Great pups, a burning motorcycle, 1978

I've been scanning and archiving old family photos.

Found some pics of a trip I took with Attila and Ildico to the top of Santiago Peak in 1978. Drove my old '66 Bug. That thing could go anywhere.

They sure were great pups.

Here's a shot (click on the photo to enlarge it; look at the center) of my little brother Ray and me. Ray had just bought himself an old motorcycle, and he had just got it to start. Boy was he happy. He road it around for a while. Then he asked me if I wanted to take a spin.

So I did. [Actually, I now think the guy to the left is my other little bro, Ron.]

I had ridden the thing for maybe two minutes when I heard Ray screaming. I couldn't tell what he was saying, though, later, I learned that it was, "You're on fire!"

I soon figured that out for myself. Somehow, the thing had caught fire, and it didn't look good. I laid it down.

Almost immediately, it was engulfed in flames. My mother had heard Ray screaming (imagine that) and managed to call the fire department. Apparently, she was convinced that someone was actually on fire.

The fire department showed up after a while. By then, an oak tree had caught fire. But they got it out. There was nothing left of Ray's motorcycle. I was burned, but not badly. I think I've got a scar on my hand from that day. Maybe.

I do believe that this episode set my mom back some. Poor thing.

There were many such episodes, where my brother Ray was concerned.

As I recall, Ray tried to blame me for the incident. That was typical of him.

Over the subsequent years, I often lent my bro money. I knew I'd never see any of it again.

The last time I saw him was the night I picked him up from county jail. It was maybe 2 or 3 in the morning. He had lost some teeth. He didn't look good.

He wanted to go to a Del Taco, so we went there. He loved that crap.

That night, as I recall, he asked me when I was gonna pay him all the money I owed him.

I just smiled.

Ronny, Ildy, Ray, and Attila, 1978.

It’s so old-fashioned!

...Speaking of bullshit, from a scientific perspective, the direction that America’s space program has taken in recent decades is seriously wrong-headed. During the Bush Administration, things got worse still: for the Bushies, science was an enemy.

Early indications are that Mr. Obama understands the value of science and has made wise decisions—in particular concerning our space program.

Many scientists complain that, Buzz Aldrin to the contrary, if we seek to attain scientific knowledge, we must abandon our prejudice in favor of manned space flight, which is both expensive and unnecessary. Robots can do almost anything astronauts can do, and they can do it much more cheaply.

Initially, in this regard, America’s space program had some stunning, though now appreciated, victories.

Yeah, but didn‘t we get caught with our pants down by the Soviets with their Sputnik? Weren’t we playing nothing but catch-up?!

As Bob Park explained yesterday (What’s New), that’s not really what happened:

Launched on 4 Oct 1957, [the USSR’s] Sputnik carried no instruments. It just beeped…. But a month later, Sputnik 2 carried a Geiger tube and a radio transmitter to relay the Geiger output back to Earth. It also carried a tape recorder to store data when the satellite is over the horizon, but it wasn't working on launch day.

Soviet scientists placed a call directly to Premier Nikita Khrushchev requesting permission to delay the launch for a day, but Khrushchev refused; he wanted to announce another successful launch at a meeting of heads-of-state the next day….
…
On 31 Jan 1958, only four months after Sputnik, the US launched Explorer 1 carrying an experiment designed by James Van Allen, Physics Chair at the University of Iowa. It was just a Geiger tube, a radio transmitter, and a recorder – but the recorder worked.

Data from a full orbit confirmed the existence of charged particle bands around Earth, now known as the Van Allen belts. It was the first major discovery from beyond the ionosphere.

Soviet scientists were crushed; only four months after Sputnik, the US had taken the lead in space science and has never relinquished it.

Manned space flight remains a sideshow. In the end, all that will endure is the science. James Van Allen was the true American space hero. During [my] long talk with Jim a year before his death in 2006, he summed-up manned space flight: "It's so old-fashioned."

"You cannot ignore the facts"

a priori (adj.): Based on a hypothesis or theory rather than on experiment or experience.

—American Heritage Dictionary

“Let’s get empirical.” As a citizen of a college community, I find myself saying that a lot. “Let’s get empirical” means: let’s take a look at what actually happens in the world.

As opposed to what? As opposed to appealing to unverified theories and our sense of the facts.

People, especially teachers, really love their sense of things, their intuitions. They trust ‘em—just like W trusted his "gut."

Screw that. Gotta look at the facts. Unfortunately, one can’t always get the facts. Getting reliable data can be difficult.

But sometimes one can get them. If relevant data (experiments, studies, surveys, etc.) are available, we need to look at all that before making decisions. That’s why I’ve been keen to monitor good studies (no, not instructor and administrator anecdotes) regarding the viability of “online instruction.” OI looks like a classic case of something shiny and new that some will embrace without bothering to ask whether it works.

Let’s give this general fallacy a name: “inappropriate a prioriism.” It is the fallacy of making decisions on the basis of theory or our sense of things—when relevant empirical data are available and have not yet been examined.

Incidentally, so far, there are strong indications that OI does work for at least some kinds of learning. But, really, not enough is known about it to justify a wholehearted embrace. (It is possible that OI works well, not because of anything intrinsic to OI, but because of the circumstance that OI students spend more time studying. My “sense” of things [oops!] is that study time is more important than “mode of instruction.”)

PRESIDENT EMPIRICUS

One thing that has impressed me about President Obama is his apparent tendency to get empirical.

A couple of days ago, Paul Krugman offered a defense of Obama’s efforts with regard to health care reform (Costs and Compassion). At one point, he stated:

I don’t know how many people understand the significance of Mr. Obama’s proposal to give MedPAC, the expert advisory board to Medicare, real power. But it’s a major step toward reducing the useless spending — the proliferation of procedures with no medical benefits — that bloats American health care costs.

And both the Obama administration and Congressional Democrats have also been emphasizing the importance of “comparative effectiveness research” — seeing which medical procedures actually work.

If ever there were an area of human thought and action afflicted by “inappropriate a prioriism” it is health and medicine. Here, the affliction is widespread and system-wide. It’s the perfect place to “get empirical.” That’s what Obama wants to do.

Perhaps another example of Obama’s “appropriate empiricism” concerns reform of K-12 education. In the LA Times this morning (Obama chides California for not using test scores to evaluate teachers), we learn that

President Obama singled out California on Friday for failing to use education data to distinguish poor teachers from good ones, a situation that his administration said must change for the state to receive competitive, federal school dollars.

Obama's comments echo recent criticisms by his Education secretary, Arne Duncan, who warned that states that bar the use of student test scores to evaluate teachers, as California does, are risking those funds. In an announcement Friday at the Education Department in Washington, Obama and Duncan said the "Race to the Top" awards will be allocated to school districts that institute reforms using data-driven analysis, among other things.

"You cannot ignore facts," Obama said. "That is why any state that makes it unlawful to link student progress to teacher evaluations will have to change its ways."

Obama recently announced that considerable federal funds will be made available for instruction in the states, but it is largely tied to recipients' efforts at determining what actually works.

THE IRRATIONAL EGOIST

Now, as it turns out, emphasizing “the facts” in education is an approach that can be abused, a fact illustrated by eight years of George W. Bush and his right-wing “learning outcomes” crowd.

Whether the subject was education or foreign policy, Bush was consistently factually challenged. Not only did he and his people commit the fallacy of inappropriate a prioriism, they dove still deeper into irrationality, routinely proceeding as though the truth is somehow “known” (by the righteous? the God-fearing?) independent of the evidence and the “evidence” is something that one manufactures or exploits to sell this “knowledge.”

I do hope that the era of Presidential anti-rationality is over. Looks like it is.

Prima facie, it should be possible to determine whether a teacher teaches well or not. At the very least, we should be able to identify the very bad teachers. Getting rid of them would be a great help.

EDUCATIONIST ANTI-RATIONALISM

There’s one problem though. The California K-12 educational establishment rivals the Bush Administration for systematic anti-rationality. Remember California's absurd embrace of “whole language” reading instruction? (Empirical evidence did not support the "whole language" approach. It did support the "phonetic" approach that WL eschewed.) Remember the emphasis on “self-esteem”? (There were no studies supporting the idea that encouraging high self-regard prevents problems like teen pregnancy, criminality, and drug use. No matter!)

If we leave the matter of evaluating teachers up to them, we’re in big trouble.

I say we get Penn and Teller. (Nobody's perfect: read this.)