Web sites for graduate degree programs

The web makes education, and information about quality of education, cheaper and easier to find. This will challenge institutions to improve both their education and the information they publish about it.

Using web-based materials and the textbooks that the web makes so easy to evaluate and locate, an adult may, in some fields, be able to learn the material more efficiently on his own than in a degree program. What does the program provide beyond textbooks and lectures? How much interaction does it foster, and with whom; how well do its professors teach, how tough do they grade, how well-connected are they, how weighty is their recommendation, how well-regarded is the degree as a credential, and if so, where?

I think that any web site describing a degree program should strive to answer these questions:

1. What is the target market for the program's graduates? Which organizations were consulted on the program's design, and have any of them vouched for it? Answers to these questions are more informative to a prospective student than is accreditation, as the best and worst programs in a given region all are accredited by the same body, but their graduates will not be equally sought-after.

2.Who should apply?

3. What are some options for subsequent study? If the program is a MS, are there any PhD programs that would accept this program's MS credits toward their PhD?

4. How good is the instruction? Why not post course syllabi online? Why not post the course and professor evaluations collected from students by the department? Why not videotape at least one course session from each instructor and offer it on DVD for a nominal fee of, say, $10? Prospective students considering an investment of probably at least two years and on the order of $7,000-12,000 should be happy to spend $10 to inform their choice.

Do-it-yourself projects

Make is a blog that reports do-it-yourself projects. Most, but not all, involve electronics. They look fun.

Although I do not do much actual tinkering, as a problem-solver I like to monitor the do-it-yourself (DIY) community for at least two reasons. (1.) Others' DIY projects can form parts of solutions to problems I am currently trying to solve. (2.) DIY stories can reveal needs that others are newly perceiving and/or (3.) newly available components that can fill those needs.

Measuring school quality

I've been asked by a local (Johnson County) group of parents to help compile, and publish to the web, ratings of local schools. How should I gather this data? What questions should I ask? How can I make the reviews accountable and libel-free while maintaining a commitment to report more than the rosy side of news?

Once I collect the ratings, I'd like to see how they correlate geographically with other data, including demographics and this index of home price by subdivision.

Read more at www.kchba.org/shows/Spr...

"How to Live Well on Very, Very Little:The Best Ways to get the Essentials of Modern Human Sustenance for Minimal Cost"

This site seems to be the product of systematic and deep thinking. Although it gets esoteric in some places, and is not entirely polished, I share the values evident from the author's outline, and he offers a lot of useful material.

Read more at www.jmooneyham.com/poor...

Composting toilets key to global sanitation, say scientists

'Michael Rouse, formerly the UK's chief drinking water inspector, recently said that if Britain were planning sewage disposal from scratch today, "we wouldn't flush it away - we would collect the solids and compost it" .'

Composting toilets are better than flush toilets; this is another reason I'd like to see building codes liberalized.

Read more at www.newscientist.com/ar...

$500 habitats for humanity

Lately I have been doing a little volunteer building here in Kansas City, Kansas, for Kaw Valley Habitat for Humanity . Although the lots and some materials are donated or highly subsidized, we don't skimp; the homes we are building are standard entry-level homes. Nationwide they cost an average of $59,324 and as such we are not able to deliver them to the poorest and most needy of citizens.

The scarcity of affordable homes can be understood as partly an artificial scarcity, a side effect of regulations we have enacted. If building codes and municipal restrictions on camping were liberalized, it would become easier to provide housing at every price point. Can this be done, and should it be done? Economics suggests, and Habitat believes, that ownership fosters stewardship and permanence and, in turn, stability and safety. After all, "where your treasure is, there will your heart be also."

As an argument for cities to relax regulations, nothing is better than an actual success story (article, "Homeless in Portland"). See Dignity Village , which organized itself as a nonprofit and obtained a 10-year lease from the city of Portland, Oregon. Possessing the lease enables individual investment in durable structures, making possible the construction of $500 cabins .

No, $500 homes are not ideal, nor would $5,000 ones be. But do we prohibit the construction of $50,000 homes just because $200,000 homes can be safer and more comfortable? I once worked for several months building premium homes with handmade hardwood trim, and I can testify that these are nice homes and worth the price to those who can afford them. But if we think that everyone should have a Lexus ideally, do we outlaw lesser makes?

Surely there should be a wide range of options in between homeless shelters and sidewalks at one price point, and Habitat for Humanity's conventional homes at another. Are people with little hope of improving their little situation motivated to commit themselves to the large efforts required to reap large gains? If we aren't sure, we should not outlaw the small incremental steps .

Building codes and restrictions on camping were enacted for specific reasons which must be acknowledged. Yet these concerns must be balanced with all others. If, arguably, such regulations impede the production of affordable housing, then the regulations must be counted among the causes of homelessness. Is this cost worth the benefits of strict regulation? Arguably, exceptions must be made, and if so, legal precedents should be established.

In the article "Homeless in Portland" notice the reference to straw-bale homes. Because this construction method (the stacked bales are covered in stucco) can produce fine homes of superior insulative value, it is admired by home buyers at all levels of wealth. Traditional materials such as straw, adobe and cob are also "dirt cheap," extremely durable, non-toxic, renewable, thermally efficient, and amenable to construction by amateurs. Because a straw-bale home is relatively easy for amateurs to build , it is also well-suited to volunteer labor by friends and neighbors after the fashion of "barn raisings." When neighbors work together to build and maintain their own homes and neighborhood, they and their communities grow stronger. (See architect Christopher Alexander 's excellent book A Pattern Language.)

Less-costly homes may also entice some at higher levels of income, freeing them to use more of their resources to help others. This interests me personally and may interest other Habitat for Humanity volunteers. [Addendum 4-Jan-06: I think that living with someome, and in the same manner as they do, is the best way to know them and their needs. Thanks to whom I met 3-Jan-06.]

I would like to see the citizens of my city make the decisions to enable low-income citizens to increase their investment gradually from $5 winter coats to $50 tents and $500 and $5000 homes. These natural first rungs of home ownership would complement, and function as "baby steps" toward, that $50,000 rung which Habitat has chiefly been engaged in building. I intend to work toward the legal enablement of communities like Dignity Village in my city, and if given an opportunity I would love to help build a $500 "habitat for humanity."

Read more at http://www.outofthedoorways.org/

Putin Advisor Illarionov Quits, Says Russia Not Free (Bloomberg.com)

Russia is re-nationalizing its industries, vowing to use energy as a foreign policy tool, and strengthening its connections to China.

My father is an economist whose specialty was the agriculture of the Soviet Union. His work took him to the Soviet Union many times, including two extended stays with me included. (For one year I even attended Soviet preschool.) Dad ended up as chief of the Centrally Planned Economies Branch of the Agriculture and Trade Analysis Division of the USDA Economic Research Service. This job fizzled out in 1997: after Dad had "won the cold war" (he is proud of his photograph with Gorbachev, whom he met once and with whom he was too shy to speak!) the need for the job gradually diminished. Ironically, the import of Dad's job was that we (the U.S.) used (and still use; this is the motivation for agricultural production subsidies) our agricultural products as a foreign diplomacy tool in the same way as as Russia has just declared it will use energy.

After my own visits to Ukraine (totalling 7 months) in 1998, 2000-01, and 2002-03, I wasn't so sure that the Soviet Union was truly dead. I figured its leaders may just be "playing possum:" They would let the nation open up widely enough and long enough to bring in sufficient Western capital to modernize their infrastructure to their satisfaction, and then reclaim power and nationalize everything again.

On the bright side, perhaps in such a scenario such jobs as Dad's old one would come back. But he'd agree with me that this is small consolation to anyone who cares about those people who have been and will be victimized by those least meritorious of robber barons, those Soviet-era bureaucrats who became the post-Soviet oligarchs and kleptocrats.

A nation has a right to self-determination, but the problem I see is that, at last count, many of the people running former Soviet nations--including apparently Russia's president Putin--were unreformed or just-barely-reformed instruments of a regime widely regarded as extremely corrupt. Perhaps even worse, 70 years of Newspeak do take their toll on the minds a populace. If you're not concerned about that, please re-read Orwell's 1984.

While the reconstitution of a Soviet Union seems unlikely, it also seems likely that many rough years are ahead unless the citizens of CIS nations can elect more reform-minded leaders. I wish good luck to my friends in Ukraine, and to "Tolya Bolya" and the rest of my 1976-77 class of my Detsky Sad, which I assume was the one nearest Moscow's Timiryazev Agricultural Academy.

Social bookmarking for scientists using Connotea, and "Ontology is Overrated"

I registered at Connotea , the social bookmarking service for scientists, from Nature Publishing group. It is pretty good. One can bookmark an article, comment on it, and optionally let other Connotea users see one's own bookmarks and comments.

At Connotea I discovered a good paper articulating in compelling terms a belief (which I share) that "ontology is overrated ."

Read more at shirky.com/writings/ont...

Is it pretentious to use the word 'apposite'?

Usage of the word 'apposite' is demonstrated today by a quotation from Fashionable Nonsense : Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science by Alan D. Sokal and Jean Bricmont. An Amazon reader review of the book mentions counts Goedel's Theorem as among the ideas abused. I hope that my own informal use of the theorem, inspired by my 1993 reading of G.J. Chaitin , does not offend Goedel too greatly.

For hypothesis generation and other creative processes, I relish finding analogies from one field to another and even "mixing metaphors" in a brainstorming session. Lateral thinking may make one's ideas easier to find, understand, and use; may promote collaboration; and may, via a "network effect," increase the value of the work. I expect most readers will agree thus far.

In rhetoric, one must be more careful. To introduce a second term--or by analogy, a second field--is not likely to be effective unless this second is more familiar or more obvious to the intended audience than is the first. To explain a new concept, we explain it in terms of familiar ones. To defend a questioned assertion, we show that it follows from accepted beliefs. To defend a contested action, we show that it follows from accepted goals. Arguably, the same general principle holds in mathematical proof, hard science, soft science, literature, rhetoric, jurisprudence, teaching, sales, and even in learning in general.

Within any particular science of well-defined scope, a scientist should and probably will avoid introducing outside metaphors needlessly. I expect that those sciences which permit the freest mixing of metaphors are most likely to be deficient in discipline and to run the greatest risk that those outside these fields will not consider them to be either scientific or disciplines.

Even so, let us not discount the value of these less-formal assertions, even within a science. For to introduce concepts not yet integrated into a formal system typically precedes the development of the formal system to encapsulate it; this is especially true in the more empirical sciences (such as biology) versus the more systematic sciences (such as mathematics, or even physics, in which mathematical formalisms facilitate thought experiments). And some of these new concepts will be just the thing needed, even 'apposite.' Yet initially they may strike some readers as unnecessarily strange, just as did the word 'apposite' when I encountered it this morning. (And does it help or hinder the reader if I explain that it was Chaitin's exposition of Goedel which first made clear to me that formal systems must be built chiefly through such encounters?)

Finally, let's remember that each person has several dimensions. A scientist may have not only a career but also a religion, moral or aesthetic values, and/or other such convictions under-determined by proof. She may enjoy, as the postmodernists are supposed to do, playing or creating intellectual games. She may be an artist. Her mind is also host to various other ideas which are not likely to be classifiable by any accepted system. Yet these ideas may, especially if not advertised as mathematically derived and not forced upon others, be quite valuable, both privately and publicly. Any idea might be 'apposite' for a day.