Forms of Inquiry: 2/19/15 Today's Inquiries

Having grown up in the South, I am completely unprepared to function in an environment where we have 18+ inches of snowfall. Being the amateur that I am, I've managed to get Lisa's Jeep stuck in a snow drift. And, I've thrown out my back while shoveling a path from the garage to the street.

Yeah, it got plowed 2 days later!

Here's my Doc telling all the grannies to stay home.

Oh well. At least we are better off than our neighbors in West Virginia.

Going multimedia heavy today.

The Links:

Let's abolish the Department of Homeland Security.

Since neither side is fighting to make the case for DHS, it's as good a time as any to look back over the agency's decade-plus-long history, and assess how the department's actually worked. The answer appears to be that the problems built deep in the department haven't aided national security — and might have damaged it.

Your info-porn for the week is a chart of FDA drug trials. The article says it's proof that the FDA isn't protecting Americans' health. Okay, remember folks, the FDA, USDA, and most of the other food/farming/drug regulatory agencies were created with the specific mission of furthering US farming, agricultural, and pharmaceutical interests. Protecting consumers was never a part of the mission. Rather, these organizations were repurposed in the post war era to combat perceived Soviet agricultural and medical superiority.

Mighty fine Police Work there Lou:

Can violence be virtuous? Only when fighting Nazis and brown foreigners.

What ISIS really wants.

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

Insights into radicalization.

Life in the algorithm.

The searches we make, the news we read, the dates we go on, the advertisements we see, the products we buy and the music we listen to. The stock market. The surveillance society. The police state, and the drones. All guided by a force we never see and few understand.

UPS uses the algorithm to drive the trucks.

I more or less hate Elon Musk but count me in for the home battery. In fact, I'd like it used like a really high end uninterrupted power supply where the battery conditions the power to the house. Nice smooth sine wave of power! It's be great during brown outs, outages, and reduce grid load (except maybe right after thousands of people buy them and hook them up the first time.

The intellectual war over the rise of the machines continues. Meanwhile, researchers fire the opening salvo in the war against the machines by kicking a defenseless robot dog.

I think there was a Mass Effect subplot about this.

Why does financial sector growth crowd out real economic growth?

Analysis of post recession wage growth.

Data about young people and jobs and stuff.

The new Census data provide a striking look at how today’s young adults are different on many important demographic characteristics compared to their counterparts in 1980. We can also see from the Census study how the geographic center of gravity in the US for the highest-paying jobs for young Americans has dramatically shifted over the last several generations, from cities in the Midwest and Rust Belt states to the West Coast (Silicon Valley and Seattle) and East Coast (Boston, Washington, New York, Baltimore).

What happens when wives out earn their husbands. Apparently the answer is not permanent vacation. Or is it?

[A]ctually, in 1 in 3 of those cases, the woman's only earning more because her husband isn't earning anything at all...

It found that once a woman started to earn more than her husband, divorce rates increased. Surprisingly, though, this data showed that whether the wife earns a little bit more or a lot more doesn't actually make much of a difference. So the researchers concluded from that that what really matters is the mere fact of a woman earning more.

Is teaching about instruction or selection. Given that I see our education system as tasked with social reproduction, I tend to think it's about signaling which is basically what the selection hypothesis is leading to. Related.

Teaching is commonly associated with instruction, yet in evolution, immunology, and neuroscience, instructional theories are largely defunct.

We propose a co-immunity theory of teaching, where attempts by a teacher to alter student neuronal structure to accommodate cultural ideas and practices is sort of a reverse to the function of the immune system, which exists to preserve the physical self, while teaching episodes are designed to alter the mental self.

Also, a lot of information about how to fix inequality in US schools collapsed into a manageable form. Here's your hook:

So Fryer and fellow researchers began to study successful charter schools, like the Harlem Children’s Zone led by Geoffrey Canada, as well as some less successful schools. The team spent several years interviewing and videotaping, and came up with five rules to follow to close the academic achievement gap. Here are the five (from the slides accompanying Fryer's talks), with some comments from Fryer

Owning guns changes the way you think.

The painkilling properties of hot peppers.

If you're a language nerd, you might like this news about origins of Proto-Indo-European.

Zadie Smith never really kept a diary. She did however, have a Yahoo! email address which she's used since 1996.

A guide to insulting scientists. Oh snap! Isn't no.5 a feature of the university research system?