The Army Corps of Engineers have just released a study on flooding risks in NOLA due to hypothetical hurricanes.  As it is summarized in the New York Times, the study shows that the risk today is basically equivalent to the pre-Katrina risk — though some areas had improved while others had deteriorated.

The article and study make for interesting perusal, but I have to say I’m a bit dubious.  Firstly, though the jury is still out, the concept of a “1 in 100 year storm” &c may be a rapidly moving target due to global warming, making a Katrina-strength storm much more likely in the future than it was in the past.  The science isn’t there for us to know how climate change will effect hurricanes, but I’m afraid that by the time we have a conclusive model it will be far too late.  This is especially relevant as much of the improvement in flood protection seems targeted at the 1-in-100 storms, leaving the 1-in-400 flood risks more or less unchanged.

I’m also skeptical about the accuracy of this elevation-based flood modeling, which more or less assumes that water will be spread over the city in nice even layers.  If we learned anything from Katrina, it was that things fail in unpredictable, uneven ways.

My only hope then from this study is that because the insurers will certainly pay attention to it, it has the potential to affect rebuilding patterns.  To date it seems that so many balls have been dropped, and so many opportunities have been missed, that it’s hard to hope that anything sensible will emerge.  Nonetheless, money talks, and if insurers stop funding development in the flood zones there will be some pressure to do the right thing, which is to build sustainable communities on the natural high ground.

global warming, katrina, New Orleans, science, united states | No Comments »

After reading my posts on the startlingly low occurrence of heliocentrism in the U.S., several folks have asked me what the corresponding numbers are in Canada.  I’ve done a bit of searching, and have so far unable to find a Canadian data set which directly addresses this question.  My sense though, was that the spirit of the question does not demand a direct answer as such, but is rather intended to knock this admittedly smug Canada-dweller off his high horse (otherwise, they could have asked me about Italy, or the Sudan).

Accordingly, I searched for studies which featured direct comparisons of different types of literacy between countries.  The best I’ve found so far is the “Findings from the Condition of Education 2006: U.S. Student and Adult Performance on International Assessments of Educational Achievement“, a roundup prepared by the U.S. Department of Education which summarizes results from a great number of international literacy comparisons.  Anyone who’s interested in this topic should have a look at the document…it’s a great read.

The two studies quoted are the TIMSS and PISA.  TIMSS is a great series of studies which were run in 1995, 1999 and 2003 which looked at cross-country scientific knowledge.  Unfortunately, Canada did not participate in the 2003 run, so I won’t include the data here.  TIMSS 2007 is currently underway, so we’ll have to wait until December 2008 to see what the results are.  TIMSS 1999 featured a comparison of math and science literacy in 8th graders in which Canada scored 531 — “significantly higher” than the U.S. score of 515.

Table 9 in the FCE document shows the results of the science literacy data gathered as part of PISA 2003.  Here Canada scores 519 — “measurably higher” than the U.S. score of 491.  This data quantifies the scientific knowledge of 15 year olds.

The FCE’s Table 10 shows a very interesting summary of the results.  Looking at Math and Science, it seems that the U.S. remains competitive through the 8th grade, and more or less collapses thereafter.

So the nutshell answer seems to be yes, Canadians know more about science than people in the U.S.  We also have Universal health care and don’t start wars.

canada, science, united states | 3 Comments »

One of the best parts about being back in school is that I have full access to UofT’s extensive digital library. After I posted on the 2006 GSS, and how it showed that only 73.6% of surveyed U.S. adults knew that the Earth goes around the Sun, I figured I might like to have a closer look. So I googled the GSS, and was informed by the website that thanks to an agreement they have with UofT, I would enjoy full access to the data. Wow!

Well, turns out the full dataset is 300Mb, and in a format which is designed to be read by high end statistics packages (which I sadly do not have access to yet). So it took me a little while to write some software to begin to look at this data.

Once that was done, I thought I’d start simply — using the earth/sun question which had originally intrigued me so. In the above graph, you can see the % of correct responses to the question plotted against the highest grade level completed by the respondent (5 for 5th grade, 16 for four years of college, &c). The results are both expected and unexpected. The dominant trend of the graph shows a strong and pleasing (at least to those of us who have left comfortable jobs for difficult slogs as born-again students…and who also think it’s important to know who revolves around who) correlation between answering correctly and being educated longer.

Strangely though, the group with only 2nd grade education scored extremely high…as high in fact as those who completed 3 years of college. This group consisted of only 9 people, so it’s easy to write it off as a low-statistics anomaly. But both the 5th grade and the 7th grade groups were smaller, and fit nicely into the correlated trend. Furthermore, it’s easy to see from the error bars that despite the sample’s small size, the high marks were above the linear fit in a statistically significant sense. Sadly, the sample group did not contain any 3rd or 4th grade dropouts, so we can’t see how the data behaves in that gap.

The chart more or less speaks for itself. The good news is that education seems to correlate with heliocentrism. The bad news is that if you continued in school past the 2nd grade in the U.S., you won’t have better than a 50% chance of knowing that the earth revolves around the sun until your Sophomore year of high school.

academia, physics, science, united states | 1 Comment »

Lately Jacob has taken to authoring elaborate presentations to commemorate the various special days which come about.  My first whiff of this one was last Friday when Jacob told me right out that incredible things were happening upstairs for Father’s Day.  When I told him that the actually day would be Sunday, he rushed upstairs for about 15 minutes performing unknown actions of hiding and preparation, and by the time I was upstairs there was no trace of anything amiss.

Sunday morning came about, and Jake came trotting downstairs beaming with two bright red crepe paper packages in tow.  He wished me happy Father’s day and handed me the packages.  Opening them, I found two exquisite picture frames, decorated with carefully chosen bits of hardware.  Jake explained that Sophie had needed a bit of help gluing hers on.

Jake then cryptically mentioned that my bed was under attack by monsters!  He ran upstairs, giving me looks to indicate that I should follow immediately.  You can imagine the shock I felt when the following tableau revealed itself:

The chest at the foot of the bed had been colonized by an enormous variety of KNex monsters which Jacob had laboriously constructed for maximum scariness and POWER!  He proceeded to walk me through the collection, explaining the details of each — including the inspiration behind the monsters as a quick sketch of the more interesting difficulties in construction.

We then proceeded to “play monster” for about 30 minutes, breaking a few in the process, and building some new ones.

My little boy is the sweetest, best boy a father could ask for.  He made my Fathers day one that I’ll remember for all time.  His optimism, energy, and creativity are an inspiration to me that I can’t even begin to describe.

jacob daum, kids, sophie daum | 3 Comments »

Not much to add to this video, but I know how this boy feels. Worth watching.

read more | digg story

kids | No Comments »

Just saw a Transformers  story on digg.   Following the link I was treated to a quite nice poster for the upcoming movie.  But that’s not really important.  What’s important, and clear from the image on the poster (also above, is that Optimus looks cool.  And by cool, I mean that he has no lips.  Think giant robot that transforms into an ass-kicking 18-wheeler, rather than “kinda like a parrot”.

geek, movies, transformers | 2 Comments »

Each and every time I see a headline about my hometown these days I have to steel myself against the seemingly inevitable heartbreak to follow. Today it happened twice.

First I read about FEMA trying to claw back $485 Million in Katrina aid. Now I won’t claim that every dollar in aid was spent in the best interest of the victims’ recovery, but don’t we have better things to do than go after these people when they’re down? How many minutes of the Iraq war will this fund? The recent budget supplemental was on the order of $70 billion as I recall…10 times the total amount of money spent so far on Katrina recovery, and 140 times the amount FEMA is trying to recover here; and the do-nothing Dems let that one skate into law without one single drop or whisper of a check or a balance. So stop nickling and diming and if you can’t help at least have the courtesy to get the hell out of the way.

Which leads us to the question of where the hell should NOLA look for recovery funds? Well, it seems Smarty Nagin has a bright idea: if the feds won’t cough up — maybe other countries will! That’s right…taking his cue from Fidel Castro’s offer of aid in the hurricane’s immediate wake, Nagin has begun talks with no less than 5 foreign countries to see if anybody wants to embarrass the U.S. by throwing a couple of shiny shekels into his hat. And it’s not just Nagin — Mary Landrieu is in the game as well. Get this: she’s talking to the government of Saudia Arabia to see if they’ll fund the reconstruction of City Park. One more time: the Democratic Senator for Louisiana is asking Saudia Arabia for money to fix City Park.

‘Nuff Said

fight the power, katrina, New Orleans, politics | No Comments »

RealClimate has a beautiful explication of the above curve, which was presented by climate change denier E.G. Beck. The intention of the curve is to show that the current rise in global mean temperature is explainable as part of a naturally occurring sequence of cycles having a period of approximately 1500 years ( the Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles). From the picture, it seems that we should be currently near the peak of the most recent cycle. But if one tries to extrapolate from the leftmost cycle, one finds the peak should not occur until the year 2700 or so. The curve is smooth and beautiful…seems a good fit. So what gives?

But wait — let’s have a look at the key at the bottom. Seems there’s been a break inserted between 400AD and 1200AD, deleting 400 years from the record! So is there a corresponding discontinuity in the wiggly temperature curve? No way. He simply shrunk the x-axis down in order to make his data fit. Lovely.

At what point can we move on from this ludicrous debate and start trying to live in a way which isn’t destroying our home?

global warming, science | 3 Comments »

Well, it’s no suprise, but certainly spectacular.  Last night the first of the roses in Elena’s garden opened up.  We have blossoms on 4 plants so far:

The red rose bush by the front fence

The giant pink rose which climbs up the side of the house

The light pink bush by the house

Red roses woven into the fence by the front walkway

cabbagetown, flower, gardening, toronto | No Comments »

The Columbus Dispatch has a story about how Antioch College is closing its doors!

My brother Jer started his path of higher education at Antioch.  I visited there during the height of political correctness in the mid 90′s.  Even just being there for a day or two was pretty shocking to me.  One really had the feeling that the chickens were running the hen-house.   They also had a co-op program where they would send kids out into the world to work with little oversight or quality control over the jobs.

Part of me is sad on general principles of not wanting to see an educational institution close its doors under any circumstance (not sure if I’ve ever heard of this happening before, actually).  But most of me is so unsurprised at this demise that all I can think is “Good Riddance”.

academia | 1 Comment »