General

The Near Future of High School

The baby boom echo kids (born between 1982-1995) are almost out of high school on average. It will be another 5 years of reduced enrollments until the baby boom echo echo kids start showing up in the schools. This will have implications for optimal school policy. Underlying this is a richer, better prepared, better nourished, healthier population that is increasingly going to college after high school. The high schools will increasingly adopt the trappings of junior and four-year colleges in order to adapt to the academic and funding environment.

With the schools having a temporarily sufficient capacity, there is a strong incentive for school to heavily recruit students for transfers under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). The facilities costs are largely fixed. The money brought in by additional students would be marginal profit for the school system. That money could be used to provide enrichment activities for the existing student body and hold the line on general cuts in services as enrollment subsides.

NCLB encourages high schools to take a step in the direction of becoming like universities by having admissions requirements. College admissions are brutally competitive. High schools develop brands that influence college admissions officers much as the college brands influence employers. A high school needs to have high scores, achievement and diversity from its student body for the school brand to positively influence a college admission decision. It follows that a high school admission requirement be put in place to increase the academic and cultural luster of the high school.

High schools also face a budget squeeze. Money from state and federal sources is often keyed to the number of students. As the number of students fall, budgets come under pressure. Many jurisdictions have property tax caps that prevent further tax increases. School financing has a difficult battle at the ballot box as empty nesters and newlyweds grow in the demographics compared to parents of school age children. Financing pressure leads schools to turn to parents and community to establish and fund foundations and build alumni associations to assist with high school excellence. As contributions go to the foundations and the schools, the money can be used to further improve the brand and upgrade the teaching quality, supplies and equipment.

The curriculum must also evolve to become more relevant to the knowledge age. Vocational tracks should encourage students to become software developers and enter other high wage careers. As computers and the internet have nullified or inverted age stereotypes in many industries, we have already seen high school students driving new SUVs with money they earned from software development. This may be a critical national resource to tap as overseas competition forces older workers even higher up the value chain.

It will no longer be enough to simply offer AP courses. High schools will need to start considering hiring ever more qualified and illustrious professionals to teach their college courses. If many students are taking AP courses, the school must compete with the junior colleges, community colleges and four year universities for staff. With those staff will come research opportunities for students that rival those at highly rated universities. Those will be necessary to match the bios of the Intel Science Talent Search winners. As hundreds of schools aspire to be the next Bronx Science, Bronx Science is aspiring to be the next Caltech and already boasts six Nobel Prize winning alumni. High school researchers from the baby boom echo echo may well be the source of the next shot heard round the world.

Media Criticism

Props To Time Mag

In their Ann Coulter edition (and yes, that was an awful cover photo, and I don’t think it’s an accident), they mistook Communists For Kerry and the Protest Warriors for real anti-right-wing groups protesting Ann. Maybe the protesters were a little too “nuanced” for them.

They’ve since fixed it though. Rather than just putting it down the memory hole, they’ve since changed the caption of the picture to reflect reality, and noted their original error. That’s refreshing, and when they do something right, we should encourage them.

It does make you question their savvy, though. Weren’t the jokes obvious, or did they look too much like signs that moonbats would actually carry? I like the “Criminals for Gun Control,” myself.

Space

A Million Here, A Million There

A commenter at this post writes:

When it costs hundreds of millions of dollars to fly a single Shuttle mission, I fail to see the problem with spending another 10 to fix the wiring.

The first problem is a misunderstanding of Shuttle costs. The marginal cost of a flight is not “hundreds of millions of dollars.” It’s probably somewhere between a hundred and a hundred and fifty million. The average cost is much more, but that’s not a useful number, because it can vary so much with flight rate (for example, when the flight rate is zero, as it has been since February, 2003, the average cost per flight is infinite, regardless of how much we spend on the Shuttle program).

The second problem is that, while ten million dollars may not seem like much in the context of a program that costs billions annually, the fact remains that NASA has a finite budget, and ten million spent on one item is ten million less available to be spent on something else, that might be more important. According to the article that the original post linked to, the odds of an uncommanded thruster firing resulting in a catastrophe are somewhere between one in ten thousand and one in a million (it doesn’t say if that’s on a per-mission basis, or totaled over the next twenty-odd flights). Assuming that those are valid numbers, with any degree of confidence, then the standard way to determine how much we should spend to prevent that event from happening would be to use the expected value of that event (probability times cost). The problem with that, of course, is assessing the value of either the Shuttle fleet, or the ISS, given that current policy recognizes them both as dead ends, in terms of future space policy.

That, in fact, is why I think that the CAIB recommendations should have been revisited after the new policy was announced. If the CAIB had known that the Shuttle was going to be retired at the end of the decade, they may not have recommended some of the more costly (and impractical) fixes for what would then have been recognized as a rapidly depreciating asset.

Space

Past Its Sell-By Date

This article, describing the potential danger of an uncommanded thruster firing, is just one more illustration of why the Shuttle has to be retired, and the sooner the better.

Back in the olden days, when I worked at Rockwell in the eighties and early nineties, some of my colleagues would write technical papers, in all seriousness, that we would likely be flying the Shuttle well into the 2020s or 2030s. Ignoring the fact that this was a self-serving delusion (we were, after all, in the business of building and flying the things), their logic was that it was designed for a hundred flights, and at the low flight rate we were getting out of it, it would easily last well into those decades. I didn’t make myself very popular when I laughed at this logic, but I did nonetheless.

Setting aside the issue of what a disaster it would be for space policy if we were still flying such an economically absurd system five decades after it had been designed, they didn’t seem to understand that, like the old oil commercial, “think months, not miles.” The fleet is aging, as we saw a couple years ago with the cracks in the fuel-cell liners. The standard rejoinder to this argument is that we are still flying B-52s that were originally built in the 1950s, and in some cases we have grandsons of some of the original flight crews flying them today.

That ignores the economics, of course. B-52s are heavily used, still flying sorties every day, and it makes sense to continue to maintain and inspect them, because the cost of doing so is amortized over a large number of flights. But it’s hard to justify the expenditure of many millions of dollars to replace wiring in the RCS, when the fleet is going to be retired soon anyway, and only flies a few times a year. This logic applies to almost any maintenance/replacement issue with the vehicles, all of which are uniformly hyperexpensive to implement. Unless it’s a clear and obvious safety issue in the context of the next couple dozen flights, it’s very hard to justify the expense at this point.

Space

Into The Mainstream

You know that space tourism is being taken seriously when you can read about it in Travel and Leisure magazine. This piece by Los Angeles writer M. G. Lord was in the January issue, which Patricia just pointed out to me.

I last saw M. G. last June in Mojave for the first SpaceShipOne flight into space. I hadn’t realized that she has a new book out. It looks quite interesting. Check out the review by NASA historian Roger Launius.

Technology and Society

The Past Brought By The Future

Long-time readers know that I’m not real big on the “spin-off” argument for funding space exploration and technology. Still, when something like this happens, it’s certainly a nice side effect.

Since it was unearthed more than a century ago, the hoard of documents known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri has fascinated classical scholars. There are 400,000 fragments, many containing text from the great writers of antiquity. But only a small proportion have been read so far. Many were illegible.

Now scientists are using multi-spectral imaging techniques developed from satellite technology to read the papyri at Oxford University’s Sackler Library. The fragments, preserved between sheets of glass, respond to the infra-red spectrum – ink invisible to the naked eye can be seen and photographed.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!