The Millennium Shrimp

From the Journal of Higher Education:

Among high-school students who graduated in the bottom 40 percent of their classes, and whose first institutions were four-year colleges, two-thirds had not earned diplomas eight and a half years later.

And yet we keep encouraging kids to go to school. Even for those of us that weren’t in the bottom 40% of students and did actually graduate with a degree — did a College degree really vastly improve our earning potential? Improve it to the point where it was wise investment. Would it have been better for my parents to have invested the money they spent on College in a mutual fund?

I liked school. I was good at academics, but I have degrees in Archaeology and Geography. There’s really not much market value in being able to dig stratigraphically or knowing how to construct a choropleth map. Not as much as in being able to ping an IP address on a TCP/IP network or set up a network printer. You can get a decently paying entry-level IT job with the last two skills.

I can’t imagine not having gone to College, and I am sincerely glad that I had the opportunity to go, but it breaks my heart when I see someone who’s taking on a mountain of debt to take classes that they are struggling to pass because they think it will be the key to a better life.

(With apologies to Marvin Harris)

From the New Yorker (via Boing Boing)

Surprisingly to outsiders, most Highland wars start ostensibly as a dispute over either pigs or women. Anthropologists debate whether the wars really arise from some deeper lying ultimate cause, such as land or population pressure, but the participants, when they are asked to name a cause, usually point to a woman or a pig. Any Westerner who knows the story of Helen and the Trojan War will not be surprised to hear women named as a casus belli, but the equal importance of pigs is less obvious. However, New Guinea Highlanders, whose main food staples are starchy root crops like sweet potato and taro, are chronically starved for protein, of which the island’s dark, bristly pigs traditionally furnished the only large source. As a result, pigs are prized symbols of prestige and wealth. Peaceful competition and ostentatious displays involve pigs, and they are also used as currency for buying women. Pigs are individually owned and named, and, as piglets, they are sometimes nursed at one breast by a woman nursing an infant at her other breast.

Jared Diamond is one of those people I love to hate. He’s an ornithologist (actually he’s a biogeographer who teaches geography at UCLA, but his academic research is is in studying the geographical distribution of birds), but he feels the need to write about human culture. Nonetheless, the Boing Boing comments section has a good discussion of him and some of the criticism that anthropologists have of his work.

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The 1337 prayer.

heh, an analysis of the Red Shirt Phenomenon:

Conclusion:
We can reliably improve the survivability of the red-shirted crewmen by only exploring peaceful, female-only planets (android and alien females included).

It would be interesting to see if the Red Shirt phenomenon continued into the Next Generation. TNG was supposedly on a 20 year mission, but it’s hard to see how they could have survived so long with a 13% per annum attrition rate. It would also be hard to imagine that they would allow children and families on board with those kinds of attrition rates.

If you contrast the mortality rate in TOS to the mortality rates in the nineteenth century Royal Navy, the closest real-world analog we have for the putative future Starfleet, you see that loosing 13% of your crew at one duty station would not be unexpected even during peace-time. According to the Royal Navy web site, the West Coast of Africa station lost 25% of their personnel in one year primarily due to tropical disease. This is an obvious outlier, but a quick Google search turned up this web site, which has mortality rates for a number of duty stations. The UK, Canada, Malta and Gibraltar (essentially “known space”) all had mortality rates under 2% per annum. Madras and Bengal (both in India) had a rate under 6%, but the Windward Islands (in the Caribbean) and Jamaica had mortality rates between 10% and 16%. If we make the assumption that explorers in outer space face risks similar to what sailors would have faced in the nineteenth century (in terms of hostile natives, unknown diseases, and opportunities for amorous adventures), which the creators of Star Trek clearly do, then it raises an interesting question: Did the red-shirt phenomena exist for Marines and shore-parties in the nineteenth century Royal Navy?

Brotherly love in the City of Peace:

Israeli police had to break up a fist fight that erupted between Greek and Armenian Orthodox clergymen at one of Christianity’s holiest sites.

Evidently the Armenian priest felt that the Greek priest was hogging the alter at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Yep, they were fighting in the church built over the reputed tomb of Jesus. Remember to show God’s love by picking a fight with someone of a slightly different branch of Christianity today!

Went to see the last event in the Modern Slavery Awareness week at Malone College Tuesday evening with people from my small group. It touched some on child soldiers in African countries - children who are kidnapped and forced to serve as soldiers in rebel armies.

Ran across this story from Yemen yesterday:

Yemeni girl, 8, gets divorce after forced marriage

SANAA (AFP) — A Yemeni court on Tuesday granted a divorce to an eight-year-old girl whose unemployed father forced her into an arranged marriage this year, saying he feared she might be kidnapped.

“I am happy that I am divorced now. I will be able to go back to school,” Nojud Mohammed Ali said, after a public hearing in Sanaa’s court of first instance.

…Dressed in traditional black, Nojud said she would now go to live in the home of her maternal uncle and did not want to see her father.

The BBC also has an article on it today.

How your taxes turn into  Manure

…remember that paying taxes is not a ”one-way street.” When you send your money to the government, the government, in return, provides you with vital services, such as not putting you in prison.

The Mask Slips

By WILLIAM KRISTOL

Published: April 14, 2008

It’s one thing for Karl Marx to assert that “religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature” and another for Barack Obama to claim that we “cling to … religion” out of economic frustration.

I don’t normally link to op-ed political pieces in the dead-tree-based medium of record, but I think Kristol raises an interesting point: Obama has put an enormous effort into putting his Christianity on public display, but in his comments on voters in PA, he’s as dismissive of their religious convictions as Karl Marx was of the religion of the bourgeoisie. “DIe Religion… ist das Opium des Volkes.” (I have to agree with Kristol, Marx does sound better in German.)

Friday morning I saw the following article in the NY Times:

Abuse Trails Central American Girls Into Gangs

“I thought it would be like my family,” Benky said of her reason for joining the gang, asking that her full name not be used. “I thought I’d get the love I was missing. But they’d hit me. They ordered me around. They told me I had to rob someone or kill someone, and I did it.”

When she tried to leave the gang five years later, her fellow gang members shot her six times. The scars still visible on her body vouch for her story, as do social workers who visited her during the nine months she spent in a hospital.

Gang initiation was being forced to participate in group sex with the males in the group. She was 14 at the time.

Some links and definitions:

From About.com:

During 2001, at least 700,000 and potentially as many as 4 million men, women and children worldwide were bought, sold, transported and held against their will in slave-like conditions, according to the U.S. State Department.
http://usgovinfo.about.com/library/weekly/aa061202a.htm

From Infoplease:

public perception of modern slavery is often confused with reports of workers in low-wage jobs or inhumane working conditions. However, modern-day slaves differ from these workers because they are actually held in physical bondage (they are shackled, held at gunpoint, etc.)
http://www.infoplease.com/spot/slavery1.html

From Anti-Slavery.org

A slave is:
* forced to work — through mental or physical threat;
* owned or controlled by an ‘employer’, usually through mental or physical abuse or threatened abuse;
* dehumanised, treated as a commodity or bought and sold as ‘property’;
* physically constrained or has restrictions placed on his/her freedom of movement.
http://www.antislavery.org/homepage/antislavery/modern.htm

Trafficking in Persons Report
http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/10815.pdf
Related Media:
http://www.state.gov/g/tip/rls/tiprpt/2002/

Not For Sale
http://www.notforsalecampaign.org/Default.aspx