Interests Archives - Page 7 of 8 - the patient investor

October 22, 2013

Is the ocean broken?

Carlos Duarte, Director at the Oceans Institute at University of Western Australia highlights the threat to dwindling global fish stocks:

These are real problems, as more than three-quarters of the ocean’s fish stocks have been depleted, sometimes beyond recovery, and, particularly, the global tuna fishery can be better portrayed as war on tuna than as a fishery.

But he points out that current levels of plastic pollution in the Pacific are a result of the 2011 tsunami and will start clearing in 2014.

Soon after the tsunami of March 2011 that triggered the Fukushima accident, NOAA published models that predicted how the huge patch of debris washed to the ocean by the power of the retreating waves would take three years to travel across the ocean to strand, sometime in March 2014, along the beaches of California, Oregon and Washington in the USA.

And that jellyfish blooms, algae blooms and coral bleaching are natural cycles and not a threat to the ecosystem.

Inside the Nation’s Biggest Experiment in School Choice | WSJ.com

Stephanie Banchero at WSJ describes how state introduction of charter schools in New Orleans has lifted academic performance.

There is broad acknowledgment that local schools are performing better since Hurricane Katrina washed away New Orleans’ failing public education system and state authorities took control of many campuses here.

Graduation rates went to 78% last year from 52% before Katrina—surpassing Detroit, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and Oakland, Calif., cities also struggling to boost achievement among lower-income students. The share of New Orleans students proficient in math, reading, science and social studies increased to 58% in 2012 from 35% before the 2005 storm, state data shows.

….About 84% of its 42,000 public school students attend charters, the largest share of any district in the U.S.

Charter schools are largely free to manage their own budgets and hiring, set curriculum and schedules, and select textbooks. The lowest performing schools are eventually closed by state officials or replaced with new operators.

For the school year that started in August, parents picked among 78 charter schools, as well as eight traditional campuses, one independent school with a board appointed by the governor and 38 private schools that are paid with state-issued tuition vouchers. To help guide the selection, public schools are issued grades of A to F, based on academic performance.

State-issued vouchers promote competition amongst schools and lift performance. The system not only empowers parents but also empowers staff in those institutions, judging them on performance rather than on conformity to strict regulatory controls.

An experiment in the Lombardy region of Italy has also demonstrated that similar competition between state and private institutions in the health care sector reduces costs and improves outcomes. Given the striking success of this model, expect to see growing adoption in both health care and education despite resistance from vested interests.

October 15, 2013

The US corporate boom in solar power explained in five charts – Quartz

Todd Woody writes:

While electricity prices are expected to continue to rise in the years ahead, the installed cost of a photovoltaic system continues to drop.

The plummeting price for photovoltaic electricity means that installations are spreading beyond states like California that feature both high electricity prices and generous subsidies for solar.

I suspect that generous subsidies are the primary motivation. Even at $3500 per KW and 300 sunny days a year, the payback period is more than 10 years when compared to the average commercial cost of 14 cents/KWH. The cost of PV systems would have to halve again to make them commercially viable without subsidies.

October 9, 2013

A lesson from Sweden

Sweden is one of the leaders in a recent OECD survey of literacy and numeracy levels. Anders Aslund describes how the education system recovered from the ravages of the 1960s and 70s:

The Swedish school system, Palme’s [hardline socialist Olof Palme] original bailiwick, was badly ravaged by left-wing reforms of the 1960s and 1970s. Today, all pupils are entitled to school vouchers of equal value for each child of a certain age. Their parents can allocate this school voucher to any school the child is qualified to enter. As a result, while in the 1970s Sweden had only four private schools, one-fifth of Swedish secondary schools are now private, some for profit, others cooperatives or non-profit foundations…….

October 8, 2013

How do our reading and math skills compare to other countries? | WSJ

Skills Testing

Workers in Spain and Italy were the least skilled among the 24 developed countries surveyed by the OECD for proficiency in literacy and numeracy.

Literacy and Numeracy scores:
Italy 29.8%; 28%
Spain 32.5%; 28.6%
USA 45.7%; 34.4%
UK 49%; 41%
Australia 56.4%; 45.8%
Japan 71.2%; 62.5%

Click here to see the infographic Literacy and Numeracy Scores for OECD countries | WSJ.

October 8, 2013

City of London to kick out the cars | FT.com

Two of the busiest roads at the heart of London’s historic financial centre are to be pedestrianised under radical plans to transform the City.

Cramped medieval lanes and alleyways that run throughout the Square Mile will also be opened up with improved lighting, more greenery and clearer signage to encourage workers and visitors to make better use of them.

October 7, 2013

Pumped hydro energy storage – making better use of wind

Electricity system operators and investors could use pumped hydro energy storage to complement the growing deployment of renewable energy. The current grid struggles to push power through when it is being generated in large quantities, and to meet demand when generation is low. Storing energy from wind using pumped hydro means the electricity wouldn’t have to be sold as it is being made, but could be saved for later.

August 9, 2013

State Thugs and the Purpose of Government | Libertarianism.org

Great article by Aaron Ross Powell:

I think much tolerance of the repugnant happens because we let ourselves forget what the state is for. If the state is justified at all, it’s as somewhere to turn for protection. We create the state because we need someone stronger than those who would do us harm. But not just someone stronger. Someone better, too. We need institutions that won’t use the awesome power we give them to do us more violence than the petty criminals we seek protection from.

The state is, in other words, a tool. It exists for a purpose, and thus its every characteristic (size, powers, laws, funding, employees, and so on) should be judged by how well and how efficiently it advances that purpose.

August 8, 2013

The danger of over-thinking

[University of California Santa Barbara’s Taraz Lee] was inspired by his background in sports, where he saw professional golfers who had the lead for 18 holes choke up on the easy shot that really mattered. His next research will look at instances like this, which he thinks are similar to the memory issue. “I want to know why it is that during the most important time, when it matters most to you and you’re trying,” Lee told Quartz, “that a task suddenly becomes harder.” The answer, he thinks, lies in our inability to sit back and let our subconscious do the driving during times of stress. “I wouldn’t tell someone not to pay attention,” Lee said, “but I would caution against over-thinking. If you’re well trained at something and really good at it, you might be better off just going for it.”

From Rachel Feltman. Read more at Want to remember something? Forget it – Quartz.

July 8, 2013

It’s time we draft Aussie Rules to tackle Indigenous mathematics

I found this essay by Christine Nicholls, senior lecturer at Flinders University, truly inspiring:

When discussing how to embed Indigenous Australian knowledge and practices into the Australian national curriculum effectively – particularly the maths curriculum – there’s no better place to start than analysing our own distinctively Australian national sport: AFL, the winter game.

Why, you might ask. Well, have you ever wondered why Indigenous players frequently excel at Aussie Rules, where they are vastly over-represented in the national AFL competition?

She points out that this excellence is not natural ability, based on superior genetics, but learned from early nurturing.

Australia’s Indigenous languages are rich in spatial terminology. As linguist Mary Laughren once noted:

“Desert children’s ability to handle directional and spatial terminology in particular is taken as a sort of intelligence test similar to the counting prowess test among Europeans.”

This ability, to handle sophisticated terminology about space and directionality with confidence and accuracy, and the concomitant skill in land navigation even when one is completely surrounded by desert, is inculcated into children from the earliest infancy, even today.

This spatial terminology is largely foreign to our Western culture.

This culturally specific form of mathematical knowledge, intergenerationally transmitted, imparted in its most intact form via Aboriginal languages, plays itself out not only on the AFL field but in tradition-oriented Aboriginal art, and has an important role in other Indigenous knowledge.

The ability to apply such knowledge is a product of nurture, not nature – it cannot be genetically transmitted any more than it is possible to transmit concepts about number and computation to other little Australians, except via processes of acculturation.

This reinforces the view that one culture is not superior to another — just different. And that we have a great deal to learn from indigenous culture. As Will Rogers once said: “We are all ignorant. Just on different subjects.”

P.S. I will forgive Christine for classing AFL as the only football code requiring 360 degree spatial awareness. She obviously has not been exposed to Soccer or Gridiron.