My Beauty Best Teacher

Calestous Juma makes a case for strenghthening engineering education he
"...argues for more engineering academies to engage young engineers and practitioners and generate innovative solutions to sustainable development. Africa has 12 national science academies, as well as a continental one, but only one engineering academy,Nationmedia.
via Scidev and TheGuardian


photo courtesy of the Guardian

It is kind of like the time my husband and I drove up on a horrible motor cycle accident that must have happened milliseconds before. The man had flipped over his bike and slid several feet on his face. I didn't want to look but I did and will never forget it. That is how I feel about the book Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker, legendary hacker Kevin Mitnick's personal memoir.

As a huge fan of Leo LaPorte's old show the Screensavers, I knew who Kevin Mitnick was but really had no idea how much effect he had on my own life or what he had really done.


[Video. Kevin Mitnick uses a computer for the first time after his sentence of being unable to use a computer expires on the Screensavers with Steve Wozniak and Leo Laporte]

Cyber-enemy #1: Arrested February 1995
I missed his arrest in 1995 because I had just had my first child and was on maternity leave but I had been working for telephone companies since 1991 for one of Kevin's targets: GTE, then, the nations second largest phone company. But now, I understand a lot.

Mysteries Explained
Kevin Mitnick's book explained so many of the things that the "engineers wouldn't tell us" that I am glad I read it. I am only beginning to put things together of what must have been shaking the telecommunications business to the core and still does, but I wasn't at a high enough level to really know about in detail.

Questions like:

• Why were telephone CO (central offices) so secure? (We weren't allowed to tour them.)
• Why weren't more features on switches enabled and used? (call waiting/ caller id)
• Then, when I worked on the cell phone side: how did people clone the ESN's (electronic serial numbers) and why was fraud so ridiculously high? How did that work? When I went on trips, why were such subjects taboo among engineers and not even talked about over dinner?
• As market manager of a major city, I wasn't allowed into the company cell sites. I had a valid reason at one point but engineering and operations were very separate to the point of it being odd. Why?
• When we asked questions about fraud why did the engineers go silent?
• Why did that smart guy who could write in binary get hired and why did he work late into the night? The engineers said he had "special skills" but wouldn't explain them. Why did the engineers have secret meetings and not tell those of us in marketing and sales even what they were about? What was going on?

Kind of like when your Momma and Daddy are sharing that secret language about something important but not really letting you in on what it is. Why?

It makes sense now.

COULDN'T PUT IT DOWN
Like the motor cycle accident, I couldn't look away.I really wanted to.

I feel like good people are being hurt with this book.
Now that I have said that, I know that Kevin himself says he is glad he is no longer breaking the law, but my biggest problem is that he seems to still be doing harm.

Much of Kevin's ability to steal the source code of the prominent operating systems of the 80's and 90's comes from his uncanny ability to "social engineer" or gain people's trust through deceit to get them to tell him passwords and share whole files. He shares the real names and phone numbers of many of these "nice" people in the book.


People Behind the Pain
I think the thing that bothers me the most, though was when I tweeted about reading the book, a close friend who has been at a major software giant for a very long time dm'd me on Twitter.

"Read the book, but don't make Mitnick out to be a hero. I owned a computer hacked by him in the 80's."

I wanted the back story and reached out. He worked for DEC programming the operating system (OS) when Kevin stole a copy of their code.

In the book, Kevin asserts that his hacking didn't cost the companies any money. He is wrong. According to my friend, DEC's development calendar was delayed over a month while the 70-person OS team audited every line of code of DEC's operating system.

"Just because a hacker says he just copied the code because he could, doesn't mean we could afford to believe him. We had to audit every line of code because as a company we had to make sure that our product was safe."

As a person hired to find and help fix security breaches, Mitnick should know that breaches, even if a person doesn't do something, cost money. Hacking cost companies money. I feel like he marginalizes the harm he caused.

I don't buy that people who hack in this way really help make us safer or provide benefits of any kind. (Note: There are many "white hat hackers" who do us a service through protecting us. I am talking here about the hacking described in this book before he began his security business.)


Mitnick's mutiny- a last revenge.
Kevin was truly sorry for the pain he caused his Mom and Grandma. Early in the book he mentions that he has an uncanny memory.

He names names and phone numbers in this book of the "nice" and gullible people who gave them their passwords and data files. The "nice" government officials that he conned into giving out social security numbers, addresses, phone numbers, tax records, and all kinds of personal information relating to his targets including how he hacked voice mails. (Sound familiar?) This was in the 1980's until 1995: just a few years, later these people are still around.

What is social engineering?
Social engineering is another word for conning or lying. Period.

The thought of good people losing their jobs because they were duped and now those good people having the whole world know they were duped because Kevin used their names in his book...that makes me feel like he is still doing harm. Some may not even know it until the book comes out.

What good comes from your reading this book?
So, in this book, he embarrasses people and companies by relaying phone numbers, names, and exposing security flaws for major companies like Pac Bell, GTE, DEC, OKI, Nokia, Microsoft, the IRS, the Department of Motor Vehicles, government agencies of all kinds and more?

Why should I read this book, Vicki?

If we need something to make us more paranoid, this is it. If you are in charge of an IT department or security, you need to understand what Kevin did and that every Mitnick-wannabe will probably be trying this in the future.

I will never view any phone conversation the same ever again. I will never even view any open wifi connection the same again. One of the top tweeters, Ashton Kutcher had his wifi device hacked and fake tweets posted to his account, for goodness sakes.

You know, we know that hackers are there, but this book makes them real. It makes me paranoid. Maybe that is a good thing.

What do I feel?
I really don't know what to do with this book. I see the man who just had his nose rubbed off by the pavement looking out at me with blood pouring out of the hole where his nose used to be.

This is probably the first disgusting thing like that you've ever seen me write. But it is the only way to tell you what I feel.

I know that because this book inhaled me and I read it in 4 days that other people will look too, but I am horribly in pain for those Kevin has double hacked by putting their naivety on display. I am sorry.

I don't know what to think except that we all need to wise up and teach our students to have secure passwords that they don't write down and they never share with each other.

It is time to grow up and realize that bad people are out there and just because a nice guy calls on the phone doesn't mean we need to be helpful. I just don't know how I like living in a suspicious world but I guess that is where we are.

I just wish Kevin Mitnick would rethink the harm he could do to nice people. I guess us nice people are dumb and he is so smart that we dumb nice people deserve to be humiliated but I just don't buy it. I don't think the names and phone numbers were really necessary.

Nothing nice to look at. I don't even like the fact I am reviewing it in some ways. I feel sick.

Why didn't someone engage his talent in a positive way?
I have to also be upset by the school system that didn't give him access, the people more interested in "catching him" than giving Kevin a positive way to use his talent. In another conversation, I learned how a computer science teacher found a kid who had started hacking and he put him in charge of school security. Now he runs security for a major university.

Sure, Kevin bears responsibility for his action, but I think that it is our job as educators to help talented people like Kevin use their talents in positive ways.

So, as I fly to Microsoft headquarters to one of Mitnick's former hideouts and finish up this post on my iPad (ok, I know the irony, it is ok.) I have time to think over this before I hit publish.

I keep seeing the guy on his face in the street.

It is going to be an important and much discussed book in all IT circles, an unpleasant journey but one that is going to attract interest no matter what we do.


UPDATE:
I feel like if I don't write about it someone else will and perhaps deify Mitnick's story. Maybe he will read this post and comment he did change some names and numbers, but here it is. The ugly truth about a book I wish was fiction but if it was, I'd accuse the author of writing sci-fi.

With friends like Kevin Poulson (another former hacker) , Steve Wozniak (author of the foreword of this book) and Leo Laporte, a lot of buzz will circulate about this book whether my 2 cents goes in or not and I bet movies and headlines will hit as people begin to doubt the security procedures of the tech companies who dominate our lives.

- Posted using BlogPress from Vicki's iPad

In what could also be construed as a warning to frontier market types that emphasize financial services over manufacturing. Dale Dougherty of Make Magazine writes about "The Visible Hand":

Wall Street hired the best and the brightest paid them handsomely and gave them unlimited resources and technology. It turns out they were building enormously complicated castles made of sand. A great wave washed them away,astounding all the smart people who devoted their lives to speculation not production..."We need to get back to making stuff based on real engineering not just financial engineering..."-Thomas Friedman [continue reading]

Related articles by Zemanta

• Magazine foments do-it-yourself revolution

Kwadwo Osseo-Asare writes:

While I was on sabbatical at the University of Ghana this year, I used to walk to and from work at the Faculty of Engineering Sciences (Torto Chemistry Building) on the Legon campus. One of the things that struck me was the several huge ant hills along the way. I realized that I had no idea how they were constructed...At the same time, I was thinking about how to convey to my students some of the central concepts of materials science and engineering: processing/structure/properties/behavior. How do you teach the concept of microstructure in an environment without microscopes?
Eventually, I assigned my students a project...[continue reading]

Several times on my blog I've written about how President Obama has handled NASA. I've criticized that it took Obama several months to bother to getting around to appointing a new head of this agency in my post Obama too Busy to Appoint Public Officials. I've criticized Obama's decision to cancel NASA's Constellation program, pointing out that by doing this he has revealed to me that he does not not have a bold vision of the future that reaches for the stars, but instead has a vision of the world that is old and already tried (call it tyranny, call it European socialism, call it whatever you want) that sets it sights on the mud underneath our boots- see my post Obama is No Visionary for more on this idea. And lastly I've criticized Obama's budget proposal for NASA last year, a budget that will have NASA focus on studies and reports and analysis for future plans, and change its mission away from exploration of outer space to research and monitoring of climate change- see my post Obama's New NASA Policy- Yet More Broken Promises and Lies for more on this.

Today over at Powerlineblog I watched a video from the Director of NASA (who Obama eventually got around to appointing) that is just mind blowing, and yet another example of how badly voters messed up our nation (perhaps beyond the point of no return) when they voted for Obama and the Democrats over the last several elections. Here is how Powerlineblog reviews the video:

In the video below, Charles Bolden, head of NASA, tells Al Jazeera that the "foremost" task President Obama has given him is "to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with predominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering." Thus, NASA's primary mission is no longer to enhance American science and engineering or to explore space, but to boost the self-esteem of "predominantly Muslim nations."

Exploring space didn't even make the top three things Obama wants Bolden to accomplish. The other two are "re-inspire children to want to get into science and math" and "expand our international relationships."

This is more evidence, if any were needed, of Obama's lack of interest in American achievement or, indeed, American greatness. He seems to believe we've achieved enough (or perhaps too much) and that the trick now is to make nations that have achieved little for centuries feel like we couldn't have done it without them (in the video, Bolden goes on to talk about how much NASA owes the Russians and the Japanese).

Behind the bravado of the Muslim world there may well lie an inferiority complex. If so, Obama is a fool if he believes we can help Muslims overcome that complex by having the head of the agency that symbolizes our technical superiority make patronizing statements about ancient Muslim contributions to science.

Here is the video, where Obama's appointment (confirmed by the Democrats in Congress) discusses NASA's new mission to build Muslim self-esteem, inspire children, build relationships, and study climate change (basically anything other than explore outer space, put men on the moon, build bigger rockets, conquer Mars, or anything that NASA was really established for):

Originally via Weasel Zippers.

The website of RSUST's Department of Agricultural and Environmental Engineering is testament to the innovation at many of the continent's underfunded and neglected universities.It does however raise a number of questions:

• To what extent are their engineering departments and others like them liaising with their business counterparts to explore the possibilities of developing spin-off enterprises?
  
• The sizable number of standalone research institutes and in-house institutional facilities (within the continent) are yet to spawn any startups of note. Why is this so?
• Could the Civil-Servant university mindset be impeding the awareness of realizable assets that exist within the confines of the same institutions?
• To what degree do local industries,businesses, agricultural concerns etc., perceive the results of prototyping and research as aligned with their business needs and objectives? Could we be looking at the most deleterious examples of the ivory tower syndrome writ large, where it can be least afforded?
• How can we begin to kickstart the process of bootstrapping innovation and entrepreneurship within existing institutions that are reservoirs of talent and appropriate research?
  

The greatest learning experiences of my life have never been on mountaintops. They have almost always been in closets, in holes, and in the mud. Today, my incredible husband, Kip turns another year older. (Note: I began this draft on his birthday in November. Just finished today.) I want to write a post of inspiration and encouragement dedicated to him because he is a safe haven for me. He gets me to sit still when I won't. He helps me understand why I do what I do. He is my perfect match not perfect because he's perfect but perfect because we love each other even though we are imperfect.

As we enter the holiday season, I'm using examples from his life to show what I think helps us all live "a wonderful life."

1 - Put love last and you put it first
Kip makes sure the last thing he says to each of us when departing or going to bed is "I love you." I like to do this too because if something should ever happen, I want each person I love to know that I love them with all my heart. Love transcends crabby moments and petty disagreements.We don't have to be alike to love each other.

When do you say I love you to those you love? Is it often enough?

2 - Know that hard times give you the chance to be a hero
One of the things that totally won my heart was when I was expecting each of our three children. I was not a blushing expectant Mom. I was literally, physically sick 6-7 times a day so that the mere mention of the word "chicken" or certain colors would send me running for the ladies room.

My husband took care of me. Cooked dinner. Brought dinner and never complained once for 9 months x 3 children. He was there. Because of his service, loyalty and total selflessness in those months as well as many other times when I was just having a hard time I totally adore him. He was there for me when I wasn't attractive and not even pleasant to be around. He loved me unconditionally. Such love is rare. So many people want to have the enduring love but don't want to endure when times get tough. Kip is a modern hero in my book because he saved me during some very dark days for me with his kindness and love.

When you have rough times, think of how that person will feel when you make it through that time and stayed loyal no matter what.

Are you willing to go through hard times with those you love? Everyone has them.

3- Have your priorities straight.

Do you know your priorities? Are they good priorities?

My husband does: Creator, Companion, Children, Calling, Church. In that order. He tells us that and he lives it. Many men talk such things. To live with a man who lives it every day is a dream come true.

Wow.

4 - Set your morning routine for greatness
Kip has a morning routine. He doesn't like mornings so it isn't my get up at 5 am routine but it is still a routine that fits with his priorities. Shower. He wakes up every kid in the house and keeps them on time. When he is out of town we miss him because he keeps us all in order. He sits on the edge of the bed after getting dressed, reads his daily devotional, checks the kids grades for email, checks Facebook for some inspirational pages he follows, and heads to breakfast where he reads his daily news on his ipad2. He heads out after knocking on everyone's door to say goodbye and "I love you." His morning routine is a stabilizing force in our household because he is so incredibly consistent.

What is your morning routine?

We saw this snail/slug in the mountains and Kip stopped to explain how they move. Their body chemistry. And wouldn't let the kids touch him as he crawled across our path one day on our annual trip to the mountains.

5 - Be trustworthy
When my husband says he will be somewhere, he is. He is there. I can count on his word. He keeps his promises no matter what. I need to be more like him as my concept of time is not as good as his and I lollygag sometimes. I've seen him keep his promises even when he realized he made a mistake.

Do you keep your promises?

6 - Never ever quit
I told part of our story of never quitting back in 2007 in Happy Anniversary CoolCat Husband. I was washing the dishes two weeks a go listening to Brian Tracy's book The 21 Success Secrets of Self-Made Millionaires where Tracy says that his research shows that the average millionaire loses everything 3.2 times. I called up Kip and we laughed together, "Well we only have .2 to go, don't we." We've had layoffs, pecan groves go under water, and me become a stay at home Mom all of which had dire consequences to our checkbook and had us searching the house for quarters to buy milk. Now, we have me staying home to help with tutoring one of our children and not speaking as much this year. These are the struggles of life. It is OK, it is part of life and we will not quit. He has never quit.

Do you persist?

7 - Always move onwards and upwards
When Kip was laid off the Monday before Thanksgiving 8 years a go he could have thought the world was over. He applied and applied and went for the jobs he felt called to go for. He kept us in this small town even though it was hard to find an engineering job here. He took an entry level job as an engineer at a local plant even though in some ways it was a step backwards. He is now Engineering manager for the entire plant with over 1/3 of the people in the plant reporting to him.

A few years back, he was faced with having to lay off some people around the holidays. He did everything he could to keep as many of them employed and worked hard for transitioning others. Happily, he's been able to hire most of them back. He had been there and used that experience to help others who had to travel that hard path.

He could have had a pity party but he chose to move on and see it as an opportunity. Because he didn't get stuck in a pity party, he can now have a victory party. Yes, it took time and a whole heck of a lot of very very hard work and still does.

Do you let yourself get stuck in a rut or are you willing to move onwards and upwards?

8 - Channel your energy in positive ways
When he was having a hard time after we lost the pecan grove, I came home and our entire back porch was completely knocked out and Kip was wacking away rebuilding it. After the layoff, he built the most beautiful corner cabinet I've ever seen with his bare hands. In fact, we don't have room for it now and I can't bear to let it go because it represents so much of who he is to me.

Working with wood has always been therapeutic for Kip because he says he can see the impact immediately. It also is a benefit because our children saw their father still working even though he was in the midst of a transition.

But after 3 tornadoes that hit Camilla in 2000, I saw this in action. Kip literally took over the volunteer recovery efforts. We're not really sure how it happened but he was president of the Rotary club and I was president of the chamber of commerce and he showed up at 5 am after it happened in the command trailer and poof. He received many awards for that work and many people here in Camilla know my husband for who he is. When he's upset he doesn't sit around, he does positive things.

When you are upset or anxious, do you have a positive channel for your energy?

Taken in the Smoky Mountains. Yes, we laughed.

9 - Laugh and Laugh
There are so many times when life gets completely preposterous around here that Kip and I just start laughing at the dumbest things. "What can you do?" Is a statement we often say when things get so tough we just can't imagine it could get any crazier.

The best laughs don't come from a movie (although we do love pulling out old Pink Panther, Stooges, or the Great Race movies) they usually come from circumstances. Circumstances that would make one of us angry if we let it.

Like the time in my pregnancy lack of coordination I literally almost knocked myself out with the freezer door. I ended up on the ground when I thought I grabbed the handle for the bottom fridge and hit myself in the head with the top freezer door. It hurt and left a mark. But "what could I do?" We laughed and still do to this day. We still laugh about the worst dish I ever cooked (when my oldest son was 3 - he still remembers it! I do have to admit I wish he'd forget that one!)

Do you relax enough to laugh at yourself and see the funny things in life?

South Africa at Microsoft Innovative Educators with Stacey Rainey

10 - Encourage others around you
This blog is here because Kip believed in me. The book in January is here because Kip believed in me. My husband believes in me and encourages me.

I'll never forget last year when I was debating if I should take extra personal days and have my pay docked to go to the Microsoft Innovative Educators Technology Conference in South Africa. I was talking myself into not going.

He said,

"Vicki, I know you. I know who you are. I will take care of things at home. You know this is a once in a lifetime opportunity. It fits with your mission of encouraging educators and loving teaching. I believe the people at Microsoft are a top notch company and they'll keep you safe. I think you'll regret it the rest of your life if you don't go. I'm your husband and I'm telling you to take the time, take the pay cut and go. If you don't, you'll have problems living with yourself. I can't let you do that."

So, I went, and my life was changed. I found many stories I have shared here, many new friends, and I got to see one of the most beautiful places on the planet.

It was 6 years a go just about right now (my blog-birthday is next week) when I came to my husband after my morning routine and said,

"Kip, I think God has called me to blog. It is crazy. I don't really know what it is, but I have something to do with this and it is an important part of our future."

He said,

"Vicki, I don't know what it is, but if you feel called to do it, know that you have my total support. Do it. Follow it. If you're going to do it, be the very best at it that you can be."

I'm so grateful. By telling me to be my best and do my best - it wasn't a ticket to blindly follow some dream. It was a ticket to excel. To study it. To learn it. Some people think they are helping others follow their dreams with just blind faith. My husband always expects to see actions behind my dreams. He wants to see me live it -not just say it. (That is why I'm very careful to filter things before I take him my dreams!)

I hope that I do the same for him.

Do you support the dreams of others who are closest to you in positive ways that spur them to action?

Perfection is a lie
No, my husband isn't perfect but goodness knows I'm not either.

I'm not writing this to make you sick or jealous. I'm writing this because Kip and I have had times when we had to run through the house finding enough quarters to buy milk. We've had a time when we all bundled up in our winter clothes so we could keep our infernal heater's temperature down 5 degrees so we could save enough money for Christmas. We still have many struggles and dreams as of right now.

We've given up a lot so I could write "my books" as my family calls them. The Flat Classroom book comes out in January. The Common Core in the Cloud Collaborative Writing book (still looking for your collaborative writing stories) comes out in December of next year. Kip has sacrificed as much as I am.

Well, now it is 6:42 am and I hear Kip in the hall waking up the kids. I think I'm in the mood to go give him a hug and tell him how I'm the luckiest woman on the planet to have him in my life.

I hope you'll use this to realize that love is a great thing. It isn't always beautiful, sexy, nice, fun, glamorous where two people sit in a little cafe making moon eyes at each other. The greatest loves are often forged a midst dirty diapers, job loss, insecurities, and reaching for dreams that may or may not ever happen. These are the loves that define you and make you feel like you lived a good life on this planet. I'm grateful every day that the good Lord blessed me with Kip. I've been asking for my husband since I was a child of 10.

Happy (belated) birthday Kip, I love you.


Thank you blog readers, for letting me take a day to make a tribute to my husband and best friend. Have a great day!

Jeffery Sachs contends that:

Proper risk management is critical to the farmers' well-being and their financial viability since it increases their creditworthiness and thus allows them to make investments in high-yield activities such as higher value-added farming (using fertilizer to plant their crops). Engaging in these activities greatly diminishes the likelihood that a farmer will fall into poverty.
Citing the success of other financial schemes like micro-finance in boosting the lives of destitute farmers, Sachs raises the concept of micro-insurance as an instrument to further the progress already made. Micro-insurance as he envisions it, unlike traditional crop insurance, would have the effect of improving the fortunes of both the farmers and the companies involved and carry little risk.

via TreeHugger

Engineering News profiles a report(pdf) on Africa's "Emerging Financiers"-China,India SWF's etc.:

...the investment being made by emerging financiers are unprecedented in scale and focus on large infrastructure projects. In a changing world, with new actors and financing modalities coming into play, there is a learning process for investors and recipients. This will place new demands on national capacity to negotiate complex and innovative deals, and apply appropriate environmental and social standards needed for the long-term success of such partnerships...[continue reading]

via Mootbox

From Slate:

....It is no secret that the ranks of scientists and engineers in the United States include dismal numbers of Hispanics and African-Americans, but few have remarked about another significantly underrepresented group: Republicans.


No, this is not the punch line of a joke. A Pew Research Center Poll from July 2009 showed that only around 6 percent of U.S. scientists are Republicans; 55 percent are Democrats, 32 percent are independent, and the rest "don't know" their affiliation....

...Yet, partisan politics aside, why should it matter that there are so few Republican scientists? After all, it's the scientific facts that matter, and facts aren't blue or red....

...Or could it be that disagreements over climate change are essentially political—and that science is just carried along for the ride? For 20 years, evidence about global warming has been directly and explicitly linked to a set of policy responses demanding international governance regimes, large-scale social engineering, and the redistribution of wealth. These are the sort of things that most Democrats welcome, and most Republicans hate. No wonder the Republicans are suspicious of the science. Think about it: The results of climate science, delivered by scientists who are overwhelmingly Democratic, are used over a period of decades to advance a political agenda that happens to align precisely with the ideological preferences of Democrats. Coincidence—or causation? Now this would be a good case for Mythbusters.

During the Bush administration, Democrats discovered that they could score political points by accusing Bush of being anti-science. In the process, they seem to have convinced themselves that they are the keepers of the Enlightenment spirit, and that those who disagree with them on issues like climate change are fundamentally irrational. Meanwhile, many Republicans have come to believe that mainstream science is corrupted by ideology and amounts to no more than politics by another name. Attracted to fringe scientists like the small and vocal group of climate skeptics, Republicans appear to be alienated from a mainstream scientific community that by and large doesn't share their political beliefs. The climate debacle is only the most conspicuous example of these debilitating tendencies, which play out in issues as diverse as nuclear waste disposal, protection of endangered species, and regulation of pharmaceuticals.

How would a more politically diverse scientific community improve this situation? First, it could foster greater confidence among Republican politicians about the legitimacy of mainstream science. Second, it would cultivate more informed, creative, and challenging debates about the policy implications of scientific knowledge. This could help keep difficult problems like climate change from getting prematurely straitjacketed by ideology. A more politically diverse scientific community would, overall, support a healthier relationship between science and politics....

This relationship is an interesting one, and is explained not by the fact that all Republicans are idiots and unscientific, but because Republicans are all busy actually doing things for society and not just getting government contracts to write papers that no one reads. Scientists are largely useless bureaucrats of a specialized sort today, performing little to no function for society but rather drawing off wealth from working engineers, businessman, and inventors who send their hard-earned tax money to government-run institutions who employ professional scientists to formulate government responses to government-related problems, and so it is no wonder they are all Democrats.

If you can produce a good, improve a product, design a new system, or contribute research that people actually will pay to get their hands on, then you aren't going to be a scientist, you're going to become a businessman, inventor, engineer, or something like that and give yourself a different label than "professional government controlled scientists".

"...Nka is an Igbo (African) word for artistry, its literary translation is “…of art”. It is also an Akan word that implies “may be” but in Akan, nká means “ancient”. We reckon the arts are the most ancient of human activities.Along these lines, Nka Foundation has a focus on human capital development through use of the arts, broadly defined to include visual arts, literary arts, performing arts, design, new media/film production, arts history, arts criticism, arts education, arts administration and curatorship, and emerging others..."-website
One of their projects is the "DESIGN+BUILD-AND-LIVE-IN PROJECT":

Mbacké NIANG(Architect, Researcher and Consultant in Dakar, Senegal)

... which welcomes artistic persons in the fields of architecture, engineering and the arts that include visual arts, literary arts, performing arts, design, new media/ film production, arts history, arts criticism, arts education, arts administration and curatorship, and emerging others to apply for residence. Length of residencies is usually from 1 month to 12 months. The applicant’s project plan may be to design and build dwellings or non-dwellings out of earth and other materials from the environment.

2011, regardless of what happens in the 2010 elections, will be a bad year for America due to the avalanche of tax increases that will hit everyone, specifically dead people, married people, rich people, investors, poor people, those with kids, those who save, those who buy medications, and small businesses. New tax increases of varying amounts will be levied on these groups starting in 2011, and the result of these tax increases will be lower spending, lower saving, lower investment, lower business activity, and increasing hiding of taxable income by those that can, with the end result being falling revenues to the government and less economic activity. That will mean less jobs, less income, and a lower quality of life for you. The blame for this can be laid 100% on politicians, namely anyone who voted for Obamacare and anyone who refused to vote to make permanent the 2001 tax cuts, both of whom are almost all Democrats and who are all liberals.

There are so many new taxes and taxes that are going to come back from the dead that it is tough to know where to begin, so let's start at the end- on midnight of December 31, the death tax returns. If you die before than, there is no tax on your beneficiaries property simply because you died, but if you die in 2011, the government will swoop in after you die and take more of your already-taxed before property simply because you are dead. They will take 55% of the property of those who have left behind $1 million or more in savings and redistribute that property to favored political groups in society. Of course this is immoral and unethical, but that's what you get when you vote Democrat. If you are a small business owner or farmer, you may very well have an estate that is valued in excess of $1 million, especially if you have worked hard your whole life and been successful, and after you are dead government agents will come in and figure out how to destroy your life's work and break it up and redistribute it to those who didn't work hard and earn it. This will obviously hurt our economy.

The Bush tax cuts are also set to expire in 2011. These tax cuts are not just 'for the rich'- the lowest bracket for the personal income tax, or the tax cuts 'for the poor', will jump 50% from 10% today to to 15% under Obama and the Democrats. You read that correctly- Obama and the Democrats will have worked to raise taxes on the most poor in our society by 50%.

The next lowest income bracket, we'll call that 'taxes on the lower-middle class' or 'taxes on the working class', will be increased from 25% to 28%, and 'taxes on the upper-middle class' or 'taxes on the hard-working class' will be increased from 28% to 31%. Again, these tax increases will strike the middle class as well, meaning that more of your money that you work hard for every day will be taken to you and transferred to the government who will then transfer that money to various politically connected groups. You will have less money to spend on goods and services, which will mean lower demand for those products, which will mean someone will lose a job who provides or makes those, which will mean someone else on welfare sucking down tax money. Unemployment will raise, consumer demand will fall, and our society will be more poor because of these tax increases.

Oh, I guess 'the rich' also will be taxed at higher levels too, although once you become rich, you are able to hire good tax attorneys who figure out how to hide your wealth from the government anyways. And I imagine with a more confiscatory government swooping in to take more of your wealth just because you are more successful will encourage more people to seek to hide their income and assets behind politically-engineering loopholes and accounting tricks, leading to the tax increases 'on the rich' not taking as much of their wealth as liberals and Democrats hope. The details are that those currently in the 33% taxable income bracket will have their taxes increased to 36% and the 'taxes on the super-rich' will be increased from 35% to 39.6%. I predict that the results of these massive tax increases on the rich will not provide the revenue that the government hopes it can steal from these people, and so they will demand higher and higher taxes on 'the rich' out of envy and greed. This immoral theft will result in more money and effort spent in hiding assets from an unethical government rather than in doing anything good for society, less money at the top for goods and services resulting in less demand for products resulting in unemployment and a falling economy, considerably less 'play money' for the 'rich' to put in the bank where it can be used for mortgages or small business loans, or less 'play money' for the 'rich' to invest in the stock market leading leading to depreciating assets and less business investment.

Democrats, liberals, and anyone who votes for them, are bringing this falling economy on us in 2011 by letting the Bush tax cuts expire and the death tax revive. But that isn't all- those who voted for Democrats in 2008 also share the blame for the massive amounts of taxes that come with the new Obamacare bill. That will be my next post.

Source: Investors Business Daily.

Basil Enwegbara asks "...Can Africans learn something from today’s Chinese and Indians? Can we learn that a strong market for goods and services is a leading cause of economic growth, and that market is itself a major cause of capital, investment, and technological advancement? Are we now convinced that economic growth is an organic process, involving many interrelated factors? What about understanding that even the banking industry and other financial institutions do not create the conditions for economic growth, since they are only important when an economy is sufficiently sophisticated to make efficient and creative intermediation between savings and business?...Have we now finally realised that a continent that does not educate majority of its young men and women in job-enhancing education (science and engineering) to prepare them as useful citizens is not building its future high-value carrying workforce? Are we still in doubt that Africa having the world’s single largest number of highly educated professionals in the US and yet they could not be made to work closely with their African counterparts—like their Chinese and the Indians counterparts—to help jumpstart continental economy is our collective sin future generations will find difficult to forgive us? Have we now come to pose the question: How come our well-trained scientists and engineers, those that refused to migrate are allowed to roam our streets without being fully mobilised? What about the understanding that the future of our economic development lies in the mobilisation of Africa’s entrepreneurs, especially our highly gifted men and women who have the psyche of economic warriors? Put differently, are we now fully aware that it is this lack of entrepreneurial dynamism that today separates us from the developed economies of the West and recently Asian economies..."

Source

This California-based website offers free, customizable text books for all your students.

 I don't have an account (yet), but the way I understand it is this:

1) Sign up for a free account.
2) Browse the available textbook information, grabbing whatever pages or sections you think you need.
3) Print the pages and assemble the books for your students.
4) Distribute for free.

There are several advantages of using FlexBooks instead of traditional text books. For one thing, the online texts are updated frequently, so you always have the latest information at your fingertips. For another thing, it's free. How much money do you think your school could save if they didn't have to pay for textbooks? And think of all the other things we could spend that money on! :) Third, your students would no longer have to worry about lugging that 10 lb textbook with them, because the teacher might only print the portions she is going to use. Fourth, there's no need to worry about a kid losing the "book," or letting it get caught in the rain. I mean, the only costs are the paper, ink, and staples used to make the book. ...I just think these FlexBooks could revolutionize classroom textbooks...and give eBooks a run for their money!

Of course, there is a slight catch. ...OK. TWO "slight catches." The most important thing is that the FlexBooks are limited at the moment. I assume the company will come out with more as time goes on (where are the literature books?!), but it's limited to just a few books in the following subjects: engineering, math, science, and technology. The other catch is that, since this a California-based company, their textbooks are only guaranteed to align with the California standards. ...But wait. Isn't the US (or, most of it, anyway) about to adopt those Common Core standards? So really, the phrase "California standards" will be obsolete in a couple of years. Those few years should give this FlexBooks company time to add more content! :) I'll be keeping an eye on this site as time goes on....

At the start of the 2011 model year, customers will look in vain for four well-known American car brands that were the victim of government policies. While many customers enjoyed these cars and many people had jobs making them, they were unable to withstand enviornmentalists who pushed for higher gas prices and arbitrary fuel standards or government bureucrats who pushed for fewer brands and smaller cars.

The push by environmentalists to make cars smaller and more fuel-efficient is based on the desire for clearner air and to fight global warming. Cleaner air is a worthy goal and speaks to the failures of firm property rights with regards to air, but global warming is a passing fad that is based on religion more so than any real science. And yet in spite of the evidence regarding global warming, the evidence that it is purely harmful, the evidence that humans are the cause of this global warming, or the evidence that government policies will have a meaningful positive effect, the government has acted and put in place 'fuel efficiency' standards that are arbitrary numbers made up by some bureaucrats. In addition to forcing car manufactures to use lighter materials which have led to increases in automobile deaths, for some car brands these government standards are too difficult or challenging to reach.

The second assault on traditional American car brands was waged by government bureaucrats who took advantage of a downswing in finances for GM and Chrysler (caused by government attacks on them through regulation, taxes, cap-and-trade, and other government policies) to seize these formerly private companies, steal the wealth and investments by private investors, and then use the power of government to transfer that power and wealth and investments to government officials and politically-connected unions. Then these government officials, most lacking experience in business in general and almost all lacking experience running automotive companies in particular, decided that these companies they had seized needed 'fewer brands' and 'smaller cars.'

But for the 2011 model year—thanks largely to the huge economic downturn that began in late 2008—four well-known American nameplates have gone the way of the Edsel, so to speak.

And so this year we say goodbye to good American brands such as Hummer, Pontiac, Mercury, and Saturn.
Via Yahoo Auto's:

Of these four, the Hummer brand was the most short-lived. The original Hummer H1 (or Hum-Vee) was a celebrity of the Persian Gulf War. In 2002 came a smaller and (slightly) more manageable version, the Hummer H2. Exactly what made suburbanites decide they needed a four-wheeled facsimile of a machine-gun toting, troop-hauling war machine parked in their driveway is best left to future generations to explain. Perhaps the supersized and fuel-guzzling excess of the Hummer brand will someday look as quaint as towering tailfins from the late-1950s? Or perhaps not.

Pontiac and Mercury always maintained a far more balanced product portfolio during their much longer life-spans. Founded in 1939, Pontiac was introduced as a companion make to prop up sales at GM’s Oakland division. Pontiac immediately outsold, and eventually far outlived, its parent brand. Oakland faded away in 1931. Pontiac’s historical highlights include the 1964 Pontiac GTO (the car that defined the muscle-car era) and the Firebird sports coupe.

Mercury was introduced in 1939, not to boost another brand’s sales, but to fill the price gap that had emerged between Ford and its upscale sibling, Lincoln. Cars like the 1949 Mercury Coupe driven by James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause all but guarantees the brand immortality – even if the nameplate itself has finally driven into the sunset. Years of badge engineering eventually dissolved Mercury’s identity, squeezing the brand out of the Ford Motor Company family tree.

Perhaps the biggest surprise – at least in terms of positive automotive karma – is the loss of Saturn. Created by GM to take the fight to imports, Saturn was marketed as “a different kind of car company,” thanks to a lineup of fuel-sipping small cars and no-haggle pricing policy. If only the cars lived up to the feel good dealership experience. A lack of development and new models left Saturn spinning out of orbit. A list ditch effort to market vehicles built by GM’s German-based Opel division as Saturns proved too little too late.

• Not Your Grandma’s Conference | always learning

  Great post by Kim Cofino about the Flat Classroom conference. It is worth looking at this post just to see the quality of the photos she takes! Scroll down and look how they Pop! She taught us how she did this - but oh, wow!
  
  She just did an amazing job!

  tags: education flatclassroom

• National STEM Video Game Challenge Winners announced

  "Aneesh Chopra, United States Chief Technology Officer, announced today the winners of the National STEM Video Game Challenge, a competition to motivate interest in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) learning by tapping into the natural passion of youth for playing and making video games, at the Newseum in Washington, DC. The first year of the Challenge featured competitions for students and developers. Twelve students from across the U.S. in grades 5-8 were selected as winners of the Youth Prize for their original game designs. In the Developer Prize category, for emerging and experienced game developers, the science themed game You Make Me Sick! was awarded the Grand Prize and a collection of math games titled NumberPower: Numbaland! received both the Collegiate and Impact Prizes."

  tags: education gaming gamebasedlearning

• Decoding Writing with The 39 Clues featuring Ruth Culham and the Traits of Writing | Scholastic.com

  Upcoming free webinar from Scholastic
  
  Tuesday, April 5, 1pm ET 10 am PT - my friend Tyler Reed says:
  
  "Scholastic has an exciting video webcast for students and classrooms coming up with Ruth Culham (of “Traits of Writing” fame) and the authors of The 39 Clues series to help inspire good writing in kids.
  
  
  
  It features four of the authors from the book series, and is anchored by writing instruction from Ruth. The idea is that these authors and The 39 Clues series are perfect “writing mentors” and “mentor texts” for kids."

  tags: education writing

• Late Nite Labs

  Virtual Biology and Chemistry labs. These have a lot of potential in science education!

  tags: education science_teacher science curriculum

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Via Dissecting Leftism I came across this article called 'Econophysics' points way to fair salaries in free market':

A Purdue University researcher has used "econophysics" to show that under ideal circumstances free markets promote fair salaries for workers and do not support CEO compensation practices common today.

"It is generally believed that the free market cares only about efficiency and not fairness. However, my theory shows that even though companies focus primarily on making profits and individuals are only looking out for themselves, the collective self-organizing free market dynamics, under ideal conditions, leads to fairness as an emergent property," said Venkat Venkatasubramanian, a professor of chemical engineering. "In reality, the self-correcting free market mechanisms have broken down for CEOs and other top executives in the market, but they seem to be working fine for the remaining 95 percent of employees."

In the new work, the researcher has determined that fairness is integral to a normally functioning free market economy. Findings are detailed in a research paper that appeared in June in the online journal Entropy and is available at http://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/12/6/1514/

This is pretty interesting, and provides hope that our society will finally begin making progress on psychohistory. Pshychohistory, invented by science fiction author Isaac Asimov and a key point to The Foundation Series, is a concept of mathematical sociology analogous to mathematical physics that uses the law of mass action so that it can predict the future, but only on a large scale; it is error-prone on a small scale. It works on the principle that the behaviour of a mass of people is predictable if the quantity of this mass is very large (equal to the population of the galaxy, which has a population of quadrillions of humans, inhabiting millions of star systems). The larger the number, the more predictable is the future. Using pshychohistory, you can predict the future.

This scientist who is working on econophysics could be an early Hari Seldon.

UPDATE: To elaborate on my thoughts on the fictional theory of pshychohistory, I do think there is a plan out there- God's plan- and I do think that some of God's plan is revealed to us through the Bible and his unseen hand (the free market). I think that the field of economics is probably the closest to guessing at some of it, and thus I find it kind of cool whenever anyone works on this.

Too many people are focusing on the 'fairness for CEO's' aspect of this guy's equation, but the more important point is that the free market is working. Probably the failures with fairness with CEO compensation are the result of government policies.

Listening to a recent speech by US President Barack Obama (Democrat) regarding the passage of the American Invents Act at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Virginia, I was bothered by way that he phrased things. Shortly into his speech, he said:

...But there are other steps that (the national government) can take. Today, for example, my (the national government) administration is announcing a new center that will help companies reduce the time and cost of developing lifesaving drugs. When scientists and researchers at the National Institutes of Health discover a new cure or breakthrough, (the national government's) going to make it easier for startup companies to sell those products to the people who need them. (The national government) got more than 100 universities and companies to agree that they’ll work together to bring more inventions to market as fast as possible. And (the national government's) also developing a strategy to create jobs in biotechnology, which has tremendous promise for health, clean energy and the environment....

....So (the national government's) going to have to make sure that (the national government's) continuing to invest in basic research so you can do the work that you’re capable of — and still pay the rent, which is important, you will find out. (ha ha, paying the bills is funny.)

(The national government's) need to continue to provide incentives and support to make sure the next generation of manufacturing takes root not in China or in Europe, but right here in the United States — because it’s not enough to invent things here; our workers should also be building the products that are stamped with three proud words: Made in America.

And if (the national government) wants companies to hire our workers, (the national government) needs to make sure we give every American the skills and education that they need to compete. (The national government has) got to have more schools like Thomas Jefferson....

...That’s why (the national government's) boosting science and technology and engineering and math education all across the country. And that’s why (the national government's) also working with businesses to train more engineers, and revitalize our community colleges so they can provide our workers with new skills and training. And, finally, that’s why (the national government's) making sure that all of our children can afford to fulfill their dream of a college education — that they can afford to go to school and that Pell grants and student loan programs ensure that they don’t come out of college with mountains of debt.

This is the economy (the national government) needs to build — one where innovation is encouraged, education is a national mission, and new jobs and businesses take root right here in America.

So that’s the long-term project.

To be helpful, I replaced the word 'we' with 'the national government' so that I could better understand exactly what Obama sees as the long-term project of change for our nation.

You see, what bothers me is that the economic philosophy that I increasingly believe that Obama is increasingly pushing in our nation is State Socialism. Wikipedia describes it this way:

State socialism is an economic system with limited socialist characteristics, such as public ownership of major industries, remedial measures to benefit the working class, and a gradual process of developing socialism through government policy.

Proponents of state socialism claim the state, through practical considerations of governing, must play at least a temporary part in building socialism. Many Socialists, such as Fredrick Engels and Saint-Simon, take the position that the state will change in nature and function in a socialist society; specifically, the nature of the state would change from one of political rule over people into a scientific administration of the processes of production; specifically the state would become a coordinating economic entity of inclusive associations rather than a mechanism of class and political control....

...Traditional social democrats and non-revolutionary democratic socialists argue for a gradual, peaceful transition from capitalism to socialism. They wish to abolish capitalism, but through political reform rather than revolution. This method of gradualism implies utilization of the existing state apparatus and machinery of government to gradually move society toward socialism, and is sometimes derided by other socialists as a form of "socialism from above" or political "elitism" for relying on electoral means to achieve socialism....

....Trotskyists believe that central planners, regardless of their intellectual capacity, operate without the input and participation of the millions of people who participate in the economy who understand/respond to local conditions and changes in the economy, and because of this criticize central state planning as being unable to effectively coordinate all economic activity....

Perhaps I'm wrong, and Obama isn't in favor of State Socialism, but I think I'm narrowing down exactly just exactly this guy is thinking for the future of America.

Clarence Thomas has long been my favorite Supreme Court Judge, and that was even before I read his amazing book. This weekend marks his 20th year on the Court, and we as a nation can only hope that he is on there for another 20 years. John Yoo wrote the following article as a tribute to him in the Wall Street Journal, and I hope you all get a chance to read it. Here it is in part...

This weekend marks the 20th anniversary of Clarence Thomas's appointment to the Supreme Court. In his first two decades on the bench, Justice Thomas has established himself as the original Constitution's greatest defender against elite efforts at social engineering. His stances for limited government and individual freedom make him the left's lightning rod and the tea party's intellectual godfather. And he is only halfway through the 40 years he may sit on the high court.

Justice Thomas's two decades on the bench show the simple power of ideas over the pettiness of our politics. Media and academic elites have spent the last 20 years trying to marginalize him by drawing a portrait of a man stung by his confirmation, angry at his rejection by the civil rights community, and a blind follower of fellow conservatives. But Justice Thomas has broken through this partisan fog to convince the court to adopt many of his positions, and to become a beacon to the grass-roots movement to restrain government spending and reduce the size of the welfare state.

Clarence Thomas set the table for the tea party by making originalism fashionable again. Many appointees to the court enjoy its role as arbiter of society's most divisive questions—race, abortion, religion, gay rights and national security—and show little desire to control their own power. Antonin Scalia, at best, thinks interpreting the Constitution based on its original meaning is "the lesser evil," as he wrote in a 1989 law journal article, because it prevents judges from pursuing their own personal policies. Justice Thomas, however, thinks that the meaning of the Constitution held at its ratification binds the United States as a political community, and that decades of precedent must be scraped off the original Constitution like barnacles on a ship's hull....

Make sure you take a minute to read the rest and gain hope for the future of our great nation.