View 594 October 25 - 31, 2009 (original) (raw)
Monday, October 26, 2009
We had breakfast after church this Sunday with our energetic friend Joanie who retired as an assistant principal in Glendale then became principal of a Catholic school in Los Angeles. That got me thinking about the abysmal public education system in the United States.
This morning's Wall Street Journal has an article: "Diamond Industry Makeover Sends Fifth Avenue to Africa" about how Tiffany is training diamond cutters in Botswana.
It seems to me the two topics are related. If a Fifth Avenue company can train people in Botswana to cut diamonds, surely there are Americans who can learn to do that job? So what's the problem here? Education system, regulations on hiring and firing, worker attitudes? If New York City can't compete with Botswana (and Canada!) as a place to teach apprentice diamond cutters, in just what jobs can we compete? There was nothing about that in the Wall Street Journal article; apparently it's just a given that corporations don't want to invest capital in creating high skill jobs anywhere in these United States. Should we all be concerned?
Regarding education, nearly everyone knows that:
(1) The single most important factor in education is the classroom teacher. Study after study has shown that getting the best teachers is more important than class size, administration, textbooks, or anything else.
(2) If the bottom 10% of teachers were replaced by average teachers -- not outstanding, just average -- the US education system would be enormously improved.
(3) Very little of what is taught in education classes in college has any utility whatever for any purpose other than gathering "credentials".
(4) The "credential" system for teachers has absolutely no value in predicting who is or is not a good teacher, and the "qualification" system is more concerned with preserving the jobs of those who teach teachers than with anything of any value whatever to improving education.
(5) The best thing science and math teachers can study to improve their teaching ability is more math and science; confidence in one's knowledge of the material makes for a better teacher. Even so, there will be mathematics and science experts who simply can't teach. They're fairly easy to detect, and can either be retrained or not: that too is either fairly easy or impossible.
(5.1) The best high school level math teachers I ever heard of are USAF sergeants who teach math to USAF recruits. Having done this for 20 years they retire -- and are not considered "qualified" to teach math in public high schools. They haven't the proper credentials. To get the credentials they have to take a lot of Mickey Mouse courses on how to teach, which is discouraging and demeaning.
(6) The entire system is designed to protect bad teachers and preserve their jobs; it is theIron Law in action in spades with Big Casino.
If you have not seen my previous notes on this subject (from last week) they are here.
I am sure the other reason Tiffany didn't consider the US as a location for their diamond cutting factory is the US financial and regulatory environment; perhaps that's more important than education systems. But for whatever reason, there won't be high skill jobs for Tiffany for America. You can still have breakfast outside the store, though.
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Cold Fusion.
Jerry,
Cold fusion rears its ugly head again. Serious report on 60 minutes at http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?
id=4967330n&tag=related;photovideoYup, it works.
Let the record show that twenty years ago John Edwards said that Fleichman and Pons, respected and established scientists, would not commit professional suicide by announcing a fraud. Whatever their colleagues said. Therefore it is a real phenomenon.
Your correspondent in the tinfoil hat.
John Edwards
The video is well worth watching. It is apparently established that more energy comes out than goes in -- sometimes. As to the obligatory skeptic, I have encountered Richard Garwin before, and he has always put his politics ahead of his judgment; his "analysis" of Strategic Defense was a travesty of physical analysis, and his candidate for basing ICBM's was so ridiculous that I had real trouble getting my staff to take it seriously long enough to do an actual analysis.
I have no idea what is going on with "cold fusion" or whether it's any kind of fusion at all. I do know that several physicists whom I respect take the data seriously. I have also seen non-fusion explanations of the bursts of output based on chemistry -- the palladium stores energy and gives it off unexpectedly, then recharges -- but apparently that explanation doesn't cover all the data, and the hypothesis has been tested.
Clearly something of this sort would quite literally change the world if it can be harnessed. Hot fusion has been coming in about twenty years for the past forty years (it's always twenty years away) and while it's possible to do hot fusion by brute force, it's expensive and the path to any kind of reliable commercial energy source is unknown. I don't expect to live to see practical hot fusion. I am not quite so sure regarding cold fusion. It's unlikely but there's still data to be accounted for.
As to the original announcement, their real regret is that the word "fusion" was used. The energy burst was certainly there. That was the phenomenon that ought to have been analyzed, and it was not a fraud; it was just ignored. The whole incident is another reminder of why Big Science can really Fail Big sometimes.
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I keep hearing about the Lexus whose accelerator gets stuck and the car can't be stopped. When I was a lad, the simple thing to do was to turn the ignition off if something like that happened. The engine stops, and you can coast to a halt. Or, with a stick shift, take the car out of gear. I've not tried to put my Explorer in neutral while going fast, but I presume you can do that; of course if you're suddenly going 100 mph and coming up on a canyon you might not think of that. But what genius decided that we are all safer for not being able to remove the key to stop the engine when the car is running? I do not understand the logic here. I was always taught that if the throttle got stuck -- there were throttle controls on cars when I learned to drive -- you take the key out of the ignition. The car will stop.
What is the logic of not allowing the ignition to be turned off while the car is running?
(I have just been told that with the Lexus, no key is inserted to begin with; there is a button you can press and hold for three seconds (at 132 feet per second) which will stop the ignition. Read the flipping manual if you don't know that. All your fault if you don't RTFM.) I still don't understand the logic of making it hard to turn off the ignition when the car is running.
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All of which probably shows just how far out of date I am:
Dr. Pournelle:
The problem with turning off the engine on a 'runaway' car is that you lose power to steer and brake the car (just about all cars have power steering and power brakes, I believe). Better to put the car in Neutral and coast/brake to the side of the road. Once you are safely stopped, then you can turn off the car.
Even if this process damages the engine (due to over-revving), you can still stop safely and save your life.
Regards,
Rick Hellewell
and Peter Glaskowsky adds
I strongly agree. The old advice about cutting the ignition dates back to the days before power steering and brakes.
Every driver should be prepared to react to a runaway engine by shifting into neutral and braking normally.
I wouldn't worry about the over-revving problem when the engine's under no load. That ought to be less harmful than revving to the red line while in gear, and I do that all the time. :-) The car will be stopped in just a few seconds anyway.
At that point, you can turn off the ignition and reach down there to get the floor mat off the gas pedal, or un-wedge the kid's pacifier or the dog's squeaky toy, or remember to lift your right foot, whatever's causing the problem.
Back in 2002, when I did the three-day driving school at the Nurburgring in my new BMW M3, one section of the course involved learning how to stop a car in the event of brake failure on a steep Alpine downhill road-- by scraping the right side of the car along the guard rail. We actually got to try this process a couple of times with relatively new BMW 320's. Lots of fun.
. png
The last time I had to turn off the ignition on a car was with my International Harvester Scout, which had power steering and brakes but was steerable and stoppable without them. I forget the emergency; it was way off road in the Arizona desert. My Bronco could also be driven safely without power on, but it wasn't fun without the power steering. I never tried it with the Explorer.
When one is going 132 feet per second and the accelerator is stuck there isn't a lot of time to think of what to do; taking it out of gear seems reasonable if that will work, and I expect that is what one ought to learn. Is that the logic of making it impossible to turn off the key? Still, I'd rather be steering a powerless car than continuing to go under power. It's going to stop if the ignition is off, although I expect it will take longer if you don't have power assist -- assuming that adrenalin isn't a power assist.
I gather that with some cars you can turn the key off without putting it in park; in others you can't. Perhaps I am mistaken. With the Lexus in question there isn't any key to begin with, and at 132 feet per second there's not a lot of time to look up in the manual what to do...
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Bottom line here:
The important issue here to convey to your readers is to NOT turn off the engine if the accelerator is stuck, but to put the car in Neutral and use the brake and steering (still functional since the engine is running) to steer the car to the side of the road and safely stop.
...Rick...
Especially if there isn't any key to begin with. I suppose they ought to train new drivers to put the car in neutral if the accelerator is stuck. Note that one of the fatalities was in a car driven by a Highway Patrolman (off duty). One presumes that Highway Patrol officers know how to drive; yet he was killed about four seconds later. A passenger in the car was on 911 reporting it at the time of the crash. So it's not entirely obvious what one ought to do: Now we know. Get it out of gear but leave the motor running...
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