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Earth Day 2011 Courtesy of miraclesofnature.org |
Quote of the Day
Work like you don't need the money. Love like you've never been hurt. Dance like nobody is watching.
Mark Twain
My Favorite Pop Religious Song:
"El Shaddai" (performed here by songwriter Michael Card)
I first heard this song on an Amy Grant hit compilation. On Good Friday, let us remember the sacrifice of Christ Jesus; the Romans may have unjustly killed a man, but God's Word lives always. Michael Card co-wrote this hauntingly beautiful ballad.
And Amy Grant, one of my favorite female vocalists, so beautiful with the voice of an angel, a true blessing from God; I think I love her live, beautifully sung interpretation even better than her original hit:
Reprise: "Mary, Did You Know?"
Christ Church Choir, available on iTunes
Video for download here
Guest Editorial: Charles Murray/CATO, "Replacing the Bachelor's Degree": Thumbs UP!
I have already written a couple of commentaries on Arum & Roksa's Academicially Adrift (here and here); this work seriously raises the issue of just what return we are getting from the unsustainable increase from colleges (see Dr. Perry's chart, showing college costs leaving the home prices and general CPI in the dust over the past 30 years). Among other things, the Collegiate Learning Assessment shows very little gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills from about 1 in 3 new college graduates, with questions particularly raised of students enrolled in undergraduate education, social work, and business studies and a higher proportion over the first two years, which involve more general background studies (largely dominated, of course, by pervasive progressive academic groupthink.)
Murray talks about 3 of the key reasons behind a university: a world-class library; research colleagueship; and personal interaction between professors and students. All of these reasons have been largely rendered obsolete by the introduction of new, improving technologies, e.g., Google Books and Skype. While President Obama continues to insist that the federal government must fund the college bubble (they assure the rightly skeptical voters that Big Government can cut down the cost of servicing college loans just as progressive experts have cut the costs of and achieved policy goals by government over the past several decades), they miss the forest because of the trees: what prospective employers are faced with is a heterogeneous group of college graduates with unrealistic expectations from programs of varying quality and rigor, many of whom cannot cope with complex, ill-defined business issues, rapidly changing technologies, business environments or government regulations, or communicate effectively with managers, peers and clients. Even if you save, say, a rounding error on a six-figure education loan, but the graduate has learned little or acquired few skills to meet today's business needs, what is the value of that education if that person ends up being functionally unusable as a potential employee?
Charles Murray raises an intriguing possibility: what if we saw something similar to the idea of a professional standard, comparable in nature to a CPA, bar exam, or medical boards? We would be able to identify, say, the critical path schedule relevant for the discipline, with shorter, less costly certification paths, leading to an independently validated examination.
Obama, O'Reilly, and the Perennial Scapegoats: Speculators
Obama is doing the same thing he did in 2008 and last year by once again arguing the evil speculators are responsible for the recent spike in prices; he's demagoguing the issue by threatening possible Justice Department prosecution of nefarious speculators.
Speculation is part of everyday life; when you buy a house at a particular price, you are implicitly making a reward-risk trade-off. During the housing bubble, you purchased a property with the expectation prices were more likely to go up in the future from the settlement price. Similarly, when you are selling a property, you are making a judgment you are unlikely to obtain a materially higher price in the short term.
During an auction process, you sometimes run into situations where prices get ahead of themselves; I remember when I bought a notebook PC on eBay some years ago I saw other people vested in the bidding process itself and overpay for an item (in the sense a similar item was sold at a significantly lower price just a couple of hours later). We've had cycles in oil prices. We know at a certain point oil and gasoline prices are too high to be sustainable as energy costs outstrip our budget. But for each transaction, someone is expecting for oil to become even more expensive, and the other thinks the price is more likely to drop. In each decision, there's a certain knowledge base (including expectations of supply and demand, past industry price cycles, etc.) Fundamentally at any price you have a supply and demand; as price increases, you have fewer buyers. Eventually everyone who wants to buy a widget has already done so.
The people who flipped Florida condos for profit at the peak found themselves trying to find buyers to mitigate their losses--and no doubt buyers were speculating they might be better off waiting, because prices would only get better from here. Speculators got burned. But Obama and O'Reilly didn't have a problem with oil prices dropping in the aftermath of the economic tsunami in 2008. The point is--speculation exists throughout the process. Every speculator realizes with each increase in price there's more risk and less reward. The market decides when prices become too high--not Obama and O'Reilly. Who are they to argue that the market price is unacceptable, simply because high prices are unpopular? It's arbitrary.
Fukushima Nuclear Incident Update
NEI has among the blogs I've been regularly tracking which have resorted to periodic publications, this one being a weekly summary. As with the other blogs, any significant event that occurs between updates will result in interim posts. I have been maintaining a daily segment since the earthquake/tsunami. I will continue to monitor the blogs daily for relevant posts. If I find no noteworthy status post, I'll post a boilerplate segment noting no significant daily update. This week's NEI update notes the ongoing as-needed cooling injections to reactor pressurized vessels 1 through 3, spent fuel pools 1 through 4 (plus the common use spent fuel pool), and pumping of reactor 2 turbine basement contaminated waters to the rad waste storage tank; ambient radiation levels continue to decline and/or remain stable. It also notes selective extensions of closure outside the 12-kilometer exclusion zone around the Daiichi site.
Atomic Power Review notes:
- Friday morning Will Davis notes that NRC considers Fukushima Daiichi to be stable but fragile, meaning vulnerable to further leaks to the environment and/or failures in currently manual cooling procedures (say, with another strong earthquake). He then shows how the US nuclear power industry has made a long series of regulatory changes over the past few decades which would have prevented or mitigated many of the issues we've seen crop up at the Daiichi site, including strengthening of the suppression chamber, venting directly from the primary containment vessel, and independence and increased redundancy of backup power supplies and/or water pumps.
The Hiroshima Syndrome blogger reports on the latest data, noting significant temperature improvements in reactor 1 readings and more modest improvements in the other two. He notes now all but two seawater sampling locations now report within LNT safety limits. He says that the Japanese have lowered the radius of evacuation around the Daini site to 6 kilometers and even the Daiichi limit is a hard 2-kilometers and soft 20 to 30 kilometers. (Residents, with civic permission, can return to their homes for clothes or other supplies.) He notes that Japanese government officials are concerned that foreign governments are stoking anti-nuclear fears to rationalize protectionist policies against Japanese goods, but notes that the government's own excess caution on a variety of fronts contributes to the problem. He also points out that the anti-nuke group Greenpeace has decided that TEPCO and regulators are in a conspiracy, deliberately underreporting the "real" catastrophic results and will conduct its own "independent" tests. (Yeah, right...We can expect fair results from an organization that has "independent" procedures (not validated by mainstream science) that (surprise! surprise!) reveals thousands of "Chernobyl"-related cancer deaths every year.,,)
Political Humor
"President Obama is in Los Angeles raising money for his campaign and meeting with Dr. 90210 about an ear tuck." - Jimmy Kimmel
[The doctor may also be able to help with that thin skin condition President Obama recently displayed at the end of a local news interview with a Texas reporter.]
An original:
- President Obama had a Passover Seder at the White House earlier this week. I'm not saying it's his first Jewish dinner experience, but he thought the big, thin crackers tasted a little bland and could have used more salt...
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups
ABBA, "Take A Chance On Me". The male chanting backdrop is very catchy (it reminds me of a chugging railroad sound in the background of a country/western song). Agnetha and Frida are simply AWESOME. I've always loved the flower-in-the-hair look for the ladies. This is a fun video (it comes across to me like a mix between the Brady Bunch and the Monkees), and the ladies' flirtations are exaggerated in an amusing way.
