For Profit Education is a Scam, Continued

The numbers on America's for-profit colleges get more dismal the harder you look. The Times:

According to federal data, graduates of two-year, for-profit career training programs average a loan debt of $23,590. By contrast, most community-college graduates owe nothing.

The Department of Education recently reported that, of the thousands of for-profit programs it analyzed, an astonishing 72 percent produced graduates who, on average, earned less than a high school dropout who worked full time. This means that the most debt-ridden students are unlikely to earn enough to ever repay their loans. While students at for-profit colleges are 13 percent of the total higher education enrollment, they account for nearly half of all student loan defaults.

I don't know what we can do about this dismal charade, but if it were up to me we would shut them all down.

A Side Note on Appalachian Poverty

From the latest depressing article about poverty in southern West Virginia, this one by Trip Gabriel in the Times, I take away one illuminating anecdote. It concerns Emalee Short, a teenager who lives with her grandparents in Hensley, taking care of stray dogs and dreaming of being a biologist or veterinarian. (That's her above.) Describing her desire to escape from McDowell County, she said,

I don’t want people to talk about me.

Because in her experience, talking about people means reciting all the bad things that have happened to them: overdoses, injuries, arrests, prison terms. That's what talk is in McDowell County. That talking about people might mean bragging about their accomplishments is something outside of her experience.

Can College Students Plan Ahead?

Tom Friedman has been back talking with Google's hiring manager, Laszlo Bock. He had this to say about the potential value of college:

“My belief is not that one shouldn’t go to college,” said Bock. It is that among 18- to 22-year-olds — or people returning to school years later — “most don’t put enough thought into why they’re going, and what they want to get out of it.” . . . don’t just go to college because you think it is the right thing to do and that any bachelor’s degree will suffice. “The first and most important thing is to be explicit and willful in making the decisions about what you want to get out of this investment in your education.” It’s a huge investment of time, effort and money and people should think “incredibly hard about what they’re getting in return.”

I would file this under good advice that hardly anybody could actually use. How many 19-year-olds have enough notion of what they want in life to draw up such a plan? Or, if they do at 19, really stick with it? Or put a lot of effort into education that they end up not being able to use, like people who spend seven years getting a Ph.D. and then can't get a teaching job? And if you don't have such a plan, should you, like my two older sons, refuse to pursue any education because without clear goals you can't see the point? Many thousands of people drift through college but somehow end up in reasonable demanding and prestigious jobs. I suppose what Friedman is warning is that drifting into management has become thing of the past, but I wonder.

Bock puts a lot of emphasis on taking hard, technical classes, which is fine if you want to do technical things. But most jobs are not very technical; is there really any advantage for future managers and sales reps in studying programming?

Maybe Bock and Friedman are right and the old status hierarchy that put graduates of good colleges into management slots is crumbling. If so, the landscape for young people will only become more chaotic and harder to navigate, with more decisions to make and more places to falter or fall behind. Even more than now, the qualities that matter will be ambition, careerism, and a complete lack of curiosity about things that won't help you get ahead.

Easter 2014

Our two remaining egg hunters, Ben and Clara, had a rousing chase around the yard this morning. In some ways they are getting big, but they still love hunting for candy.

Robert has been hanging around with his friends who work night shifts, so he is sleeping all day and awake all night. I took advantage by asking him to hide the eggs after Ben, Clara and I were all abed.

And then for dinner we had relatives, and there was much mayhem involving cousins and padded weapons. All in all, it was a fine Easter.

The Empty Parts of the Map

From Nik Freeman, a map of all the census blocks with 0 population. About 47% of census blocks are empty.

Archaeology in Patterson Park: first Saturday

We started digging in Patterson Park on Tuesday, but today was the first day I managed to get out to the site. It was a gorgeous day, and everything is going great. Above, Jason, the field director, delivers his orientation speech to the morning volunteers.

To back up a bit: besides the fortification ditch, which I already mentioned, our GPR guy found something else in his data: a building foundation that corresponds with a structure shown on one of our Civil War maps. We think this was the butcher's shop that gave Butchers Hill its name, and that served as the headquarters of this part of the defenses in 1814.

So when we set up our initial excavation units we placed them in three places: along the ditch north of the bastion, along the ditch south of the bastion, and over the butcher's shop. This is the trench south of the bastion, where we can already see the ditch clearly. The Pagoda was built right in the middle of the bastion, probably right over the 1814 magazine. You can see that we put the volunteers right to work.

Emily, one of the professionals from our regular crew, exposes a piece of blue and gray stoneware in the ditch fill.

Eli from Baltimore Heritage (our client) leads a tour by the trench across the butcher's shop.

The trench north of the pagoda, where we have yet to find anything that looks like a fortification ditch. Probably need to dig deeper.

Clara helps volunteers screen.

It got pretty crowded around the butcher's shop trench right before lunch.

Ben and Clara by the duck pond. All in all, it was a great day.

Ready for Easter

A tree.

Karfreitag (Good Friday) procession in Lohr am Main, Germany.

The Britannia Coco-Nut Dancers cross Bacup, Lancashire from boundary to boundary every Easter Saturday.

The Northern Cross Pilgrimage, held every Holy Week, in which pilgrims walk from various points in Britain to the Holy Island of Lindsifarne. The last stretch is across the tidal causeway.

Easter Bonnet Parade, New York City.

Passion Brotherhood procession, Cordoba Spain.

Eggs.

Philippe Baudelocque

Rhinoceros done in temporary oil chalk. More here.

The Most Earth-like Planet Yet?

Scientists have announced the discovery of what they say is the most earthlike planet yet:

The newfound planet, called Kepler-186f, was first spotted by NASA's Kepler space telescope and circles a dim red dwarf star about 490 light-years from Earth. While the host star is dimmer than Earth's sun and the planet is slightly bigger than Earth, the positioning of the alien world coupled with its size suggests that Kepler-186f could have water on its surface, scientists say. . . .

"This is an historic discovery of the first truly Earth-sized planet found in the habitable zone around its star," Geoff Marcy, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley, who is unaffiliated with the research, told Space.com via email. "This is the best case for a habitable planet yet found. The results are absolutely rock-solid. The planet itself may not be, but I'd bet my house on it. In any case, it's a gem."

The planet's diameter is 1.1 times that of Earth's, so its mass and gravity will be about 30% more than Earth's. It would also receive slightly less solar radiation than Earth does, so it might be much colder, although that, of course, depends on the details of the atmosphere.

How Not to Talk about your Children

Those who are constantly talking about their children, their wives or their nursemaids, are equally at fault. 'Yesterday my boy made me laugh so much. Listen to this...You have never seen a more lovable son than my Momo...' No-one has so little to do that he has the time to answer or even to listen to such nonsense and so it irritates everyone.

Giovanni della Casa, Galateo (1558)

Via Ask the Past, this is a nice reminder of how timeless our parenting instincts are.

Natural Genetic Engineering

Ferns got a jump start by stealing genes from other plants:

The scientists found that roughly 100 million years ago, ferns exploded into a number of new lineages. Eighty percent of today’s fern species can be traced to that evolutionary burst.

Intriguingly, these successful ferns also evolved a new kind of light-sensing protein. Known as a neochrome, it makes ferns sensitive to dim levels of light. These neochromes may have enabled ferns to thrive on shady forest floors.

In 2011, one of Dr. Pryer’s graduate students, Fay-Wei Li, set out to discover the origin of neochromes. It was possible, he speculated, that an older light sensor that was sensitive to brighter light became adapted to dim forest shade.

But Li could not find any precursor for the neochrome gene in any species of fern; all their neochrome genes were pretty much the same. Frustrated, he turned to a new database of plant DNA. There he found what he was looking for, a neochrome gene with the sort of variability one expects closer to the evolutionary root of anything new. It was not in ferns, though, but in a distantly related group of plants called hornworts:

Comparing all the data, Mr. Li and his colleagues came up with an unexpected hypothesis for how ferns got their neochromes. Neochromes did not gradually evolve in ancient ferns. Instead, a single lineage of ferns picked up the neochrome gene from hornworts about 180 million years ago.

This discovery is another triumph for the now deceased Lynn Margulis, who always argued that the key stages of evolution happened more by the sharing of genes than by Darwinian natural selection. It is also a reminder of the risks involved in inserting genes for things like herbicide resistance or insecticides into crop plants, since there is a small but real chance that those genes will jump to weed species.

Grand Expositions: St. Louis, 1904

The 1904 World’s Fair was a celebration of American expansion. It as officially called the Louisiana Purchase Exhibition, although like the Chicago Fair it actually opened a year late for the centennial of the 1803 event it was supposed to celebrate. It was saturated with references to the frontier and to American exceptionalism, and among other things it was, at 1200 acres (4.9 km²), by far the biggest great exhibition yet celebrated. The fair's official brochure proclaimed:

The heroes of Homer’s Iliad were engaged in petty achievements when compared with the work of the men who wrestled a vast wilderness from savages and wild beasts and made it the seat of twenty great commonwealths in a single century.

The fair was staged on what had been the Forest Park, and there were even some protests against the clearing of these woodlands. But in America in 1904, you were wasting your breath to complain about the clearing of forests for progress, so of course the trees were cut and the show went on.

The landscape was designed by George Kessler.

The fair as huge -- more than 1500 buildings, one of which, the Palace of Agriculture, covered 20 acres (324,000 m²) by itself. There were 75 miles of roads, plus a railway.

The Plaza.

Palace of Liberal Arts.

Electricity dominated the technical wonders. The newest hot technology was wireless, and a radio tower allowed visitors to send messages to Chicago via wireless telegraphy.

One of the lagoons, with the wireless tower in the background. The sort of people who post World's Fair pictures on the internet seem fascinated by these early color photos, so much that it is hard to find the sort of magnificently clear black and white images I found by the hundreds for the Chicago World's Fair.

But I did find this one, of the Festival Hall, which featured the world's biggest organ.

And this one of the Brazilian pavilion.

At these fairs they always wanted to break a sheaf of records for the biggest of all sorts of things; this was the world's biggest aviary.

The entertainment district was called The Pike, and it featured the usual assortment of nineteenth-century fun:

Considered the carnival side of the Fair, Pike visitors could enjoy fifty different amusements, including contortionists, reenactments of the Boer War, babies in incubators, the Dancing Girls of Madrid, Jim Key the Educated Horse, and Hagenbeck’s Zoological Paradise and Animal Circus—which featured an elephant water slide.

Above is the design for the Creation Pavilion, which looks grand and sinister, but since it as on the Pike, I have to wonder.

I find it amusing that the Pike included an Irish village. I suppose instead of starving people got drunk while dreaming of the Old Country.

The most controversial part of the fair, then and now, was the Philippines exhibit. The US had acquired the Philippines just five years before, and Congress voted the then princely sum of $1.5 million to stage an exhibit introducing Americans to their new friends. More than a thousand Filipinos from ten different ethnic groups were brought over for the fair and housed in a 47-acre compound that included several distinct villages. They were drawn from groups of fairly primitive farmers, the better to display quaint, savage customs. There was also a troop of Filipino soldiers who drilled and saluted the American flag to show their new patriotism.

Among the people offended by this show were the Filipino elite, the sort of people whose families had been speaking Spanish for 300 years, and from their haciendas in Manila they fired off angry letters to the governor, the President, the Secretary of the Interior, the Governor of Missouri, and the officials of the fair. The governor fired back, saying that the tribesmen were just as Filipino as the people of Manila and maybe the Manila elite should pay more attention to their fellow citizens instead of pretending that they represented everyone in the islands.

But plenty of Americans were just was offended, in their case by the display of people in what amounted to a zoo, which, they said, was the perfect expression of the sort of dehumanizing militaristic imperialism on display in the Spanish-American War.

The show went on, though, and the exhibits were fairly popular. It is harder to find out how the various Filipino natives felt about the experience, although Filipino Americans have tried. Ambivalent, seems to be the answer; some complained about being used and not paid all the money they were promised, others were pleased to see something of the world at government expense. Some were fascinated by the notion of electing the President, so a voting booth was set up for them -- although their votes weren't part of the official count.

On a lighter note, the fair has a big place in American popular culture. The ice cream cone is supposed to have been invented there, and Dr. Pepper was introduced to the nation. The hamburger was certainly not invented there, but some people do say it got a huge boost as the quintessential American food. And, yes, Meet Me in St. Louis was written for the fair. All in all, quite a happening.