Pirates

NPR says the somali pirates do it out of necessity, as they have no other work, so one of the options was to recruit these people as paid members of a coast guard, impressive way to think outside the box!

Flu Stuff

Some author/ historian (John Berry - the Great Influenza) on NPR today (May 5th) talking about the 1918 flu claims that the government tried to hide the epidemic to keep up moral for the war effort - that once people were lied to they had no trust, to the point where fear kept neighbors from bringing each other food in cities and rural areas and some died from starving to death. It is these messages of history that can teach us more in a moment that without record we could perhaps ever understand in a lifetime. Let us study history to learn why we value truth!

Supreme Choices

Here's one on the appointee for Justice Souter's Supreme court seat (too bad my 3 hour wait on the steps of the Court last tuesday didn't earn me a seconds viewing time at the last of these 9 together...)From the Washington Post article (Sunday May 3rd) by Christina Boyd - Washington U, and Lee Epstein - Northwestern Law, "When Women Rule, It Makes a Difference"

"In research that we conducted with our colleague Andrew D. Martin, we studied the votes of federal court of appeals judges in many areas of the law, from environmental cases to capital punishment and sex discrimination. For the most part, we found no difference in the voting patterns of male and female judges, except when it comes to sex discrimination cases. There, we found that female judges are approximately 10 percent more likely to rule in favor of the party bringing the discrimination claim. We also found that the presence of a female judge causes male judges to vote differently. When male and female judges serve together to decide a sex discrimination case, the male judges are nearly 15 percent more likely to rule in favor of the party alleging discrimination than when they sit with male judges only. This holds true even after we account for judges' ideological leanings."

The Interdisciplinary Approach

In college I was a major advocate for the interdisciplinary approach. It is silly to believe life acts in the same isolation as a college major. In studying economics we did not stoop to consider human behavior or psychology, in studying public speaking we did not discourse on the morality of truth and deception, in political science we did not discuss natural resources.

I remember trying to work out with my school administration a program that would take a current events topic and present it before a panel of academics from various disciplines so they could offer a picture of how their like-minded peers would see the problem and then broaden the discussion to how those of the panel working in a cross-disciplinary manner could brainstorm a solution. I graduated before the project went anywhere.

Today I read an article where a professor suggested grad school become more interdisciplinary with students taking on a more broad and inclusive focus for their studies. Funny how I can admire an interdisciplinary approach to problem solving, yet I still hold to the value of specialization. In our current world we have an abundance of information, to expect each person to specialize in it all is unrealistic. I do not mind human beings splitting up the work to focus on parts. There is a certain fear that in looking at too small a piece of a picture you cannot find a real solution, the same way NASA has outsources pieces of its shuttles only to bring them all together to find it cannot make a working rocket. But as humans, I think we can be privy to coordination and specialization, I like to call the plan "society by posse".

If we can aggregate groups of experts targeted to specific problems with the open-mindedness to respect each others professional expertise, we can still have people with finely detailed knowledge but an overall collective which can problem solve towards the big picture. I think the National Science Foundation in its reports does a good job of this type of aggregation. It is just like I envisioned back in college. We do not need people to become generalists, we need people to communicate and coordinate, but that comes with certain costs arising from the difficulty of organization and as such must be arranged by an outside source. So those who don't want to specialize can be among the big picture generalists who aggregate specialists.

So, I have to disagree with the author of the article who wants all graduate education to become broad. After all it was a woman collecting the cute little pterapods of the sea for some completely unrelated scientific experiment who noticed they were all killed in transport due to the acidification of the small container's water with the output of their own CO2. It was she who in reporting that occurrance discovered how current CO2 emissions could acidify the ocean to the point where these creatures, the food base for the whole food chain of the sea would disappear. And that's just one of the many examples of how a focused and seemingly obscure scientific interest has re-directed the course of knowledge by accident! I simply cannot say if a group of generalists would have been able to discover that at all.

The Supreme Court Strip Search

The case is whether schools ought to be allowed to ask students to strip to their underwear if the school has ANY reason to believe the student might be concealing illegal and dangerous items, mainly drugs. In my mind, like all American freedoms, the onus should be on the school. If a student has drugs we can assume a few things: 1. that they might at some point need to distribute them 2. that they might consume them, ir 3. that somebody else knows about it. In each case we could expect to see a change in physical or physiological aspects, such as their need to congregate with other students or a change in behavior. Unless we are willing to make all innocent students feel like criminal victims of a police state which in my mind will make them more vulnerable to crime, we must provide them as a whole with respect, love and trust. We must allow those who have information about dangerous activities to come safely forward including where and when they might be trading, selling and taking the drugs, but we must not victimize the innocent simply because we lack the resources to be more thorough in our investigation. Yes I want our schools to be safe but if we behave as though every student has drugs, then I fear students too will believe that is the norm.