idea what they're doing?
Friday, November 20, 2009
Thursday, November 19, 2009
This Is What Happens When You Don't Let Kids Fight
A few well-timed, peer-administered beatings could have prevented this.
Jihad Is For Losers
It's really not the case that perfectly normal, nice, put-together Muslim dudes suddenly go bonkers and shoot the joint up:
Murderers in general are huge fuckups. The violence comes only at the end of a very long chain of increasingly poor life choices. Jihadis, or at least Western jihadis like Hasan, do not appear to be an exception to this rule.
Two years ago, a top psychiatrist at Walter Reed Army Medical Center was so concerned about what he saw as Nidal Hasan's incompetence and reckless behavior that he put those concerns in writing.
...
"Even if we were desperate for a psychiatrist, we would not even get him to the point where we would invite him for an interview," says Dr. Steven Sharfstein, who runs Sheppard Pratt's psychiatric medical center, based just outside Baltimore.
...
The memo ticks off numerous problems over the course of Hasan's training, including proselytizing to his patients. It says he mistreated a homicidal patient and allowed her to escape from the emergency room, and that he blew off an important exam.
...
Sharfstein says that in the 25 years he has been supervising and hiring psychiatrists, he has seen only a half-dozen evaluations this bad.
...
"I would never, ever hire a physician with this kind of a record," says Judith Broder, who runs the Soldiers Project, an award-winning private therapy program for troops in Southern California.
...
But sources say that when the Army sent Hasan to Fort Hood earlier this year, Walter Reed sent the damning evaluation there, too. So commanders at Fort Hood would know exactly what they were getting.
...
"Even if we were desperate for a psychiatrist, we would not even get him to the point where we would invite him for an interview," says Dr. Steven Sharfstein, who runs Sheppard Pratt's psychiatric medical center, based just outside Baltimore.
...
The memo ticks off numerous problems over the course of Hasan's training, including proselytizing to his patients. It says he mistreated a homicidal patient and allowed her to escape from the emergency room, and that he blew off an important exam.
...
Sharfstein says that in the 25 years he has been supervising and hiring psychiatrists, he has seen only a half-dozen evaluations this bad.
...
"I would never, ever hire a physician with this kind of a record," says Judith Broder, who runs the Soldiers Project, an award-winning private therapy program for troops in Southern California.
...
But sources say that when the Army sent Hasan to Fort Hood earlier this year, Walter Reed sent the damning evaluation there, too. So commanders at Fort Hood would know exactly what they were getting.
Murderers in general are huge fuckups. The violence comes only at the end of a very long chain of increasingly poor life choices. Jihadis, or at least Western jihadis like Hasan, do not appear to be an exception to this rule.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
I Don't Really Know Why It Takes A Special Law, But If It Does, We Should Make One
This seems exactly right:
Good for Mr. Carter.
Military victims of the Fort Hood massacre will be eligible to receive the Purple Heart if Congress passes a bill introduced Tuesday.
...
"As far as I'm concerned, this was an attack by an enemy upon American troops on American soil," [Congressman John] Carter said Tuesday at a Capitol Hill news conference.
...
"As far as I'm concerned, this was an attack by an enemy upon American troops on American soil," [Congressman John] Carter said Tuesday at a Capitol Hill news conference.
Good for Mr. Carter.
Friday, November 13, 2009
I Don't Recommend That You Google This
It would of course be more hilarious to find previous stories about the kidnapping itself, the priest's treatment in captivity, and any ransom demands that came in. But with some things, you go with what you got because you dare not Google:
H/T to Instapundit.
H/T to Instapundit.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
What She Does With Her College Degree
See here; you'll find her under the "Reason for the holiday" subhead.
I cleaned out our surname (I still like to keep BQ from turning up in Google searches for my name) but it's there in the original.
Several area schools will also be holding special Veterans Day events in an effort to teach students what it means to be veteran.
At the Oxford-University School, kindergarten teacher Sarah [] felt that even small children should learn why veterans are so important.
"A lot of children don't really know anything abut what it's like to have to go off to war," [Sarah] said Monday.
When [Sarah] joined the staff at OUS two years ago, she suggested holding a Veterans Day ceremony for the students.
"It was something we did at the school I worked at in Utah before coming here," [Sarah] said. "I never really thought about Veterans Day before. I just knew it was on the calendar and that banks and the post office were closed. But the ceremony there was so touching, it really made me think. It was very meaningful."
"A lot of children don't really know anything abut what it's like to have to go off to war," [Sarah] said Monday.
When [Sarah] joined the staff at OUS two years ago, she suggested holding a Veterans Day ceremony for the students.
"It was something we did at the school I worked at in Utah before coming here," [Sarah] said. "I never really thought about Veterans Day before. I just knew it was on the calendar and that banks and the post office were closed. But the ceremony there was so touching, it really made me think. It was very meaningful."
I cleaned out our surname (I still like to keep BQ from turning up in Google searches for my name) but it's there in the original.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
In Other News...
I challenge you to find another blogger willing to toss the phrase "bag of ass" into the middle of a story about attending a church meeting.
One Of Those Big Roundup Posts On Everything That's Going On In My Life
1. Had a long-running dental saga come to a sub-ideal but final disposition when I had the offending tooth removed last Friday. Took the day off Friday, but spent Saturday out and about and paid for it on Sunday. Seems that surgery, even simple oral surgery, takes more than a few hours to fully recover from. Who knew?
2. Home early Saturday, I got a call from our minister. He wanted to personally invite us to the last of several "Fall Gathering" meetings for the church. This conversation had a "everybody's doing it --- this is expected of you" feel to it, so we dragged out to the church Sunday evening to attend. (I say "dragged", because in the aftermath of Saturday, I felt like a bag of ass all day Sunday.) Now, the average service at this church draws about 600 people. When we got there we found that only 20 or so people were in attendance; unless this crowd represented a precipitous decline in turnout from the previous four meetings, attendance at these gatherings was certainly not something "everybody's doing." Of course, no harm, no foul; we watched a video on stewardship, then the meeting's leaders opened the floor for attendees to discuss "what the church's priorities should be in 2010". That went well enough; people had interesting things to say, and it was good to listen. But then toward the end the minister stood up, put his hand on my shoulder, and said to the room "now, I don't mean to put Brian on the spot, but I think we should hear from him on this..." As if I'm going to walk into a 170-year-old church that I joined six months ago and announce what its priorities ought to be. Ay caramba.
3. Committed to another round of IVF in the coming year. Last time, I waited until after Sarah was pregnant to start the baby blog, and never got to the "story so far" catch up I wanted to do. This time, I intend to start from the beginning. It'll be a new (read: third) blog, but it'll serve the same purpose as the one I did for Miss Ainsleigh: to keep a record of the process that's easily disentangled from the technical, political, football, and other general ramblings that pollute Broken Quanta.
4. Am gearing up for Christmas in the Caribbean. No, that's not a theme party I'm hosting at the house; we're actually going to be in the Caribbean (Jamaica, to be precise) on Christmas day. One day in January, when it had been gray and cold for weeks, I was watching TV and a Jamaica tourism ad came on. I said to Sarah, "Let's go to Jamaica next winter." She said "sure." Five minutes later I was surfing for cruise fares, and then resort rates. You'd be shocked at the deal you can get on a vacation in the current economy. Less than three days after TV said "Come to Jamaica!", we were booked. We leave for a Sandals resort in Ocho Rios, Jamaica on December 19th and we won't be back until the 26th. Christmas in the Caribbean.
5. Have reached a point of diminishing returns vis-a-vis my annoyance with Ole Miss football. Yes, the Auburn game was a debacle. Yes, the team is good enough to be 8-1 rather than 6-3. Yes, that's annoying. But you know what? As far as I'm concerned, the Auburn loss saved me at least $500 or more; it's now basically impossible for the Rebels to go to a bowl game that I'd feel bad about skipping. With the dental bills and the tab for Jamaica and the cost of IVF next year, I'm thinking that's not so bad. Plus, did I tell you? I'm going to Jamaica.
2. Home early Saturday, I got a call from our minister. He wanted to personally invite us to the last of several "Fall Gathering" meetings for the church. This conversation had a "everybody's doing it --- this is expected of you" feel to it, so we dragged out to the church Sunday evening to attend. (I say "dragged", because in the aftermath of Saturday, I felt like a bag of ass all day Sunday.) Now, the average service at this church draws about 600 people. When we got there we found that only 20 or so people were in attendance; unless this crowd represented a precipitous decline in turnout from the previous four meetings, attendance at these gatherings was certainly not something "everybody's doing." Of course, no harm, no foul; we watched a video on stewardship, then the meeting's leaders opened the floor for attendees to discuss "what the church's priorities should be in 2010". That went well enough; people had interesting things to say, and it was good to listen. But then toward the end the minister stood up, put his hand on my shoulder, and said to the room "now, I don't mean to put Brian on the spot, but I think we should hear from him on this..." As if I'm going to walk into a 170-year-old church that I joined six months ago and announce what its priorities ought to be. Ay caramba.
3. Committed to another round of IVF in the coming year. Last time, I waited until after Sarah was pregnant to start the baby blog, and never got to the "story so far" catch up I wanted to do. This time, I intend to start from the beginning. It'll be a new (read: third) blog, but it'll serve the same purpose as the one I did for Miss Ainsleigh: to keep a record of the process that's easily disentangled from the technical, political, football, and other general ramblings that pollute Broken Quanta.
4. Am gearing up for Christmas in the Caribbean. No, that's not a theme party I'm hosting at the house; we're actually going to be in the Caribbean (Jamaica, to be precise) on Christmas day. One day in January, when it had been gray and cold for weeks, I was watching TV and a Jamaica tourism ad came on. I said to Sarah, "Let's go to Jamaica next winter." She said "sure." Five minutes later I was surfing for cruise fares, and then resort rates. You'd be shocked at the deal you can get on a vacation in the current economy. Less than three days after TV said "Come to Jamaica!", we were booked. We leave for a Sandals resort in Ocho Rios, Jamaica on December 19th and we won't be back until the 26th. Christmas in the Caribbean.
5. Have reached a point of diminishing returns vis-a-vis my annoyance with Ole Miss football. Yes, the Auburn game was a debacle. Yes, the team is good enough to be 8-1 rather than 6-3. Yes, that's annoying. But you know what? As far as I'm concerned, the Auburn loss saved me at least $500 or more; it's now basically impossible for the Rebels to go to a bowl game that I'd feel bad about skipping. With the dental bills and the tab for Jamaica and the cost of IVF next year, I'm thinking that's not so bad. Plus, did I tell you? I'm going to Jamaica.
Why I Don't Know That Many People Who Are Out Of Work
Fascinating gizmo on the Times web page. It lets you select various demographic slices of the population (by race, sex, age, and educational level, and any combination thereof) and shows you the unemployment trend in the group over the past ~30 months. The qualitative results aren't that surprising: statistically it's best to be white, educated, older, and a woman. Quantitatively, the results are shocking; unemployment levels in Sept 09 range from less than 5% for white college grads over 24 (eg, me and most of you) to more than 40% for blacks without high school diplomas under 24.
Windmills
Facebook suggest to me this morning that I "Become a Fan" of an organization called "Help Eliminate Adolescent Risk Taking". Now, it looks like the org was founded by a couple who lost their son, and obviously I really feel for them. But I know a lost cause when I see one.
You may make the obligatory Rhett Butler quotes in the comments.
You may make the obligatory Rhett Butler quotes in the comments.
Tuesday, November 03, 2009
I'm Pretty Sure They Get Paid For This
Here is the result of a modern social science experiment on the role of fathers:
Here are the lyrics from a Chris Ledoux song recorded 15 years ago and based on nothing but common sense:
Hey, child psych types: keep churning out those incandescently obvious conclusions. And welfare bureaucracies, keep funding them. It's money well spent, people. Money well spent.
Fathers tend to do things differently, Dr. Kyle Pruett said, but not in ways that are worse for the children. Fathers do not mother, they father.
Dr. Kyle Pruett added: "Dads tend to discipline differently, use humor more and use play differently. Fathers want to show kids what's going on outside their mother's arms, to get their kids ready for the outside world." To that end, he said, they tend to encourage risk-taking and problem-solving.
Here are the lyrics from a Chris Ledoux song recorded 15 years ago and based on nothing but common sense:
Now your mother she'll try to protect you;
she'll hold you as long as she can.
But the higher you climb, the more you can see,
and that's something I understand.
she'll hold you as long as she can.
But the higher you climb, the more you can see,
and that's something I understand.
Hey, child psych types: keep churning out those incandescently obvious conclusions. And welfare bureaucracies, keep funding them. It's money well spent, people. Money well spent.
The Scaling Problem
Here's an interesting Op-Ed in the New York Times on how to "create a critical mass of great teachers". The program the author suggests is intensive:
Virtually none of what I've quoted seems really objectionable, does it? In the full article, there are some howlers. A suggestion that teacher-ed programs "learn from family therapy programs" is one such; therapists are famously useless. Another is the suggestion that "our best universities" contain the "strongest students" and "most inspiring professors", which is flatly untrue. But I digress.
The thing that's really bothering me isn't the particular program suggested here, but the premise underlying it: that improving education means getting more and more crackerjack teachers into the classroom. If this is the case --- and maybe it is --- then boy, are we ever screwed.
There are 6.1 million teachers in the United States. If you rounded them all up and made them a state, the resulting Greater Edukota would rank 18th in population, just behind Tennessee and ahead of Missouri. Which is to say, teaching is a vast enterprise. A plan for running this enterprise that begins with "hire only the very best and brightest and give them intensive training for several years" is doomed to fail.
You want to solve the problems with the American school system? Great! So do I. Here's step 1: acknowledge that the population of teachers is large enough that it will inevitably obey a normal distribution in virtually any quality you could care to name: "smart", "passionate", "well-educated", "skilled", "happy"; you name it, I'll show you a bell curve of it. Now tell us how you're going to work with this population as it actually is. This is not a trick question: all kinds of complex enterprises get great (and ever-improving!) results with vast populations of workers with normally-distributed talents. However, solutions predicated on significantly shifting, skewing, compressing, or wishing away these distributions will get no credit.
Show your work.
...And if we want smart, passionate people to become these great educators, we have to attract them with excellent programs and train them properly in the substance and practice of teaching.
...
So the first step is to get the best colleges to throw themselves into the fray...These new teacher programs should be selective, requiring a 3.5 undergraduate grade point average and an intensive application process.
...
Once we have a better pool of graduate students, we need to train them differently from how we have in the past. ...First, future teachers should continue studying the subject they hope to teach, with outstanding professors...Meanwhile, students should learn their craft the way a surgeon learns to operate: by intense supervision in a real setting with expert mentors...Teachers must also learn far more about children: typically, teaching students are provided with fairly static and superficial overviews of developmental stages, but learn little about how to watch children, using research and theory to understand what they are seeing.
...
One more thing is required — give as many public schools as possible the financial incentives to hire these newly prepared teachers in groups of seven or more.
...
Show me a school where teachers are smart, well-educated, skilled and happy to be there, and I'll show you a group of children who are getting a good education.
...
So the first step is to get the best colleges to throw themselves into the fray...These new teacher programs should be selective, requiring a 3.5 undergraduate grade point average and an intensive application process.
...
Once we have a better pool of graduate students, we need to train them differently from how we have in the past. ...First, future teachers should continue studying the subject they hope to teach, with outstanding professors...Meanwhile, students should learn their craft the way a surgeon learns to operate: by intense supervision in a real setting with expert mentors...Teachers must also learn far more about children: typically, teaching students are provided with fairly static and superficial overviews of developmental stages, but learn little about how to watch children, using research and theory to understand what they are seeing.
...
One more thing is required — give as many public schools as possible the financial incentives to hire these newly prepared teachers in groups of seven or more.
...
Show me a school where teachers are smart, well-educated, skilled and happy to be there, and I'll show you a group of children who are getting a good education.
Virtually none of what I've quoted seems really objectionable, does it? In the full article, there are some howlers. A suggestion that teacher-ed programs "learn from family therapy programs" is one such; therapists are famously useless. Another is the suggestion that "our best universities" contain the "strongest students" and "most inspiring professors", which is flatly untrue. But I digress.
The thing that's really bothering me isn't the particular program suggested here, but the premise underlying it: that improving education means getting more and more crackerjack teachers into the classroom. If this is the case --- and maybe it is --- then boy, are we ever screwed.
There are 6.1 million teachers in the United States. If you rounded them all up and made them a state, the resulting Greater Edukota would rank 18th in population, just behind Tennessee and ahead of Missouri. Which is to say, teaching is a vast enterprise. A plan for running this enterprise that begins with "hire only the very best and brightest and give them intensive training for several years" is doomed to fail.
You want to solve the problems with the American school system? Great! So do I. Here's step 1: acknowledge that the population of teachers is large enough that it will inevitably obey a normal distribution in virtually any quality you could care to name: "smart", "passionate", "well-educated", "skilled", "happy"; you name it, I'll show you a bell curve of it. Now tell us how you're going to work with this population as it actually is. This is not a trick question: all kinds of complex enterprises get great (and ever-improving!) results with vast populations of workers with normally-distributed talents. However, solutions predicated on significantly shifting, skewing, compressing, or wishing away these distributions will get no credit.
Show your work.
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