Go See Europe: While It Lasts

The fertility rate for Spain is 1.15 children per woman. Replacement level is 2.1 children per woman. European levels across the board are below 1.5. Europe is shrinking, Europe is dying. Looking at Spain (from a Dennis Mangan comment):1.15 Children per female birthrate in Spain...

200 people have 115 children.
115 children have 66 grandchildren.
66 grandchildren have 38 great grandchildren.......

It is clear that as indigenous Spaniards, Russians, Germans, and French decline rapidly, third world immigrants to Europe will be procreating at rates well above 3.0 children per woman. With polygamy fueled by young female immigration and supported by state welfare payments, the fertility rate for third worlders in Europe could easily reach 5.0, per 1st generation woman. But if you think about it, even with a fertility rate barely above replacement, third worlders would replace Europeans within a few generations! You must include European decline juxtaposed to third world incline, when looking at demographic projections.

Russian Population

The poorer the nation, the higher the fertility rate. Understand that the poorer the nation, the greater the motivation to emigrate away from the third world toward the first world. The overcrowding from high fertility accelerates the poverty, and acts as a physical force to push uneducated third worlders over to Europe.As illiterate third worlders replace the voting populations of modern Europe, the outlook of European governments will necessarily change. Infrastructure will necessarily break down for lack of upkeep. Cities of Europe will resemble Beirut at its worst. Recent elections in Kenya will become the model for European elections. Europe is growing old, while poorer and less literate nations are remaining young, and reproducing rapidly. The surplus young will continue pouring across porous borders, looking for opportunity wherever it presents itself. While the opportunity held out by the USA is the opportunity to work hard and prosper, the opportunity that Europe presents to the third world is the opportunity to receive generous state welfare payments. Europe may as well erect billboards across the third world: "Come to Europe and have many children--on our dime!"

If you take into account that a large slice of Europe's best educated and most energetic people are emigrating from Europe to the far-flung Anglosphere, the situation appears particularly bleak for Europe. And Europe's brightest and most ambitious who choose to stay at home? Their fertility rate is even lower than that of their nation's as a whole. Much lower. So visit while you can. While Europe still exists as Europe.

Transition of Europe and Japan to labour shortage economies
Fascinating Philip Longman PDF presentation on depopulation
Russian plans to reverse population decline
No Easy Answers

Making Photovoltaics Cheaper and Easier

Three different approaches to speeding up the production of photovoltaic surfaces--print-on PV , paint-on PV, and quantum PV--may provide product designers and architects with novel energy solutions. First, "print-on PV" uses ink-jet printer technology to rapidly print out PV surfaces.

Konarka Technologies, the Massachusetts-based company we first recognized with a 2005 Breakthrough Award for its affordable Power Plastic solar film, said this week that it has successfully manufactured those thin solar cells using an inkjet printer. In addition to decreasing production costs because it relies on existing inkjet technology, the printable Power Plastic cells can be applied to a range of small-scale, highly variable power opportunities, from indoor sensors to small RFID installations. ___PopMech__via__BayouRenaissanceMan

Next, paint-on PV

The University of Swansea said it would now begin working with Bangor University, the University of Bath and Imperial College London on the project....Dr Dave Worsley, a reader in the Materials Research Centre at the University's School of Engineering, who led the first phase of research said that the breakthrough could have enormous implications for the way new buildings are powered.

"[Corus' pre-finished steel division] Corus Colours produces around 100 million square metres of steel building cladding a year," he observed. "If this was treated with the photovoltaic material, and assuming a conservative five per cent energy conversion rate, then we could be looking at generating 4,500Gw of electricity through the solar cells annually. That's the equivalent output of roughly 50 wind farms."

It is also hoped that the solar cell material could be applied to steel using existing paint rollers used during steel manufacturing processes. The researchers said they hoped to develop a way of applying layers of solar cells to a flexible steel service at a rate of 30-40m sq per minute, potentially making the process relatively cost effective.___Source

Eventually, every conceivable (non-living) surface could be generating electricity while the sun is shining. As engineers provide more flexible methods of adding PV to virtually any product, it is up to designers to incorporate the technology in such a way as to be unobtrusive, safe, and reliable.The third new PV approach is custom-sized quantum dot PV for catching solar energy across the solar spectrum.

The researchers used four different sizes of quantum dots (between 2.3 and 3.7 nm in diameter) which exhibited absorbent peaks at different wavelengths (between 505 and 580 nm). The group observed a trade-off in performance corresponding with quantum dot size: smaller quantum dots could convert photons to electrons at a faster rate than larger quantum dots, but larger quantum dots absorbed a greater percentage of incoming photons than smaller dots. The 3-nm quantum dots offered the best compromise, but the researchers plan to improve both the conversion and absorption performances in future prototypes.

Besides investigating the quantum dots’ size quantization effect, the researchers also experimented with two different nano architectures – particle films and nanotubes – that act as scaffolds for transporting electrons from the quantum dots to the electrodes. The group found that the hollow 8000-nm-long nanotubes, where both the inner and outer surfaces were accessible to quantum dots, could transport electrons more efficiently than films. ___NextBigFuture

Solar energy is available in quantities too large for humans to use. By incorporating PV into more products and installations, we can use ever more of the plentiful resource.

Of course, the real solar revolution happens when we can store as much energy as we can collect.

Brain Boost: Neural Wave "Surfer's Helper"

In a recent commentary in the journal Nature, two Cambridge University researchers reported that about a dozen of their colleagues had admitted to regular use of prescription drugs like Adderall, a stimulant, and Provigil, which promotes wakefulness, to improve their academic performance. The former is approved to treat attention deficit disorder, the latter narcolepsy, and both are considered more effective, and more widely available, than the drugs circulating in dorms a generation ago.

NYTimesThese are competitive times for top brains. The person who can best keep up with trends while developing his own competitive approach to his field, has the best chance of success. One must ride the wave of discovery--and inject unique input into the wave at the same time. Brains strain to stay "on" all the time. An assist is often needed.

One person who posted anonymously on the Chronicle of Higher Education Web site said that a daily regimen of three 20-milligram doses of Adderall transformed his career: “I’m not talking about being able to work longer hours without sleep (although that helps),” the posting said. “I’m talking about being able to take on twice the responsibility, work twice as fast, write more effectively, manage better, be more attentive, devise better and more creative strategies.”___NYTimes

Cognitive enhancers are being used in many areas where focus and alertness are valued, beyond the academic and research setting.

Cognitive-enhancing drugs are increasingly being used in non-medical situations such as shift work and by active military personnel....There are also situations in which many would agree that the use of drugs to improve concentration or planning may be tolerated, if not encouraged, such as by air-traffic controllers, surgeons and nurses who work long shifts. One can even imagine situations where such enhancing-drug-taking would be recommended, such as for airport-security screeners, or by soldiers in active combat.

...In future, drug treatment may be better tailored to individuals through a better understanding of how genes influence the body's response to drugs. Because domain-specific effects vary between individuals depending on their genetic make-up, drug efficacy may ultimately be enhanced and side effects reduced. Many believe that with increasingly sophisticated and targeted treatments, truly smart drugs with moderate-to-large effects on cognition, will become feasible in the future.___Nature

Investment analysts, stock brokerages, venture firms, commodities traders, and the like certainly support the manufacturers of methylphenidate, adderall, and modafenil. The military is another big customer. And we all know medical students or grad students who swear by the stuff--insist it keeps them going.

The tradeoff is the main consideration. What do you gain, what do you lose? A few drinks of alcohol can make it harder to refuse the next drink. Perhaps once on the mental enhancers, coming off of them becomes doubly or triply hard?

Never forget the evolutionary origins of life. Life is competition. Competition entails risk. For modern humans, making sense of information can be craved more desperately than food or drink.

Bio-Energy Exceeds World Energy Use

Bio-Energy stands to become one of the main energy pillars of the Earth within twenty years (alongside nuclear fission, enhanced geothermal, and solar thermal/PV). Failure to understand that simple and obvious fact is allowing fear and confusion about energy prospects to obscure the near-future energy picture. Every year, land biomass alone stores 6 times more energy than the total world annual energy consumption.

• Total mass of living matter (including moisture) - 2000 billion tonnes
• Total mass in land plants - 1800 billion tonnes
• Total mass in forests -1600 billion tonnes
• Per capita terrestrial biomass - 400 tonnes
• Energy stored in terrestrial biomass 25 000 EJ
• Net annual production of terrestrial biomass - 400 000 million tonnes
• Rate of energy storage by land biomass - 3000 EJ/y (95 TW)
• Total consumption of all forms of energy - 400 EJ/y (12 TW)
• Biomass energy consumption - 55 EJ/y ( 1. 7 TW)

SourceExciting and revolutionary breakthroughs with clear implications for Bio-Energy such as this and this, combined with the huge and growing work in biomass, liquid biofuels, garbage to energy projects, and synthetic biology projects suggest that the government-academia-industrial complex has just begun to tap into the potential resources of bio.

Turning the huge potential of biomass into usable energy is the purpose of the rapidly growing Bio-Energy industry. It takes time to develop the necessary infrastructure for a global bio-energy industry, but the economic and energy promise of such an industry makes the project worthwhile. The very de-centralised nature of Bio-Energy should allow much larger numbers of small and medium-scale enterprises to take advantage of the money flow--as opposed to the mega-centralised oil industry.

The biosphere is hugely expandable, unlike global oil deposits. Bio-Energy potential, once developed, dwarfs any conceivable human energy needs projections for the next several hundred years. Bio-Energy should not compete with food for feedstock, and third generation projects are featuring the use of agro-waste and forestry waste as feedstocks.

First generation approaches to biofuels such as soybean biodiesel and maize ethanol, were corrupt and misguided mega-farm industry insider deals, involving US Senators such as Ben Nelson and Chuck Grassley. Corrupt politicians from farm states should be held to account for their huge waste of US taxpayer resources and wasted time.

As long as the media continues to trumpet faux crises such as CAGW and Peak Oil, and demonise hopeful energy solutions such as Bio-Energy and safe nuclear, the public will continue to be "dumbed down" and incapable of making informed decisions on energy.

Global Warming: Politics, Science, Loot

There is a lot more to the "catastrophic anthropogenic global warming" (CAGW) scheme of things than what you typically read in the papers or see on television news. Tonight I focus on the politics, the (uncertain) science, and the loot.

First, politics:

”Many individuals, including a large portion of environmentalists, believe that a purely technological approach to stablizing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere could lead to social apathy towards climate change.

Ted Parsons, a professor at the School of National Resources and Environment at the University of Michigan, writes that the promises of air capture could carry a ‘moral hazard’ because political pressure for near-term efforts to curtail climate change may be reduced.

Air capture also addresses one of many factors adversely affecting the environment. The climate crisis is a powerful tool to motivate change - like checking the ever-expanding global population and excessive resource consumption - and if the urgency of climate change is compromised, other environmental projects may fall by the wayside.”

Thus we have the reasoning as to why the science issues on Climate Science have been mostly ignored - the issue is not about climate science. The goal is to use the term “global warming” (with “climate change” used to make the concept cover all aspects of climate) not to ”motivate” change, but to force the public and policymakers to adopt specific policy and political actions that promotes particular agendas. ___ClimateScience

Next, the uncertain science:

"Runaway greenhouse theories contradict energy balance equations," Miskolczi states. Just as the theory of relativity sets an upper limit on velocity, his theory sets an upper limit on the greenhouse effect, a limit which prevents it from warming the Earth more than a certain amount.

How did modern researchers make such a mistake? They relied upon equations derived over 80 years ago, equations which left off one term from the final solution.____DailyTech

Finally the loot:

There’s money to be made by cultivating a green image. And there’s lots of money to be doled out to researchers studying climate change and new energy technologies.___NYTimes

Just ask Al Gore: he, can, tell, you, plenty, of ways to make money on a convenient scam. Not bad, if you have the cold blood to pull it off.

Climate change is a euphemism referring to a jigsaw puzzle that is lacking most of its pieces. Some people can take the puzzle, pretend it is solved and complete, and turn the world into their own private paradise. Woe to the others, though. Everyone else.

The Oil Price Bubble: How Low Can It Go?

While most people are asking "How high can oil go?", a lot of informed analysts are wondering how far the price of oil will drop when the bubble bursts. T. Boone Pickens is shorting oil, the chief of the IMF considers an oil price drop more than just possible, Saudi oil minister Naimi suspects prices may fall into the $60 to $70 range for a while, and the IEA has thought for several weeks that international oil prices are likely to fall for many reasons.

Many "doomseekers" would like to think that oil production has peaked, and prices will keep climbing to $200/bbl, $300/bbl and higher. But the inside analysts in the industry believe that prices are more likely to fall--significantly--before they go that high, if they ever do.

Oil has been on a tear since last summer, when investors began reacting to financial turmoil and economic weakness in the United States – and the resulting decline in American dollar and interest rates – by moving aggressively into crude oil futures markets.

Since then, crude prices have climbed nearly 50 per cent from $70 a barrel. That increase came even as analysts were reducing their forecasts of global demand growth this year, in light of growing economic weakness in the United States and elsewhere.

The stunning price rise has been driven almost exclusively by investors who were bailing out of the dollar and other financial assets and pouring into commodities, Judith Dwarkin, chief economist at Calgary-based Ross Smith Energy Group, said yesterday.

“The fundamentals don't support prices at $80, let alone $100,” Ms. Dwarkin said. She said global demand growth has slowed in recent years, while spare capacity among members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries has expanded somewhat, even as inventories of gasoline are at robust levels.

“The greater prices diverge from what is fundamentally supportable, and the longer they stay at a distance from what is fundamentally supportable, the greater the risk of a correction, and a large one.”...She has forecast an average price of $75 a barrel for this year.

Oil consumption in the developed world is dropping more sharply than anticipated just a few months ago because the subprime crisis has contributed to increasing economic weakness, Mr. Lynch said. Even emerging economies have slowed their demand growth in the face of record high prices, he added.

Prices are remaining high owing to speculation. “It's people saying the stock market doesn't look good, real estate doesn't look good, the dollar doesn't look good, so let's buy commodities,” he said.

He said prices could drop below $50 a barrel over the next three to five years, if OPEC is unable to significantly cut production in the face of weaker demand.___GlobeandMail_via__EnvironmentalRepublic

Other analysts think the prices will remain in the US $90 to $110 range for the foreseeable future, if world economies continue to grow.

Al Fin readers understand that far more oil is still in the ground, than has been pumped. The price of pumping and refining that oil will likely rise as the more attainable oil is depleted. High oil prices (above US $60 a barrel) are likely from now on. Anything above $60 at this time is likely due to lively speculation by hedge investors, and perhaps even manipulation by high level traders in the run-up to US presidential elections this November. A lower dollar and higher oil could have a significant impact on US voter mood in November.

In the long run, however, technology is king. Better oil production technologies will keep the EROEI for oil from skyrocketing. Within the decade we will see unexpected growth of the bio-energy sector, reducing demand for petro-crude. Nuclear energy growth in many countries--probably including the US--will reduce demand for other petro products due to shifts in transportation and home heating from oil to electricity. Better utility-scale electrical storage will bring more large-scale renewables into the energy picture. More efficient electricity transmission and distribution (high temp superconductors, HVDC, etc) will make electricity more invisible to the landscape, but more reliably available. And better efficiencies in energy use across the board will further reduce use of oil. It will all add up.

The oil dictatorships of the middle east, Africa, Russia, Venezuela, and the far east will need to find other sources of income if they do not want to end up like North Korea and Zimbabwe.

Update: Brian Wang at NextBigFuture has an update on the huge oil field that straddles the US:Canadian border, the Bakken field. With oil prices high, you can expect oil exploration to enjoy a huge boost.

Why Jenny Flunks Math 55

Math 55 is supposed to be the hardest math course in US higher education. "Honors Calculus and Linear Algebra". Classes meet three hours a week, and class homework requires up to 60 hours a week. Few women take Math 55. Fewer still ever pass.

Math 55 does not look like America. Each year as many as 50 students sign up, but at least half drop out within a few weeks. As one former student told The Crimson newspaper in 2006, “We had 51 students the first day, 31 students the second day, 24 for the next four days, 23 for two more weeks, and then 21 for the rest of the first semester.” Said another student, “I guess you can say it’s an episode of ‘Survivor’ with people voting themselves off.” The final class roster, according to The Crimson: “45 percent Jewish, 18 percent Asian, 100 percent male.”

Why do women avoid classes like Math 55? Why, in fact, are there so few women in the high echelons of academic math and in the physi­cal sciences?

Women now earn 57 percent of bachelors degrees and 59 percent of masters degrees. According to the Survey of Earned Doctorates, 2006 was the fifth year in a row in which the majority of research Ph.D.’s awarded to U.S. citizens went to women. Women earn more Ph.D.’s than men in the humanities, social sciences, education, and life sciences. Women now serve as presidents of Harvard, MIT, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, and other leading research universities. But elsewhere, the figures are different. Women comprise just 19 percent of tenure-track professors in math, 11 percent in physics, 10 percent in computer science, and 10 percent in electrical engineering. And the pipeline does not promise statistical parity any time soon: women are now earning 24 percent of the Ph.D.’s in the physical sciences—way up from the 4 percent of the 1960s, but still far behind the rate they are winning doctorates in other fields.

...So why are there so few women in the high echelons of academic math and in the physical sciences? In a recent survey of faculty atti­tudes on social issues, sociologists Neil Gross of Harvard and Solon Simmons of George Mason University asked 1,417 professors what accounts for the relative scarcity of female pro­fessors in math, science, and engineering. Just 1 percent of respondents attributed the scarcity to women’s lack of ability, 24 percent to sexist discrimination, and 74 percent to differences in what characteristically interests men and women.___American__via_SteveSailer

But the truth may be a bit less politically correct. La Griffe du Lion looks at sex differences in mathematics and concludes:

Mathematics is a man's game. A gender gap appears early in life, blossoms with the onset of puberty and reaches full bloom by mid-adolescence. It indelibly shapes women's prospects for doing significant mathematics. In this account of cognitive sex differences, Prodigy shows how sex-differentiated ability in 15 year-olds accounts for the exiguous female representation at the highest levels of mathematical research. A female Fields Medalist is predicted to surface once every 103 years.

Another look at women and minorities in science concludes:

Prospects for women and minority doctoral scientists in engineering and other math-intensive areas are examined. A calculation of the ethnic-gender profile of this segment of the workforce is made for U.S. citizens and permanent residents. Rank ordering on mathematical reasoning ability predicts that women will top off at approximately 27 percent of this market. Similarly, rank ordering predicts almost 99 percent of math-intensive doctoral jobs will go to whites and Asians of primarily Chinese, Japanese, Korean and South Asian descent. Asians will continue to be represented in these fields well beyond their numbers in the general population. A study of the math-intensive academic marketplace predicts that women will top off there at about 22 to 23 percent.

In fact, women are already topping off at roughly 24% in the physical sciences which are more math intensive. If you read the Christina Hoff Sommers article you will find that politically, this lack of gender equity is simply unacceptable. Regardless of how many other academic fields and professions that women may be coming to dominate, if even a few fields remain where male dominance appears unchallenged, political feminists will cry foul. And when that happens, billions of dollars suddenly change hands, department heads and college deans will fall, and congress suddenly shakes a leg to please.

This is simply power politics for high powered feminist heavyweights, such as those mentioned in the article. But for academia, it sounds more like the death knell of minimally politicized science and math. The further entrenching of ideology into every aspect of academic thought and training. Make the world conform to your insular views, at all costs. Regardless of who is finally elected US President in November, there is no doubt who is at the wheel. PC--a cold and killing dogma.

Women Scream, Swoon, then Become Prickly

A recent Washington Post article by Charlotte Allen took a light-hearted poke at womanly quirks and eccentricities.

What is it about us women? Why do we always fall for the hysterical, the superficial and the gooily sentimental? Take a look at the New York Times bestseller list. At the top of the paperback nonfiction chart and pitched to an exclusively female readership is Elizabeth Gilbert's "Eat, Pray, Love." Here's the book's autobiographical plot: Gilbert gets bored with her perfectly okay husband, so she has an affair behind his back. Then, when that doesn't pan out, she goes to Italy and gains 23 pounds forking pasta so she has to buy a whole new wardrobe, goes to India to meditate (that's the snooze part), and finally, at an Indonesian beach, finds fulfillment by -- get this -- picking up a Latin lover!__We Scream, We Swoon ...

Reaction from women readers was swift and hostile. In gracious fashion, Ms. Allen took the time to answer some of her female accusers.

Memphis, Tenn.: Ms. Allen, I am confused about The Post editors' "it was satire, stupid" defense of your article. Could you explain why (or how) you thought the reader could have (or should have) picked up on the satirical tone? I recognize that this question may provoke a response not unlike the Supreme Court's "I know it when I see it" approach to obscenity, but I have read a lot of satire, and I just don't see it in your article. Perhaps you could give me a quick and dirty review of my eighth-grade English class?

Charlotte Allen: I'm not sure whether I'd characterize the piece as satire, but I'd certainly characterize it as humor: my poking fun at the dumb things my sex does.

West Lafayette, Ind.: You said, in reference to women in typically male-dominated fields, that "the number of women in these fields will always lag behind the number of men, for good reason." Do you honestly believe there is any good reason that women are excluded from these fields? As a woman, don't you have any kind of desire at all to see women succeed in the same areas as men?

Charlotte Allen: I don't think women are excluded. They used to be, but no more. And I believe passionately that no woman should be excluded from choosing any career she desires--but I don't believe in quotas, double standards, etc.

Woodbridge, Va.: Congratulations on a hilarious article. Do you think the hysterical response to it provides further proof that feminists have no sense of humor?

Charlotte Allen: Is the pope German? ___WaPo

And so on. Very entertaining.

I suppose I should have expect the prickliness and absence of good humour shown by most women responding to the article, just from watching Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Hopkins, Drew Faust, etc. But honestly, can half the human race be this hyper-sensitive to the least criticism? How can they ever find the time to get anything productive done, when they are so busy addressing imagined or implied criticisms?

Imagine North American women being placed in an Islamic country such as Saudi Arabia or Iran, to live the rest of their lives. Is it even possible for them to imagine such an hostile environment for women? But there is no need for that.

North American women are on a roll. They are successful beyond the fondest dreams of women 100 years ago. One woman stands at the brink of the most powerful political position on Earth. Except for a few fields where the top rank of men are clearly better suited for elite performance--math, physics, engineering and CS specialties requiring higher math, fighter pilots, etc--women are virtually taking over the professions, by the numbers.

Some people think that is good, some think it is bad. Actually, it is neither. What is important is that society put its best people in critical positions, regardless of gender, ethnicity, or religion. And we desperately need people who can laugh at themselves sincerely, at least a little.

Solar Thermal: The More Mature Older Solar Sister

Of the "Solar sisters", PV and Thermal, Thermal is clearly the more mature and ready for primetime. Why? Because Thermal solar contains its own storage.

...Some of the new plants will feature systems that allow them to store heat and generate electricity for hours after sunset..

..The workability of solar thermal power was established in the 1980s, when developers in California built a series of plants in the Mojave Desert, eventually reaching 354 megawatts of capacity. A megawatt is enough electricity to run 1,000 room air-conditioners at once.

The California plants grew more sophisticated and costs shrank as the project progressed. But then the price of a competing fuel, natural gas, collapsed in the 1990s and building new solar plants became uneconomic.

...solar plants do tend to produce peak power during the hottest part of the day, when demand is highest and electricity is costly, so at certain times they are already competitive with plants using natural gas. And they have an advantage over the other widely available form of renewable power, wind turbines: they are more predictable.___NYTimes__via_KurzweilAI.net

Heat is currently easier to store for later use than is electricity. With photovoltaic, when the sun is gone the power is gone. With solar thermal, the heat can be stored and used for several hours after sundown, until people go to bed.

Al Fin has argued for the superiority of solar thermal over PV for years. Incorporating phase change materials in thermal storage systems should extend heat storage through most of the night.

Top Down Brain, Bottom Up Brain

Cognitive Science has embarked upon the epic quest to understand--and recreate--a functioning "human-equivalent" brain. With such a daunting task of unprecedented magnitude, different teams of scientists are approaching the problem from different directions. A UC Berkeley team used an fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scanner to learn how the visual cortex (occipital lobe) of the brain decodes visual images.

Writing in the journal Nature, the scientists, led by Dr Jack Gallant from the University of California at Berkeley, said: "Our results suggest that it may soon be possible to reconstruct a picture of a person's visual experience from measurements of brain activity alone. Imagine a general brain-reading device that could reconstruct a picture of a person's visual experience at any moment in time."

...The technique relies on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a standard technique that creates images of brain activity based on changes in blood flow to different brain regions. The first step is to train the software decoder by scanning a subject's visual cortex while they view thousands of images over five hours. This teaches the decoder how that person's brain codes visual information. The next stage is to take a new set of images and use the decoder to predict the brain activity it would expect if the subject was viewing each of them. Finally, the subject views images from this second set while in the scanner. "We simply look through the list of predicted activities to see which one is most similar to the observed activity, and that's our guess," said Gallant.

...The team estimate that if they used 1bn images (roughly the number on Google) it would have a success rate of 20%. With that many images, Gallant said, the software is close to doing true image reconstruction - working out what you are seeing from scratch. "There is no reason we shouldn't be able to solve this problem ... That's what we are working on now."___Guardian

A better understanding of brain coding for various tasks done by different parts of the brain, should facilitate better neurochips to serve as temporary "neural-scaffolding" after stroke or brain injury. The neurochip would allow continued brain processing for the damaged parts of the brain, while ongoing stimulation encourages natural brain connections to re-form.The opposite, bottom-up approach to understanding the brain is being done by IBM researchers in Switzerland. The researchers are attempting to "recreate", or simulate a rat brain cortex with advanced silicon parallel processors.

In the basement of a university in Lausanne, Switzerland sit four black boxes, each about the size of a refrigerator, and filled with 2,000 IBM microchips stacked in repeating rows. Together they form the processing core of a machine that can handle 22.8 trillion operations per second. It contains no moving parts and is eerily silent.

...Each of its microchips has been programmed to act just like a real neuron in a real brain. The behavior of the computer replicates, with shocking precision, the cellular events unfolding inside a mind. "This is the first model of the brain that has been built from the bottom-up," says Henry Markram, a neuroscientist at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and the director of the Blue Brain project. "There are lots of models out there, but this is the only one that is totally biologically accurate. We began with the most basic facts about the brain and just worked from there."

Every brain is made of the same basic parts. A sensory cell in a sea slug works just like a cortical neuron in a human brain. It relies on the same neurotransmitters and ion channels and enzymes. Evolution only innovates when it needs to, and the neuron is a perfect piece of design...In theory, this meant that once the Blue Brain team created an accurate model of a single neuron, they could multiply it to get a three-dimensional slice of brain.

...After assembling a three-dimensional model of 10,000 virtual neurons, the scientists began feeding the simulation electrical impulses, which were designed to replicate the currents constantly rippling through a real rat brain. Because the model focused on one particular kind of neural circuit—a neocortical column in the somatosensory cortex of a two-week-old rat—the scientists could feed the supercomputer the same sort of electrical stimulation that a newborn rat would actually experience.

It didn't take long before the model reacted. After only a few electrical jolts, the artificial neural circuit began to act just like a real neural circuit. Clusters of connected neurons began to fire in close synchrony: the cells were wiring themselves together. Different cell types obeyed their genetic instructions. The scientists could see the cellular looms flash and then fade as the cells wove themselves into meaningful patterns. Dendrites reached out to each other, like branches looking for light. "This all happened on its own," Markram says. "It was entirely spontaneous." ___Seed__via__NextBigFuture

Read the full article at the link above.

Of course, that is just a bare beginning in the approach to simulating a real rat brain. A human brain will be much harder. Still, there is much to be said for the bottom-up approach.

The goal is for researchers taking opposite approaches in understanding the brain to meet somewhere in the middle--like the US intercontinental railroad builders. The reality will probably be more interesting. We will likely see the two approaches feeding off each other--each result from one suggesting new experiments for the other.

Both approaches rely largely upon the ability of processor chips to analyse information, and put it in a form that allows the human brains of the researchers to generate logical hypotheses for testing and falsifying. The final goal of understanding human cognition well enough to recreate it in a machine, is still some distance off. Expect significant spinoffs to occur from such research long before the final goal is reached.

Frozen China Uncovers Corrupt Infrastructure

This has been an exceptionally cold winter for China. Hundreds of millions were affected with loss of power, loss of heating, low food supplies, and disrupted transportation. One of the most shameful revelations coming out of China this winter is the widespread criminal corruption in infrastructure.

As reported by the Chinese media, an unspecified number of concrete power poles in South China's Guizhou province, which were jack-knifed by the snowstorms to interrupt electricity supply, have been found to have had no required reinforcing steel bars inside. Instead, small iron wires were used to replace the reinforcing steel bars. Vast areas in mountainous Guizhou province suffered the worst power blackouts amid the snowstorms due to the collapse of pylons and poles for overhead transmission.
Critics said flaws in the government system had led to incompetence in combating corruption, which in turn made the situation even worse.

A devastating natural disaster like the snowstorms is certainly beyond human control. However, analysts say, what a government can and must do is to prevent man-made factors from worsening the damage caused by the natural disaster. In the case of Guizhou, had qualified materials been used, power blackouts might not have been so serious or lasted so long.

The Beijing News, an outspoken and influential daily based in the Chinese capital, reported that in Guizhou's Kaili prefecture, a huge number of power poles turned out to be produced with substandard materials, as no reinforcing steel bars were found inside when they broke and collapsed in snowstorms.

...According to reports, most of the broken poles exposed small-diameter iron wire instead of strong reinforcing steel bars as required by production standards. In one estimate, in Kaili prefecture alone, over 10,000 poles were broken and still need to be replaced...As it is clear power shortages in many places were caused by the poor quality of electricity poles rather than by the snowstorms, the Chinese government is obligated to launch a thorough investigation. Producers and suppliers of the substandard poles, and those who approved the purchase and use of them, are in the firing line. As is often the case, official corruption is likely involved in such massive production and use of substandard products.

...Blogs and websites across the country are urging the the government to make a thorough investigation into the scandals - including the possible involvement of official corruption - and to punish those who used their power to protect groups with vested interests...Beijing is being called on to review and improve its mechanisms aimed at curbing the corruption that now runs rampant in almost every sector of society. ___AsiaTimes

Of course, these shoddy construction methods would have revealed themselves eventually. There really is no good time for bridges and buildings to collapse, or for power poles to snap. For this to happen in the midst of such a cold, cruel winter makes it all the worse.

This is the type of corruption upon which China's "miraculous growth" is based. It lies unseen, for the most part, for now. As long as foreign media and foreign investors choose to look the other way, the effect on China's financial rise will be minimal. But just as substandard powerlines tend to snap at the worst possible time, so does the collapse of public and investor confidence in a corrupt financial and political system tend to collapse at the worst time.

Islam in Europe

Europe is said to be a dying continent. Europeans are breeding--in some countries--at approximately half of replacement rate. Meanwhile, new immigrants are largely uneducated and unassimilated, from different cultures and religions (mostly Muslim) than Europe is accustomed to. Within the century, given current trends, large swathes of Europe will be Muslim.

It is obvious to intelligent people that unassimilated immigrants, particularly those of a militant nature, tend to have an influence over the population out of all proportion to their actual numbers, particularly where violent, unassimilated sub-populations settle in cities where much of the business of the country is carried out. When well-intentioned reverse discrimination against majority populations begins to drive indigenous majorities to emigrate away from Europe, one should understand that the problem is already critical.

Blogger Kantor, at Social Equilibrium blog, demonstrates the results of his Kantor Web spreadsheet created to look at this issue.

The following hypotheses are done in all the scenarios:
1) Muslim and non-muslim populations are supposed totally separated, ignoring conversion and inter-marriage. In fact, this paper proves (for the Austrian case) the high level of separation between the two populations.
2) Fertility structure is given by the convex model (see Demo-tool readme)
3) The age structure of the European population in 2005 is extrapolated from the Netherlands. Also its mortality curve.
4) The European Muslim population in 2005 is supposed to be 8% of total; its age structure and fertility is extrapolated from the Algerian population (UN stats), whose fertility (of 2.38 children/woman) is taken as Muslim fertility in 2005.
5) The European non-muslim population is the 92% of total EU population of 463 millions (425 million aproxx); its fertility in 2005 was 1.52 children/woman (European Comission).
6) For migration flows, the Eurostat statistical Yearbook (pag.53) quantifies total net immigration in the EU-15 in 1.5 million/year (2002). We suppose that 400.000 immigrants are from the New EU countries (EU-10), leaving a net inflow into the EU of 1.1 million. Our hypothesis is that 60% of those immigrants are Muslim.

The three scenarios differ are about the fertility paths of both populations and the migration flows received.

1) Business as usual (with migration): fertility is locked in its 2005 levels (Muslim 2.38, non Muslim 1.52) for the whole century. Europe receives 1.5 million immigrants a year, 60% Muslims, for the rest of the century.
2) Business as usual (without migration): fertility is locked in its 2005 levels (Muslim 2.38, non Muslim 1.52) for the whole century. Migration is halted in 2005.
3) Linear convergence 2030 (with migration): Fertility moves linearly for both populations, converging to 2 children per woman in 2030. Europe receives 1.5 million immigrants a year, 60% Muslims, for the rest of the century.
4) Linear convergence 2030 (without migration): Fertility moves linearly for both populations, converging to 2 children per woman in 2030. Migration is halted in 2005.____SocialEquilibrium___via_HiberniaGirl

Read Kantor's entire article to fully understand how he produced his population scenarios graph (pictured above).

It is my opinion that Kantor underestimated the rate of Muslim population increase--perhaps out of a desire to use the most conservative assumptions. Since it is unlikely that Europe will halt immigration, we can expect immigration to accelerate, due to the natural aging of the European population. Muslim immigration into Europe will accelerate more quickly than Eastern European immigration, due to larger birthrates and excess youth populations in Muslim countries, along with far inferior prospects for advancement in Muslim countries, and the tendency of Muslim youth in Europe to send away for multiple wives (often cousins) from the old country. It is no problem for the Muslim youth to support these wives, since he will simply place each one on welfare. As European countries tolerate polygamy with its accelerated muslim population growth (far above Kantor's assumptions), the path to dhimmitude lies clear.

In a parliamentary government, it is not necessary for a group to attain an absolute majority in order to be the controlling power. It is only necessary to dominate a controlling coalition. The natural coalition partners for Islamic and Islamist political parties within Europe are the leftist political parties of Europe. If leftists believe that they will be able to dominate their Muslim political parties, they will have an interesting education ahead of them.

If a sizable population group is also a group known for violent intimidation, the attainment of influence far out of proportion to the group's size comes much more quickly along the growth curve. Consolidation of power continues to occur as the growth curve is climbed.

Update: Read this interesting AsiaTimes article on Geert Wilder's lonely struggle against the Muslim conquest of Holland. Given the Dutch government's willingness to surrender Holland to the invaders, Wilder's stubborn defense of his homeland appears all the more heroic.

Utility Scale Energy Storage

For electric powered automobiles, Lithium Ion batteries appear to be state of the art, for now. For large-scale energy storage, something "bigger" is necessary. While we are waiting for redox flow cell technology to mature, Sodium Sulfide (NaS) batteries appear ready to step in and provide enough heavy-duty electrical storage for utility load-leveling. Brian Westenhaus at New Energy and Fuel looks at NaS battery storage and comes away hopeful.

NaS is one of the oldest technologies in battery chemistry. By the 1960s, Ford Motor Company pioneered the modern design in hopes of powering early electric automobile designs. NGK and Tokyo Electric have refined it for power grid applications. NaS is actually a quite advanced technology. The anodes and cathodes are not vulnerable to the corrosive effects that plague lead (Pb) acid batteries, which makes the NaS battery very long lasting. The NaS is about 5 times more energy dense by volume than Pb acid.

Over the years, Tokyo Electric and NGK have installed enough battery storage in Japan for 155,000 homes. In the U.S. the latest installation is by AEP who installed a unit large enough to supply 260 homes with the idea that it would charge at night and discharge onto the grid by day during peaks, so leveling the demand and reducing costs.

...The ability to buy power off peak and use it during high peak offers large users a way to cut costs. Today the batteries are still quite expensive. At $2,500 per kilowatt they cost about 110% of a new coal plant per kw. Industry people say the one source and limited production of today replaced by mass production can greatly reduce the costs.

One of the more curious quotes comes from Imre Gyuk the head of the U.S. Department of Energy who said, “Stick it any place you can stick it.” I take that to mean that the biggest batteries ever can make a big difference in the total generating capacity required to run a modern economy.___NewEnergy

Large scale energy storage is important for several reasons:

1. Demand is higher in the day and early evening than overnight. This makes night-time power cheaper, if you have the means to store it and use it during peak demand.
2. Large scale storage helps to smooth out transient supply:demand mismatches in the grid.
   
3. Large scale storage helps compensate for temporary grid power outages when located at hospitals, industrial plants, high rise buildings (elevators), city traffic light systems, etc.
4. Large scale storage allows much greater scaling and utilisation of renewable energy power generation, such as wind and solar.

As time goes by, and large scale storge gets better and cheaper, we will find that the economics of power systems works out much better with large scale storage in the mix.

More information on NaS batteries at Energy Blog.

Peak Oil: 2050

The price of oil hovers above US $100, but then the dollar is not what it used to be. Even without the huge reserves of tar sands, oil shales, heavy oils, or biofuels breakthroughs, there is enough crude oil underground to last a few more decades. The price is apt to remain high, however, which in terms of attracting investment in alternatives, is a very good thing.

...Hundred-dollar oil will provide a clear incentive for reinvigorating fields and unlocking extra barrels through the use of new technologies. The consequences for emerging oil-rich regions such as Iraq can be far more rewarding. By 2040 the country's production and reserves might potentially rival those of Saudi Arabia.

Paradoxically, high crude prices may temporarily mask the inefficiencies of others, which may still remain profitable despite continuing to use 1960-vintage production methods. But modernism will inevitably prevail: The national oil companies that hold over 90% of the earth's conventional oil endowment will be pressed to adopt new and better technologies.

- What will be the average rate of crude consumption between now and peak oil? Current daily global consumption stands around 86 million barrels, with projected annual increases ranging from 0% to 2% depending on various economic outlooks. Thus average consumption levels ranging from 90 to 110 million barrels represent a reasonable bracket. Any economic slowdown -- as intimated by the recent tremors in the global equity markets -- will favor the lower end of this spectrum.

...When will peak oil arrive? This widely accepted tipping point -- 50% of ultimately recoverable resources consumed -- is largely a tribute to King Hubbert, a distinguished Shell geologist who predicted the peak oil point for the U.S. lower 48 states. While his timing was very good (he forecast 1968 versus 1970 in fact), he underestimated peak daily production (9.5 million barrels actual versus eight million estimated).

But modern extraction methods will undoubtedly stretch Hubbert's "50% assumption," which was based on Sputnik-era technologies. Even a modest shift -- to 55% of recoverable resources consumed -- will delay the onset by 20-25 years.

Where do reasonable assumptions surrounding peak oil lead us? My view, subjective and imprecise, points to a period between 2045 and 2067 as the most likely outcome.

Cambridge Energy Associates forecasts the global daily liquids production to rise to 115 million barrels by 2017 versus 86 million at present. Instead of a sharp peak per Hubbert's model, an undulating, multi-decade long plateau production era sets in -- i.e., no sudden-death ending.___WSJ

If one factors in new nuclear plants to power larger fleets of electric vehicles, increasing use of biomass CHP, and enhanced geothermal power plants alongside larger-scale solar thermal plants--which are highly scalable--one discovers ways to make the oil supply last longer.

Transportation needs diesel fuel and jet fuel. Aviation, maritime shipping, rail freight, truck freight--civilisation depends on these petro-fuels. Clearly, biofuels will eventually provide sustainable substitutes for every liquid fuel humans need. Just as clearly, new in situ methods of crude recovery from oil shale, tar sands, and heavy oil deposits will provide more petroleum than humans are likely to need--assuming biofuels scale up in the next 50 years to the size infrastructure they are capable of building.

There is still a minority view, held largely by a small band of retired petroleum geologists and some members of Congress, that oil production has peaked, but the theory has been fading. Equally contentious for the oil companies is the growing voice of environmentalists, who do not think that pumping and consuming an ever-increasing amount of fossil fuel is in any way desirable.___NYT

Peak oil panic belongs with other fashionable panics of modern times--the holy warmer climate orthodoxy, the overpopulation dieoff.orgians, the gray-goo nano-apocalypse, etc. Even the determined march of the leftist-islamist alliance is not likely to spell the ultimate doom of civilisation, as hard as the duo may try.

Humans will survive, and they will prosper. But they will need to learn to love a challenge. And that will be very difficult for the psychological neotenates among us. Psychological neotenates crave tenure--cradle to grave security provided by others. The future is not likely to provide that.

Invisible Death and Pain: Welcome to Your Future

If you go to war, if you die in war, the chances are you will be killed by an invisible force. By a rocket fired from miles above, by invisible energy beams, by invisible tanks and ships. Death is easy. Living is hard, and getting harder for combatants.

The “stealthiest” ship that currently exists is Sweden’s Visby Corvette. Apart from being painted in grey dazzle camouflage and made of low-radar reflectivity materials, it also does not use propellers, which are the noisiest part of a ship. The vessel also has the lowest “magnetic signature” of any current warship.

But the next generation of warships could be truly invisible by exploiting “metamaterials” – artificially engineered structures first dreamt up by physicist John Pendry at Imperial College, London. Metamaterials are tailored to have specific electromagnetic properties not found in nature. In particular, they can bend light around an object, making it appear to an observer as though the waves have passed through empty space.___Source

The US Pentagon is developing futuristic energy weapons, of course. High power lasers, microwaves, sound waves...

It's a gun that doesn't look anything like a gun: it's that flat dish antenna which shoots out a 100,000-watt beam at the speed of light, hitting any thing in its path with an intense blast of heat.

An operator uses a joystick to zero in on a target. Visible only with an infrared camera, the gun, when fired emits a flash of white hot energy -- an electromagnetic beam made up of very high frequency radio waves. ___CBS

The Active Denial System causes exquisite pain, but does not kill. But a slight modification to the system could change that. Current sentimental non-lethality is not likely to survive the next large scale terror attack on a western homeland.

It is not just the Pentagon that is getting into the high-tech energy weapons. China is doing its best to keep up, and possibly get ahead here and there.

"China is developing a multi-dimensional program to limit or prevent the use of space-based assets by its potential adversaries during times of crisis or conflict," the report said.

The report said the Chinese People's Liberation Army had developed a range of weapons and jammers to prevent an enemy from using space-based systems such as satellites.

"The PLA is also exploring satellite jammers, kinetic energy weapons, high-powered lasers, high-powered microwave weapons, particle beam weapons, and electromagnetic pulse weapons for counterspace application," it said.___Source

China is still dependent on the US and the west for its economic and industrial well-being. Consider the way Asian and Chinese stock markets get pneumonia when the US markets catch cold. Still, when the time is right, and Chinese leaders feel they are ready economically to act against the US, they intend to be ready militarily.

Consider it an arms race to the singularity. Eventually satellites will be armed with energy beam weapons as well. But the truly dangerous weapons are those that are invisible because they are so small. Nano-bio weapons. You will not be relieved to know that the US and China are racing for superiority on that front as well.

Meanwhile, back in the current capital of western civilisation, the US public is consumed by the political spectacle of the 2008 presidential election campaign. Of the candidates likely to win--either Senator Obama or Senator Clinton--both lack a firm grasp of the larger reality they will be expected to face in the real world outside US politics. Psychological neotenates in oblivion, living in a dream world on borrowed time.

My suggestion to readers. Think about what is likely to happen. Where do you want to be when it does? Who do you want to be with, and what sort of environment do you want to create for yourself? Do not count on affirmative action. Do not count on political correctness. Do not count on society or relief agencies.

Clearly Superior

Westerners are not supposed to recognise that they are living in a civilisation that is superior to other civilisations. But the smarter ones have trouble not seeing it, and in their more honest moments they admit the superiority of western civilisation, at least to themselves.

The great ideas of the West—rationalism, self-criticism, the disinterested search for truth, the separation of church and state, the rule of law and equality under the law, freedom of thought and expression, human rights, and liberal democracy—are superior to any others devised by humankind. It was the West that took steps to abolish slavery; the calls for abolition did not resonate even in Africa, where rival tribes sold black prisoners into slavery. The West has secured freedoms for women and racial and other minorities to an extent unimaginable 60 years ago. The West recognizes and defends the rights of the individual: we are free to think what we want, to read what we want, to practice our religion, to live lives of our choosing.___CityJournal

One could characterize the difference between the West and the Rest as a difference in epistemological principles. The desire for knowledge, no matter where it leads, inherited from the Greeks, has led to an institution unequaled—or very rarely equaled—outside the West: the university. Along with research institutes and libraries, universities are, at least ideally, independent academies that enshrine these epistemological norms, where we can pursue truth in a spirit of disinterested inquiry, free from political pressures. In other words, behind the success of modern Western societies, with their science and technology and open institutions, lies a distinct way of looking at the world, interpreting it, and recognizing and rectifying problems.

...A culture that gave the world the novel; the music of Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert; and the paintings of Michelangelo, da Vinci, and Rembrandt does not need lessons from societies whose idea of heaven, peopled with female virgins, resembles a cosmic brothel. Nor does the West need lectures on the superior virtue of societies in which women are kept in subjection under sharia, endure genital mutilation, are stoned to death for alleged adultery, and are married off against their will at the age of nine; societies that deny the rights of supposedly lower castes; societies that execute homosexuals and apostates. The West has no use for sanctimonious homilies from societies that cannot provide clean drinking water or sewage systems, that make no provisions for the handicapped, and that leave 40 to 50 percent of their citizens illiterate.

Western civilisation has worked its way through periods of monarchy, world colonialism, battles of totalitarian ideologies that took themselves too seriously--and has mostly come out on the side of facilitating the healing of the world's sick, feeding of the world's hungry, and helping to enable the impoverished of the world to acquire a measure of comfort. All of that, and much more typifies the prevailing spirit of the achieving west.

The suicidal west is another matter, but I suspect we can deal with them. All the doomseekers, holy warmers, lefty dieoff.orgies, and the like. But we cannot allow the suicidal insiders to sabotage us in our resistance to the bloody outsiders who would take our freedom and our lives.

Single Sex Education, Mind the Difference

Boys and girls have different ways of learning. But modern schools are biased toward a girl's way of learning. This hurts boys, which is evident by educational statistics showing increasing numbers of boys driven away from higher education over time.

Boys are currently behind their sisters in high-school and college graduation rates. School, the boy-crisis argument goes, is shaped by females to match the abilities of girls (or, as Sax puts it, is taught “by soft-spoken women who bore” boys). In 2006, Doug Anglin, a 17-year-old in Milton, Mass., filed a civil rights complaint with the United States Department of Education, claiming that his high school — where there are twice as many girls on the honor roll as there are boys — discriminated against males. His case did not prevail in the courts, but his sentiment found support in the Legislature and the press. That same year, as part of No Child Left Behind, the federal law that authorizes programs aimed at improving accountability and test scores in public schools, the Department of Education passed new regulations making it easier for districts to create single-sex classrooms and schools.

...Among advocates of single-sex public education, there are two camps: those who favor separating boys from girls because they are essentially different and those who favor separating boys from girls because they have different social experiences and social needs. Leonard Sax represents the essential-difference view, arguing that boys and girls should be educated separately for reasons of biology: for example, Sax asserts that boys don’t hear as well as girls, which means that an instructor needs to speak louder in order for the boys in the room to hear her; and that boys’ visual systems are better at seeing action, while girls are better at seeing the nuance of color and texture.

...After visiting a handful of single-sex schools, Sax threw himself into studying neurological differences between males and females, eventually focusing on how to protect boys from a syndrome he calls “failure to launch,” which Sax often characterizes as caring more about getting a Kilimanjaro in Halo 3 than performing well in high school or taking a girl on a date. Among his early proposals was that boys should start kindergarten at age 6, a year later than girls, in order to ease the “sense of scholastic incompetence” that so many boys feel early on because they tend to develop later. Several friends quickly convinced Sax that American families would never go for this. So Sax started thinking it might be better for boys and girls to be in different classrooms.

...For boys, he said: “You need to get them up and moving. That’s based on the nervous system, that’s based on eyes, that’s based upon volume and the use of volume with the boys.” Chadwell, like Sax, says that differences in eyesight, hearing and the nervous system all should influence how you instruct boys. “You need to engage boys’ energy, use it, rather than trying to say, No, no, no. So instead of having boys raise their hands, you’re going to have boys literally stand up. You’re going to do physical representation of number lines. Relay races. Ball tosses during discussion.” For the girls, Chadwell prescribes a focus on “the connections girls have (a) with the content, (b) with each other and (c) with the teacher. If you try to stop girls from talking to one another, that’s not successful. So you do a lot of meeting in circles, where every girl can share something from her own life that relates to the content in class.”___NYT

Boys are different than girls? Well, who cares? Certainly not teachers' unions, the ACLU, university schools of education, and most of the rest of the education-industrial complex.

Another important factor being ignored in North American education is that boys need male role models. Since male role models are often not provided at home, boys need to see male role models at school. But North American early education is becoming a woman's profession. Alternative certification methods that could bring in many more qualified male teachers are rejected by teachers' unions, school boards, and the education bureaucracy.

Perhaps the enormous anti-male bias seen throughout North American society will blow over in the next few decades. Probably not, but even should it do so, it will be far too late for at least three generations of boys thrown on the trash heap.

H/T to Half Sigma

Also see Dennis Mangan's discussion of why boys are falling behind.

Wiping Out the Human Population of Earth Lovelock: This is the Real Thing Dammit

James Lovelock is the revered, grand old man of doom. Lovelock is quite cheerful about the coming demise of humanity. After all, what has humanity ever done for Lovelock?

Lovelock believes global warming is now irreversible, and that nothing can prevent large parts of the planet becoming too hot to inhabit, or sinking underwater, resulting in mass migration, famine and epidemics. Britain is going to become a lifeboat for refugees from mainland Europe, so instead of wasting our time on wind turbines we need to start planning how to survive. To Lovelock, the logic is clear. The sustainability brigade are insane to think we can save ourselves by going back to nature;....But he fears we won't invent the necessary technologies in time, and expects "about 80%" of the world's population to be wiped out by 2100. Prophets have been foretelling Armageddon since time began, he says. "But this is the real thing."

Faced with two versions of the future - Kyoto's preventative action and Lovelock's apocalypse - who are we to believe?...when I ask if he attributes the conflicting predictions to differences in scientific understanding or personality, he says: "Personality." ___Guardian

Lovelock...appears to have laughed and grinned and smiled his way through this interview. He predicts doom for almost all, and laughs about it.

"Well I'm cheerful!" he says, smiling. "I'm an optimist. It's going to happen."___Source

Lovelock is not the only one of his generation to predict massive human die-off. Modern prophets of doom have been profiting from the apocalypse since the late 1960s and early 1970s, when eco-apocalyptic books became best sellers. Paul Ehrlich, the Club of Rome, Rachel Carson--all these and more preceded Lovelock and Al Gore through the Valley of the Shadow of Human Apocalypse, and made money doing it.

According to these prophets, NYC should be underwater, the population of the Earth should already be below 1 billion from starvation and resource depletion, the entire Earth should be a wasteland, and the new Dark Ages should have long since fallen onto surviving human populations.

Remember Y2K? Sure you do. Unless you are too intent on the prophets making profits from the crises du jour, such as CAGW and Peak Oil? The Ozone hole scare has taken a backseat for now, but it can always be re-cycled, once the climate scare dies down and alternative energy sources predictably come on line one by one.

Or perhaps as Lovelock says, this is "the real thing." The evidence suggests otherwise, and it should be noted that Lovelock is promoting a new book. Should we simply put Lovelock up on the shelf alongside Ehrlich, the Club of Rome, the Y2K thrillers, and Al Gore? Perhaps we will.

Education in Finland: Can High Finnish Test Scores be Replicated in Other Countries?

What Makes Finnish Kids So Smart?, reads a Wall Street Journal Headline. It seems that test scores for Finnish children are among the highest of all advanced countries, and a lot of educators from North America and elsewhere want to know "why?"

...by one international measure, Finnish teenagers are among the smartest in the world. They earned some of the top scores by 15-year-old students who were tested in 57 countries. American teens finished among the world's C students even as U.S. educators piled on more homework, standards and rules....In the most recent test, which focused on science, Finland's students placed first in science and near the top in math and reading, according to results released late last year. An unofficial tally of Finland's combined scores puts it in first place overall, says Andreas Schleicher, who directs the OECD's test, known as the Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA.

...The academic prowess of Finland's students has lured educators from more than 50 countries in recent years to learn the country's secret, including an official from the U.S. Department of Education. What they find is simple but not easy: well-trained teachers and responsible children. Early on, kids do a lot without adults hovering. And teachers create lessons to fit their students.

...The Norssi School is run like a teaching hospital, with about 800 teacher trainees each year. Graduate students work with kids while instructors evaluate from the sidelines. Teachers must hold master's degrees, and the profession is highly competitive: More than 40 people may apply for a single job. Their salaries are similar to those of U.S. teachers, but they generally have more freedom.

Finnish teachers pick books and customize lessons as they shape students to national standards. "In most countries, education feels like a car factory. In Finland, the teachers are the entrepreneurs," says Mr. Schleicher, of the Paris-based OECD, which began the international student test in 2000.

...Finland separates students for the last three years of high school based on grades; 53% go to high school and the rest enter vocational school. (All 15-year-old students took the PISA test.) Finland has a high-school dropout rate of about 4% -- or 10% at vocational schools -- compared with roughly 25% in the U.S., according to their respective education departments.

...Once school starts, the Finns are more self-reliant. While some U.S. parents fuss over accompanying their children to and from school, and arrange every play date and outing, young Finns do much more on their own. At the Ymmersta School in a nearby Helsinki suburb, some first-grade students trudge to school through a stand of evergreens in near darkness. At lunch, they pick out their own meals, which all schools give free, and carry the trays to lunch tables. There is no Internet filter in the school library. They can walk in their socks during class, but at home even the very young are expected to lace up their own skates or put on their own skis.___WSJ

It seems that teachers in Finland are much better trained and are given more freedom to teach to their students' needs and interests. Teaching is seen as a desirable job in Sweden, and the enthusiasm of teachers helps keep students interested.

Although Finnish people do not have higher IQs than other Europeans--and it is not likely the children are born with higher Executive Function or short-term memories--the nature of child up-bringing, and early education likely contributes to a more independent mind-set, and a tendency to understand the need to follow the guidance of parents and teachers in preparing for the future. Life in Finland can be hard, due to extremes of climate and insolation. All of these things are likely to help Finnish children learn more self-reliance than more coddled children of lower Europe and North America.

Psychological neoteny is a very real problem for North American children and children in many other first world countries. Children are too often treated as fragile, pampered parental trophies, rather than as human beings who have to learn to deal for themselves with a real and often dangerous world.

H/T to Dennis Mangan and Steve Sailer , who have provided interesting comments on the WSJ article, and its topic. Check out their take on the article.

No Sunspot, Mumblings of Mutiny

The sun continues quiet--eerily quiet. People are starting to notice.

Cooler weather has the blogosphere alight with speculation about the climate’s real changes. Short-term temperature moves fire up both camps. From Planet Gore:

Hopefully this will cool the hysteria in the U.S. Congress and parliaments around the world so that we can understand the science of our climate before we pursue policies that could wreck our economy and quality of life.

Environmental Defense says one month does not a trend make:

Global warming is a process that occurs over decades. It can’t be proven or disproven by a single month’s temperature.

There are theories for all tastes. Daily Tech started it all, arguing that last year’s nippy weather “wipes out a century of warming.” Energy Outlook pored through the data and points at the sea. Maybe it’s the sun? Environmental Economics did the heavy lifting, parsed all the sunspot data from Goddard, and concluded that’s not to blame:

The current downturn in temperatures may be caused by a valley in the sunspot cycle. But that doesn’t mean that global cooling is taking place. It just means that temperatures are likely to be more variable until sunspot activity increases again.

Whether it’s sunspots, La Nina, or something else altogether, the timing couldn’t be better for the Heartland Institute, set to host a global warming skeptics powow Monday on Broadway. Friends in high places?___WSJblog

Who would have thought a few cold days and a little snow in Baghdad would get people talking about "global cooling?" What is worse, northern polar ice caps are growing and thickening, glaciers on Mount Kilimanjaro are growing again, and preliminary research findings on the cosmic ray hypothesis of solar climate influence are provocative.

Periods of extended low sunspot activity correspond historically to cooler climates on Earth. The details are still being worked out.

Image from SolarCycle24.com H/T TomNelson and GreenWatch