" Jerry: People are very attached to the value of their skills. They believe that the skills of their generation should be preserved, with new skills added on.
Theo: Such an attitude represents a tremendous degree of disrespect of our forepersons. It was really, really hard to be a cave person. The skills needed to live comfortably in, say, northern Europe in 20,000 BCE were extremely complex. They required then and would require now the full range of human intelligence.
To think that a modern human should be able to do everything that previous generations have been able to do (hunt, speak Latin, do square roots by hand, etc.), and also have any time left over to learn anything new (microbiology, email, calculus), is basically insulting to all those previous generations, since it implies that they under-employed their intelligence. It is also quite false.
Jerry: I think it matters that students spend their time thinking and learning. People seem happiest if they are good at something. But I agree it doesn't matter whether they learn all the same things their parents learned. Not learning Latin is a problem only if you need to speak to Latin people on a regular basis, or if people will make fun of you on the playground. Not learning to add is a problem only if you have to add regularly, or if people will make fun of you for using a calculator to do
5 + 7
12
Theo: Well, you probably do think people should learn to add. Adding is not that hard, and it's a fairly practical skill in the day-to-day world.
Jerry: In the old days (before television), being able to add up a long column of numbers without making any mistakes was a valuable skill. People would pay you a living wage to do nothing but add numbers well. Not today.
Theo: Today, it's nice to be able to add small numbers, and larger numbers in a pinch, but the specific mental tricks and habits needed to get the right answer consistently when adding lots of numbers are just not helpful. Not being able to do this does not represent a failure of the intellect, any more than not knowing which fields in your neighborhood have the best rabbit hunting: both were, at one time, failings that would get you laughed at.
Jerry: But, you'd agree that being able to estimate the sum of a column of numbers is valuable. I would spend more time learning to do that well than working to reduce my error rate in doing exact sums.
Theo: And yet, in schools you find worksheets with 100 addition problems that are supposed to be done correctly, with points taken off for errors. What a waste of time.
Irate bystander: Oh, now I get it. You're one of those romantic educational know-nothings who think it's not necessary to learn anything in particular, as long as you learn "critical thinking skills" and have good self esteem. Yuck.
Theo: No, and let me make this very clear. No one can learn to think without having something to think about. If you try to teach someone how to think in the abstract, you are not going to get anywhere. If you try to make education "easy", by removing the content, you are cheating your students out of the most important thing you have to offer: the chance to do something hard. Only by mastering a difficult body of knowledge can a child develop into a confident, thinking adult. The point is, it doesn't necessarily have to be the same difficult body of knowledge that the child's parents learned.
And while we're on the topic of romantic educational know-nothings, let me just say that if you think you can improve your students' self esteem by letting them "succeed" at various insipid educational games, you are kidding yourself. Kids are much smarter than that. There is nothing more demoralizing to most children than being put through an educational program they know they can't fail at. Instead of teaching them self esteem, it teaches them that you expect so little of them that you have contrived special extra-stupid lessons for their benefit. Don't think for a minute they don't know what's going on.
If you start a lesson off by telling the students "This is going to be easy", you are simultaneously telling them "We had to make this easy because we don't think you're capable of doing anything hard". And when the lesson is over, the only sense of accomplishment they can feel is that they did something easy. So what?
Learning is hard work. If you are not working hard, you are not learning. Period. Kids love hard work, as long as they see where it's going and why. Instead of killing that energy by giving them something easy, we should foster it by giving them something really hard. We should tell them it's hard. We should give them the chance to do something meaningful.
Jerry: Readers should be aware that Theo is the father of one three year old and a couple-odd babies, while I am the father of four adults. It is well known that people at the beginning of the child rearing process have much stronger opinions than those who have completed at least two children. However, in this case I have to agree with Theo.
His viewpoint is nicely supported by Joseph Mitchell's story in his wonderful book Up in the Old Hotel about a bridge-building disaster which killed a number of young members of the Mohawk nation. People believed this disaster would drive the Mohawks away, but instead it had the opposite effect. The tragedy confirmed that working on high steel is serious, dangerous work, worthy of the efforts of young Mohawk men. Mohawks have gone on to erect the steel of a high proportion of all the high-rise buildings and bridges on the North American continent since 1910.
We seem to agree in general principles but how do we put them into action. If we want our children to learn some things that are hard, how do we decide which hard things are-- or are not--worth their effort?
Theo: It's not easy, and of course it changes every day. The one sure wrong answer is: The same thing we learned as children."
"My hair used to be much shorter, but I have grown it out during the pandemic. When a student mistook me for Steven Pinker, I knew it was time to join the LFHCfS."
"In 1924, a National Geographic Magazine writer chronicled his adventures in Sudan from 1916 to 1920, in which watermelons played a key role. He enjoyed watermelon tea the locals made—after punching the fruit open and squeezing the flesh to press the juice out—and, in brutal 110-120F heat, endured a six-week journey on which watermelons were his sole source of water. The writer, Major Edward Keith-Roach, complained about being unable to shave during that trip but couldn’t praise watermelons enough for saving his life and making the trek possible.
Watermelons stayed in Africa for a while and it would take thousands of years for the refreshing plant to reach California. In ancient Egypt, pharaohs enjoyed the red, fleshy fruit: watermelon paintings adorned 4,000-year-old Egyptian tombs, including King Tut’s. What better treat than a durable 10-pound fruit holding a gallon of water inside? Doubling as food and drink, watermelons were a must for the underworld journey. Watermelons arrived in India and China in the 7th and 10th centuries respectively and the Moors introduced them to western Europe in the 13th century. By 1576 Spanish colonialists had planted watermelons in Florida. From there, they spread to the American southwest in 1598 where the indigenous people already living there grew fond of the new crop. Plus, watermelon was a long-lost cousin of the squashes indigenous people were used to growing (watermelons and squashes are both members of the Cucurbitaceae family) and, as a bonus, watermelons did not mind the long, hot, southwest summers."
"Due to their confidence and dominance, narcissistic leaders oftentimes can be perceived favorably by followers, in particular during times of uncertainty. In this study, we propose and examine the relationship between narcissistic leaders and followers who are prone to experience uncertainty intensely and frequently in general, namely highly anxious followers. We do so by applying machine learning algorithms to account for personality traits in a large sample of leaders and followers on Twitter. We find that highly anxious followers are more likely to interact with narcissistic leaders in general, and male narcissistic leaders in particular. Finally, we also examined these interactions in the context of highly popular leaders and found that as leaders become more popular, they begin to attract less anxious followers, regardless of leader gender. We interpret and discuss these findings in relation to previous work and outline limitations and future research recommendations based on our approach."
"The problem here is that science itself is not always trustworthy, especially in the role that it is now playing in our society. There are too many examples of scientific misconduct and fraud, and too many failures to prevent them, to ignore. Much of science, perhaps the vast majority of it, is not of concern. But too often, incentives are misaligned with the goal of scientific quality: competition has tremendous benefits in producing excellence, but the downside is the production of fraud as well. The result is that, taken as a whole and given its role in our society, scientific practice and communication are insufficiently trustworthy. The consequences of this failure extend beyond the current pandemic to other global imperatives such as climate change.
One category of problems is scientific misconduct and fraud, which, it is important to note, is perpetuated by scientists themselves. This category includes scientists who use fraudulent data, inappropriately manipulate images, and otherwise fake experimental results. Publishers have been investing increasingly to block bad contributions at the point of submission through editorial review and more is almost certainly needed, likely a combination of automated and human review. Another form of misconduct is the failure to disclose conflicts of interest, which, notwithstanding efforts by publishers to strengthen disclosure guidelines, have continued to be disclosed “too little too late.”
Beyond individual misconduct, there are also organized and systematic challenges. We are seeing “organized fraud” and “industrialized cheating” to manipulate the scientific record to advance self-interests. These choreographed efforts include citation malpractice, paper mills, peer review rings, and guest editor frauds. And, even if it does not rise to the level of misconduct, we have seen the use of methods and practices that make substantial portions of at least some fields impossible to reproduce and therefore of dubious validity. Whether individual, organized, or systematic, all these are threats to scientific integrity.
Overall, it is clear that science is failing to police itself. Some observers hope that “open science” will minimize misconduct and fraud, and as much as it may help it seems unlikely to be sufficient. Indeed, a number of cases have been discovered by an “image detective” who has been profiled not only in Nature but also in the New Yorker. Some egregious misconduct is investigated at a university, funder, or national level. What none of this does however is prevent misconduct. This is all after-the-fact detection. The ultimate solution probably requires incentives that provide enough deterrence to eliminate such misconduct proactively rather than treating it reactively.
When the editorial process fails to detect fraud or other serious problems in submissions, these submissions are issued publicly and in many cases formally published. Preprint services were not prepared to combat their role as vectors of misinformation, generating a series of preprint disappointments that have been extensively chronicled in The Geyser. Peer review has failed on too many occasions, with major journals publishing articles about COVID treatments that turned out to be unsupportable. The effect on the public trust of science has been just as corrosive as the vaccines-cause-autism scandals of years past, in whose shadow we still shiver. And of course, we also have the cases of journals that appear to provide relatively little review or are actually not really providing any review, including those that are sometimes termed predatory."
"Despite the calls for change, there is significant consensus that when it comes to evaluating publications, review, promotion, and tenure processes should aim to reward research that is of high "quality," is published in "prestigious" journals, and has an "impact." Nevertheless, such terms are highly subjective and present challenges to ascertain precisely what such research looks like. Accordingly, this article responds to the question: how do faculty from universities in the United States and Canada define the terms quality, prestige, and impact of academic journals? We address this question by surveying 338 faculty members from 55 different institutions in the U.S. and Canada. While relying on self-reported definitions that are not linked to their behavior, this study’s findings highlight that faculty often describe these distinct terms in overlapping ways. Additionally, results show that marked variance in definitions across faculty does not correspond to demographic characteristics. This study’s results highlight the subjectivity of common research terms and the importance of implementing evaluation regimes that do not rely on ill-defined concepts and may be context specific."
" We argue that taxonomical concept development is vital for planetary science as in all branches of science, but its importance has been obscured by unique historical developments. The literature shows that the concept of planet developed by scientists during the Copernican Revolution was theory-laden and pragmatic for science. It included both primaries and satellites as planets due to their common intrinsic, geological characteristics. About two centuries later the non-scientific public had just adopted heliocentrism and was motivated to preserve elements of geocentrism including teleology and the assumptions of astrology. This motivated development of a folk concept of planet that contradicted the scientific view. The folk taxonomy was based on what an object orbits, making satellites out to be non-planets and ignoring most asteroids. Astronomers continued to keep primaries and moons classed together as planets and continued teaching that taxonomy until the 1920s. The astronomical community lost interest in planets ca. 1910 to 1955 and during that period complacently accepted the folk concept. Enough time has now elapsed so that modern astronomers forgot this history and rewrote it to claim that the folk taxonomy is the one that was created by the Copernican scientists. Starting ca. 1960 when spacecraft missions were developed to send back detailed new data, there was an explosion of publishing about planets including the satellites, leading to revival of the Copernican planet concept. We present evidence that taxonomical alignment with geological complexity is the most useful scientific taxonomy for planets. It is this complexity of both primary and secondary planets that is a key part of the chain of origins for life in the cosmos."
"In this post I will discuss a set of 46 articles from the same institution that appear to show severe problems in many journals in the field of obstetrics and gynaecology. These are not entirely new discoveries; worrying overlaps among 35 of these articles have already been investigated in a commentary article from 2020 by Esmée Bordewijk and colleagues that critiqued 24 articles on which Dr Ahmed Badawy was lead author (19) or a co-author (5), plus 11 articles lead-authored by Dr Hatem Abu Hassim, who is Dr Badawy's colleague in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at Mansoura University in Egypt.
Bordewijk et al. reported that they had detected a large number of apparent duplications in the summary statistics across those articles, which mostly describe randomized controlled trials carried out in the Mansoura ObGyn department. Nine of these articles appear as chapters in Dr Badawy's PhD thesis , which he defended in December 2008 at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands.
I think it is fair to say that Dr Badawy was not especially impressed by the arguments in Bordewijk et al.'s commentary; indeed, he wrote a reply with the uncompromising title of "Data integrity of randomized controlled trials: A hate speech or scientific work?" in which he questioned, among other things, the simulation techniques that Bordewijk et al. had used to demonstrate how unlikely it was that the patterns that they had observed across the 35 articles that they examined had arisen by chance."
"A few weeks before, I was looking at a map of Kazakhstan and wondering how to get around this vast country. I soon found out that the state railway company is the country’s largest employer, with 146,000 employees. Nevertheless, the railway network is only 16,000km long – far less than Germany’s, although Kazakhstan is the same size as central Europe.
The majority of the country consists of vast plains, sometimes merging into hills, and almost half is covered by sand or gravel deserts. The only mountainous area is in the south-east, where the Tian Shan mountain range runs along the border with China and Kyrgyzstan.
Among the country’s 48,000 lakes is the Aral Sea, which has almost dried up. It is one of the greatest environmental catastrophes of the last decades, caused by large-scale cotton cultivation during the Soviet era.
In the morning, I roll out of my bunk bed and climb down the ladder. A few fellow passengers are already there, eyeing me curiously. Foreigners are a rarity on Kazakh trains. On my 7,500km journey, I will meet only three western travellers. I introduce myself to the passengers with Daulet’s help. Practically no one speaks English here; in this far corner of the world, Russian is still the lingua franca."
"Sodium-cooled reactors can experience rapid and hard-to-control power surges. Under severe conditions, a runaway chain reaction can even result in an explosion. Such a runaway reaction was the central cause of the 1986 Chernobyl reactor explosion, though that was a reactor of a different design. Following Chernobyl, Germany’s Kalkar sodium-cooled reactor, about the same size as the proposed Natrium, was abandoned without ever being commissioned, though it was complete.
All these technical and safety challenges naturally drive up the costs of sodium-cooled reactors, making them significantly more expensive than conventional nuclear reactors. More than $100 billion, in today’s dollars, has been spent worldwide in the attempt to commercialize essentially this design and associated technologies, to no avail.
The Natrium design, being even more expensive than present-day reactors, will therefore be more expensive than practically every other form of electricity generation. The Wall Street firm, Lazard, estimates that electricity from new nuclear plants is several times more than the costs at utility-scale solar and wind power plants. Further, the difference has been increasing.
To this bleak picture, Terrapower has added another economically problematic feature: molten salt storage to allow its electric output to vary. Terrapower hopes this feature will help it integrate better into an electricity grid that has more variable electricity sources, notably wind and solar.
Molten salt storage would be novel in a nuclear reactor, but it is used in concentrating solar power projects, where it can cost an additional $2,000 per kilowatt of capacity. At that rate, it could add a billion dollars to the Natrium project.
This host of factors makes it reasonably certain that the Natrium will not be economically competitive. In other words, even if has no technical problems, it will be an economic lemon."
"For too long, Americans were fed a false narrative that they should feel individually guilty about the climate crisis. The reality is that only a handful of powerful individuals bear the personal responsibility.
The nation’s worst polluters managed to evade accountability and scrutiny for decades as they helped the fossil fuel industry destroy our planet. The actions of these climate supervillains have affected millions of people, disproportionately hurting the vulnerable who have done the least to contribute to global emissions.
Working- and middle-class people must stop blaming themselves for the climate crisis. Instead, it’s time to band together to seek justice and hold these profiteers accountable. Only in calling out their power and culpability is it possible to reclaim the world that belongs to all of us, together."
"I've heard it described as everything you hate about a suburban gated community, just in the city and without the gate.
Those who disdain Milwaukee Avenue for this reason should consider its origins. This street was built in the 1880s as cheap housing (due to the unusually small lots) for working-class immigrants, many of whom worked at the nearby railyards. Through most of the 20th century, it would not have been considered quaint, kitschy, or precious, nor snobbish, upscale, or uptight. And, if we had dozens or hundreds of Milwaukee Avenues, there's a good chance nobody would consider it any of those things today, either.
These homes today are quite expensive for their size and amenities. But here's the crucial thing to understand: They're not expensive because they're cute. Or because their architecture is traditional rather than modern. It's not even because the street is pedestrianized—it's not any of those things directly.
No, the explanation is simpler. Places like this are expensive because places like this are scarce, and scarce things almost always become expensive.
The same story applies to the countless row house neighborhoods of the Northeast, Chicago, and San Francisco. In city after city, the mass-market, working-class housing of its time has acquired a distinctly bourgeois reputation today. In all cases, the reason lies in economics, not design. What's abundant becomes culturally coded as middlebrow; what's scarce becomes culturally coded as elite.
There is abundant evidence that nearly the entirety of the U.S. and Canada are dramatically undersupplied, not just in quaint historic places, but in walkable urban places, period. It's our “shortage of cities“ that makes urbanism a hot commodity. Even if car-free design to the extent of Milwaukee Avenue isn't a majority preference—and it likely isn't—if a product serving a niche preference is rare enough, its price is liable to be bid up by those who hold that preference.
The answer to this isn't to lower our standards for design or to be dismissive of the things that are really lovable about these places. The answer is simply to allow a lot more Milwaukee Avenues to exist."
"Climate change is an imminent threat to highly populated coastal and river communities worldwide. For centuries, people have built defence structures to prevent floods and erosion: seawalls, bulkheads, breakwaters, groins, levees, dykes, and revetments. Nowadays, we usually build these structures at least partly from energy- and carbon-intensive materials: reinforced concrete (most commonly), geotextiles, steel, wire mesh, asphalt. However, people can and did build very adequate river and coastal defences without adding to environmental destruction in the longer term.
Inspiration comes – not surprisingly – from the Netherlands. The sea has been a threat in the Low Countries since long before climate change. The Dutch built their country partly at the bottom of the sea, drained it with windmills, and surrounded the new land with dykes. The Dutch coast has fine-grained, sandy soil that offers little resistance to the friction of the water. Currents, waves, and propellers of ships scour the bottom and can easily lead to the collapse of dykes, banks, quays, locks, and abutments.
With stagnant or slow-flowing fresh or brackish water, planting reeds on the waterline can protect riverbanks. However, this approach doesn’t work with saltwater, nor does it prevent damage from large waves. At least 400 years ago, the Dutch came up with a solution: the fascine mattress. A fascine mattress consists of thousands of fine twigs, mainly from willow trees. These are woven together into a sturdy mat dropped at the bottom of a canal, estuary, or river. A fascine mattress can lay partly on the river-bank or dyke.
Fascine mattresses were often rectangular and of large dimensions: usually between 20 and 30 metres wide and up to 150 metres long (sometimes more). The structures were made on land, towed to their location, and then sunk to the bottom by weighting them with rubble. Everything happened by hand. Nearby coppice plantations supplied the wood for braiding the mattresses."