Links - 27th March 2020 (1)

F-35 Problems: How the Joint Strike Fighter Got to Be Such a Mess - "For over two decades, the F-35 has been the symbol of everything that's wrong with mammoth defense contracts: behind schedule, over budget, and initially, over-sold... The development of the F-35 has been a mess by any measurement. There are numerous reasons, but they all come back to what F-35 critics would call the jet's original sin: the Pentagon's attempt to make a one-size-fits-all warplane, a Joint Strike Fighter... Long before the delays and overruns that riddles the F-35 program, history was littered with illustrations of multi-mission aircraft that never quite measured up. Take Germany's WWII Junkers Ju-88, or the 1970s Panavia Tornado, or even the original F/A-18. Today the Hornet is a mainstay of the American military, but when it debuted it lacked the range and payload of the A-7 Corsair and acceleration and climb performance of the F-4 Phantom it was meant to replace. F-35 supporters were undaunted in the face of that evidence, adamant that the technological advances needed to make a do-it-all aircraft for several brances of the military had finally arrived... Who gets the blame for a 20-year misadventure? In 2013, the GAO's Michael Sullivan asserted that Lockheed had failed to get an early start on systems engineering and had not understood the technologies involved at the program's launch. But a RAND study the same year found the three F-35 variants had drifted so far apart during development that having a single base design may prove to be more expensive than if services had just built separate aircraft tailored to their own requirements from the get-go. And to this the fact that enormous defense projects almost always go over-budget and you've got a recipe for the start-and-stop, muddled first two decades of the F-35."

F-35’s Gun That Can’t Shoot Straight Adds to Its Roster of Flaws - Bloomberg - "Add a gun that can’t shoot straight to the problems that dog Lockheed Martin Corp.’s $428 billion F-35 program, including more than 800 software flaws... The annual assessment by Robert Behler, the Defense Department’s director of operational test and evaluation, doesn’t disclose any major new failings in the plane’s flying capabilities. But it flags a long list of issues that his office said should be resolved -- including 13 described as Category 1 “must-fix” items that affect safety or combat capability -- before the F-35’s upcoming $22 billion Block 4 phase... “no significant portion” of the U.S.’s F-35 fleet “was able to achieve and sustain” a September 2019 goal mandated by then-Defense Secretary Jim Mattis: that the aircraft be capable 80% of the time needed to perform at least one type of combat mission. That target is known as the “Mission Capable” rate."

Questioning Law’s Empire - "Until the 19th century, Sumption says, “most human interactions were governed by custom and convention”, whereas now “law penetrates every corner of human life”. Witness the number of statutes and regulations that now govern us, as well as the “the relentless output of judgments of the courts”. Reviewing the range of questions over which judges now have jurisdiction, he observes that even “special areas that were once thought to be outside the purview of the courts, such as foreign policy, the conduct of overseas military operations and the other prerogative powers of the state, have all one by one yielded to the power of the judges”. And he notes further that the Human Rights Act 1998 “has opened up vast new areas to judicial regulation”. The lawyer’s conceit is that the expansion of law’s domain – and the jurisdiction of the courts – is simply the outworking of the rule of law. Not so says Sumption, for the rule of law “does not mean that every human problem and every moral dilemma calls for a legal solution”... lawmaking tends to displace other forms of social order and to curtail the discretion (of someone other than a judge) that may be necessary to respond intelligently to the problem... the recent, tragic case of little Charlie Gard reveals much about the changing place of law and courts in our public life. The doctors were unwilling to decide for themselves whether to discontinue treatment, instead seeking “absolution” from the court... The term “absolution” was chosen with care, I am sure, and implies, plausibly, that the rise of law turns partly on the retreat of religion... Turning more briefly to the quest for security and reduced tolerance of risk, Sumption argues that this inevitably results in ever more legal rules and legal action... His misgivings, I infer, concern the unreality of public expectations, which often overlook the trade-offs that must be made, the costs that pursuit of security entail. Lawmaking involves compromise and not every problem, to repeat, can or should be solved by extending law or empowering courts."
A more profound variety of judicial activism

The New Teacher Project says low expectations hurt kids - "Students only demonstrated grade-level mastery on their assignments 17% of the time. More often than not, their teachers are not assigning work that would bring them up to their grade level. “Students spent more than 500 hours per school year on assignments that weren’t appropriate for their grade and with instruction that didn’t ask enough of them–the equivalent of six months of wasted class time in each core subject,” the report found. But classrooms filled with predominantly higher-income students spent twice as much time on grade-appropriate assignments as classrooms with predominantly lower-income students."
The soft bigotry of low expectations hurts

It’s Okay to “Forget” What You Read - "What we get from books is not just a collection of names, dates and events stored in our minds like files in a computer. Books also change, via our mental models, the very reality that we perceive."

Genetic influence on family socioeconomic status and children's intelligence - "Environmental measures used widely in the behavioral sciences show nearly as much genetic influence as behavioral measures, a critical finding for interpreting associations between environmental factors and children's development. This research depends on the twin method that compares monozygotic and dizygotic twins, but key aspects of children's environment such as socioeconomic status (SES) cannot be investigated in twin studies because they are the same for children growing up together in a family. Here, using a new technique applied to DNA from 3000 unrelated children, we show significant genetic influence on family SES, and on its association with children's IQ at ages 7 and 12. In addition to demonstrating the ability to investigate genetic influence on between-family environmental measures, our results emphasize the need to consider genetics in research and policy on family SES and its association with children's IQ."
All those articles claiming meritocracy is a failure actually prove it's a success - smart people have smart kids

Beepocalypse myth busting: Honey bees, not wild species, key for crop pollination—and they're doing fine - "Fearmongers warn of a coming “Beepocalypse.” The media narrative is that bees are dying, humans are responsible, and if bees go extinct, many of our favorite foods will disappear and humans will starve to death. That’s a gross exaggeration.In reality, the western honey bee (a.k.a., European honey bee), which does much of the heavy lifting in regard to crop pollination, is doing just fine. Though there is evidence that some wild bee populations are declining, keep in mind that there are about 20,000 bee species, only a fraction of which contribute meaningfully to crop pollination. A paper published in Nature Communications underscores that latter point... bees are responsible for about 7% of our food supply. That’s a substantial portion; however, a bee extinction would not trigger civilizational collapse."

The Lost Meme - Posts - "Life hack *use of pants to concentrate and split the air output from a fan into two to channel it towards 2 tiers of a bunk bed*"

Algorithmic Extremism: Examining YouTube's Rabbit Hole of Radicalization - "The role that YouTube and its behind-the-scenes recommendation algorithm plays in encouraging online radicalization has been suggested by both journalists and academics alike. This study directly quantifies these claims by examining the role that YouTube's algorithm plays in suggesting radicalized content. After categorizing nearly 800 political channels, we were able to differentiate between political schemas in order to analyze the algorithm traffic flows out and between each group. After conducting a detailed analysis of recommendations received by each channel type, we refute the popular radicalization claims. To the contrary, these data suggest that YouTube's recommendation algorithm actively discourages viewers from visiting radicalizing or extremist content. Instead, the algorithm is shown to favor mainstream media and cable news content over independent YouTube channels with slant towards left-leaning or politically neutral channels. Our study thus suggests that YouTube's recommendation algorithm fails to promote inflammatory or radicalized content, as previously claimed by several outlets."
So much for one of journalists' favourite claims. Also notable, the finding that there is a left wing bias in YouTube's algorithm

Differences Between Currants, Raisins, and Sultanas - "The currants mentioned here are the dark, black currants popular in cakes. You will find them in classic dishes like Spotted Dick or an Eccles cake. They are dried, dark red, seedless grapes often called the Black Corinth grape... The name currant comes from the ancient city of Corinth... Raisins are dried white Moscatel grapes. When they are dried the result is a dark, dried fruit much like a currant, making it dense in texture and bursting with a sweet flavor... Raisins can (unlike currants) soak up other flavors, which is why it is popular to soak raisins in flavored alcohols such as brandy or almond-flavored Amaretto before using in cooking. The raisins can hold the flavor making the finished dish even tastier... A sultana is a dried white grape, but of the seedless variety. Sultanas are golden in color and tend to be much plumper, sweeter, and altogether juicier than other raisins... Also known as golden raisins, sultanas will absorb other flavors, but not as well as regular raisins."

Raffles Girls' School gets new home in Braddell Road, across from Raffles Institution - ""I'm excited to be coming back and I'm glad the new location is near RI - not for any funny reasons, but because it would be more convenient for the girls."She explained that when her daughter, also an RGS alumna, was in school, she had to frequently travel to RI for some programmes."

Local PTA didn't think this one through. : funny - "BJs in your PJs. Come socialize & eat ice cream in your pajamas!"
This matches: BJs in your PJs! - "Come get BJs... in your PJs. Ben and Jerry's that is! Come in your pajamas and get some yummy ice cream sandwiches.    This event is centered around safe sex, healthy relationships, STD's, and everything in between."

Selling My Own Kidney Should Be My Body, My Choice - "in Iran, a living donor compensation model was adopted in 1988 and, by the next year, the long transplant list had been eliminated—those who needed kidneys had received them... we already have markets for plenty of other body parts:
    What about compensating living donors? It should be noted that in the United States we already have robust markets for blood, semen, human eggs, and surrogate wombs...
43,000 people die each year in the United States because of our shortage...
each transplant saves taxpayers about $146,000, because the total lifetime cost for treating a transplant patient is far less than the lifetime cost for a patient receiving dialysis therapy, and the government accounts for most of the spending on both. Thus, the government could afford to compensate a kidney donor up to $146,000 and still save money for taxpayers...
The pro-choice crowd is wrong when they screech about “my body, my choice,” oversimplifying their opponents’ arguments, thinking abortion is a debate of mere bodily autonomy (it’s not). But all those quibbles aside, if they do authentically believe their own rallying cries, presumably every pro-choice person would be in favor of consensual kidney-selling."

Laws Banning Organ Markets Kill Even More People than Previously Thought - "I criticized the "exploitation of the poor" justification for banning organ markets in somewhat greater detail here, including pointing out that it cannot justify banning organ sales by donors who are not poor. The related argument that poor patients could not afford to buy kidneys in a market is also weak. The government can, if need be, subsidize the purchase of kidneys by poor patients, just as it currently subsidizes many other kinds of medical treatment for the poor. It would be far cheaper than the massive cost of paying for kidney dialysis, to say nothing of the cost of premature death, which deprives society of useful labor and the government of tax revenue. Even if we cannot get the subsidies completely right, that surely does not justify consigning thousands of people to death, any more than the absence of perfectly structured food subsidies justifies banning food markets and thereby causing large-scale starvation."

Markets with Just a Few Limits - "many nineteenth and early twentieth Americans opposed the introduction of life and health insurance for children, because they feared it would amount to treating children as if they were mere financial assets. For centuries, it was widely believed that it is wrong to pay teachers for education, because doing so debased the value of knowledge and wisdom. In the 1920s and 1930s, many people even opposed the introduction of parking meters because putting a price on the right to park was considered “un-American.”... many people oppose legalizing organ markets because they believe it would lead to exploitation of the poor. But most of them have no objection to letting poor people perform much more dangerous work, such as becoming lumberjacks or NFL players. If it is wrong to allow poor people to assume the risk of selling a kidney for money, surely it is even more wrong to allow them to take much greater risks in order to increase their income. If you believe that organ markets must be banned because they exploit the poor, you must also argue that the poor should be forbidden to take jobs as lumberjacks and football players. If you believe that such considerations justify banning participation in organ markets even by the non-poor, than we must also categorically forbid monetary compensation for football players. Indeed, the case for banning the payment of football players is actually much stronger than that for banning organ markets. Unlike the ban on organ markets, a ban on professional football  would not  lead to the deaths of thousands of innocent people.Other critics believe that organ markets must be banned because it is inherently wrong to “commodify” the human body. Yet most of them have no objection to letting a wide range of people profit from organ transplants, including doctors, insurance companies, hospital administrators, medical equipment suppliers, and so on. All of these people get paid (often handsomely) for helping transfer organs from one body to another. Perversely, the only participant in the process forbidden to profit from the “commodification” of organs is the one who provided the organ in the first place"