When Every Child Is Good Enough

Tuesday, November 23rd, 2004

The Incredibles has spurred discussion on the notion that every child is special. From When Every Child Is Good Enough:

Competition has long been out of fashion at education schools, as indicated in a 1997 survey of 900 of their professors by Public Agenda, a nonprofit public opinion research group. Only a third of the professors considered rewards like honor rolls to be valuable incentives for learning, while nearly two-thirds said schools should avoid competition.

To some critics, that cooperative philosophy is one reason that so many boys like Dash are bored at school. “Professors of education think you can improve society by making people less competitive,” said Christina Hoff Sommers, author of “The War Against Boys” and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. “But males are wired for competition, and if you take it away there’s little to interest them in school.”

In his new book, “Hard America, Soft America,” Michael Barone puts schools in the soft category and warns that they leave young adults unprepared for the hard world awaiting them in the workplace. “The education establishment has been too concerned with fostering kids’ self-esteem instead of teaching them to learn and compete,” he said.

The No Child Left Behind Act was an attempt to put more rigor into the system by punishing schools whose students don’t pass standardized tests, but it has had unintended consequences for high achievers. Administrators have been cutting funds for gifted-student programs and concentrating money and attention on the failing students.

“In practice, No Child Left Behind has meant No Child Gets Ahead for gifted students,” said Joyce Clark, a planner in the Pittsburgh public schools’ gifted program. “There’s no incentive to worry about them because they can pass the tests.”

“The Incredibles” might take comfort from a recent report, “A Nation Deceived: How Schools Hold Back America’s Brightest Students,” by the John Templeton Foundation. It summarizes research showing that gifted children thrive with more advanced material and describes their current frustration in prose that sounds like Dash: “When they want to fly, they are told to stay in their seats. Stay in your grade. Know your place. It’s a national scandal.”

But if they do fly, what happens to the children left on the ground? One of the report’s authors, Nicholas Colangelo, a professor at the University of Iowa who is an expert in gifted education, pointed to research indicating the left-behind do not suffer academically or emotionally.

Brad Bird wisdom:

“Wrong-headed liberalism seeks to give trophies to everyone just for existing,” he said. “It seems to render achievement meaningless. That’s a weird goal.”

He sounded very much like Professor Colangelo, who says that children want to compete and can cope with defeat a lot better than adults imagine. “Life hurts your feelings,” Mr. Bird said. “I think people whine about stuff too much. C’mon, man, just get up and do it.”

Baby Dies After Her Arms Are Severed

Tuesday, November 23rd, 2004

I don’t know what to say. From Baby Dies After Her Arms Are Severed:

But, on Monday, authorities discovered a grisly scene at the family’s apartment after the child’s father called a day-care center, and asked them to check on his wife and daughter.

Day-care workers called 911 after talking to the mother; an operator then called Schlosser.

Asked if there was an emergency, Schlosser calmly responded ‘Yes,’ according to 911 tapes released by police.

‘Exactly what happened?’ the 911 operator asked.

‘I cut her arms off,’ Schlosser replied, as the hymn ‘He Touched Me’ played in the background.

‘You cut her arms off?’ he repeated.

‘Uh huh,’ she answered.

Five Killed in Hunting Incident in Wisconsin

Tuesday, November 23rd, 2004

Crazy. From Five Killed in Hunting Incident in Wisconsin:

A trespassing deer hunter in Wisconsin opened fire without warning on other hunters when they asked him to leave, killing five and wounding three, police said on Monday.

Chai Soua Vang, 36, of St. Paul, Minnesota, a member of that city’s Hmong community, emptied his SKS semiautomatic rifle into the hunter who confronted him on Sunday and others who had come to his aid, Sawyer County Sheriff James Meier told a news conference.
[...]
He said Vang apparently got lost, asked for directions and later wandered onto a 400-acre parcel of private land where “he found an empty deer stand and crawled up and occupied it.” Hunters often build platforms called stands from which they watch for deer to appear within shooting range.

Meier said a hunter using the land saw Vang in the stand, radioed others in his party and said he was going to ask the intruder to leave. The land owner and others in the party arrived shortly thereafter, the sheriff said, and Vang after walking about 40 yards “turned and he opened fire on the group” after apparently removing the telescopic sight from the rifle.

Four men and one woman were killed. Three other men were wounded, one of whom remained in critical condition on Monday.

One of the victims had noticed the number of the hunting license tag Vang was wearing and scrawled it in dust on an all-terrain vehicle the party was using. That, along with a physical description, led to Vang’s arrest, with the help of two other hunters, when he emerged from the woods later, Meier said.

The magazine and chamber of the rifle Vang was carrying were empty, the sheriff said. The rifle can hold 20 rounds.

In case you weren’t aware, “About 75,000 Hmong have settled in Minnesota in the last 30 years,” as refugees from Laos.

The Crisis of Legitimacy: America and the World

Monday, November 22nd, 2004

The Crisis of Legitimacy: America and the World explores the rift between American and European points of view:

Opinion polls taken before, during, and after the war show two peoples living on separate strategic and ideological planets. Whereas more than 80 percent of Americans believe that war can sometimes achieve justice, less than half of Europeans agree. Americans and Europeans disagree about the role of international law and international institutions and about the nebulous but critical question of what confers legitimacy on international action. These diverging world views predate the Iraq war and the presidency of George W. Bush, although both may have deepened and hardened the transatlantic rift into an enduring feature of the international landscape.

Whereas more than 80 percent of Americans believe that war can sometimes achieve justice, less than half of Europeans agree. I wonder why that would be…

In Falluja, Young Marines Saw the Savagery of an Urban War

Monday, November 22nd, 2004

Some scary combat reporting, from In Falluja, Young Marines Saw the Savagery of an Urban War:

Eight days after the Americans entered the city on foot, a pair of marines wound their way up the darkened innards of a minaret, shot through with holes by an American tank.

As the marines inched upward, a burst of gunfire rang down, fired by an insurgent hiding in the top of the tower. The bullets hit the first marine in the face, his blood spattering the marine behind him. The marine in the rear tumbled backward down the stairwell, while Lance Cpl. William Miller, age 22, lay in silence halfway up, mortally wounded.

“Miller!” the marines called from below. “Miller!”

With that, the marines’ near mystical commandment against leaving a comrade behind seized the group. One after another, the young marines dashed into the minaret, into darkness and into gunfire, and wound their way up the stairs.

After four attempts, Corporal Miller’s lifeless body emerged from the tower, his comrades choking and covered with dust. With more insurgents closing in, the marines ran through volleys of machine-gun fire back to their base.

“I was trying to be careful, but I was trying to get him out, you know what I’m saying?” Lance Cpl. Michael Gogin, 19, said afterward.

So went eight days of combat for this Iraqi city, the most sustained period of street-to-street fighting that Americans have encountered since the Vietnam War. The proximity gave the fighting a hellish intensity, with soldiers often close enough to look their enemies in the eyes.

For a correspondent who has covered a half dozen armed conflicts, including the war in Iraq since its start in March 2003, the fighting seen while traveling with a frontline unit in Falluja was a qualitatively different experience, a leap into a different kind of battle.

From the first rockets vaulting out of the city as the marines moved in, the noise and feel of the battle seemed altogether extraordinary; at other times, hardly real at all. The intimacy of combat, this plunge into urban warfare, was new to this generation of American soldiers, but it is a kind of fighting they will probably see again: a grinding struggle to root out guerrillas entrenched in a city, on streets marked in a language few American soldiers could comprehend.

The price for the Americans so far: 51 dead and 425 wounded, a number that may yet increase but that already exceeds the toll from any battle in the Iraq war.

More:

The 150 marines with whom I traveled, Bravo Company of the First Battalion, Eighth Marines, had it as tough as any unit in the fight. They moved through the city almost entirely on foot, into the heart of the resistance, rarely protected by tanks or troop carriers, working their way through Falluja’s narrow streets with 75-pound packs on their backs.

In eight days of fighting, Bravo Company took 36 casualties, including 6 dead, meaning that the unit’s men had about a one-in-four chance of being wounded or killed in little more than a week.

The sounds, sights and feel of the battle were as old as war itself, and as new as the Pentagon’s latest weapons systems. The eerie pop from the cannon of the AC-130 gunship, prowling above the city at night, firing at guerrillas who were often only steps away from Americans on the ground. The weird buzz of the Dragon Eye pilotless airplane, hovering over the battlefield as its video cameras beamed real-time images back to the base.

The glow of the insurgents’ flares, throwing daylight over a landscape to help them spot their targets: us.

The nervous shove of a marine scrambling for space along a brick wall as tracer rounds ricocheted above.

The silence between the ping of the shell leaving its mortar tube and the explosion when it strikes.

The screams of the marines when one of their comrades, Cpl. Jake Knospler, lost part of his jaw to a hand grenade.

“No, no, no!” the marines shouted as they dragged Corporal Knospler from the darkened house where the bomb went off. It was 2 a.m., the sky dark without a moon. “No, no, no!”

Nothing in the combat I saw even remotely resembled the scenes regularly flashed across movie screens; even so, they often seemed no more real.

Homegrown terror

Monday, November 22nd, 2004

According to Homegrown terror, many of the greatest terrorist threats to America aren’t from foreign Islamists:

On April 10, 2003, a team of federal agents armed with a search warrant entered a storage unit in a small Texas town and were stunned to find a homemade hydrogen cyanide device — a green metal military ammo box containing 800 grams of pure sodium cyanide and two glass vials of hydrochloric acid. The improvised weapon was the product of 62-year-old William Joseph Krar, an accomplished gunsmith, weapons dealer, and militia activist from New Hampshire who had moved his operations to east central Texas just 18 months earlier.
[...]
Along with the sodium cyanide, hydrochloric acid, acetic acid, and glacial acetic acid, Krar and Bruey’s armory included nearly 100 assorted firearms, three machine guns, silencers, 500,000 rounds of ammunition, 60 functional pipe bombs, a remote-controlled briefcase device ready for explosive insertion, a homemade landmine, grenades, 67 pounds of Kinepak solid binary explosives (ammonium nitrate), 66 tubes of Kinepak binary liquid explosives (nitromethane), military detonators, trip wire, electric and non-electric blasting caps, and cases of military atropine syringes.

The storage unit also contained an extensive library of required reading for the serious terrorist: U.S. military and CIA field manuals for improvised munitions, weapons, and unconventional warfare; handbooks on assault rifle conversions to full-auto and manufacturing silencers; formulas for poisons and chemical and biological weapons; descriptions of safety precautions in handling; and information on means of deployment. Many of the same easily acquired, open-source materials, translated into Arabic, were found in Al Qaeda terrorist manuals recovered in Afghanistan and Europe.
[...]
His activities were being monitored when, on January 11, 2003, Krar was arrested by a Tennessee state trooper in the course of a routine traffic stop on the outskirts of Nashville. Searching Krar’s rental car, Trooper William Gregory found a plastic bag containing “seven marijuana cigarettes, one syringe of unknown substance, one white bottle with an unknown white substance, 40 wine-like bottles of unknown liquid,” as well as two pistols, 16 knives, a stun gun, a smoke grenade, three military-style atropine injections, 260 rounds of ammunition, handcuffs, thumb cuffs, fuse ropes, binoculars, and “other various close hand-to-hand combat items.” Gregory also found Krar’s passport, a birth certificate, a California credit union card for “William Fritz Hoffner,” and a Christian missionary identification card with Krar’s photo and the name “W. F. Hoffner.” There were also other documents, letters to IDC America, and four pages of what appeared to be a clandestine operations plan for cross-country travel and communications. Gregory busted Krar on marijuana possession, took him into custody, and impounded the car.

Google Scholar

Monday, November 22nd, 2004

Google’s new Google Scholar (“Stand on the shoulders of giants”) search engine might make academic research tolerable:

Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.

Just as with Google Web Search, Google Scholar orders your search results by how relevant they are to your query, so the most useful references should appear at the top of the page. This relevance ranking takes into account the full text of each article as well as the article’s author, the publication in which the article appeared and how often it has been cited in scholarly literature. Google Scholar also automatically analyzes and extracts citations and presents them as separate results, even if the documents they refer to are not online. This means your search results may include citations of older works and seminal articles that appear only in books or other offline publications.

Undergraduates Study Much Less Than Professors Expect, Survey of Student ‘Engagement’ Says

Monday, November 22nd, 2004

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on the latest National Survey of Student Engagement:

Only about 11 percent of full-time students say they spend more than 25 hours per week preparing for their classes — the amount of time that faculty members say is necessary to succeed in college. Forty-four percent spend 10 hours or less studying.

Yet students’ grades do not suggest that they are unprepared for their academic work: About 40 percent of students say they earn mostly A’s, with 41 percent reporting that they earn mostly B’s.

Rethinking doomsday

Monday, November 22nd, 2004

Rethinking doomsday summarizes a number of doomsday scenarios, their likelihoods, and their likely consequences. The good news is that the media have been overblowing the threats.

This anecdote about nuclear reactor security didn’t put me at ease though:

Could intruders force their way into a reactor to wreak havoc? Past incidents have demonstrated that one need not have sophisticated plans or skills in order to gain some level of access to a nuclear plant. In 1993, a mentally ill man drove his mother’s station wagon past the guarded entrance at Three Mile Island (TMI). Although he was driving at about 35 miles per hour, the surveillance cameras couldn’t swivel fast enough to keep up with his car. The intruder drove through a fence, then a roll-up door, and into the turbine building, where he got out of his car and hid before he was arrested four hours later. Fortunately, his intentions were not malicious.

Eliica eight-wheeler

Monday, November 22nd, 2004

The British Auto Express looks at the new Eliica eight-wheeler from inventor Hiroshi Shimizu:

Called the Eliica — short for Electric Lithium-Ion battery Car — this radical 800bhp eight-wheeler from Japan is proof that electric vehicles can be fast and fun to drive, too. Boasting a four-second 0-60mph sprint and seven-second 0-100mph time, the Eliica is faster than a Porsche 911 Turbo.

Electric motors offer tremenous torque right off the line, so it’s no surprise that an electric car can out-accelerate a Porsche 911 Turbo. The problem with electric cars is that they have very little range, and batteries are expensive and heavy.

Once you’re used to a roaring internal combustion engine, the electric motor feels odd:

At our drive at Keio University near Tokyo, we punched the ‘D’ button on the dash, pointed the car down the road and flattened the gas pedal. With a faintly audible whirr of eight 100bhp in-wheel motors, the 0-60mph sprint was smooth, effortless, quiet — and surreal. The mind-boggling acceleration was on a par with that of a 500bhp GT racing car. Yet the lack of a transmission meant there were no jerky cog swaps as we were thrust back in our seat by an incredible 0.8Gs.

(Hat tip to Slashdot.)

Roger Ebert’s Review of National Treasure

Sunday, November 21st, 2004

Roger Ebert’s Review of National Treasure brings back some of the biting sarcasm:

‘National Treasure’ is so silly that the Monty Python version could use the same screenplay, line for line.

Ebert considers the whole thing a rip-off of The Da Vinci Code — which he didn’t exactly like:

I should read a potboiler like The Da Vinci Code every once in a while, just to remind myself that life is too short to read books like The Da Vinci Code.

Jayhawk Down

Sunday, November 21st, 2004

In Jayhawk Down, Nick Gillespie insightfully points out that the cost of living reflects both supply and demand — that is, “Economic freedom may be just another word for nothing else to do”:

Living in Huntsville and, less dramatically, in Oxford taught me that the price of a house didn’t simply reflect the cost of living but also the demand for living in a given area. If you can’t move a five bedroom house at $100,000, there ain’t a lot of living going on.

Q&A: A conversation with Yuri Slezkine

Friday, November 19th, 2004

Q&A: A conversation with Yuri Slezkine explains why Jews were so successful in the early Soviet Union:

The story of the Jews in the early Soviet Union is similar to the story of the Jews in America. That is, they were especially successful in the realms of education, journalism, medicine, and other professions that were central to the functioning of Soviet society, including science.

Jews in the Soviet Union were much more literate than any other group, they were untainted by any association with the imperial regime, and they seem to have been very enthusiastic about what the Communist Party was doing. This was to some extent a conscious commitment to ideology, but mostly it was just because there were no more legal barriers against Jews. The doors opened, and they flooded in and did exceedingly well in the 1920s and the first part of the 1930s.

My belief is that you can?t understand the second part of the Jewish story in Russia — the anti-Semitic policies, and what happens to Soviet Jews later, their desire to emigrate, for example — unless you know the first part of the story, which is mostly about amazing success.

Notes from Antiquity

Friday, November 19th, 2004

Notes from Antiquity explains that Greek poems and plays were actually musicals:

Greek poets and dramatists regularly set their work to music themselves, and from at least the fifth century B.C. on they used a highly sophisticated system of musical notation. The very idea of poetry, in fact, originally tended to imply music, and Athenian tragedy at its artistic peak, in the fifth century B.C., was a complex combination of poetic text, solo and choral song, recitation with instrumental accompaniment, and dance. This has an unsettling if little-recognized implication: watching a play by Euripides or reading poetry by Sappho is perhaps as incomplete an experience today as watching a ‘play’ by Wagner or reading ‘poetry’ by Stephen Sondheim would be.

(Hat tip to 2blowhards.)

How Pixar conquered the planet

Friday, November 19th, 2004

How Pixar conquered the planet examines the most successful film studio of all time:

In Hollywood, though, figuring out Pixar’s secret has become a matter of panicky necessity. Since 1995, when Toy Story became the first computer-animated feature film, the company has had an unbroken record of triumphs, as popular with critics as the box office, resulting in 17 Oscars and sufficient millions to make Pixar, movie for movie, the most successful studio of any kind in the history of cinema. (The Incredibles took $70.7m [£38m] in its first three days in America, more than the rest of that weekend’s top 10 put together.) Other animation studios, saddled with a string of flops, have been left to glower from the sidelines – with the exception of Disney, the grandfather of them all, thanks to a deal under which it provided most of the financing for Pixar’s hits.

At Pixar, the work is tremendously technical and time-consuming — yet gleefully childish:

Telling a good story in animated form, though, requires a particularly bizarre kind of personality — an equal mix of childishness and deep, very adult patience. Pixar’s offices are carefully calibrated to nurture the requisite eccentricity. The animation team work not in cubicles but in miniature open-fronted wooden cottages, each individually furnished by their occupants with a clashing variety of leopardskin sofas and extensive toy car collections. (In a detail that epitomises Pixar’s alchemical knack for turning freewheeling creativity into profit, the cottages were actually cheaper than standard-issue office cubicles.)

Days begin with an hour-long “sweatbox”, where the movie’s director gathers the animators and critiques their latest shots in front of the others. But for the most part, the nuts and bolts of the work is done inside the cottages, at computer screens, as artists painstakingly manipulate hundreds of points on a character’s body, spending whole days on shots that could last for no more than 10 frames.

So true:

It is an article of faith at Pixar that trying to make your animated characters look as realistic as possible is as pointless as it is difficult. [...] “There is a contingent of the digital-effects community to whom that is the holy grail — to create photographically real humans,” says Brad Bird, the writer and director of The Incredibles and, previously, The Iron Giant. “To me that is the dumbest goal that you could possibly have. What’s wonderful about the medium of animation isn’t recreating reality. It’s distilling it.”

What’s wonderful about the medium of animation isn’t recreating reality. It’s distilling it. More Brad Bird wisdom:

“Really, really little kids should not see this movie ,” says Bird, who wrote and directed the film, and provided the voice for its funniest character, Edna, a fashion designer to the superheroes. “They should wait till they get older. We’re getting some reactions from people who were disappointed that their four-year-old was a little freaked out by it. Well, I don’t want to compromise the intensity in order to please a four-year-old.”

Bird makes no effort to disguise his anger at critics who suggest the movie, brilliant though it undoubtedly is, may fail as a result of failing to cater properly to an audience of young children. “I reject that whole point of view — that animation is a children’s medium,” he says. “The way people talk about it is, well, hey, it’s a good thing I have kids, because now I get to see this. Well, hey, no, man! You can just go and see it. There’s no other art form that is defined in such a narrow way. It’s narrowminded, and I can’t wait for it to die.”