Linky Friday #27

JLA - TV Pilot

Education:

[Ed1] Abel Keogh ponders the his third grade son being given a (closed) email address.

[Ed2] Private schools are struggling. A lot of what people used to need private schools, they now have charter schools for.

[Ed3] National Journal makes the case for the cost-effectiveness of supersized universities.

[Ed4] Matthew Yglesias makes the pretty obvious, but under-discussed point: Don’t go to college if you aren’t going to graduate. Another way of looking at this is that perhaps we (as a nation) shouldn’t be sending people to college who won’t graduate.

Health:

[H1] I was and am neutral-to-skeptical on PPACA, but the exchanges are one of the areas that I had hopes for. I’m pleased as punch that rates are coming out below cost estimates. Go markets!

[H2] John Goodman (not that John Goodman) thinks that we’re headed to a two-tiered health care system. Or rather, a more formal two-tier system, as we already have one. This is actually not far from my own predictions. I just don’t see it as dire.

[H3] Apparently some are suspecting that babies can be too fat. Great, something else to worry about…

[H4] Bicycle highways were once the future of transit.

Energy:

[En1] How the oil boom is improving the working class in North Dakota and maybe the tribes in Montana.

[En2] Scientific American writes on the revised estimates of the rate of global warming.

[En3] David Wogan argues that fossil fuels aren’t going anywhere, while NewScientist looks at wave power farms.

[En4] The Washington Post likes to use deceptive photography.

Business:

[B1] Doug Mataconis and Greg Beato ask whether driverless cars represent a threat to our privacy. Most likely, though I suspect that the threats will come in other forms, even if driverless cars don’t materialize.

[B2] As an avid Waze user, I’m keeping an eye on Google’s interest in purchasing Waze. I don’t know why, but I feel a little resentful that my input is helping make some Israeli a billion dollars.

[B3] T-Mobile’s no-contract plans appears to be working well.

[B4] The New York Times demonstrates how not to take a tribute

[B5] Successful people leave their loser friends behind. Fortunately for me, ambition is underrepresented amongst my friends.

America:

[A1] American morality.

[A2] The IRS has been targeted adoptive families. Well, if there’s one thing I’ve learned from a number of my friends, they probably had it coming. The list of right-wingers adopting kids is endless.

[A3] The Christian Science Monitor explains why high jackpot lotteries suck. I hate lotteries.

[A4] I wrote the Free State Project off when they chose inferior candidate New Hampshire over superior candidates Wyoming and Montana. But Garrett Quinn says they’re having some success.

[A5] The case against Portland’s rejection of water fluoridation.

[A6] I don’t know why I think this as cool as I do, but here are some illustrations of what New York City would look like on other planets. Also, what if Earth had a ring?

World:

[W1] Dave Schuler on the violence in Sweden and England. Police in England are arresting people for hateful Facebook posts, while in Sweden the people are resorting to vigilantism.

[W2] Robin Simcox looks at why soldiers get targeted by Muslim extremists.

Will Truman

Will Truman is the Editor-in-Chief of Ordinary Times. He is also on Twitter.

62 Comments

  1. [H1]
    My company just had our annual health-care enrollment meeting, and it was the usual: less coverage at a higher cost. But with a possible silver lining: since we’re demographically unfortunate (a small company with a high proportion of older employees), moving over to the exchanges might help us a lot.

    [En4]
    the photo [darkened] the billowing vapor to make it look ominous.”

    They learned that trick from what Time Magazine did to O. J.

    • Whoops. Forgot that the Coyote Blog post to which I linked had an example of cooling tower “smoke.” Still, the fact that the other one is from the UN makes it especially noteworthy.

  2. Ed1: That school fished up. There is room to disagree on the appropriateness of email, even closed email, for young children (my primary question is: What purpose does it serve?), but the school absolutely should have notified parents beforehand.

    They should also consider whether they risk creating greater inequity among students. As hard as it may be to believe, not all homes have computers or reliable high speed internet. Other families severely restrict internet/computer usage, even for ed purposes, or have a singlr computer shared amongst many users.

    As schools go more digital (mine now posts some assignments online only, sometimes after school hours, which means internet access is required to do one’s homework… Not to mention students have to consistently check for updates lest they miss an assignment posted at 7pm… So stupid… But no one asked me…), certain students are left at great disadvantage.

    As great as tech can be/is for education, it also allows a certain laziness to set it. One 4th grade teacher at my school created a “Googler” classrom job, someone who would Google anythin that needed confirming. I challenged her on this: “Doesn’t that teach kids that Google has all the answers? Shouldn’t you call it ‘Researcher’ with Google being one among many tools.”

    “Eh, they’ll just Google it anyway. Plus ‘Googler’ sounds more high tech.”

    Sigh.

    Okay, rant over.

    Tl;dr – Tech can be a boon to education but does not come without drawbacks, which should ne thoughtfully considered before rollout.

    • I’ll give a big ol’ plus-one to this.

      Additionally, I don’t understand why students need access to the email addresses of every other student in the school district. Every student in their class, sure, ok, but what’s the value in being able to search and email/pester/harass any student in the area?

      • It would probably require making all sorts of different lists and setting unique privileges and stuff.

        And who wants to do that when you can simply announce, “STUDENT E-MAIL!”?

          • Google- as a prefix makes everything high tech… didn’t you know?

            In much the same way that allowing kids to be distracted with iPads instead of with paper football is high tech.

          • Back in the olden days it was anything ending in “-scape”.

          • Clearly we need to invent Googlescape.

            Better yet, iGooglescape.

      • “Evil” is probably too strong a word, but if you consider the “rake”, the way state lotteries use the government to create monopolies, the marketing patterns of each, etc. the former looks much more like theft and the latter like contracts between consenting adults.

        Balko had a great series of exchanges somewhere on this with an anti-gambling advocate.

  3. On energy:

    Today, 1/8-scale floating wind turbine will be launched in the Gulf of Maine.

    These turbines are built of concrete/aggregates instead of steel; lighter and less culpable to corrosion. Lot of research into how to make them storm-surge safe. For maintenance, they’ll be able to be towed into shore instead of worked on in deep water, one of the big cost problems of deep-sea windfarms.

    • The Denver Post had a piece yesterday reporting that Xcel Energy asserts that by 2016 it will get 30% of its electricity for Colorado from wind, beating the state’s legal mandate to reach that level of renewable electricity by four years. Back in the fall of 2011, Xcel set a then world record for a one-hour early-morning period when 55.6% of electricity delivered to their Colorado customers was from wind power (not necessarily all generated in-state). That’s kind of a contrived record, of course — early-morning demand is very low, and fall is a season with easy-to-forecast periods of steady high winds.

      • On the wind energy front, its more interesting to monitor Ercot (the grid element that covers most of Tx) Wind has been up to 25% at times I have checked. In Tx the wind blows more at night than during the day however, in particular during the summer. On Feb 9 25% of the entire grid demand was by wind. Now interestingly if you combine solar with with wind, and look at the peak hour which is in Aug at around 5 pm, when the sun is still bright. Solar is a good partner for wind, since they peak at different times in the summer. Over the year 2012 9.2% of the total energy provided was wind based.

      • Thank to whoever tidied up the missing close-anchor-tag. It’s been a generally bad week for my writing HTML.

  4. En3: Both links lead to the Wogan piece. Wogan was fairly reasonable until near the end, where he tossed in “shale oil in Utah” on his list of very large unconventional oil resources. While Utah has potential for shale gas that can be extracted using hydraulic fracturing, there’s relatively little shale oil. What there is is large amounts of oil shale — kerogen-bearing rock — which is a different matter entirely. Lots of oil shale in Colorado and Wyoming as well. Unlike shale oil, no one has ever extracted a barrel of liquid fuel from the Green River oil shales on a profitable commercial basis. For the last century or so, the price at which liquids could be extracted from the kerogen at a profit has been $20-30 per barrel higher than the price of regular crude — no matter what the regular crude price was at the time. The federal government has signed eight leases for oil shale research. Last year, Chevron gave up its oil shale lease, using language that implied they had better places to put their research dollars.

    • Chevron was doing research into oil shale when I worked there back in the early 80s, so they’ve given it a pretty good shot.

      • And it’ll be useful… when we run out of alternatives.

        • My opinion is that if we get to the point where kerogen-bearing rocks in the Green River basin are an attractive feedstock — either for manufacturing liquid fuels or burning them to generate electricity a la Estonia — we’re going to be so energy-poor that it’s no longer feasible. They’re a long way from the big markets for those products and the other inputs needed are in relatively short supply in that neck of the woods. My answer to the question, “Well, where else would you put your research dollars?” is that there are a number of exciting things happening in the catalyst field for producing syngas and for converting syngas into a number of different liquid fuels at higher efficiencies.

          • Oh, no, not for FUEL. for Medicine, for Fertilizer, for all the good things we get out of oil.

          • “Oh, no, not for FUEL. for Medicine, for Fertilizer, for all the good things we get out of oil.”

            I don’t know as much chemical and petroleum engineering as I should, but am always willing to learn…

            It is my understanding that, aside from trace elements removed from crude during refining (eg, sulfur), fertilizer is not oil-based. Methane, yes, but not petroleum. Fertilizer production left the US in pursuit of cheap natural gas. Stranded gas resources in particular, where ammonia or ammonium nitrate are either easier to handle and transport, or much more valuable than the natural gas, or both. Some production has moved back to the US since natural gas got overly cheap here. (Side note: US NG prices are on the upswing, enough so that we’re seeing some generators shift back to coal for electricity compared to 2012.)

            As to the rest, I think it’s open to debate. The liquids produced from the kerogen are not crude oil, and require upgrading before they’re ready to run through a conventional refinery. Not because they’re too heavy to pump (as is the bitumen extracted from oil sands), but because they’re not suitable chemically. It seems entirely possible to me that for most of the things you list, catalyzed reactions to produce the important components out of lighter hydrocarbons from other sources may be more effective than whatever processing is required to produce them from the kerogen-based synthetic crude. And for heavy stuff like asphalt it seems like it would make more sense to extract it from (for example) Utah’s oil sands, where it’s almost suitable as soon as you separate it, than from Utah’s oil shale.

  5. Thank you so much for the rings link in [A6]! Awesome images and I learned a bit more about ring formation, too.

    • But it didn’t say anything about Pak Protectors.

        • Like reading Niven is something to be proud of?

          • I loved Ringworld.

            And The Mote in God’s Eye

            So yeah, it’s something to be proud of.

          • Niven is better when he’s got a co-author. I enjoyed Oath of Fealty when it was new, the first couple of Dream Park novels, and still think The Mote in God’s Eye is a quite good first-contact novel.

          • Michael,
            Yeah, but Pournelle is such a collossal ass. I’m not sure how Niven stands working with the bloke.

          • Mote was quite good, making the sequel one of the biggest disappointments ever.

          • The Gripping Hand has at least one redeeming feature. It’s a go-to example of why science fiction writers who do Age of Sail sea battles set in space all invent some sort of New Physics drive for getting around a solar system in a reasonable amount of time.

    • Being too much of an engineer, a quick check at Wikipedia shows that Earth’s Roche limit is well below the height needed for a geosynchronous orbit, so the rings will be inside that (certainly the images shown appear to be). I know almost nothing formal about orbital mechanics; are there transfer orbits with reasonable delta-v from LEO to GSO that wouldn’t intersect a set of rings? GPS satellite orbits are higher than the Roche limit; unless the rings are pretty transparent to the frequencies used, GPS might be either considerably less accurate or much more expensive.

      • “…are there transfer orbits with reasonable delta-v from LEO to GSO that wouldn’t intersect a set of rings?”

        No.

        No follow up questions.

  6. [En2]Smart people are betting on more sea rise, not less. We’re nearly at one lost country already (Kiribati)

  7. E4-One big problem in the American education system is that it makes no provision for the non-college bound. Many European education systems handle the issue of the non-college bound better by creating a stream of vocational and technical education for them. In America, its simply assumed that everybody is capable of and wants to go to college and that vocational/technical education could simply be done in the private sector after high school.

    • There’s a lot not to like about our Republican governor. But he wants to merge the community-college system and high-school for these students; five years, and you get both the HS diploma and the associates degree.

      I think this is an excellent idea, and one I hope liberals in Maine embrace wholeheartedly.

      • Actually if you also change the training for Plumbing and electrical to be more school oriented and less an apprenticeship based training (typically 4-6 years of apprentice work), that would help and you could see an associates degree in repair and upgrade plumbing. Repair plumbers will always be needed and will have to know a range of technologyies as the median house was build in 1974. Likewise for electricans, repair and upgrade. Both of these are more complex than new construction.

        • Lyle, I think to get licensed in either trade (this will vary by state), journeymen electricians and plumbers still have to do the apprenticeship, in this case, that means working under the supervision of a master for a period of time before they qualify as masters themselves. I’m a big fan of apprenticeships, and I think that apprenticeships and technical school are compatible and there should be more of both working in concert to train people in the skilled trades.

          • My understanding is this is how they do it in a lot European countries, technical school and apprenticeship combined.

  8. [Ed4] Matthew Yglesias makes the pretty obvious, but under-discussed point: Don’t go to college if you aren’t going to graduate. Another way of looking at this is that perhaps we (as a nation) shouldn’t be sending people to college who won’t graduate.

    Yglesias’ advice strikes me as fairly useless. It’s not as if many people go to college intending to drop out. It’s probably a mix of people who become simply unable to afford it any more, people who think they can handle university and after the first year or two find they can’t hack it, and people, and people who get caught up the a residence party lifestyle and fail their classes.

    I don’t have the statistics to speculate on the relative size of each group, but my guess would be that group 3 is fairly small and group 1 is a lot larger than Yglesias is considering. It’s easier to get scholarships your first year than any of the other years, and I wouldn’t be surprised if bursaries are similar; it’s also easy to lose a multiyear scholarship (or, likely, bursary) if you don’t do as well as expected/required your first year. The first year at university is a culture shock, and always a challenge.

    Both society and the individuals concerned would, I think, benefit from people who are not suited to academic study going to trade schools or something rather than university. It’s why I’m against drumming into young people that everyone absolutely has to go to university if they want any success in life. If you don’t like academics, and aren’t good at academics, then find something you do like and are good at instead. It’s a square peg, round hole problem.

    • KMW & ND,

      I think a non-trivial number of students decide to “give college a try” and go into debt or waste family resources in order to do so. Which is fine, at community college.

      I think the bigger thing, on the student end, is that people don’t necessarily enter with a 4-year or 5-year plan. Though it is not without considerable faults, our student loan system gives good students a path to graduate. I think students need to be better prepared for running out of money, either by spending less (community college) or factoring in the cost of student loans. If it’s not worth it to you to take out loans for, you probably shouldn’t go, because even if your parents have set aside enough money for four or five years of tuition, things change (tuition goes up, investments go sour, it takes longer than you anticipated to graduate).

      I’d also argue that there is some overlap between the three possibilities you provided.

      Ultimately, though, I look at it from the opposite end as MattY. He places the onus on students. I think that we, as a society, have to look at this. Trying to send more people to college likely means sending more people who won’t graduate and therefore whose investment in college will be in the negative.

      Derek Thompson wrote a piece basically suggesting everybody go to college because it’s always worth it. There is an asterisk about “if you graduate”… but still. It fails to account for the people that won’t make it. That’s something that we, as a culture, need to deal with.

      • Ultimately, though, I look at it from the opposite end as MattY. He places the onus on students. I think that we, as a society, have to look at this. Trying to send more people to college likely means sending more people who won’t graduate and therefore whose investment in college will be in the negative.

        One thing to change is that going, and not graduating, is necessarily negative. People leave for all sorts of reasons; and I know numbers of entrepreneurs who left because they found something else they wanted to pursue. Even if leaving is due to lack of resources or being overwhelmed, you’ve had your experiences broadened in that way, you’ve had opportunity to learn and to learn from your failures; and you at least have some idea of the expectations of college just in case you decide to try it again.

      • I don’t think people should have to go into serious debt to graduate from university, because all too often university doesn’t lead to a good-paying job, especially not right away. There’s already enough loans a young person needs to accrue (a car; later, a mortgage) that they shouldn’t be saddled with a ton of debt.

        I’d like to see a combination of lower tuition fees (in Canada a year of undergrad is ~$5000-$7000, after going up a LOT in the last couple decades), more scholarships (to ensure that talented people do attend, regardless of financial standing) and a lot more bursaries (to equalize access to university between income levels). I don’t think it should be free, because too many people wouldn’t take it seriously if it was, but it shouldn’t be a multi-decade financial burden either, like it is now, and bursaries should be prevent it barring people from poorer families from accessing education. Alternatively, you could just make it free for everyone who keeps an A- average or higher.

        The current situation isn’t the one that’s always existed; the cost of university has been rising far above the cost of inflation, and the proportion of university costs funded by the government have plummeted.

        • the proportion of university costs funded by the government have plummeted.

          That’s true, but somewhat misleading. The percentage covered by the government has gone down in part because other spending has gone up. In other words. Universities that spend more and raise tuitions to meet those expenses will have the government covering less even if per-student expenditures are constant.

          Plus, I read recently that per-capita spending (by the government) hasn’t even decreased. Rather, it might just be that it’s being spread out among more students. Which brings us back to how we should invest that money. More for fewer students, or less for more students. Or more money for more students.

          Even if we have the government cover more of the cost of tuition, someone is still spending the money if we’re not holding down costs.

          I am personally more interested in lowering the cost of attendance, for those that have difficulty of paying (and aren’t eligible for merit-based scholarships). I don’t mean covering more of their tuition, but providing cheaper alternatives. Community colleges, MOOC, etc.

          I am very sympathetic to lowering the cost – and taxpayers paying the freight – of bright students who can’t pay their way. I’d much rather focus on that than either reducing tuition across the board or what we’re doing now with subsidized student loans.

          (I say “we” even though I know that doesn’t include you. Force of habit.)

          • H1 has been debunked. The Obamacare rates are less than current individual market rates only if your income is low enough to qualify for a significant subsidy.

          • That should have gone directly under the OP.

          • I saw that this afternoon. Roy is correct that the numbers given tell only a partial story, though his numbers appear to also be skewed (by looking at a 25yo nnon-smoker. Haven’t read the whole thing though. Plan to, with a followup post.

          • I take that back about Roy’s piece. He does go beyond 25 year olds.

            I still need to read it all the way through, but so far: Disappointing.

        • I don’t think people should have to go into serious debt to graduate from university, because all too often university doesn’t lead to a good-paying job, especially not right away.

          As a rule of thumb, if you can’t make college pay for itself in NPV terms, you shouldn’t be going.

          • For perfect application, sure. But we can do better, e.g., by not subsidizing college so much, by declining to extend subsidized loans to those who are statistically unlikely to graduate with good job prospects, and tightening up standards at public universities.

  9. I agree with Katherine on Matt Y’s advice. Does anyone really go to college with the intent to drop out?

    We talked about this in the League over the summer when the NYTimes ran a long in-depth article about three women who were the first in their families to attend college and all had horrible luck adjusting. The NY Times article strongly suggested or said that this was because no one could help them navigate college and university life.

    • I think this is advice that is more applicable to administrators and policymakers than to students. In terms of individual students, it’s probably good advice, but there’s a bit of a catch-22 in that the ones who are likely to think about it seriously may not be the ones who actually need it. But definitely admissions officers and lenders should be more aggressive in screening out students who are likely to drop out.

      What’s far more interesting to me, though, is his allusion to the signalling theory of college, which gets far less attention than it deserves.

      The NY Times article strongly suggested or said that this was because no one could help them navigate college and university life.

      This is a bit of a head-scratcher for me. I was the first in my extended family to graduate from college, and I went to an out-of-state school with no friends from high school. I don’t recall that there was anything particularly difficult to navigate.

      • I don’t even mean that in an “it wasn’t really that hard” way. I mean I literally have no idea what “navigating college and university life” means or what sort of problems one who has trouble with it might encounter. For me, the only difference from high school was that the classes were a bit harder and attendance was very laxly enforced.

      • I think this is advice that is more applicable to administrators and policymakers than to students.

        Exactly.

        I mean I literally have no idea what “navigating college and university life” means or what sort of problems one who has trouble with it might encounter.

        Here’s the article he’s referring to. It’s been a while since I read it, but I sort of remember it being about knowing being able to handle your affairs and relatively basic life management. I might be remembering it/them uncharitably.

        • Okay, just re-read it. Main issues were navigating the paperwork (particularly pertaining to aid), cultural detachment, and not-great decisionmaking. With the exception of the second, these are probably things that some sort of “coach” could help a person with.

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