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December 12, 2011 04:34 PM UTC

Monday Open Thread

  • 43 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

The man in the coon-skin cap

By the big pen

Wants eleven dollar bills

But you only got ten

–Bob Dylan, from Subterranean Homesick Blues

Comments

43 thoughts on “Monday Open Thread

  1. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45

    Here you have the last detainee in Iraq that is responsible for the deaths of 5 of our people and we can’t try him in America?

    As United States troops prepare to exit Iraq at the end of the month, the Obama administration is facing a significant dilemma over what to do with the last remaining detainee held by the American military in Iraq.

    The Republican reaction on the Hill:

    “Mr. Attorney General, if you try to bring this guy back to the United States and put him in civilian court, or use a military commission inside the United States, holy hell is going to break out,” Mr. Graham said. “And if we let him go and turn him over to the Iraqis, that is just like letting him go. I think this would be a huge mistake.”

    Frankly, I think we owe it to the families of these fine solidiers to try them here in the U.S. and if found guilty put in SuperMax in Florence for the rest of his natural life.

    1. When something is uncomfortable you bury it in the darkest hole you can find. Problem solved! Exactly the way the founding fathers wanted it.

      Now the bigger question: Why are you at war with Christmas, Santa hater?

      (I’m thinking of making a new career where I’m an expert at concocting stupid answers that say nothing while bringing in redder meat. That’ll be $5. Once the GOP nominee is named and hires me, the price goes up.)

  2. The real burden on the U.S. economy – Fareed Zakaria

    The answer is pretty clear. Only five years ago, American infrastructure used to be ranked in the top 10 by the World Economic Forum. Now we’re 24th. U.S. air infrastructure has gone from 12th in the world to 31st – roads from eighth to 20th.

    The drop in human capital is even greater than the drop in physical capital. The United States used to have the world’s largest percentage of college graduates. We’re now number 14, according to the most recent OECD data, and American students routinely rank toward the bottom of the developed world in international tests.

    The situation in science education is more drastic. Even with the increase in college attendance over the past two decades, there were fewer engineering and engineering technologies graduates in 2009 (84,636) than in 1989 (85,002). Research and development spending has risen under Obama, but the basic trend has been downward for two decades. In percentage terms, the federal share of research spending – which funds basic science – is half of what it was in the 1950s.

    In other words, the big shift in the United States over the past two decades is not a rise in regulations and taxation but a decline in investment – in physical and human capital.

    I think part of this could well be the shift of profits to Wall St. In the old days the way to make money was to manufacture something. Profits came from building cars or buildings or TVs. Banking was boring with low profits (the 3-6-3 approach). And to build this stuff you need educated people and infrastructure.

    But now when profits come from creating paper on Wall St. (and software – my industry is part of this), you don’t need infrastructure and you only need a few smart people.

    So you no longer have the people at the top pushing for infrastructure and more college graduates – because they don’t need it.

    1. economy.  Now it just creates fragile wealth on paper schemes for which the risk is deflected to the little people, who enjoy no significant or secure part of the gain, and that create nothing, neither goods, infrastructure nor jobs. The gains in retirement portfolios that the worker may enjoy is the first thing lost when the houses of cards collapse and, to add insult to injury, average taxpayers must rescue the very masters of the universe who lost their money.

      Finance used to serve the economy. Now it simply serves itself.  While anyone unwilling to continue to boast about American exceptionalism and being number one is called unpatriotic by the right, the rankings Zakaria cites are not the rankings of an exceptional, number one nation. True, we’re still number one in military might but how long can that last in the new Banana Republic USA with our military stretched too thin for our resources already? Something’s got to give.

  3. Newt Romeny have taken the gloves off and are engaging in open warfare:

    Romney: Gingrich should return Freddie Mac money

    http://www.boston.com/news/loc

    Feisty Gingrich blasts Romney record at Bain Capital

    http://www.latimes.com/news/po

    Could Mitt and Newt tear each other down?

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/

    And the problem in the nutshell?

    Hill Poll: GOP gives Gingrich edge, Romney shows Nov. appeal

    http://thehill.com/polls/19863

    So let’s all raise a year end toast to the Teapublicans and their race off the right edge of a Flat World!  And bid farewell to poor Willard, who even if he is not buried somewhere around South Carolina under the Newt, will be scathed and battered, appealing to weary Teapeeps who fear he is the second coming of the Commie-in-Chief and will probably just vote for Ron Paul in the end, on the Crazy Uncle ticket.    

    1. If Governor Romney would like to give back all the money he’s earned from bankrupting companies and laying off employees over all his years at Bain then I would be glad to then listen to him. And I will bet you $10, not $10,000, that he won’t take the offer.

      Can a Romney retort mentioning Gingrich’s multiple infidelities be far off? . . .

      . . . to be followed by a Gingrich rebuttal suggesting that he’s seen the light, and anyway infidelity is much better than most Mormon men, who secretly wish for their own private harems, and are little better than Arab potentates? . . .

      The Peloponnesian War was never this entertaining . . .

  4. Teachers Don’t Like Creative Students

    From Creativity: Asset or Burden in the Classroom?, a good review paper. What the paper shows is that the characteristics that teachers use to describe their favorite student correlate negatively with the characteristics associated with creativity. In addition, although teachers say that they like creative students, teachers also say creative students are “sincere, responsible, good-natured and reliable.” In other words, the teachers don’t know what creative students are actually like.  (FYI, the research design would have been stronger if the researchers had actually tested the students for creativity.)  As a result, schooling has a negative effect on creativity.

    1. I think most of my teachers LIKED me. I also think most of them would have rather not had the responsibility of teaching me. And that’s a direct result of conditions in the modern school system, not teachers’ personalities or the inherent annoying traits of creative people.

      There’s a parenting element, too. Creative kids tend to be aware that they’re unusual. This leads to disrespect for authority and refusal to study material that doesn’t interest them. I have a creative niece now, and she’s old enough to realize she’s smarter and more clever than most of her peer group. I’ve been carefully trying to teach and model the value of good study habits for her (as has her mother) to help her avoid the usual pitfall of the creative mind: Eventually, you get to a place where you’re not the smartest one (no matter how smart you are) and not the most creative one (no matter how creative you are) and you can’t skate by without having ever learned to work hard for your achievements.

      I went to an alternative school that highly valued creativity. Even so, it wasn’t always easy to be an oddball creative type as an adolescent. The CSAP system is not designed for creatives. The zero tolerance philosophy definitely isn’t. If my school had actually applied the district conduct code consistently, I’d have been expelled… and even with their fairly liberal interpretation of the same, I came pretty close something like four times.

      If I could make one change specifically to make the modern public school system more friendly to creative types, it’d be this: Don’t try to prevent mistakes. You can’t teach a precocious adolescent to behave in a particular way by shepherding and shaping them along that path. They see intrinsic value in resisting that kind of instruction and exploring alternative paths. The “no child left behind, but no child allowed to go ahead” philosophy just makes for creative dropouts, or, at best, kids who realize they can’t survive in modern K-12 and go to college early. You can’t breathe down the neck of a creative young person and expect them to excel. You have to advise, talk to them as equals, then step back and let them fuck up enough times to figure out a path to success that works for them.  

        1. also terminating those teachers whose students don’t meet each and every one of the required CMCPS*.

          * Colorado Minimum Creativity Performance Standards.

    2. (FYI, the research design would have been stronger if the researchers had actually tested the students for creativity.)

      It’s like showing a bunch of single women pictures of the Revenge of the Nerds cast and concluding, “Hey, women don’t like smart and funny guys after all!” (Which I’m sure is tomorrow’s attention-whoring post from you.)

      Creative students might be more irresponsible. Lazy students are also irresponsible. Many irresponsible students are not particularly creative. This is such a basic logical error that even the blogger addresses it, but neither of you is apparently honest enough to admit that it destroys the thesis.

      If my student doesn’t turn in homework, I’m unhappy. If it’s because she’s playing basketball or making a painting or writing a symphony somewhere, I don’t give a fuck, because I want her to learn math. If on the other hand she solves a problem in a clever, unexpected way, I think that’s fantastic and will tell her so and try to make sure she keeps doing math later.

      1. She wanted him to do all the problems the way she told him, and he insisted upon doing them his way.  She told me (at his 8th grade graduation) that his way worked but it drove her nuts that he refused to do what she told him.  He told me (frequently throughout) that she drove him nuts because she kept nagging him to do the problems her way.  Fortunately he found a coping mechanism (ignoring her and talking to his friends) that had the intended effect (drove her crazier), and now he loves math.  Maybe the challenge of driving his teacher crazy contributed to his love for math.  I would have appreciated it if she had encouraged him, though, and suspect that her life would have been a little easier if she had.

        1. to realize when an alternate method works, and I suppose not every teacher does.

          However sometimes we get students who get the right answer even though they did it the wrong way, and we can’t give them credit, since they got it basically by accident (and their method doesn’t work in any other case). In such a case, it’s really not a matter of us just wanting to see it the way we know, it’s a matter of making sure a student can do the same type of problem with different numbers (or that a student didn’t just write some random junk to show some work and then peek at the answer in the back of the book or on another student’s assignment). It can be hard to tell the difference if a student skips steps in using a custom method.

          Although, yeah, pissing off a teacher can be a powerful motivation. John Allen Paulos told a story about figuring out something about a batting average in baseball mathematically, and his teacher not believing it, and that’s what made him want to be a mathematician.

      2. When I was helping my kids with math there would be a number of times I would start working through a solution with them and they would tell me that wasn’t the way to do it. I’d read the section and the book was using a different approach. And sometimes that approach was a harder and less elegant way to do it.

        But usually[1] there was a reason to teach that approach. It gave the kids an understanding of how math works and that understanding is important. I remember when I first learned Laplacian transforms – it made some work so incredibly easy, but learning the harder way was needed elsewhere.

        On the flip side, math teachers can be hidebound in a bad way. I was first given Boolean logic in 5th grade and I would just see the answer. So I would write the answer. My 5th grade teacher thought that was great. My 10th grade teacher would give me a 0 for not “showing my work”.

        [1] For the life of me I don’t understand why Geometry is still a year of study instead of a couple of weeks.

        1. I’m not sure we do proofs in the best possible way (using them pretty much only in geometry and taking everything else in high school mathematics on faith), but modern mathematics IS proof. Many times you can see intuitively why something should be true and get the right answer, but for a typical mathematician the more interesting situation is when you think something should be true but it isn’t. This is why calculus had to be reinvented in the late 1800s, with proofs: because eventually people stopped getting the right answer when the problems got more complicated, and they didn’t really know why. (For an example of why this matters, refer to my favorite “proof” that 1=2, which is a bit hard to explain to most high school students.)

          High school geometry is meant to introduce this notion while also giving a historical basis for it. It’s meant to display the beauty of a theory that can be built from minimal assumptions and generate really strong results. The problem is that by drawing a decent picture you can basically guess what most of the results should be, and there aren’t a whole lot of surprises. It’s hard to truly appreciate high school geometry until you’ve studied non-Euclidean geometry, where a slight change in one of the assumptions leads to a complete but totally different theory.

          It sounds to me like you were the type of student who didn’t see the need for proving things.

          1. For math I was quite happy to take the word of a teacher that something worked and here’s how to use it. To me math has always been a tool. Now for Physics, there yes I enjoyed working out the why. So in Physics I did see the value. (And no one can be an expert in everything.)

            I don’t think Geometry is worth a year of every high school student’s time. Get them through the basics of calculus by 12th grade instead.

            1. one of the few areas where students are exposed to formal logic of any sort these days.

              The mechanisms learned in geometry proofs are the same mechanisms used in calculus proofs, and are the intellectual precursors to good computer software logic.

              I do have to say that geometry was by far the driest course I had to take in grade school, because its formal logic does not lend itself to creative teaching methods.  That part could be improved perhaps.  But the subject and discipline it instills is worth the time – I certainly didn’t find myself without work to do for an entire year’s worth of class.

          2. A lot of students who do well in the rest of math have a lot of trouble with Geometry. It’s different from Algebra/Trig. For students who hit a wall there, it often means the end of math for them. If it was a needed part then that’s life, but if it’s not needed then it’s an unnecessary filter on who continues on to STEM.

            1. 1) I think that’s exactly backwards; math is pretty much the only subject where you CAN understand why something works, and in principle explain it to anybody. In physics there are lots of heuristic arguments that are convincing but wrong experimentally.

              2) If you’re going to teach math only because it has monetary value, then of course geometry is worth eliminating, but so is algebra, since most people don’t need it in their everyday lives. The reason to teach it even to students who are not going into STEM is the same reason to teach Shakespeare even to people who are not planning to act in his plays. It’s part of our culture and is historically important. Furthermore, high school geometry is a lot closer to what mathematicians do than calculus.

              3) There are actually a fair number of students who do better in geometry than in algebra/calculus. They may think visually or understand things conceptually. They may not get excited by complicated integrals but may be great at graph theory. And they may be great at logic, which is ultimately much more important than following an algorithm (computer algebra systems can do most computations better than almost any student). For these students, exposure to geometry may be the only thing that keeps them from quitting math.

              1. You clearly love math and learn it for the beauty inherent in the logic of being able to fully prove each part. And that is invaluable in a mathematician. But for many of us it’s a tool to understand any work with the subject we love. That’s not placing a monetary value on it, but it is reducing it to a language we use.

                It’s like English. Some people find great beauty in poetry. Some merely find English a tool by which they can communicate their thoughts.

                The important thing is not for everyone to find joy and beauty in every subject – people are different. The important thing is people find what studies brings them joy and beauty and they dive in to those, and become competent in the others.

                1. all manner of engineering including: architecture, construction, stress analysis, plant design (not biological), manufacture (yeah, I know you think that’s all soon going away . . .), transportation systems, packaging, etc., etc. . . . As far as things in the real world, I think geometry has only slightly fewer good, practical uses as imaginary 1s and 0s.

                  1. Since that’s the relevant issue. Knowing how to prove 2 triangles are equivalent is a decent way to teach proofs in math. But I don’t see it providing value to students in further study, except for those that will major in math.

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