High Technology Equipment for Low Technology Countries

Third world countries often attempt to buy their way into first world credibility through advanced weaponry. Given the well-known perennial lack of maintenance in third world countries, this sort of accident should not be surprising.

The South African National Defence Force "is probing whether a software glitch led to an antiaircraft cannon malfunction that killed nine soldiers and seriously injured 14 others during a shooting exercise on Friday."

SA National Defence Force spokesman brigadier general Kwena Mangope says the cause of the malfunction is not yet known...

Media reports say the shooting exercise, using live ammunition, took place at the SA Army's Combat Training Centre, at Lohatlha, in the Northern Cape, as part of an annual force preparation endeavour.

Mangope told The Star that it “is assumed that there was a mechanical problem, which led to the accident. The gun, which was fully loaded, did not fire as it normally should have," he said. "It appears as though the gun, which is computerised, jammed before there was some sort of explosion, and then it opened fire uncontrollably, killing and injuring the soldiers."

Wired

High tech weapons and low tech culture makes for a dangerous combination. Yet, so many third world leaders feel they will have more world-class clout if they possess the most sophisticated and powerful weapons available. It is a "cargo-cult" psychology that will only lead to more tragedy.

The same neglect of maintenance is seen in Iraq and Saudi Arabia. The first world can supply many third world nations with the most sophisticated infrastructure for health care, agriculture, transportation, and other means to modern living--but if the machines simply break down for lack of maintenance, what is the use?

Part of the problem is a near-universal aversion to hard and dirty work, even in the third world. Part of the problem is the lack of knowledge skills needed to understand maintenance manuals and proper maintenance procedures. And a large part of the problem is allocation of funds geared toward acquisition of technology, but not maintenance or training.

If you listen to IQ researchers, you may begin to believe that the human capital--the number of people with >90 IQ needed to do rudimentary maintenance, and with >110 IQ needed to do more complex maintenace, is not available. That is a matter of debate.

What is clear, is that this type of weapons catastrophe is likely to happen wherever such sophisticated weapons are sold to third world nations, and entrusted to third world militaries.

World Without Men?The Immaculate Conception--Stem Cell Parthenogenesis By Mistake. Accidental Virgin Births May be Next

South Korean researcher Hwang Wu-Suk was declared a fraud and laughed off the stage of stem cell research, but the much maligned scientist may have accidentally created the first human embryo-by-parthenogenesis.

Hwang Woo-Suk was found in a 2005 documentary to have conducted cloning experiments using eggs donated by junior staff in his own laboratory, and fabricated the results data. He was charged with fraud and embezzling money from those who funded his research, forcing him to resign in disgrace.

However, according to a US study into his work published last night, the professor inadvertently created cells that were derived by "parthenogenesis", a method by which unfertilised eggs start to divide to form embryos asexually.

Parthenogenesis derives from the Greek for "virgin birth", and is the means of reproduction among all fungi and many plants and animals, including lizards, bees and some fish.

Researchers at the Harvard University Stem Cell Institute and Children's Hospital Boston Stem Cell Program believe the dismissed scientist may have stumbled across the discovery without noticing it.

...Parthenogenesis involves chemically tricking an egg into developing without being fertilised by sperm. Dr Daley's team has done this in mice, and he said researchers recently succeeded in humans. He and his colleagues have now devised a set of standards to analyse the DNA of embryonic stem cells that allows researchers to determine how they were made. They used this method to analyse the South Korean stem cell line. "We now know unequivocally that they are human parthenogenetic stem cells," he said.

Source

A world where men are no longer necessary for the propagation of the species, has long been a dream of feminists--in academia and in science fiction. I have speculated about such worlds in fiction and non-fiction myself.

In a world where almost 60% of undergraduates are female, where approximately half of medical students and law students are female, where 70% of graduate psychology students are female--a world without men is not so difficult to imagine, at least within academia and some professions.

In the high tech world where most technological breakthroughs come from elite mathematics, physics, engineering, and computer science--where females are significantly more rare--a manless world is a more unlikely scenario.

The worlds of energy production and transmission, heavy construction, infrastructure maintenance, big agriculture, transportation, etc. etc. may be at least as dependent on male manpower as the high tech professions.

In reality, a world without men would be a much different world than feminists imagine. It would not simply be a world with little crime, warfare, and domestic strife. Such a world would be a world where large span bridge collapses would become commonplace, and other large scale infrastructure breakdown would likewise occur.





[satire]

Outspoken feminist professors Letitia Snotsberry and Nadine Bullsnort were unavailable for comment as of this writing. Other influential university feminists who asked Al Fin not to reveal their identities have expressed their unalloyed delight at this news of sperm-free embryogenesis.[/satire]

Failing with A College Degree--Succeeding Without One

In the US, a person can get rich without a college degree. In fact, a person can get rich without a high school diploma, in the US. The secret is to learn a skill that is in demand. Charles Murray of "Bellcurve" fame suggests that the fixation on a college degree for everyone of above average intelligence is hurting many students. I can add that it is also hurting the US economy.

There is no magic point at which a genuine college-level education becomes an option, but anything below an IQ of 110 is problematic. If you want to do well, you should have an IQ of 115 or higher. Put another way, it makes sense for only about 15% of the population, 25% if one stretches it, to get a college education. And yet more than 45% of recent high school graduates enroll in four-year colleges.

...The good news is that market-driven systems eventually adapt to reality, and signs of change are visible. One glimpse of the future is offered by the nation's two-year colleges. They are more honest than the four-year institutions about what their students want and provide courses that meet their needs more explicitly. Their time frame gives them a big advantage--two years is about right for learning many technical specialties, while four years is unnecessarily long.

Advances in technology are making the brick-and-mortar facility increasingly irrelevant. Research resources on the Internet will soon make the college library unnecessary. Lecture courses taught by first-rate professors are already available on CDs and DVDs for many subjects, and online methods to make courses interactive between professors and students are evolving. Advances in computer simulation are expanding the technical skills that can be taught without having to gather students together in a laboratory or shop. These and other developments are all still near the bottom of steep growth curves. The cost of effective training will fall for everyone who is willing to give up the trappings of a campus. As the cost of college continues to rise, the choice to give up those trappings will become easier.

....The spread of wealth at the top of American society has created an explosive increase in the demand for craftsmen. Finding a good lawyer or physician is easy. Finding a good carpenter, painter, electrician, plumber, glazier, mason--the list goes on and on--is difficult, and it is a seller's market. Journeymen craftsmen routinely make incomes in the top half of the income distribution while master craftsmen can make six figures. They have work even in a soft economy. Their jobs cannot be outsourced to India. And the craftsman's job provides wonderful intrinsic rewards that come from mastery of a challenging skill that produces tangible results. How many white-collar jobs provide nearly as much satisfaction?

Source.

The most common route to wealth in the US is through your own business. A good electrician, plumber, contractor etc. might have never graduated from high school, yet be good enough at his trade and at business to become quite wealthy over time.

A lot of students go to college because it is expected of them. Discovering that they are not interested in the extra two, four, six + years of additional education they need to get anywhere in most professions is an unwelcome insight. That epiphany may leave a person with a college degree working as unskilled labour.

How much better it would be to include practical training all along--from grammar school on? A high school student should have at least one skill that would earn him double minimum wage. A high school graduate should have two. A graduate of an additional one or two years of education past high school should be able to earn triple minimum wage, or higher if they have any business skills.

The emphasis on college or nothing is hurting a lot of people, and the economy as well.

Interesting Observations on Arabs: Why are We so Surprised When a Different Culture is so DIFFERENT?

12 postulates about arabs from Rants and Raves blog, based on his experience teaching in Saudi Arabia:

1)They don't think the same way we do.
2)When you meet them in ... the right circumstances they are likable.
3)Their values are fundamentally different from ours . . .
4)They can neither build nor maintain a modern infrastructure
5)They do not think of obligations as running both ways
6)In warfare, we think they are sneaky cowards . . .
7)They don't mean their rhetoric to be taken seriously
8)The abstract concept of "truth" means something different to them . . .
9)Cause and effect means something different to them . . .
10). . . They see themselves as a civilization on the skids . . .
11)We think everybody has a right to their own point of view--arabs think that's ridiculous
12)Arabs understand that western secular civilization cannot share the same world with muslim/arab civilization. One or the other must dominate, and arabs mean their culture/civilization to dominate by whatever means necessary.

I took minimal editorial license with the twelve points. Read the original observationshere. An extremely abbreviated quote from the post is below, but I recommend reading the entire thing.

1) They don’t think the same way we do.

No, I mean THEY REALLY DON'T THINK THE SAME WAY WE DO.

2) When you meet them in just the right circumstances, they are a very likable people.

Arabs are often easy to like, but difficult to respect....no friendship with you is ever going to remotely equal the obligations they have for their family, tribe or the community of the Believers.

3) Their values are fundamentally different from ours, their self-esteem is derived from a different source.

4) Not only can they not build the infrastructure of a modern society, they can’t maintain it either.

The very concept of "maintenance" is foreign to them.

5) They do not think of obligations as running both ways.

With us, contractual and moral obligations tend to be equal and reciprocal. They don’t see it that way.

6) In warfare, we think they are sneaky cowards, they think we are hypocrites.


7) In rhetoric, they don’t mean to be taken seriously and they don’t understand when we do.

8) They don’t place the same value on an abstract conception of Truth as we do, they routinely believe things of breathtaking absurdity.

9) They do not have the same notion of cause and effect as we do.

This involves some seriously weird stuff about other people being responsible for their misery because they ill-wished them.

10) We take for granted that we are a dominant civilization still on the way up. They are acutely aware that they are a civilization on the skids.

Anyone who looks at the surviving architecture of Moorish Spain can tell that Islamic civilization has seen better days.

11) We think that everybody has a right to their own point of view, they think that that idea is not only self-evidently absurd, but evil.

12) Our civilization is destroying theirs. We cannot share a world in peace. They understand this; we have yet to learn it.

The comments after the post are also very interesting.