Danielle in Nicaragua

Danielle is a family friend.  She’s in Nicaragua.  In a really rural, poor-as-dirt part of Nicaragua.  Danielle is in the Peace Corps.

Danielle graduated from college recently, and she could be doing just about anything a normal twenty-something would want to do.  She’s smart, extremely athletic, musically inclined, has a great personality and is vastly more beautiful than I could ever have been handsome.  She was one of New Hampshire’s top track athletes in high school, highly motivated and successful.  Yet all the things she’s been gifted with left her wanting for something else.

So she did what few of us would ever be willing to do; she left home and for the next two years is going to teach and farm in the lower-class region of a third-world country.  I couldn’t be more proud of her.

I write about Danielle because I want others to read about her.  She does not have it easy.   This is a huge transition and a greater learning experience for her than it is for those she is trying to help; and worse, she’s gone to a part of the world where the spiders are, like, the size of your hand.  She hates spiders.

She started a blog.  It’s called (surprise) Danielle in Nicaragua.  Her writing skills are not necessarily perfect but grammatically and phonetically close enough to get the point across.  What’s neat about her blog is its endearing nature.  It’s a quirky and fun read.  She only gets a chance to write maybe once a week at most – I believe she has to travel to some larger town that has a wi-fi connection – but her letters weave a story vastly different than the stuff we usually read and write about in the world we live in.  Her stories are about how most people on Earth live, not how we live.

Danielle in Nicaragua is worth a visit.  The embedded video above and the one below (which includes musical references to The Godfather and Radiohead) were taken and produced by one of her fellow Peace Corps volunteers; they are funny and educational.  Notice what they do with the few tools and materials they have to work with.

So read her blog and leave an encouragement or two in the comments section.  She’ll appreciate it.

Gross Incompetence Can Be Tolerated for Only So Long

There’s a fight going on in the Holland Central School district.  It’s the same fight being waged in many schools in Erie County: Too many teachers.

The teachers’ union (with the support of some parents) is resisting attempts by the Holland school board – with the support of other parents – to increase student-teacher ratios, especially in those grades with declining enrollment.  How much decline is there?  Well, the K-12 population of the school is currently 1,258 (last year’s graduating class:  99).  Next year’s kindergarten enrollment is currently estimated to be…less than 50.  Yet there are 6 kindergarten teachers.  Do the math and it is clear that in at least one grade there are probably too many teachers.

In Holland, this is a big issue.  It’s not even a blip on the Buffalo Public Schools radar.  In a bloated administrative system with an entrenched, uncooperative teachers union, a sense of victimization, isolation and systemic underachievement at all levels, the prospects for even incremental improvement to Buffalo’s public education seem remote.  Certainly, the examples set by union/administration feuding do not lend themselves to motivating students; and really, in the long run motivation is what it’s all about:  Motivated students will learn under any circumstances.

Holland is one of the most rural towns in Erie County and will spend $13,000 per student and graduate nearly all of them.  Buffalo on the other hand, spends upwards of $24,000 per student and will graduate less than half.  Holland’s board and the teachers will eventually reach some compromise.  Phil Rumore and James Williams will not.

What a tragedy for this area.  Most small businesses cannot offer jobs to those with such limited skills and worse, with little or no motivation.  The same local businesses starve for prospects because there are not enough skilled workers to go around.  And big businesses looking to possibly expand into the region?  Well, an educational system ranked at the bottom of the state drives one more nail into that coffin.

Our community’s future is being pissed away by a collectively incompetent group of professionals (and I use that word sarcastically) who appear intent on cutting the throats of the community around them.  It has taken us 50 years to get here, and we are guaranteeing at least 20 more years of another uneducated lost generation.

I get tired of watching so much money being thrown down a sewer; and greatly saddened that my analogy seems so appropriate.

Strange Dreams

Why is this?

Sure didn’t seem like a dream while I was dreaming it.

And I dream this, regularly.

Jack Davis, UB Philanthropist

I write not to bury Davis, but to praise him.

Jack Davis was officially recognized for his $1.5 million donation to the University at Buffalo’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences this morning.  President John Simpson and Dean Harvey Stenger introduced Jack to the crowd, praised and thanked him, then turned the podium over to him.  Jack was genteel and gracious, and praised the university in return.

Then he put on his politician’s hat and gave us a lesson in trade imbalances and how that issue became square one of the current economic recession.  He also pleaded with us to jump on his bandwagon.

I think most of those in attendance were academics so this may have been the wrong crowd to preach policy to.  However, I’m glad to have gotten the opportunity to hear his impassioned speech, one that I’m sure he gave many times leading up to his defeat in the 26th district Democratic primary.  It didn’t quite seem appropriate but the crowd was politely receptive.  Frankly, if I were giving UB $1.5 million I’d expect them to applaud even if all I did was wear a rubber suit and walk backward.

He was not a jerk.  He was very cordial and polite.  I’d love to meet some of his employees and ask them how he is as a boss, to learn what Jack Davis is really like when he’s not out politicking.

Philanthropists labeled as irascible are still philanthropists.  Jack could easily turn his back on Western New York; yet he does not.  Kudos to him.

NYS-sanctioned Social Programs for Inmates

There was an article on this past Saturday’s Buffalo News opinion page describing the ways in which New York State is trying to reduce prison recidivism.  These programs, social and educational in nature, try to help inmates nearing parole to transition back into society without relapse.

Many of these parolees spend a long time without freedom as we know it; but they do get free room and board, and they make friends (we are, after all, social animals).  Many regain their freedom with no clue how to find a job, how to hold a job, how to reintegrate into a society that generally wants little to do with them anyway.  Many find that they have more friends (or their only friends) behind bars.  The stigma attached to them and the very limited opportunities work against many of them from day one on the outside.

Re-entry programs don’t always work but even a modest goal of reducing the rate at which parolees end up back in jail is something to shoot for.  It is more than a humanitarian gesture:  The cost to incarcerate someone in a state prison is currently $32,000 per year.  And each court case resulting in conviction costs an estimated $50,000.  Reduction of recidivism by just a few percent pays for these social programs many times over.

This is also the kind of program that will be on next year’s chopping block as New York looks to trim billions of dollars from the budget.  Penny-wise, pound foolish.

State of the University

UB’s President John Simpson told it like it was:  No punches pulled, no political rhetoric or bias.  He was plainly pissed at how the state of the State of New York has impacted the University at Buffalo.  The University is clearly going to be affected by its $20 million cut in state funding, helpless to generate compensating revenue because of bureaucratic laws enacted 50 years ago, and unchanged since.  Staff cuts are coming.

Simpson made a couple of profound points at this morning’s State of the University speech at Asbury Hall, one of them being not so subtle:  UB is not just the University at Buffalo.  It’s also the University of Buffalo and the University with Buffalo.  He is adamant about growing the Western New York economy by growing the University.  He basically asked the state to either help or to get out of the way.  He got lots of applause for that comment.

Simpson called the state short-sighted by cutting the higher-education budget, calling higher education not the problem, but the solution to New York’s economic woes.

If only the local politicians would get the message, but unless they were hiding I saw only two there:  Mayor Byron Brown and Senator Alphonse Thompson.  Brown’s typical political speech said nothing except that he is the mayor of Buffalo (about 3 times) and that the city of Buffalo is a great place.  Some shill in the front row started a round of applause every time the mayor finished two sentences, regardless of how un-profound his statements were (and they were un-profound).  Simpson got two standing ovations.  I thought he deserved the second one, if for no other reason than for calling a spade a spade.

Simpson’s speech can be read in its entirety here.

Campaigns 2

Some of the more interesting campaigns are the personal ones.  I’m particularly impressed with this person’s attempt to qualify Barack Obama in as few words as possible.

From just four words I believe I can characterize this individual as

• Not interested in reading or research
• Barely able to finish high school
• A beer drinker who perfected the burp at 14
• Set in his ways

During this Presidential runup I’m going to scour the Internet for campaign signs like this; it shouts volumes about our electorate.  And it’s fun, too.

Misconceptions About Unions

This past week’s Buffalo Business First articulates union leaders’ concerns over the public’s misconceptions about unions.

Ask labor union workers about the public’s perception of them and you’ll usually hear something like this:  Union workers are the bearers of a bad rap.

“I think some people think unions are very selfish and only out to achieve what’s best for their members,” said Michelle Pancoe, a fourth grade teacher at Williamsville Central School District who oversees new member orientation for the Williamsville Teachers’ Association.  “But we’re not arguing for class size limits because we want to correct fewer papers.  We’re arguing because students learn better when there are less students in a room.”

Well, when I went to grade school 25+ students in a classroom were the norm, not the exception, and yet somehow I learned that fewer, not less, is the appropriate adjective to use in Ms. Pancoe’s last sentence.  B-minus for you, Ms. Pancoe.

And that B-minus is about the best I can ever give the teachers union, whose union mentality even pervades New York State politics with little but self-serving and self-preservation tactics.

It does not take a (non-union) rocket scientist to understand why today’s Buffalo News article about the current teacher pension system makes most people’s stomachs grind away.  For every altruistic aim that the teachers union touts there’s an example of abuse waiting to happen, of contract clauses unrelated to good teaching that become entitlements – pensions are just one.  Protection of poor teachers and poor teaching methodologies are others.  So is the union’s fight against charter schools (and I always thought that competition was good).  The unwillingness of the BTF to consolidate health insurance carriers to save school district costs is another.  Then the ensuing lawsuit, and the defense of that lawsuit, was taxpayer money down the drain;  I don’t think any kids were helped by that either.  Small wonder that unions get a bad rap.  They deserve much of it.

Unions doing dumb things that stick in one’s craw is not new.  I was told a great story years ago about a work stoppage that took place at Bethlehem Steel in the early 60s.  It turned out that the flag being flown in front of corporate headquarters in Lehigh, PA, had 48 stars and should have had 50, as Alaska and Hawaii had entered the union a year earlier.  The workers walked off their jobs until the correctly-starred flag was raised.

You would not guess from my anti-union rhetoric that I’m very sympathetic to unions, and pro-union in the sense that organization and concern for employees (or members of any large group) is vitally important to make sure that health, safety and employment concerns are heard above the gray din of other corporate issues.  They are critical when it comes to defending against corrupt and incompetent management (as one might find within the Buffalo school district).

But I am hard-pressed to believe that many union members are not simply in it for themselves, that they are at war with management:  Contract negotiations are not at all a town meeting to get issues out into the open:  It’s pickets and cursing, wildcat strikes, name-calling and occasional violence.  It’s entitlement-talk, pensions and health insurance for life in an economy that cannot compete globally because of them.

Several years ago the UAW agreed to a profit-share plan that has, in some years, been very successful.  That approach traded rewards based on corporate success for a little skin in the game.  I think that all unions will need to adopt more cooperative approaches to benefits, or else sit by as their jobs continue to move oversees.

It would also improve their public perception greatly.

Mythbusters and the Fake Moon Landings

On Wednesday, August 27th, Mythbusters will take on the Apollo moon landing hoax.  I think they are trying to debunk the myth that the moon landings were faked.  But I’m not sure, and they’re not saying.

Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage appeared to have a lot of fun filming the show, working with NASA, taking low-gravity flights to simulate the moon’s gravity, doing just about everything they could to reproduce the moon landing short of going to the moon.

Phil Plait (from Bad Astronomy, a great web site worth visiting if you’ve never heard of it before) was on hand to provide advice.  He wrote about the very bad Fox TV show years ago that tried to make the myth sound plausible, and went into long explanations (too long, actually) to debunk each of the myth’s claims.

Mythbusters is a fun, light-hearted program to watch; this upcoming show should be entertaining to anyone with even a passing interest in space and astronomy.

I’ll leave it to the reader to decide if the claims of fake moon landings are to be taken seriously.

Trayless Cafeterias

Colleges are going trayless.

At least at some colleges.  The Associated Press reports that West Virginia’s Glenville State College has eliminated all cafeteria trays in an attempt to conserve.  Colleges in Georgia and North Carolina, two drought-stricken states, are doing it to reduce water consumption.  Some college studies are finding that in addition to saving water and energy a side benefit is that it reduces food waste:  Students don’t/can’t stack up food while holding a plate like they can when they’re holding a tray; and maybe it’ll help fight the Freshman 15 to boot.

Cafeteria trays were very popular when I was in college, but not because they carried our food.

They were popular because they carried our asses down a small hill next to the Freshman dormitories, during the winter months when we needed a diversion from studying Differential Equations or any myriad number of engineering courses.  Those slick-bottomed trays didn’t take long to ice over the hill, which tended to make it all the more dangerous – and fun.

We learned physics (at least, acceleration and generally rapid deceleration) on cafeteria trays.

The Quiet Crisis

The National Science Foundation recently awarded $3 million over five years to a group of Upstate colleges, aimed at increasing the number of minority students in STEM degree programs.

STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.  The NSF grants are in response to the so-called Quiet Crisis – the threat to the ability of the United States to innovate, due to looming shortage in the nation’s STEM workforce.  Shirley Ann Jackson, President of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, puts it in pretty plain English:

The crisis stems from the gap between the nation’s growing need for scientists, engineers, and other technically skilled workers, and its production of them. As the generation educated in the 1950s and 1960s prepares to retire, our colleges and universities are not graduating enough scientific and technical talent to step into research laboratories, software and other design centers, refineries, defense installations, science policy offices, manufacturing shop floors and high-tech startups.

We ignore this gap at our peril.

I know of no engineer that needs to retire at age 65 if he or she doesn’t want to.  Even in the Buffalo area, which does not have a significantly large high-tech workforce, the demand for good engineers and scientists outstrips the supply.  Companies like Moog struggle to fill job openings.  My own company has been challenged of late to find qualified candidates for the engineering job openings that we’ve posted.

Minorities in particular are underrepresented in STEM disciplines.  The NSF-funded program hopes to increase minority enrollment in the Upstate college consortium and provide additional support through scholarships, mentoring and research opportunities.

The U.S. cannot afford to become a technological backwater.

Grow or Die

Chris Collins gave a speech at the Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership graduation ceremony on Wednesday, at which 50 small business leaders (aka “the students”) were honored for successful completion of the year-long course. The speech was focused on the rise of entrepreneurialism in Western New York, CEL’s advancement of it and its growing importance in the Western New York economy.

Collins’ speech got a little off-target at times, becoming somewhat political when he blasted the latest state legislation to move the merger of ECMC and Kaleida Health along. I didn’t understand how any of that related to either entrepreneurs or to CEL, and it sounded very much like venting on the County Executive’s part.

But one memorable comment that Chris made was a slam against Harvard Professor Ed Glaeser, who came to Buffalo in April to discuss how Buffalo needs to stop aiming for the glory days of high population and heavy industry, and rather shrink to success. Collins couldn’t have been more critical of this approach. “What is every company’s motto?” he asked, and then answered: “Grow or die.” Collins felt that Western New York on the whole needs to grow, not shrink, or it will die.  He said that his predecessors used to define success as less decline than last year; Chris pointed out that this inevitably leads to more decline.

I respectfully disagree with Collins criticism of Glaeser; he latched onto Glaeser’s sound bite without appreciation of the detail. Glaeser’s point was that infrastructure of all types has to represent the size of the urban environment today, not what it was 50 years ago or 50 years from now.  Buffalo has too much stuff for its population size and the support of that stuff is a real problem:  Too many houses, too much municipality, too much government.

In particular, with respect to government, the application of growth in all layers of government is what has helped make New York state – and especially upstate – the economic disaster that it has become. High taxes to pay for that government, plus unprecedented layers of bureaucracy and legislation have fueled much of our state’s paralysis and made it exceptionally unattractive to business. The growth of government has led to the shrinkage of our economy, and as a result, our population.

If anything, Collins should take Glaeser’s comments to heart and help shrink county government to help Western New York along the road to health. Collins needs to help get government off our backs, and he’s in a position to do just that.  I think that’s his goal.  I just don’t think he said it well last night.

UB 2020 Update

Today marked the 2^nd in a series of 4 forums designed to, well, design the University at Buffalo’s campus for the year 2020. Today’s forum, Campus Concepts, focused on getting each major group affected by the university – students, faculty, staff, community – up to speed on the various concepts envisioned by the planning professionals, to offer ideas, and to obtain feedback. About 700 attended workshops throughout the day.

A capstone session summarizing the day’s activities took place in the evening. Some quick notes follow.

• Students and faculty were polled for ideas throughout the year. About 80 campus conversations have taken place so far.
• The University is considering the shuffling of schools from one campus to another. In the most extreme shuffling, the downtown campus would grow from its current 400,000 square feet to over ten times that size and incorporate every school that had anything to do with medicine (and if the law students have their way, the Law School as well). At the other, lesser extreme, the School of Pharmacy would move from the North to the Main Street campus.
• Traffic and parking are major considerations. The current parking footprint on the North campus is 87 acres, and would need to grow to over 108 should nothing change to reduce dependency on single-occupant vehicles. 93% of the students, staff and faculty operate single-occupancy vehicles on campus. Alternative transportation and ways to reduce the number of trips per person are hot topics for further discussion.
• The campuses should grow by “densifying”, not by sprawl. In particular, the North Campus vision is to create a dense spine, with wind-breaking foliage and bright spaces conducive to student congregation (which is so, so different from the design of the North Campus, greatly inspired by and meant to prevent a recurrence of the campus riots of the late ‘60s).
• Dramatically improve the North Campus lake, making it something more than just a drainage pond.
• Create an urban, not a suburban, feel to the Downtown campus.

The next forum is November 19^th, when a draft design plan will be presented to the public for the first time. Some people and groups are bound to be pleased, while others will anguish that their ideas weren’t considered the correct ones.

Is that also when the litigation will begin?

Resurrecting Buffalo

Can Buffalo Ever Come Back? Probably not – and government should stop bribing people to stay here.

That title, in an article by Harvard professor Ed Glaeser in the New York publication City Journal (and repeated in the New York Sun), riled a lot of Western New Yorkers. In Dr. Glaeser’s defense, the subtitle (in italics above) was added by the Journal – nothing like a downstate magazine twisting the knife, eh? Rather than piss and moan about it, Kate Foster and her staff from UB’s Regional Institute invited Glaeser to come to Buffalo to discuss and possibly defend his position. He agreed, and spent most of this past Friday here under sunny skies.

The forum drew 350 people to WNED studios on a day when most of us would have probably preferred to soak up the warmth and brilliant sunshine. Yet there we were. I had the privilege of being on the discussion panel and also had a semi-private audience with Dr. Glaeser for several hours prior to the presentation. That’s where it got interesting, as that discussion covered many more issues than did the public forum.

But all in all, Glaeser really had two points to make:

• Good schools correlate to good urban health.
• Buffalo and other depressed cities should shrink to success.

Urban success should be measured not by population growth but by quality of life. Glaeser pointed out several times that some of the most successful cities in the U.S.: Chicago, Minneapolis and Boston – to name a few of the cold weather cities – have all suffered substantial population loss since 1970 yet they thrive as urban centers. Glaeser claims that they reinvented themselves to become centers of information flow and today manufacture ideas, not just goods. It stands to reason that a more educated society is advantageous to the creation of an urban environment that nurtures information flow; hence the stress on better schools and better education in general.

My only argument with Dr. Glaeser is the role that job opportunities play. Surprisingly, Glaeser didn’t mention this and, in fact, implied that cities in the South have become consumer cities where people move simply because it’s cheap to do so. All things being equal, I claim that most people would not move from wherever they’ve established roots if they sensed that they had job opportunities where they already live. But for many years now, Buffalo has been slow to create those opportunities, so off we go to find new opportunities elsewhere.

Other things of interest:

• Glaeser basically implied “Don’t look to government largesse to bail you out of this. Buffalo’s success depends on the business sector and the community. Government generally does a bad job, believing that big projects (read: “shiny new buildings”) are needed to solve big problems. They generally don’t work well. Glaeser was against Boston’s Big Dig for this reason. He said to me “The people in Kansas City should not have had to pay for transportation in Boston”.
• Dr. James Williams appeared to sleep through much of Dr. Glaeser’s presentation. Maybe he was just thinking really hard. With his eyes closed.

Ed Glaeser

On April 18^th Harvard Professor Ed Glaeser is invited to WNED studios in Buffalo to discuss, possible debate, his locally-controversial article “Can Buffalo Ever Come Back?” first published in the New York Sun and City Journal magazine. Although the subtitle of the article essentially screams “No, and the government shouldn’t bother to try”, a thorough reading hints that Buffalo should endeavor to right-size itself rather than attempt to grow back to its prominent old self.

I am not in agreement with all of Glaeser’s conclusions (especially the ones using old or faulty statistics), and I think he left out a number of arguments that speak highly for Western New York, like its people. Nonetheless, I am not out to disparage the guy, either. Professor Glaeser is the pre-eminent urban economist, and we should listen very seriously about what he has to say for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that people in high places listen to him.

Glaeser eagerly accepted the UB Regional Institute Director Kate Foster’s invitation to come to Buffalo (he’s been here before). He did so graciously and without reservation. The event will not be a public forum, so don’t expect to be able to walk up to a microphone and start venting your anger and frustration at him; that is not the intention. This is meant to be a serious discussion about the future and how we might get there in better shape than we are today.

I have been asked to be on the discussion panel that will meet with Glaeser at 2 PM at WNED. An audience of around 200 is expected. I also get the chance to have lunch with the man in a more private setting. I hope that as a community we take away new insights into how we can efficiently and effectively revitalize Western New York. I certainly intend to pick his brains.

Other articles about Glaeser can be found here and here and here.

Dropout Nation

Tonight’s CBS Evening News (with Katie Couric) featured a report on the dropout rate of large-city public schools.  The numbers sound depressing, but without reference to either global results or to completion of high school equivalency programs later in life, it is unclear what these results mean.  Many large cities graduate less than half the students who entered the 9th grade.  But as bad as this may look, the measures used to compute the dropout rate are inconsistent and, in some cases, so poorly known as to produce unreliable results.

The States – and various school districts – calculate dropout rates differently, not in any uniform manner.  The Detroit public school system soft-pedals their statistics claiming that their dropout numbers are skewed by students who moved away or simply died.  The Time Magazine report from the photograph above includes a number of creative ways that public school administrators inflate their own graduation rates to make their schools appear to be performing better than they really are.

What caught my attention tonight was Katie’s vivid description of the rate at which dropping out is occurring in this country:  1.2 million children a year, or 7,000 a day.  “That’s one every 26 seconds” she said.

Um, last time I checked, 1.2 million dropouts divided by 365 days was not 7,000 but about 3,300, which does work out to be around 1 dropout every 26 seconds.  Maybe the person working the television graphics didn’t do so well in high school math.  Or maybe I didn’t see the numbers correctly.  Sure looked like 7,000 to me, though.

The 6:51 PM comment by Demslie regarding this article made me chuckle.  It’s nice to learn exactly where to point the finger for this education fiasco.

By the way, this article claims that the Buffalo, New York public school system has a dropout rate of only 9.5% .  Sure.

Clifford Stoll

Clifford Stoll became somewhat famous shortly after his first book, The Cuckoo’s Egg, was published in 1990. It’s the story of his success at tracking down a hacker who had infiltrated the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory computer network in 1986.

Stoll, a University at Buffalo graduate, is a Robin Williams-esque character: energetic, brilliant, and very eccentric. A few years ago I had the privilege of meeting him when he was the recipient of the Pioneers of Science award from the Hauptman-Woodward Institute. I remember the hushed moment when he thanked the presenters, his mother, Cooley and Tukey – at which point I laughed so hard that those seated around my table got really annoyed. When I spoke with Clifford afterward he thanked me for getting the joke.

This brief presentation by Stoll is a wonderful look at what happens when you mix a mad scientist and an effervescent, almost innocent, personality. I would like to know how much of this is a rehearsed act (it is obvious that some of it is) and how much is on-stage ad-libbing.

If you like Klein bottles (you can buy one here), bad-tasting vitamin water or inspirational science, this is a fun watch.

Bad Grammar and It’s Repercussions

My older brother blogged about grammar today, in particular, whether the word none was singular or plural (correct answer:  it depends on usage).  His point was that worrying to this level of detail was irrelevant when the average American can’t handle the basics of the English language.

Or balance a checking account.

Or find Iran on a map.

As a society we often mistake our global preeminence as a sign of superior intellect, but on that issue we are steadily losing ground to most industrialized countries.  (Or are we?)

Regardless of who’s on the correct side on that debate, I do think that our educational system is on the wrong track, as evidenced by No Child Left Behind – a national program built on a false pretense to help some guy win the governor’s seat in Texas.  I think that such programs – testing for testing’s sake, and teaching for the tests – steal time away from the fundamental task of education, and as such dilute the end product.  I also think that mainstreaming children who just can’t cut it, or blending classes to mix the over- and under-achievers is a recipe for mediocrity.  And I think that as their economies grow and they are able to pump more money into their educational programs, it is only a matter of time before China and India eat our shorts.

Our kids need more quality teaching time.  And parents who instill in them the importance of a good education.  And better accountability throughout the system.  And yes, even proper use of the word its.

Instead, it often seems like we care more about the condition of the high school football field than the condition of the social studies books.

Briggs-Rauscher

For those of you who thought high school chemistry class was mysterious but boring, go check this out.

Why didn’t they do stuff like this when I was a kid?

Lake Mead

CBS and Yahoo News each had an article today about the reduction in Lake Mead’s volume which, should current dry climate conditions continue, will render the lake unusable in 6 to 9 years, and drain it by 2021.

Had I not been there in 1982, 2003 and 2006 I would probably not appreciate this article nearly so much; but having seen the lake essentially full and then half-emptied in a single generation, I am well aware that barring a weather miracle the disappearance of Lake Mead is almost inevitable.   The potential disaster that could envelop the Las Vegas suburbs -which Nevada politicians will try to avoid by sacrificing farm irrigation – is just a little further along the horizon.
The demarcation between white and gray rock in the photo above is the high-water mark (reached shortly after my first visit to the lake), which is over 90 feet above the current water line.  The top of Hoover Dam is a good 120 feet above the water line – looking down from above, the water seems very far away.

From the area just north of Boulder City (and just west of the lake) are two water treatment stations that ozonate the lake water prior to sending it down to Las Vegas.  These pumping stations use two giant straws that stick out into the lake, and constantly sip away at it.  The tremendous growth of Las Vegas and its suburbs has forced the Nevada State Water Authority to draw up plans for a third straw, which will go on line sometime around 2010.  They do not make a sucking sound, but coupled with the ongoing decade-long Western drought these straws have effectively overwhelmed the Colorado River’s ability to replenish the lake faster than the water is being drawn off.  Without a dramatic change in the current weather patterns the predictions posited in today’s articles will be unavoidable.

Lake Mead and its shoreline are hauntingly beautiful.  Go see it now, before it disappears.