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March 29, 2005
A new super web site for looking at school data...
This new web site: School Matters is full of data about all the schools in the United States. You can see a lot of information here. Impressive.
Posted by rakhier at 04:54 PM | Comments (0)
A new twist in eco-systems: introducing a preditor kills the grass...
This is from the NYTimes Science section today. It is new to me, a case where the ecosystem is so fragile that introduction of a bird eating carnivor is able to destroy the grass on an island.
---
Foxes may not graze, but a new scientific study describes how their arrival on Aleutian islands destroyed rich grasslands and left only sparse tundra. The authors of the report, which appeared in Science last week, say this transformation shows how an entire ecosystem may go into a tailspin if just one new top carnivore shows up.
The inadvertent experiment began in the late 1700's and continued into the early 20th century as fur traders looking to expand their supply released nonnative arctic foxes and, in some cases, red foxes on more than 400 Alaskan islands. Some died out, but many populations survived.
The new habitats included much of the Aleutian archipelago that curves west toward Asia. Except for the occasional polar bear rafting in on winter ice, the windswept islands had few predators before.
The botanical impoverishment that has resulted is the reverse of what usually happens when a new meat-eater comes along.
"Traditionally, the predator eats the grazer; the grazer no longer eats the green stuff; and the habitat gets more green," said Dr. Donald Croll, a professor of biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the lead author of the report.
An example of the more usual routine is in Yellowstone National Park, where returning wolves, preying on sapling-browsing elk and confining the wary survivors to areas where they can see wolves coming, have touched off a resurgence of willow, aspen and other vegetation.
The contrary effect in the Aleutians, once sorted out, has a simple explanation.
The grazers on these islands were grass- and seed-eating Aleutian geese, which are smaller cousins of Canada geese. The foxes drove the geese near extinction, which would have been a boon for grasses except that the foxes also feasted on the eggs and hatchlings of puffins, auklets and other ocean-feeding seabirds they found brooding in vast numbers almost everywhere.
Some islands lost almost all birds except for cliff-nesting species. And as ground-nesting birds faded, so did their nutrient-rich excrement, or guano, which had been a natural fertilizer.
The research team concluded that islands with no foxes received an average 361.9 grams per square meter yearly. Fox-infested islands get just 5.7 grams per square meter of guano per year.
"You ever smell one of those rookeries?" Dr. Croll asked. "That is the odor of ammonia, like in fertilizer. Even the wind scatters it around." Without the regular subsidy of nitrogen and potassium-rich nutrients winged in from the sea, grasses lost their competitive edge over tundra shrubs and herbaceous plants...
Posted by rakhier at 04:50 PM | Comments (0)
March 24, 2005
The Foreign Policy Research Institute
The Foreign Policy Research Institute is a on-line source which is new to me but some people on TigerHawk praise it.
Not very frequently updated so far as I can tell.
Posted by rakhier at 09:26 AM | Comments (0)
March 10, 2005
Education Links - March 8 Edition
Here are some interesting links about education collected by EduWonk. He calls it The Carnival Of Education: Week 5.
Posted by rakhier at 12:14 AM | Comments (0)
March 08, 2005
The Great Divide in America
A really facinating entry in Power Line about a divide in American government between the "Aristocracy of the Mind" and the "Aristocracy of Money". They quote from David Brooks --
- It's been said that every society has two aristocracies. The members of the aristocracy of mind produce ideas, and pass along knowledge. The members of the aristocracy of money produce products and manage organizations. In our society these two groups happen to be engaged in a bitter conflict about everything from SUV's to Presidents. You can't understand the current bitter political polarization without appreciating how it is inflamed or even driven by the civil war within the educated class.
[T]he contest between these elite groups is often about culture, values and, importantly, leadership skills. What sorts of people should run this country? Which virtues are most important for a leader?
Knowledge-class types are more likely to value leaders who possess what might be called university skills....Democratic administrations tend to value self-expression over self-discipline.
Managers are more likely to value leaders whom they see as simple, straight-talking men and women of faith. They prize leaders who are good at managing people, not just ideas. They are more likely to distrust those who seem overly intellectual or narcissistically self-reflective...
Many people on each side bitterly resent it when members of the other group hold power. Members of the knowledge class tend to think that Republican leaders are simple-minded, uncultured morons. Members of the business class tend to think that Democratic leaders are decadent elitists.
Speaking as someone with their feet in both camps (academic background and business background) I have some sympathy for both sides but over the years I've become convinced that at the top you really do want leadership. There are plenty of smart people in the world but smarts is not correlated with effectiveness at the most senior level of government and business.
My top presidents of the last 100 years are:
- Teddy Roosevelt - very, very smart and a real leader.
- Franklin Roosevelt - not as smart as Teddy but a supreme politician.
- Harry Truman - not smart at all but, looking back on his decisions 50 years later, he made the right call on all the big decisions.
- John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson - the man with the golden rhetoric and the greatest politician of the last 50 years. Johnson gets a lot of the credit in my analysis for ending racism in this country.
By contrast my list of the worst presidents has a lot of very smart men on it:
- Woodrow Wilson - very smart but he made a total mess of our entry into World War I and the aftermath.
- Herbert Hoover - a smart man, a good man and a total failure in the face of the market bubble and collapse of 1929 - 1930.
- Richard Nixon - only average smarts compared to other presidents, a man who didn't like the American Constitution, the most dangerous man ever elected to the presidency.
- Jimmy Carter - a very smart man who made a total hash of U.S. foreign policy - Iran, the Soviet take-over of Afghanistan, dealing with OPEC.
Bottom line: smarts are over-rated in terms of presidential effectiveness. There is another quality which is more important. Generally speaking we call it "leadership" - the ability to make the right choice in a world of conflicting ideas and suggestions and to stick to the choice in the face of disapointments.
Posted by rakhier at 11:16 AM | Comments (0)
March 03, 2005
The Declaration of Independence DOES have Legal Standing in the US
Well this is something I did not know. According to this entry in Power Line ---
- does the Declaration have any legal status such that these words can be truly deemed to state the American creed? It does, although virtually no one seems to know it. In 1878 Congress enacted a revised version of the United States Code that included a new first section entitled "The Organic Laws of the United States." The story behind the 1878 revision of the Code is told in the introduction to political scientist Richard Cox's valuable book Four Pillars of Constitutionalism: The Organic Laws of the United States. (Cox credits the idea for the book to Professor Harry Jaffa, Distinguished Fellow of the Claremont Institute.)
The Code is Congress's official compilation of federal law; the organic laws of the United States are the country's foundational laws. First and foremost of the four organic laws of the United States is the Declaration of Independence. Following the Declaration among the organic laws are the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution, and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787.
Well this is news to me. I wonder what effect this has on U.S. Law? I have never heard the term "organic laws" before. What does it mean?
Posted by rakhier at 11:13 AM | Comments (0)
Lee Harris Explains the Nonsense of Palestinian terror
Lee Harris (the writer of the brilliant book Civilization and It Enemies) has a very long essay up in which he explains why Palestinian terrorism is nonsense and must be ended.
Harris pulls no punches in this essay. Terrorism, as he explains, can be and has been used to create nations. In other words, he posits that terrorism can not be condemned in and of itself. Instead Mr. Harris relies on emperical analysis: is what the terrorists are trying to do possible? If the answer is no, then the terrorism becomes nonsense.
Clearly the Palestinian terrorists are trying to do something which is impossible: the destruction of the state of Israel.
His arguement is much more complex and you should read his essay to understand his point. I must say I'm impressed by the arguement but troubled as well. I'd certainly rather come from a position that terrorism can be condemned without first having to assess whether what the terrorists are trying to do is possible.
Posted by rakhier at 10:51 AM | Comments (0)
Victor Davis Hanson on Why the Democratic Party is in Trouble...
This is from an interview with Victor Davis Hanson by a fellow blogger Chrenkoff ---
- Q: You are a life-long Democrat, a classicist and an old-style farmer skeptical of big business, yet after September 11 you’re finding yourself on the same side of the fence as Paul Wolfowitz and Condoleezza Rice. Do you see a major political realignment taking place in American politics?
A: Yes, I do. Democrats are isolationists now.
In matters of the Middle East, a Mubarak or Saudi Royal family are the "other" and deserve the multi-cultural pass of not being judged, since they are just "different" rather than atrocious.
Those who worked in the trenches for George Bush were mostly volunteers and grass roots; those for Kerry paid, and often from monies from the likes of a George Soros.
When I see a Teresa Heinz Kerry or George Soros, or the Hollywood elite, or the pampered professoriate, I see out-of-touch utopians who lecture others to do what they never would. Sort of the Kerry SUV syndrome or the big mansions of a Barbra Streisand lecturing on conservation.
And in the media, by any fair historical measure, the blogs, call-in radio, and cable news, are far more the vox populi than Dan Rather, Bill Moyers, the New York Times, NPR, CNN, and the CBS—the old reformers, who are now dull, timid, arrogant, huffing and puffing about "standards" and "being degreed" as they do some questionable things.
Look at Jason Blair, Rathergate, the Moyers PBS family octopus, the crazy CNN President's statements, and so on. The old reformers on four feet are the new entrenched on two inside the former farmer's house, to paraphrase Orwell who had seen the same thing in the socialist world of the 1930s.
If you wish to find a pompous, affluent, stuffy, condescending, bore then go to a university or big news room—and this was not always the case when Civil Rights, worries about pollution, and exploited labor needed support.
In response, these out of touch boutique liberals thought Michael Moore's scruffy looks meant he was a populist, even though he, not George Bush, would have been booed at a NASCAR rally. As far as Wolfowitz, go back and look who favored freeing the Shiia after the 1991 halt on Baghdad or who pressured Marcos to leave. And when I saw Rice stand up to Boxer and insist that her crazy tirade "It was the WMD, period" in reference to the 23 cases for war passed by her own Senate, I thought something is radically wrong.
Boxer was the entrenched bore who raced to her website to raise money from her embarrassing invective, Rice the calm and far better prepared newcomer. So yes, the Left has to go back and start over again, and quit thinking that just because you apply affirmative action to some redneck from your tenured perch or just because you would never be a friend of a Church of God worshipper that somehow makes you, in the words of Tom Sowell, "annoited." Such smug arrogance the elite left now shows. The Democratic Party reminds me of the Republicans circa 1965 or so—impotent, shrill, no ideas, conspiratorial, reactive, out-of-touch with most Americans, isolationist, and full of embarrassing spokesmen. I would listen to Lieberman, bring back Gebhardt, ignore Dean and Boxer, ostracize Sharpton and Moore, retire Ted Kennedy, and yes, let Bill behind the scenes triangulate Hillary to the middle-if they wish to win and resonate with Americans.
Mr. Hanson here makes a brilliant point that while the Democratic elite talk about making the world a better place it is mostly a matter of "do what I say not what I do". So they live in huge mansions, drive SUVs, fly private jets from coast to coast - all actions with serious environmental costs - then proceed to lecture everyone else about the need to "save the environment". What hypocracy!
Posted by rakhier at 10:22 AM | Comments (0)
March 02, 2005
The Iraqi Insergents have Lost...
As this article in the Winds of Change.net says - the Insergency is dying. Really. When the Insergents can only blow up bombs in front of bakeries or in front of mosques or in front of hospitals, they are flailing around like a snake with its head chopped off. No rational insergency would attack targets which have ZERO military value. No rational insergency would target ordinary Iraqi people. This insergency is dying and we have won. Hundreds if not thousands more people will die over the coming years but the hard part is over and it is a huge victory for Democracy, for the United States, and for the Neo-Cons who argued for this.
Posted by rakhier at 12:17 PM | Comments (0)
Armed Liberal on why the Democrats don't Own his vote...
Armed Liberal has a brilliant post today on Winds of Change.net in which he blasts the Democratic Party. ---
- First, and foremost, I'm not genetically programmed to be a Democrat. Loyalty to a political party is not like loyalty to a sports team. I'm not going to push the button for anyone running as a Democrat, no matter what their policies may be. And guess what - neither are most of the voters out in the real, non-campaign consulting world. I would not have voted for a Dixiecrat because they were a Democrat, I didn't vote for Kerry because he was a Democrat, I didn't vote to keep Gray Davis in office because he was a Democrat, I wouldn't vote for Al Sharpton because he was a Democrat.
The Democratic Party doesn't own my loyalty.
What I am is a progressive liberal. That means I do believe that state policies in the interests of the poorer and less powerful are a good thing, and that I'll judge candidates based on the content of their policies and character far before I'll judge them on the basis of the letter next to their name on the ballot.
For the last 50 years, the Democratic Party has done more to support the interests who I support, and so I've supported them. That support is not the Party's property, and I'm not interested in hearing from some hack who makes a living losing elections (and here I'm talking about the core Party apparatchniks, not necessarily Chris) that they think it is their property - and I'm not interested in hearing it from Chris either.
The current leadership of the Democratic Party is objectively damaging the interests of poor people, working people and small business owners - the constituency it owes it's allegiance to - by mounting stupid and suicidal campaigns and losing elections. It is losing elections for all the reasons I've pointed out, Marc Cooper has pointed out, Jeff Jarvis has pointed out, Norm Geras has pointed out...and pointing this out is the reason we "party traitors" are being criticized by Bowers and Willis.
I want to see a Democratic Party built that can win, and can do so in a way that supports the basic beliefs that I have about how the world should be - free, egalitarian, prosperous. Those are serious ideological and policy issues, and guess what? Most of the country shares those issues with me. That's why the Party keeps losing.
Listening to whiny bitch Oliver Willis complain because we're insufficiently loyal doesn't move me in the lest. Oliver and his ilk need to look in the mirror and realize that it's them, not Jarvis, Cooper, Geras and me, who are hurting the interests of the less powerful. They're doing it by building an insular, brittle, and ineffective Democratic Party that looks to keep losing well into the 21st Century.
Hear Hear! I agree. The Democratic Party is trapped in the time when they were successful, the 1960s, and they haven't woken up to the fact that the world has changed. Truely, I look at the Democratic party today and I wonder "why am I a registered Democrat any more?".
Posted by rakhier at 12:11 PM | Comments (0)
A theoretical invisibility device...
This article says that two scientists Mr. Alù and Mr. Engheta of the University of Pennsylvania have come up with a theoretical method of making an object invisible. ---
- The key to the concept is to reduce light scattering. We see objects because light bounces off them; if this scattering of light could be prevented (and if the objects didn't absorb any light) they would become invisible. Alù and Engheta's plasmonic screen suppresses scattering by resonating in tune with the illuminating light.
Plasmons are waves of electron density, caused when the electrons on the surface of a metallic material move in rhythm. The researchers say that a shell of plasmonic material will scatter light negligibly if the light's frequency is close to the resonant frequency of the plasmons. The scattering from the shell effectively cancels out the scattering from the object.
OK, the current problems: 1) They haven't made this yet. 2) It only works on a narrow band of light (such as invisible to green light but visible on red light) 3) only tiny objects can be hidden from visible light through this method.
Still, what was once only a theory can sometimes become very powerful reality (like lasers).
Posted by rakhier at 12:06 PM | Comments (0)