Government: June 2007 Archive Page

Solar scientists predict that, by 2020, the sun will be starting into its weakest Schwabe solar cycle of the past two centuries, likely leading to unusually cool conditions on Earth. Beginning to plan for adaptation to such a cool period, one which may continue well beyond one 11-year cycle, as did the Little Ice Age, should be a priority for governments. It is global cooling, not warming, that is the major climate threat to the world, especially Canada. As a country at the northern limit to agriculture in the world, it would take very little cooling to destroy much of our food crops, while a warming would only require that we adopt farming techniques practiced to the south of us.

Meantime, we need to continue research into this, the most complex field of science ever tackled, and immediately halt wasted expenditures on the King Canute-like task of "stopping climate change." --R. Timothy Patterson --Read the sunspots (Financial Post)

Because Hollywood and the mainstream press in America have pretty much decided that human activity have caused global warming, I am always interested when I come across reports of an alternative way of thinking .

Environmental reporting is an area in which journalists who are sympathetic to the agenda of environmentalists (after all, who doesn't want clean water and air?) are too quick to pass along scary statistics and predictions that have little or no basis in scientific fact.

Of course he would expect I was in the pay of those whose interests I advanced. Why else would I advance them? Both he and I were in a business in which such shilling was the norm. It was totally reasonable to thus expect that money explained my desire to argue with him about public policy.

I don't want to be a part of that business. And more importantly, I don't want this kind of business to be a part of public policy making. We've all been whining about the "corruption" of government forever. We all should be whining about the corruption of professions too. But rather than whining, I want to work on this problem that I've come to believe is the most important problem in making government work.

And so as I said at the top (in my "bottom line"), I have decided to shift my academic work, and soon, my activism, away from the issues that have consumed me for the last 10 years, towards a new set of issues: Namely, these. "Corruption" as I've defined it elsewhere will be the focus of my work. For at least the next 10 years, it is the problem I will try to help solve. --Larry Lessig --Required Reading: the next 10 years (lessig blog)

Lessig is an excellent communicator and an inspiring leader. It will be interesting to see what he accomplishes when he turns from copyright reform to the broader concept of corruption.

All touching -- not only fighting or inappropriate touching -- is against the rules at Kilmer Middle School in Vienna. Hand-holding, handshakes and high-fives? Banned. The rule has been conveyed to students this way: "NO PHYSICAL CONTACT!!!!!"

[...]

It isn't as if hug police patrol the Kilmer hallways, Hernandez said. Usually an askance look from a teacher or a reminder to move along is enough to stop girls who are holding hands and giggling in a huddle or a boy who pats a buddy on the back. Students won't get busted if they high-five in class after answering a difficult math problem.

Typically, she said, only repeat offenders or those breaking other rules are reprimanded. "You have to have an absolute rule with students, and wiggle room and good judgment on behalf of the staff," Hernandez said. --Maria Glod --Va. School's No-Contact Rule Is a Touchy Subject (Washington Post (will expire))

The article features the plight of a boy who got into trouble for giving his girlfriend a hug -- but it also notes that the hug was one of two infractions: the boy also got up from his assigned seat and went over to his girlfriend without permission.

I'm not sure that I'm comfortable with the principal's statement that students need to comply with an absolute rule, but that enforcers need wiggle room. If you call the rule absolute, doesn't that just teach students to think of rules -- even so-called absolute ones -- as a means of dishing out arbitrary punishment at the whim of an authority figure? If there is wiggle room, then the rule is not absolute. It might be appropriate to say that touching itself is not a problem, but to enforce rules against such things as bullying, loitering in the halls, distracting other students, and dress code, and noting that monitors will naturally be drawn to the activities of two students who are touching one another, and that any violation of the rules that really are disruptive can lead to a harsher penalty if touching is involved. But my solution may not work for a building housing 1100 tweenagers in a space designed for 850.

The article also refers to different cultural notions of what counts as acceptable personal space.

Still, the fact that these kids even have assigned spaces in the cafeteria suggests that maintaining crowd control is more important to the administrators than teaching socialization. I understand that there are only so many hours in the day and there are probably only a small number of kids who are causing the problems, but "what about socialization" is typically the first question that homeschooling families hear from people with kids in public or private schools.

I grew up in Vienna, and I was bussed right past Joyce Kilmer to a different school. The school's namesake is best known for his poem "Trees."

I haven't the energy to write much more than "I think that I shall never see / A rule so laughably PC."

See also "Fisher v. Lowe 1999."

The Los Angeles Police Department on Tuesday announced plans to pursue improvements to the city's 911 system, saying callers in the future will be able to use text messages, photos and even video from cellphones to seek emergency assistance. --Richard Winton --LAPD plans to accept 911 text messages (LA Times)

Will future dispatchers have to be screened for the ability to understand txt-spk?

"General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." --Reagan's 'tear down this wall' speech 20 years later (USA Today | AP)