In most US states a new MRI clinic (or other medical service) cannot open without permission from the state. There is some committee which decides if there is enough demand in the area to justify opening a new provider.
The original reason for that was a good one. When MRIs came out, hospitals, and free-standing radiology clinics, were buying more MRIs than anyone knew what to do with (with the help of financing from the manufacturers).
There was an epidemic of over-use of MRIs. MRIs expose you to a lot of radiation. Somebody calculated that when you give a child an MRI, that child has a 1/10,000 increased risk of brain cancer. They were advertising (useless) whole-body scans on the radio, just to fill up their machines.
So the Medicare administration decided to limit the number of MRIs to just what they needed.
I don't know what your test was, but I used to write about medical tests. I still do occasionally.
One of the problems is that a new medical test doesn't usually give you a clear answer. You want a test that says, "You have rheumatoid arthritis" or "You don't have rheumatoid arthritis." Instead, what you get is tests that say, "You have an 80% likelihood of having rheumatoid arthritis" or "you have a 20% likelihood of having rheumatoid arthritis."
If a new test isn't widely adopted by doctors, it's usually because it's not a very accurate test. What do you do if a test says, "You have a 5% chance of leukemia"? Or what do you do if a test says,"You have a positive result for a protein that is sometimes associated with leukemia?"
If it's a test that she doesn't normally do, the most reasonable explanation is that it's a test that doesn't have much significance and won't affect your treatment.
Uh, they have a licensed pharmacist right there to analyze the results, in the rest of the world a pharmacist can basically do everything an NP can do because they have to know medicine and pharmacology to do their job.
My insurance company sent a nurse practitioner to see me. I said, "What's this thing on my arm Is it just an aging spot or is it something more serious?" She said, "I'm not allowed to diagnose."
And for good reason she wasn't allowed to diagnose. A dermatologist spends years learning to distinguish melanoma, basal cell carcinoma, squamous cell carcinoma, and thousands of other things that look like skin cancer but aren't. Make a mistake, and the patient dies needlessly.
NP!=MD.
Neither can pharmacists make diagnoses like that.
Do you want to have third world medicine, where ordinary people can't afford to see doctors?
mean in the context of patient care. But the tests themselves are just technology, and nothing brings cost down like the march of technological progress.
Pharmacist: Here's your test. You have leukemia.
Customer: What? What does that mean? Can it be treated? How long do I have to live?
Pharmacist: I'm sorry. I'm just a pharmacist. I'm not allowed to give advice like that. You'll have to see your doctor.
You're applying a general mis-informed malicious stereotype against millions of people. *Some* of them are probably close to what you describe. But MOST are not--they're tax-paying citizens who get up every morning, put on a Kevlar vest, a uniform, and a badge, and go out to deal with the best AND the worst of humanity.
"MOST"? How can you know that? I've known a few cops that seem to be dedicated. But (1) they're overwhelmed by the institutional pressures of the police department (2) they have a culture of silence and don't identify crime among their fellow officers. That's their job, right -- to fight crime? But not crime by cops. It only takes a few corrupt cops to corrupt the whole system, and there seem to be more than a few corrupt cops. Maybe the majority.
In New York City, there were hearings every so often, like the Knapp Commission http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knapp_Commission where corrupt cops had to testify under oath, in exchange for lighter sentences. Corruption was overwhelming. I used to work in restaurants, and the cops would expect to eat free. One of the cops at the Knapp hearings testified that an honest cop was one who brought his lunch in a brown paper bag.
More ominously, according to overwhelming testimony of the recent stop and frisk case in New York, the police routinely target young black men, search them illegally, illegally force them to "empty their pockets," and arrest them on small-time marijuana charges, which would have been a violation, like a parking ticket, if they hadn't emptied their pockets. So they gave hundreds of thousands of black men misdemeanor records, which disqualified them for education loans, public housing, and even food stamps.
It's the Highway Patrolman who climbs into an ambulance to hold the hand of a severely-injured driver who has no one else there for her;
Please, no violins. I've often noticed that when a cop is involved in a horrible abuse, like killing an innocent person, the police union's lawyers drag out all the stories about how he's saved a cat in a tree. Saving a cat in a tree doesn't exculpate an unjustified killing.
They're advancing mostly according to their family's money.
A much simpler explanation (that happens to agree with the data) is that smart parents both make a lot of money and also produce smart kids.
I would like to see that data, in a peer-reviewed science journal (and not an economics journal).
The best evidence I've seen, generally in Science magazine (sorry, I don't have the citation handy) is that about 50% of intelligence, as measured in standard tests, is genetic, as inferred by twin studies, and 50% is due to the environment.
The psychologists say that in a society with strong economic equality, and equal opportunity in education, like Finland, you can safely hypothesize that most of the variation is due to genetics. You can assume most people are starting out at the same starting line.
But in a society like the U.S., with great economic inequality, and expensive education, you can't assume that other factors are equal and genetics is the only variation.
The biggest difference in the environment -- and test results -- is the black/white difference. It's only since the Supreme Court case of Brown vs. Board of Education that schools were required to provide equal education to black students. You can see the results in the NAEP historical achievement tests by race in math and reading comprehension. The black scores show a steady, dramatic increase from 1970 to the latest results. Their genes weren't changing. The environment was changing.
if you want everyone to be educated to their full potential,
You keep using the term "potential". What "potential" are you exactly talking about? Genetic potential? Epigenetic potential? Potential after early childhood experiences? Potential after high school? Each of those stages progressively limits the academic potential of students. How far are you willing to limit parental freedoms to make decisions for their kids in order to let them "reach their full potential"?
You give kids the best education you can, starting from preschool and continuing to graduate school, vocational school, or whatever works. (Something like Germany.) According to a review in Science, there are preschool programs like the Perry School that have scientifically validated, demonstrated results. (The evidence on Head Start, unfortunately, isn't as good.)
When you see kids are learning something, you continue with the education. It's hard to decide exactly what learning is, or what they're supposed to be learning, so you can't judge them by nationwide curricula and high-stakes testing, until those curricula and tests have been validated (and so far, they haven't been).
So I would borrow a line from the Wall Street Journal editorial page. Individuals can best decide for themselves what's good for them. As long as they think they're learning something, they should be allowed to continue. I'd like to limit it to traditional programs and their goals, like universities and vocational schools, but if some innovator can meet the burden of proof, we would include them too.
As for parents, we have compulsory education laws in all developed countries. Parents have to comply with those laws. I'm personally skeptical of home schooling, but if they can demonstrate that they can home-school their kids to the same standards as public schools, then it's acceptable to me.
One of the differences between income, OTOH, and strength and height, OTOH, is that you can change income, by giving the poor money.
But you cannot increase intelligence by giving people money.
If George Bush is stupid, you can't increase his intelligence by giving him money. However, if you have a population of people who have low intelligence and are living in destitution, without enough food, housing and health care to give them a stable life, and you give them money, then yes, I think you can increase the individ
Diane Ravitch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diane_Ravitch was assistant secretary of education in the G.H.W. Bush Administration and the Clinton Administration. She started out as a neocon, and writes for the Wall Street Journal editoral page. One of her responsibilities was collecting data on educational accomplishment.
After looking at the data, she realized that the major factor associated with educational achievement was family income. The higher the income, the higher the educational achievement. This is probably due to first, the advantages of money, and second, the advantages of understanding the system that comes with social class. The NYT story showed that even if you tried to give students money, they still had problems understanding the system. It's irrelevant whether it's their "fault"; that's the way it is, and if you want everyone to be educated to their full potential, you have to first give them money (or at least not charge them), and second help them navigate the social system. That's what we used to do during the big immigration waves and the (mostly successful) assimilation of immigrants.
One of the differences between income, OTOH, and strength and height, OTOH, is that you can change income, by giving the poor money. If everybody gets roughly as much money, as they do in the Scandinavian countries, then students will advance according to their ability. Until then, you can't say that people are advancing according to their ability. They're advancing mostly according to their family's money.
I think that a modern economy will be more efficient and profitable when we educate people to their maximum capacity. That's what Singapore does. If there is a point at which education isn't returning value for the money invested, we haven't reached it. If you set up economic barriers to college education, you don't educate people to their maximum capacity. If you let people sink or swim, as they did in the NYT story, you don't educate people to their maximum capacity. If you leave education to the free market, you don't educate people to their maximum capacity. Singapore is as devoted to the free market as you get, and they treat college education as a government responsibility.
I'm not sure what "fact" you think those three stories are supposed to provide. You have three students who failed out of college and obviously made bad financial decisions, since they ended up owing more than average and not even getting a degree out of it.
The point of the story was that these are students who came from low-income families, and because of that they and their families didn't know how to make "good" financial decisions. Students from upper-income families know how to make "good" financial decisions because their families have been handling money all their lives. It demonstrates the advantages of upper-income families.
college graduation rates are not that dissimilar: about 60-70% for kids from families making $70k+, and about 45-55% for kids from families making less than $25k.
That looks dissimilar to me.
Suppose you had a deadly disease, and you could take one of two drugs. One drug had a survival rate of 60-70%, and the other drug had a survival rate of 45-55%. Which drug would you take?
The remaining difference is more than adequately explained by factors other than educational or financial inequality.
I can see where this is coming from. The remaining difference is explained by circular logic. Since they didn't graduate, it must have been their own fault.
Plenty of people with little or no money manage to go to college, on scholarship, loans, and by working. I got an excellent education without taking out loans and without my parents spending a dime on it. My parents had literally nothing and worked themselves through college.
I don't know the specific facts in your case, so I don't know how you got through college without loans or parents' assistance, and whether there you had some unusual benefit that those students in the Jason DeParle story didn't have.
But I've often heard people brag about how they made it themselves, and then when I found out more about them, it turned out that they had all the advantages of social class. "Yeah, my father helped me, but I could have done it myself."
Is it harder if you have little or no money? Yes. But so what?
OK, we'll take some more of your money away in taxes. You'll get by. It'll just be a little harder.
If they pick the wrong career, paying back a student loan is the least of their worries. And the typical teenager has parents to help them make decisions.
Well, let's look at the facts.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/23/education/poor-students-struggle-as-class-plays-a-greater-role-in-success.html For Poor Strivers, Leap to College Often Ends in a Hard Fall By JASON DePARLE Published: December 22, 2012 3 students from Galveston, TX, graduated 2008 at top of their class in low-ranked Ball High, were in Upward Bound, a college-prep program for low-income teenagers. All 3 got into college, but 4 years later, none has a 4 year degree. “Their story seems less like a tribute to upward mobility than a study of obstacles in an age of soaring economic inequality.” "Each showed the ability to do college work, even excel at it. But the need to earn money brought one set of strains, campus alienation brought others, and ties to boyfriends not in school added complications. With little guidance from family or school officials, college became a leap that they braved without a safety net."
Angela Gonzales went to Emory, but her financial aid got screwed up. She dropped out after 3 years with $61,000 debt. She’s working in her boyfriend’s furniture store for $8.50 an hour.
Melissa O'Neal went to Texas State University. Her high-school boyfriend ran up $4,000 on her credit card and never got a job. Melissa got depressed, skipped classes, and failed some, but is now a 5th-year senior with an engineering student boyfriend and $44,000 in loans.
Bianca Gonzales enrolled in community college to be near her boyfriend and dying grandfather. She finished her associate degree, and now works as a beach-bar cashier and spa receptionist. Education is not an equalizer. It doesn't promote social mobility. The gaps between high- and low-income kids are widening. The role of class is growing. Growing incomes at the top, single-parent households, segregated neighborhoods, lower-quality neighborhood schools, and increasing college costs are responsible. So only the prosperous get educated. “It’s becoming increasingly unlikely that a low-income student, no matter how intrinsically bright, moves up the socioeconomic ladder,” said Sean Reardon,
Giving people four years of free room and board while getting an art history degree is not "forced education", it is allowing them to waste another four years of their lives.
You obviously don't know anything about art history.
I took art history courses.
I learned about the Bauhaus, industrial design, architecture. I learned about the history of the motion picture and the birth of video. I learned how people figured out how to apply a new technology.
I learned about Leonardo da Vinci and the study of anatomy. For many centuries the study of art anatomy was the same as the study of medical anatomy. I learned about art and technology.
I learned about why they had the art that they did in Renaissance Italy, in the Soviet Union, in Nazi Germany, in 1960s New York.
It helped me understand the history of science.
Art history is simply a branch of history. Do you think the study of history is a waste of time? Do you think it's more important to study generals and battles than it is to study architects and industrial designers?
BTW, when undergraduates major in art history, they also take the same basic courses that everybody else takes, such as math, science, English, foreign languages, music, other history, etc. The idea is that you go to college and get a well-rounded education, that teaches you how to deal with anything. You don't know at age 19 what the world is going to be like for the next 40 years, so you have to be prepared for the unknown.
If you go to the Nobel prize web site http://www.nobelprize.org/ and read the biographies, you'll see that many of the most accomplished scientists studied the liberal arts as undergraduates. Harold Varmus, who is now head of the National Cancer Institute, after discovering the role of retroviruses in cancer, was an English major. Eric Kandel, who discovered the physiological basis of memory in neurons, studied German literature at Harvard.
The four-year undergraduate degree, where you let kids follow their curiosity, is the goose that lays the golden egg. It's the most valuable thing we've discovered -- throughout history, around the world. That's the way we turn out great minds, including scientists, including "producers". It's a system that works and you shouldn't mess with it if you don't understand it. If you start tossing out all the subjects that bored you, you'll kill the goose that lays the golden egg. You'll turn out technicians who don't know what to do when the world changes.
These people got their education at schools like Harvard, where they spent full-time in an environment designed to educate them, challenge their ideas, let them relax and think, and experiment -- and make the social contacts that helped their careers more than the course content they were ostensibly learning.
Now they're trying to tell us that it's just as good (and cheaper) to get a college class online. If we can only be wise consumers in the free market, we'll find a deal online that we can afford. Nobody walks.
This is a con job. It's like saying Internet porn is just as good as sex. It's like saying that you can find affordable health insurance online.
40 years ago the U.S. had a system of free college education (like most of Europe has today). It worked.
City College has a wall of pictures with the Nobel laureates who graduated CCNY, most of whom said in their Nobel biographies that they couldn't have afforded to go to college if they had to pay for it.
The University of California turned out graduates who gave us the revolutions in digital electronics and medicine. Then Ronald Reagan decided to cut the budget by attacking the liberals he didn't like anyway. If you charge people for college, only the rich can go to college. For the rest of us, the other choice is to go into debt that you may never repay.
The job of government is to pay for education.
We've got the money. We pay for wars, the military, police departments outfitted into SWAT teams, prisons filled with drug offenders spending long terms. We have the wealthiest billionaires in the world, who don't pay taxes. We pay college presidents salaries on parity with Fortune 500 executives.
Let's do what works. Bring back free university education. Pay for it out of taxes.
I based that on the parent's assumption that a 3% mortality was a 97% survival, which he said did not justify the media's "panic."
The truth is, we don't know exactly how many people this year's flu is going to kill. It usually kills between 20,000 and 40,000 people a year in the U.S., which is about equal to the automobile fatalities, which is also a major cause of death.
Because it causes so many deaths, there are things you should do about it. You should get vaccinated, to prevent yourself and everyone else from getting it. You should stay home for a few days if you have the flu, so that you don't go around infecting everybody else with it. That's what you call "panic."
But the real worry about the flu and SARS is that it may be more lethal than the usual flu. The flu of 1917-18 caused 650,000 deaths in the U.S., and maybe 40 million worldwide. That's more than the first world war. The 1917-18 flu was unusual in that it attacked mostly young people.
Nobody knows how lethal the latest flu and the latest viruses will be. They could cause another 650,000 deaths in the U.S. Scientists have created viruses in the laboratory that are capable of that many deaths, and they're trying to figure out how to prevent it.
What you call panic is what they call intelligent preparations.
As the old joke goes, if you're calm when everyone is running around in panic, maybe you don't understand the seriousness of the situation.
Why do you assume that the faculty are the employees?
The administrators are employees. They're hired by the university to make it easier for the faculty to accomplish the university's mission of teaching and research.
For example, a couple of university press releases and documents from university board of trustees meetings refer to a person as "Dr. Henderson" 6 weeks before she officially received her PhD. Oh the horror!!
Actually, it was two years before she got her PhD.
If you're a PhD in academia, it is a big deal. Falsifying credentials is academic fraud, like plagiarism.
It's like a military officer wearing a battle ribbon for a battle he was never in. There was a Navy officer who killed himself after Newsweek reported that he did such a thing.
The resumes and pay scales are public documents, which are available to anyone.
They're working for tax-supported a institution, and part of the deal if you accept the job is that your pay scale and resume will be public documents.
In New York City, pay scales of high school teachers and policemen are public. If you know what a cop's rank is, you know how much he's making.
It can't be any other way. The legislature sets the salaries, as part of a public proceeding.
But it's still true that you'll be best rewarded for the most cunning investments - assuming you have any money to invest.
I don't think that anybody can invest money more cleverly than anybody else. John Bogle, the guy who started the Vanguard mutual fund, said that nobody can beat the market, or a market basket, and he had some pretty convincing arguments.
It's the old "10 starving dogs in a cage with enough food for 5" thing, though - one will take half the food, 2 will eat reasonably, a couple more will win a few scraps, and the other 5 will starve.
Several years ago, I looked up the distribution of family income in the Statistical Abstract of the United States, by fifths. It was roughly like this:
First fifth: $100,000/yr
Second fifth: $50,000/yr
Third fifth: $25,000/yr
Fourth fifth: $12,500/yr
Bottom fifth: $6,000/yr
Get it? The families in the top fifth earned as much income as everybody else below them, and so do the families in each fifth, until you reach the bottom.
That was about 1985. The inequality has gotten greater since. And the distribution of wealth is much more unequal.
As I understand it, from reading their web site, all the boilers now being sold at Central Boiler http://www.centralboiler.com/ are EPA-certified.
That makes sense, doesn't it? If the EPA requires certification to sell boilers, the companies that have been making boilers will get their EPA certification.
Isn't trying to pass gun control laws instead of mentally ill control laws selling fear?
What "mentally ill control laws" do you propose? Do you propose that, in order to buy a gun, a person would have to be screened by a psychologist or psychiatrist, who would decide whether that person could handle a gun safely?
I was afraid somebody might ask that (because I think I could find a study to back it up, but it might take a long time).
I was extrapolating from the statements by scientists who study these things that poorly-ventilated wood stoves are as dangerous for the lungs as cigarettes, car exhaust, or coal power plant emissions. It's impossible to calculate these things precisely, but one of the data sets I use, because it's a classic study, is in the 1964 Surgeon General's Report on Smoking and Health, which found that military veterans who smoked cigarettes died about 10 years sooner than veterans who didn't smoke. There are lots of studies since then that come up with comparable numbers. There are studies of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which is one of the big killers among lung diseases, which found a high incidence of COPD among women who use traditional wood and charcoal cooking stoves indoors.
Now realize the dangers come from traditional wood stoves, and it's possible to make clean-burning stoves that don't have those dangers.
Here's one from Fox News (which sometimes gets a bad rap), comparing wood stoves to car exhaust:
Wood Stoves May Cause Cancer, Heart Disease Published February 07, 2011 FoxNews.com
A wood-burning stove in your home may be a great source of heat during the cold winter, but new data shows that invisible particles produced by burning wood may cause cancer and heart disease, the Telegraph reported.
Wood-burning stoves are becoming more popular because of the rising price of oil, gas and electricity prices. But researchers at Copenhagen University in Denmark said that breathing in air around the stoves is the equivalent to inhaling car exhaust—with the wood particles being small enough to breathe into the deepest parts of the lungs.
"The particles that come from wood smoke can certainly cause fatal heart or lung disease. In human cells that were exposed to the particles, substantial DNA damage and mutation took place. It was comparable to the effects of particles given off by traffic," said professor Steffen Loft, of the Department of Public Health at Copenhagen University....
Jan. 16, 2012 — Wood-burning stoves are a popular source of heating in many countries. However in recent years there has been much debate about the potential negative health effects associated with wood smoke. A Norwegian researcher has studied the influence of combustion conditions on the emissions and their health effects.
Traffic Pollution and Wood Smoke Increases Asthma in Adults
Aug. 20, 2013 — Asthma sufferers frequently exposed to heavy traffic pollution or smoke from wood fire heaters, experienced a significant worsening of symptoms, a new University of Melbourne led study has found....
"Our study also revealed a connection between the inhalation of wood smoke exposure and asthma severity and that the use of wood for heating is detrimental to health in communities such as Tasmania where use of wood burning is common," Dr Burgess said.
"Clean burning practices and the replacement of old polluting wood stoves by new ones are likely to minimise both indoor and outdoor wood smoke pollution and improve people's health," he said.
Slashdot Mirror
In most US states a new MRI clinic (or other medical service) cannot open without permission from the state. There is some committee which decides if there is enough demand in the area to justify opening a new provider.
The original reason for that was a good one. When MRIs came out, hospitals, and free-standing radiology clinics, were buying more MRIs than anyone knew what to do with (with the help of financing from the manufacturers).
There was an epidemic of over-use of MRIs. MRIs expose you to a lot of radiation. Somebody calculated that when you give a child an MRI, that child has a 1/10,000 increased risk of brain cancer. They were advertising (useless) whole-body scans on the radio, just to fill up their machines.
So the Medicare administration decided to limit the number of MRIs to just what they needed.
Ordering tests without knowledge of some important things (like pretest probability / accuracy and sensitivity of the tests) is basically worthless.
Hitting with a hammer ___ $5
Knowing where to hit___$495
I don't know what your test was, but I used to write about medical tests. I still do occasionally.
One of the problems is that a new medical test doesn't usually give you a clear answer. You want a test that says, "You have rheumatoid arthritis" or "You don't have rheumatoid arthritis." Instead, what you get is tests that say, "You have an 80% likelihood of having rheumatoid arthritis" or "you have a 20% likelihood of having rheumatoid arthritis."
If a new test isn't widely adopted by doctors, it's usually because it's not a very accurate test. What do you do if a test says, "You have a 5% chance of leukemia"? Or what do you do if a test says,"You have a positive result for a protein that is sometimes associated with leukemia?"
What did the Scripps web site tell you? This is the kind of test they're concerned with http://www.scripps.edu/newsandviews/e_20120521/mowen.html It has nothing to do with anything of medical significance to you today.
If it's a test that she doesn't normally do, the most reasonable explanation is that it's a test that doesn't have much significance and won't affect your treatment.
Uh, they have a licensed pharmacist right there to analyze the results, in the rest of the world a pharmacist can basically do everything an NP can do because they have to know medicine and pharmacology to do their job.
My insurance company sent a nurse practitioner to see me. I said, "What's this thing on my arm Is it just an aging spot or is it something more serious?" She said, "I'm not allowed to diagnose."
And for good reason she wasn't allowed to diagnose. A dermatologist spends years learning to distinguish melanoma, basal cell carcinoma, squamous cell carcinoma, and thousands of other things that look like skin cancer but aren't. Make a mistake, and the patient dies needlessly.
NP!=MD.
Neither can pharmacists make diagnoses like that.
Do you want to have third world medicine, where ordinary people can't afford to see doctors?
mean in the context of patient care. But the tests themselves are just technology, and nothing brings cost down like the march of technological progress.
Pharmacist: Here's your test. You have leukemia.
Customer: What? What does that mean? Can it be treated? How long do I have to live?
Pharmacist: I'm sorry. I'm just a pharmacist. I'm not allowed to give advice like that. You'll have to see your doctor.
Customer: But I don't have a doctor!
You're applying a general mis-informed malicious stereotype against millions of people. *Some* of them are probably close to what you describe. But MOST are not--they're tax-paying citizens who get up every morning, put on a Kevlar vest, a uniform, and a badge, and go out to deal with the best AND the worst of humanity.
"MOST"? How can you know that? I've known a few cops that seem to be dedicated. But (1) they're overwhelmed by the institutional pressures of the police department (2) they have a culture of silence and don't identify crime among their fellow officers. That's their job, right -- to fight crime? But not crime by cops. It only takes a few corrupt cops to corrupt the whole system, and there seem to be more than a few corrupt cops. Maybe the majority.
In New York City, there were hearings every so often, like the Knapp Commission http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knapp_Commission where corrupt cops had to testify under oath, in exchange for lighter sentences. Corruption was overwhelming. I used to work in restaurants, and the cops would expect to eat free. One of the cops at the Knapp hearings testified that an honest cop was one who brought his lunch in a brown paper bag.
More ominously, according to overwhelming testimony of the recent stop and frisk case in New York, the police routinely target young black men, search them illegally, illegally force them to "empty their pockets," and arrest them on small-time marijuana charges, which would have been a violation, like a parking ticket, if they hadn't emptied their pockets. So they gave hundreds of thousands of black men misdemeanor records, which disqualified them for education loans, public housing, and even food stamps.
It's the Highway Patrolman who climbs into an ambulance to hold the hand of a severely-injured driver who has no one else there for her;
Please, no violins. I've often noticed that when a cop is involved in a horrible abuse, like killing an innocent person, the police union's lawyers drag out all the stories about how he's saved a cat in a tree. Saving a cat in a tree doesn't exculpate an unjustified killing.
Dark Alley. 45 minutes. "Informants."
Uh huh.
Sleazy bar. 45 minutes. "Informants."
A much simpler explanation (that happens to agree with the data) is that smart parents both make a lot of money and also produce smart kids.
I would like to see that data, in a peer-reviewed science journal (and not an economics journal).
The best evidence I've seen, generally in Science magazine (sorry, I don't have the citation handy) is that about 50% of intelligence, as measured in standard tests, is genetic, as inferred by twin studies, and 50% is due to the environment.
The psychologists say that in a society with strong economic equality, and equal opportunity in education, like Finland, you can safely hypothesize that most of the variation is due to genetics. You can assume most people are starting out at the same starting line.
But in a society like the U.S., with great economic inequality, and expensive education, you can't assume that other factors are equal and genetics is the only variation.
The biggest difference in the environment -- and test results -- is the black/white difference. It's only since the Supreme Court case of Brown vs. Board of Education that schools were required to provide equal education to black students. You can see the results in the NAEP historical achievement tests by race in math and reading comprehension. The black scores show a steady, dramatic increase from 1970 to the latest results. Their genes weren't changing. The environment was changing.
if you want everyone to be educated to their full potential,
You keep using the term "potential". What "potential" are you exactly talking about? Genetic potential? Epigenetic potential? Potential after early childhood experiences? Potential after high school? Each of those stages progressively limits the academic potential of students. How far are you willing to limit parental freedoms to make decisions for their kids in order to let them "reach their full potential"?
You give kids the best education you can, starting from preschool and continuing to graduate school, vocational school, or whatever works. (Something like Germany.) According to a review in Science, there are preschool programs like the Perry School that have scientifically validated, demonstrated results. (The evidence on Head Start, unfortunately, isn't as good.)
When you see kids are learning something, you continue with the education. It's hard to decide exactly what learning is, or what they're supposed to be learning, so you can't judge them by nationwide curricula and high-stakes testing, until those curricula and tests have been validated (and so far, they haven't been).
So I would borrow a line from the Wall Street Journal editorial page. Individuals can best decide for themselves what's good for them. As long as they think they're learning something, they should be allowed to continue. I'd like to limit it to traditional programs and their goals, like universities and vocational schools, but if some innovator can meet the burden of proof, we would include them too.
As for parents, we have compulsory education laws in all developed countries. Parents have to comply with those laws. I'm personally skeptical of home schooling, but if they can demonstrate that they can home-school their kids to the same standards as public schools, then it's acceptable to me.
If George Bush is stupid, you can't increase his intelligence by giving him money. However, if you have a population of people who have low intelligence and are living in destitution, without enough food, housing and health care to give them a stable life, and you give them money, then yes, I think you can increase the individ
Diane Ravitch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diane_Ravitch was assistant secretary of education in the G.H.W. Bush Administration and the Clinton Administration. She started out as a neocon, and writes for the Wall Street Journal editoral page. One of her responsibilities was collecting data on educational accomplishment.
After looking at the data, she realized that the major factor associated with educational achievement was family income. The higher the income, the higher the educational achievement. This is probably due to first, the advantages of money, and second, the advantages of understanding the system that comes with social class. The NYT story showed that even if you tried to give students money, they still had problems understanding the system. It's irrelevant whether it's their "fault"; that's the way it is, and if you want everyone to be educated to their full potential, you have to first give them money (or at least not charge them), and second help them navigate the social system. That's what we used to do during the big immigration waves and the (mostly successful) assimilation of immigrants.
One of the differences between income, OTOH, and strength and height, OTOH, is that you can change income, by giving the poor money. If everybody gets roughly as much money, as they do in the Scandinavian countries, then students will advance according to their ability. Until then, you can't say that people are advancing according to their ability. They're advancing mostly according to their family's money.
I think that a modern economy will be more efficient and profitable when we educate people to their maximum capacity. That's what Singapore does. If there is a point at which education isn't returning value for the money invested, we haven't reached it. If you set up economic barriers to college education, you don't educate people to their maximum capacity. If you let people sink or swim, as they did in the NYT story, you don't educate people to their maximum capacity. If you leave education to the free market, you don't educate people to their maximum capacity. Singapore is as devoted to the free market as you get, and they treat college education as a government responsibility.
I'm not sure what "fact" you think those three stories are supposed to provide. You have three students who failed out of college and obviously made bad financial decisions, since they ended up owing more than average and not even getting a degree out of it.
The point of the story was that these are students who came from low-income families, and because of that they and their families didn't know how to make "good" financial decisions. Students from upper-income families know how to make "good" financial decisions because their families have been handling money all their lives. It demonstrates the advantages of upper-income families.
college graduation rates are not that dissimilar: about 60-70% for kids from families making $70k+, and about 45-55% for kids from families making less than $25k.
That looks dissimilar to me.
Suppose you had a deadly disease, and you could take one of two drugs. One drug had a survival rate of 60-70%, and the other drug had a survival rate of 45-55%. Which drug would you take?
The remaining difference is more than adequately explained by factors other than educational or financial inequality.
I can see where this is coming from. The remaining difference is explained by circular logic. Since they didn't graduate, it must have been their own fault.
Plenty of people with little or no money manage to go to college, on scholarship, loans, and by working. I got an excellent education without taking out loans and without my parents spending a dime on it. My parents had literally nothing and worked themselves through college.
I don't know the specific facts in your case, so I don't know how you got through college without loans or parents' assistance, and whether there you had some unusual benefit that those students in the Jason DeParle story didn't have.
But I've often heard people brag about how they made it themselves, and then when I found out more about them, it turned out that they had all the advantages of social class. "Yeah, my father helped me, but I could have done it myself."
Is it harder if you have little or no money? Yes. But so what?
OK, we'll take some more of your money away in taxes. You'll get by. It'll just be a little harder.
If they pick the wrong career, paying back a student loan is the least of their worries. And the typical teenager has parents to help them make decisions.
Well, let's look at the facts.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/23/education/poor-students-struggle-as-class-plays-a-greater-role-in-success.html
For Poor Strivers, Leap to College Often Ends in a Hard Fall
By JASON DePARLE
Published: December 22, 2012
3 students from Galveston, TX, graduated 2008 at top of their class in low-ranked Ball High, were in Upward Bound, a college-prep program for low-income teenagers. All 3 got into college, but 4 years later, none has a 4 year degree. “Their story seems less like a tribute to upward mobility than a study of obstacles in an age of soaring economic inequality.”
"Each showed the ability to do college work, even excel at it. But the need to earn money brought one set of strains, campus alienation brought others, and ties to boyfriends not in school added complications. With little guidance from family or school officials, college became a leap that they braved without a safety net."
Angela Gonzales went to Emory, but her financial aid got screwed up. She dropped out after 3 years with $61,000 debt. She’s working in her boyfriend’s furniture store for $8.50 an hour.
Melissa O'Neal went to Texas State University. Her high-school boyfriend ran up $4,000 on her credit card and never got a job. Melissa got depressed, skipped classes, and failed some, but is now a 5th-year senior with an engineering student boyfriend and $44,000 in loans.
Bianca Gonzales enrolled in community college to be near her boyfriend and dying grandfather. She finished her associate degree, and now works as a beach-bar cashier and spa receptionist.
Education is not an equalizer. It doesn't promote social mobility. The gaps between high- and low-income kids are widening. The role of class is growing. Growing incomes at the top, single-parent households, segregated neighborhoods, lower-quality neighborhood schools, and increasing college costs are responsible. So only the prosperous get educated. “It’s becoming increasingly unlikely that a low-income student, no matter how intrinsically bright, moves up the socioeconomic ladder,” said Sean Reardon,
Giving people four years of free room and board while getting an art history degree is not "forced education", it is allowing them to waste another four years of their lives.
You obviously don't know anything about art history.
I took art history courses.
I learned about the Bauhaus, industrial design, architecture. I learned about the history of the motion picture and the birth of video. I learned how people figured out how to apply a new technology.
I learned about Leonardo da Vinci and the study of anatomy. For many centuries the study of art anatomy was the same as the study of medical anatomy. I learned about art and technology.
I learned about why they had the art that they did in Renaissance Italy, in the Soviet Union, in Nazi Germany, in 1960s New York.
It helped me understand the history of science.
Art history is simply a branch of history. Do you think the study of history is a waste of time? Do you think it's more important to study generals and battles than it is to study architects and industrial designers?
BTW, when undergraduates major in art history, they also take the same basic courses that everybody else takes, such as math, science, English, foreign languages, music, other history, etc. The idea is that you go to college and get a well-rounded education, that teaches you how to deal with anything. You don't know at age 19 what the world is going to be like for the next 40 years, so you have to be prepared for the unknown.
If you go to the Nobel prize web site http://www.nobelprize.org/ and read the biographies, you'll see that many of the most accomplished scientists studied the liberal arts as undergraduates. Harold Varmus, who is now head of the National Cancer Institute, after discovering the role of retroviruses in cancer, was an English major. Eric Kandel, who discovered the physiological basis of memory in neurons, studied German literature at Harvard.
The four-year undergraduate degree, where you let kids follow their curiosity, is the goose that lays the golden egg. It's the most valuable thing we've discovered -- throughout history, around the world. That's the way we turn out great minds, including scientists, including "producers". It's a system that works and you shouldn't mess with it if you don't understand it. If you start tossing out all the subjects that bored you, you'll kill the goose that lays the golden egg. You'll turn out technicians who don't know what to do when the world changes.
These people got their education at schools like Harvard, where they spent full-time in an environment designed to educate them, challenge their ideas, let them relax and think, and experiment -- and make the social contacts that helped their careers more than the course content they were ostensibly learning.
Now they're trying to tell us that it's just as good (and cheaper) to get a college class online. If we can only be wise consumers in the free market, we'll find a deal online that we can afford. Nobody walks.
This is a con job. It's like saying Internet porn is just as good as sex. It's like saying that you can find affordable health insurance online.
40 years ago the U.S. had a system of free college education (like most of Europe has today). It worked.
City College has a wall of pictures with the Nobel laureates who graduated CCNY, most of whom said in their Nobel biographies that they couldn't have afforded to go to college if they had to pay for it.
The University of California turned out graduates who gave us the revolutions in digital electronics and medicine. Then Ronald Reagan decided to cut the budget by attacking the liberals he didn't like anyway. If you charge people for college, only the rich can go to college. For the rest of us, the other choice is to go into debt that you may never repay.
The job of government is to pay for education.
We've got the money. We pay for wars, the military, police departments outfitted into SWAT teams, prisons filled with drug offenders spending long terms. We have the wealthiest billionaires in the world, who don't pay taxes. We pay college presidents salaries on parity with Fortune 500 executives.
Let's do what works. Bring back free university education. Pay for it out of taxes.
I based that on the parent's assumption that a 3% mortality was a 97% survival, which he said did not justify the media's "panic."
The truth is, we don't know exactly how many people this year's flu is going to kill. It usually kills between 20,000 and 40,000 people a year in the U.S., which is about equal to the automobile fatalities, which is also a major cause of death.
There are only about 2,500 deaths a year from home fires http://www.usfa.fema.gov/statistics/estimates/index.shtm
Because it causes so many deaths, there are things you should do about it. You should get vaccinated, to prevent yourself and everyone else from getting it. You should stay home for a few days if you have the flu, so that you don't go around infecting everybody else with it. That's what you call "panic."
But the real worry about the flu and SARS is that it may be more lethal than the usual flu. The flu of 1917-18 caused 650,000 deaths in the U.S., and maybe 40 million worldwide. That's more than the first world war. The 1917-18 flu was unusual in that it attacked mostly young people.
Nobody knows how lethal the latest flu and the latest viruses will be. They could cause another 650,000 deaths in the U.S. Scientists have created viruses in the laboratory that are capable of that many deaths, and they're trying to figure out how to prevent it.
What you call panic is what they call intelligent preparations.
As the old joke goes, if you're calm when everyone is running around in panic, maybe you don't understand the seriousness of the situation.
Shouldn't Doug Williams have encrypted the names of his customers?
I have a jar with 30 jelly beans. 1 contains cyanide. Would you eat one of those jelly beans?
University professors are nerds too.
Why do you assume that the faculty are the employees?
The administrators are employees. They're hired by the university to make it easier for the faculty to accomplish the university's mission of teaching and research.
For example, a couple of university press releases and documents from university board of trustees meetings refer to a person as "Dr. Henderson" 6 weeks before she officially received her PhD. Oh the horror!!
Actually, it was two years before she got her PhD.
If you're a PhD in academia, it is a big deal. Falsifying credentials is academic fraud, like plagiarism.
It's like a military officer wearing a battle ribbon for a battle he was never in. There was a Navy officer who killed himself after Newsweek reported that he did such a thing.
The resumes and pay scales are public documents, which are available to anyone.
They're working for tax-supported a institution, and part of the deal if you accept the job is that your pay scale and resume will be public documents.
In New York City, pay scales of high school teachers and policemen are public. If you know what a cop's rank is, you know how much he's making.
It can't be any other way. The legislature sets the salaries, as part of a public proceeding.
But it's still true that you'll be best rewarded for the most cunning investments - assuming you have any money to invest.
I don't think that anybody can invest money more cleverly than anybody else. John Bogle, the guy who started the Vanguard mutual fund, said that nobody can beat the market, or a market basket, and he had some pretty convincing arguments.
It's the old "10 starving dogs in a cage with enough food for 5" thing, though - one will take half the food, 2 will eat reasonably, a couple more will win a few scraps, and the other 5 will starve.
Several years ago, I looked up the distribution of family income in the Statistical Abstract of the United States, by fifths. It was roughly like this:
First fifth: $100,000/yr
Second fifth: $50,000/yr
Third fifth: $25,000/yr
Fourth fifth: $12,500/yr
Bottom fifth: $6,000/yr
Get it? The families in the top fifth earned as much income as everybody else below them, and so do the families in each fifth, until you reach the bottom.
That was about 1985. The inequality has gotten greater since. And the distribution of wealth is much more unequal.
As I understand it, from reading their web site, all the boilers now being sold at Central Boiler http://www.centralboiler.com/ are EPA-certified.
That makes sense, doesn't it? If the EPA requires certification to sell boilers, the companies that have been making boilers will get their EPA certification.
How do you propose deciding who is dangerously mentally ill?
Isn't trying to pass gun control laws instead of mentally ill control laws selling fear?
What "mentally ill control laws" do you propose? Do you propose that, in order to buy a gun, a person would have to be screened by a psychologist or psychiatrist, who would decide whether that person could handle a gun safely?
That's a fair question.
I was afraid somebody might ask that (because I think I could find a study to back it up, but it might take a long time).
I was extrapolating from the statements by scientists who study these things that poorly-ventilated wood stoves are as dangerous for the lungs as cigarettes, car exhaust, or coal power plant emissions. It's impossible to calculate these things precisely, but one of the data sets I use, because it's a classic study, is in the 1964 Surgeon General's Report on Smoking and Health, which found that military veterans who smoked cigarettes died about 10 years sooner than veterans who didn't smoke. There are lots of studies since then that come up with comparable numbers. There are studies of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which is one of the big killers among lung diseases, which found a high incidence of COPD among women who use traditional wood and charcoal cooking stoves indoors.
Now realize the dangers come from traditional wood stoves, and it's possible to make clean-burning stoves that don't have those dangers.
Here's one from Fox News (which sometimes gets a bad rap), comparing wood stoves to car exhaust:
http://www.foxnews.com/health/2011/02/07/wood-stoves-cause-cancer-heart-disease/
Wood Stoves May Cause Cancer, Heart Disease
Published February 07, 2011
FoxNews.com
A wood-burning stove in your home may be a great source of heat during the cold winter, but new data shows that invisible particles produced by burning wood may cause cancer and heart disease, the Telegraph reported.
Wood-burning stoves are becoming more popular because of the rising price of oil, gas and electricity prices. But researchers at Copenhagen University in Denmark said that breathing in air around the stoves is the equivalent to inhaling car exhaust—with the wood particles being small enough to breathe into the deepest parts of the lungs.
"The particles that come from wood smoke can certainly cause fatal heart or lung disease. In human cells that were exposed to the particles, substantial DNA damage and mutation took place. It was comparable to the effects of particles given off by traffic," said professor Steffen Loft, of the Department of Public Health at Copenhagen University....
Here are some other studies:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/01/120116095814.htm
Wood-Burning Stoves: Harmful or Safe?
Jan. 16, 2012 — Wood-burning stoves are a popular source of heating in many countries. However in recent years there has been much debate about the potential negative health effects associated with wood smoke. A Norwegian researcher has studied the influence of combustion conditions on the emissions and their health effects.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/08/130820102516.htm
Traffic Pollution and Wood Smoke Increases Asthma in Adults
Aug. 20, 2013 — Asthma sufferers frequently exposed to heavy traffic pollution or smoke from wood fire heaters, experienced a significant worsening of symptoms, a new University of Melbourne led study has found....
"Our study also revealed a connection between the inhalation of wood smoke exposure and asthma severity and that the use of wood for heating is detrimental to health in communities such as Tasmania where use of wood burning is common," Dr Burgess said.
"Clean burning practices and the replacement of old polluting wood stoves by new ones are likely to minimise both indoor and outdoor wood smoke pollution and improve people's health," he said.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110205204159.htm
Air Pollutants from Fireplaces and Wood-Burning Stoves Raise Health Concerns