Tedious tech

I accidentally clicked on an old Parallels Edubuntu virtual machine instead of Windows, and thought, okay, might as well update it -- it was several hundred days (over 800? is that possible? not launched since I played around with setting up an Edubuntu server at the school in late 2008? Which never went anywhere.)

Several hours later, after downloading and installing all of the packages, cleaning up, rebooting -- oops, the X server wouldn't load, so no GUI. It was probably to be expected -- I have held off on upgrading the Parallels Desktop client -- I felt Nova was just randomly changing the product to keep a cash stream flowing. But this update might actually be necessary to get the latest Edubuntu to work.

So the new Parallels finally finished downloading, but before I upgrade it, I'm thinking I should back up the Windows disk images, just in case. So I do that backup, and twenty minutes later, I'm ready to install Parallels 6, but the installer informs me that an update is available, and I should download that.

And at the same time, I have been trying to get my tweets -- which I don't do very often -- to automatically show up on my Facebook page. The Twitter app for Facebook (which has a useless and ambiguous interface) is supposed to do that, but for some reason it stopped working. Sorting out problems with Twitter and Facebook seems like a hopeless cause. I found another Facebook app called Selective Tweet which only posts tweets that end with #fb. That seems to work, and the help page is, well, helpful.

While trying to write this, the Google search widget on this blog has stopped showing search results. Not a Firefox 4.0 issue, as it happens with Safari too. Finding help on Google products is a tedious process, sifting through Google Search results, with no date filter (the blogger search widget seems to have a history of problems).

I tried to make this post as boring as the process that it documents. But it is also a test to see if the change I made to Twitterfeed, to post these blog updates to both Twitter and Facebook, works. Because every word is precious.

jd

For want of a nail, etc.

Some interesting articles in the NYT today on the economics of the earthquake/tsunami in Japan:

Stress test for the global supply chain, by Steve Lohr (3/19/2011)

• "Chain" is misleading, because it really is a network, or a system ("Modern global supply chains, experts say, mirror complex biological systems like the human body in many ways"). Where there is redundancy and resilience, the disruptions are manageable.
  
• "The good news for the world’s manufacturing economy is that the sectors where Japan plays a vital role are fairly mature, global industries." Mature networks have developed redundancy and resilience, and moved away from single source.
• "Still, Japan produces a far higher share of certain important chips like the lightweight flash memory used in smartphones and tablet computers." Even if Japan makes "only" 35% of the flash memory chips, that is still a big chunk of source.
• "The field of buying and shipping supplies has been transformed in the last decade or two. Globalization and technology have been the driving forces. Manufacturing is outsourced around the world, with each component made in locations chosen for expertise and low costs. So today’s computer or smartphone is, figuratively, a United Nations assembly of parts." Attempting to separate "globalization" (as it is meant today) and "technology" as two distinct things is silly -- globalization is a function of new technologies; capitalism in the age of electronics.
• "That means supply lines are longer and far more complex than in the past." Which makes them more tenuous and vulnerable. The term for comlex procurement networks and long supply lines is "thin strands."
  
• "The ability to manage these complex networks, experts say, has become possible because of technology — Internet communications, RFID tags and sensors attached to valued parts, and sophisticated software for tracking and orchestrating the flow of goods worldwide." Exactly -- this is why one can say globalization is a function of technology.
• "'In the past, when you had a disruption, the response was regional,' says Timothy Carroll, vice president for global operations at I.B.M. 'Now, it’s globalized.'” So global supply networks should make it easier for producers to accommodate the Japan disaster.
• Here is the really interesting insight for me: as the supply networks expand and complicate, "the difficulty and expense of seeing deeper into the supply chain increases." (emph. added) The problem becomes determining the impact on the parts used to make the parts, and the parts used to make the parts that make the parts, etc. etc., and even the raw materials to make the parts etc. etc. "For example, reports that a Mitsubishi Gas Chemical factory in Fukushima was damaged by the tsunami have fanned fears of a coming shortage of a resin — bismaleimide triazine, BT — used in the packaging for small computer chips in cellphones and other products."
• "The Japan quake, some experts say, will prompt companies to re-evaluate risk in their supply chains." Rich, deep, redundant, resilient networks as risk minimizers (for more see a thing I did called "Networks and Globalization"). In this case, it might prompt "a shift from focusing on reducing inventories and costs, the just-in-time model, pioneered in Japan, to one that places greater emphasis on buffering risk — a just-in-case mentality."
• Redundancy is one strategy -- multiple sources; resiliency is another -- the ability to quickly develop alternatives in case of emergency.
  

A Crisis That Markets Can't Grasp by Jeff Sommer (3/19/2011)

• How do you price risks that are relatively remote, where there isn't much experience, if any? 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the BP oil spill, and now the Japan earthquake/tsunami? "So perhaps a bigger question is whether the markets — in which we have come to place so much trust — can put a true price on outsize risks like this."
• “Past performance is no guarantee of future success."
• Nassim Taleb, who popularized the term "black swan" (referring to rare or difficult to predict high impact events) "argues that we have psychological biases that blind us to the enormous role played by rare events — like a 9.0-magnitude earthquake. And yet we rely on history for guidance."
  
• "Whatever else they may be, markets are immensely complex counting machines. They assign values to products, whether computer chips or potato chips, based on the canny appraisals and gut beliefs of people around the planet. From day to day, it is often hard, if not impossible, to know exactly why a certain price moved the way it did. Those daily movements are often just the white noise of global capitalism."
• And then "there are stretches of extreme volatility, periods when no one quite seems to agree about where anything is going."
• And nuclear power... "The financial markets have always had a difficult relationship with nuclear power, largely because the costs — and potential risks — associated with nuclear plants are so huge. Day to day, nuclear power is cheap. But it is unclear how to accurately assess the cost of disposing of nuclear waste over the long run — or, perhaps, the cost of disasters like the one in Japan." Economists, politicians, capitalists may just ignore the externals, the environmental costs, either because someone else (namely you and me, the general public) will pick up the tab, or because it is too complex to calculate, or there isn't enough information to figure it out. "Professor Stavins said, 'You can argue that the markets have never really had a chance to price nuclear power.'”
• "In the face of black swans — also known as fat-tail events, for the way their occurrences are distributed along a probability curve [those outlier events, low probability, but possible, like winning the lottery) — market pricing may be impossible."

The last comments relate to this final article:

Lessons from Chernobyl for Japan by Ellen Barry (3/19/2011)

• The contaminated area around Chernobyl will remain contaminated for more than 300 years.
• "One had to look at Ukraine to understand the sheer tedium and exhaustion of dealing with the aftermath of a meltdown. It is a problem that does not exist on a human time frame."
• An eerie instance of an abandoned civilization: "The wild world is gradually pressing its way in... 'This is a city that has been captured by wilderness,' he [ said. 'I think in 20 years it will be one big forest.'"
• According to one worker involved in maintaining the shell around the defunct reactor: “'Nobody knows what to do with what is inside,' he [Anton Yukhimenko, who leads tours of the dead zone] said. 'There will be enough work for my children and my grandchildren.'"

jd

Diane Ravitch in Chicago

Diane Ravitch, author of The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education and frequent critic of what she refers to as "corporate education reform" spoke to over 400 people on Saturday (March 12, 2011) at the UIC Forum. The event was sponsored by the Chicago Teachers Union.

An iPhone is not the easiest thing to take notes on, but here is an assortment of what I was able to take down. The bits below end up sounding like tweets, and it so happens Ravitch is a prolific tweeter ("I am not on Facebook").

"Is this an age of insanity or an age of stupidity?"

"[Corporate education reformers are ] standing on children to push agenda. School reform as a front to destroy public sector unions."

Referring to events unfolding in Wisconsin and there potential impact on education there, "Where is Arne Duncan? Will Arne Duncan meet me in Madison? Where is President Obama?" And "Money was not the point. -- killing collective bargaining was the real goal.

"We can't let the corporate reformers destroy public education."

"The NCLB mandate [that all students be proficient in reading and math by 2014] is utopian. It can't be met. No country has done it. NCLB is a timetable for the destruction of public education. Private entrepreneurs are waiting in the wings." By analogy, if NCLB was extended to police departments: "If the United States is not crime-free by 2014, close all of the police departments, and give a badge to anyone who wants one."

"The future of public education is in the balance. It is the cornerstone of democracy. It should not be privatized."

Synonyms for Race to the Top:

• NCLB 2.0
• Race to the Trough
• Dash to the Cash

On testing:

• "Testing is not the same thing as instruction."
• "Take test scores with a box of salt."
• "Testing is not a science." Testing is a social construction.
• "Data is just a representation of reality, it is not reality."
• "How can you evaluate teachers on data that is meaningless."
• "We need a broader vision of education. We need tests for diagnostic purposes. But high stakes testing is a corruption of the test."

Poverty is the the problem, not teachers. Where the Harlem Children's Zone (Geoffrey Canada, hero of Waiting for Superman) succeeds, it is because it is an antipoverty program. Poor children arrive at school with an achievement gap already in place. Teachers had nothing to do with that. Education in the United States as a whole is not failing, only poor peoples' schooling.

"Merit pay makes no difference." See work by Daniel Pink and Edwards Deming.

See http://www.saveourschoolsmarch.org/

jd

Computers and chess

I continue to be fascinated by the ways in which computers (and new technologies in general) change the terrain in so many (all?) fields. Dylan Loeb McClain's chess column in the March 5, 2011 New York Times, titled "Still No. 1 in the World, by the Thinnest of Margins", comments on the fact that the world's three top-ranked players are only separated by a range of 9 points (out of 2,800 points). Garry Kasparov, the top-ranked player for 20 years until he retired in 2005, was, McClain notes, was often 30 or 40 ratings points ahead of his closest rival.

What I find of interest is that McClain attributes this to the fact that players today have access to the same databases of games (want to review the Immortal Game? you can find it in any number of places, and step through each amazing move. What about a match between Salo Flohr and Max Euwe, 1932? Yep. Or all of Bobby Fischer's games, or ... see chessgames.com, or chess.com). Plus they have access to powerful computer chess engines to experiment with. And for the average punter, online play can dramatically expand one's board experience. So the tools of preparation are more evenly available: "Today, players have access to the same databases and computers when they train, and native ability is more important than ever" (which is another interesting insight).

Also see this post re: an article by Kasparov on computers and chess.

jd