Ayaan Hirsi Ali has written a very good explanation of Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations as it applies to the modern world.  She rightly explains that:

Our civilization is not indestructible: It needs to be actively defended. This was perhaps Huntington’s most important insight. The first step towards winning this clash of civilizations is to understand how the other side is waging it—and to rid ourselves of the One World illusion.

In the script for the movie Apollo 13, one of the sayings fundamental views of the people working during the program was distilled into the quote “Failure is Not an Option”, and was spoken by Ed Harris, playing Gene Kranz.  Kranz notably used it to title his autobiographical history of the events.

But the lesson of Apollo has been lost over the years by various parts of the engineering world.

The reason why “Failure is Not an Option” was a philosophy during the Apollo program was the knowledge that even the smallest failures could lead to the (very public) death of astronauts, possibly in space.   This was deemed a risk for which the consequences were unacceptable.

In world of risk assessment, there are two parameters often combined to decide on mitigation action.  One of the probability of an event; the second is the consequences of said event, in terms of economic loss or danger to human life or the environment.  In most cases, there is a category of events for which the consequences are so dire that the probability is irrelevant – even if it were to happen once in a thousand years, it would still be unacceptable.  These are the “Failure is Not an Option” situations.

Which brings me to current events.  The events in the Gulf of Mexico, where human activity has directly resulted in catastrophic damage to the environment and catastrophic economic loss – this clearly should have been a Failure is Not an Option risk.

A good way to determine if an event is one of these is to ask two questions:

1. If it goes wrong, can we fix it in a reasonable amount of time with limited damages.  If not, then failure should not be an option.
2. If it goes wrong, do you want to be on TV or testifying before Congress/Parliament about why you let it happen?  If not, then failure should not be an option.

Pretty straight forward.  The problem is that many people have forgotten to ask these questions.

The secondary problem is that pressures of time and money often cause people to superficially assess risk and underestimate the consequences of things going wrong.   Gene Kranz said it after the Apollo 1 fire:

Spaceflight will never tolerate carelessness, incapacity, and neglect. Somewhere, somehow, we screwed up. It could have been in design, build, or test. Whatever it was, we should have caught it. We were too gung ho about the schedule and we locked out all of the problems we saw each day in our work. Every element of the program was in trouble and so were we. The simulators were not working, Mission Control was behind in virtually every area, and the flight and test procedures changed daily. Nothing we did had any shelf life. Not one of us stood up and said, ‘Dammit, stop!’ I don’t know what Thompson’s committee will find as the cause, but I know what I find. We are the cause! We were not ready! We did not do our job. We were rolling the dice, hoping that things would come together by launch day, when in our hearts we knew it would take a miracle. We were pushing the schedule and betting that the Cape would slip before we did. From this day forward, Flight Control will be known by two words: ‘Tough’ and ‘Competent.’ Tough means we are forever accountable for what we do or what we fail to do. We will never again compromise our responsibilities. Every time we walk into Mission Control we will know what we stand for. Competent means we will never take anything for granted. We will never be found short in our knowledge and in our skills. Mission Control will be perfect. When you leave this meeting today you will go to your office and the first thing you will do there is to write ‘Tough and Competent’ on your blackboards. It will never be erased. Each day when you enter the room these words will remind you of the price paid by Grissom, White, and Chaffee. These words are the price of admission to the ranks of Mission Control.

Nothing like destroying the incentive to work hard and save for your own retirement…

In Victoria Friday Mr. Flaherty fanned the flames further when he told executives that citizens who have saved enough for retirement will eventually be asked to help those who haven’t.

So, what you are saying is that if I save lots of money for retirement and have a nice nest-egg – that is my net worth is a large positive number – that I will have to pay more in taxes so that those people who chose not to save money are not destitute?   Exactly how is that fair?  This sounds like the socialist version of the Grasshopper and the Ant…

Has Flaherty suddenly switched to the NDP???

A report in the Economist shows that Canada is not doing enough to encourage entrepreneurship and innovation:

Why does Canada not have lots of “new firms” patenting new ideas?  Norway and the Netherlands are both smaller than Canada, so I would hope Canada was at least in the same ballpark as Germany and France…

Now, I disagree with the Economist in their proposal to impose Pigouvian taxes as a means to encourage innovation – this is little different than the pandering to “pet” technologies they hope to avoid.

Lower taxes, more flexible labour markets and less government regulation of markets and products would be a very good first step towards encouraging innovation.

PBS’s Frontline had a very good documentary this week, discussing the dispute that has raged for the last 12 years or so regarding the safety of vaccination, particularly with regard to the misguided belief of some people that autism can be caused by adverse reaction to the vaccines.  I commend Frontline for staying on the side of real science, and not the witch-hunting fears of those who think temporal correlation means causation…

Many people who are dealing with children who exhibit development problems are looking for someone to blame.  The fact that they began to see symptoms in their children after vaccination is an interesting correlation, but correlation does not equal causation.  That is why so many studies have been done looking at the relationship between the MMR vaccine and autism, or thimerasol and autism.  But the studies have found no correlation, let alone causation.  Failure to find correlation means it is EXTREMELY unlikely that there is any relationship at all.  And without correlation, causation is nigh impossible to find – especially if you have no idea what the causation pathway might be.

The problem here is that the general public do not have sufficient understanding of the scientific method or statistics.  It is easy to see relationships, even where none exist – that is a human cognitive feature.  And when we are dealing with a single case (anecdote), many people fail to realize that this CANNOT show causation, without a lot more information of exactly how that cause/effect relationship is organized.  It is IMPOSSIBLE for medical science to prove beyond all doubt that a vaccine or drug is safe – but they can show that the benefits outweigh the risks.   Prior to the introduction of the measles vaccine in the US in the 1960s, hundreds of thousands of cases PER YEAR were reported, and the death rate was often in the hundreds.  Considering no scientific study has shown vaccines to have a such significant downside, we must side with real science and accept vaccination as a safe technology.

So please, have your children vaccinated – the need for herd immunity is great.

And remember, the only way we can ever discontinue a vaccine is if we eradicated the disease from the human population – as was done with smallpox in the 1970s.  We should have eradicated measles and polio by now, but fear-mongering has scared too many people away from vaccines, both in the developed world (in the case of measles) and the developing world (see Nigeria).

Here is a good link to some facts about oil sands operations and their real impact on the environment.  Please read.  And avoid the over-hyped nonsense about the oil sands bringing doom to our world…

Recently, I’ve stumbled onto a few bad science columns and articles in major science publications, Discover and Scientific American.

To start, Lawrence Krauss, a respectable physicist, starts delving into ocean chemistry and climate when he brings forth the notion that increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere will decrease the pH of the ocean, making it acidic and preventing the formation of calcium carbonate shells in shelled animals and coral reefs.  The problem is, that isn’t good science.  That is taking a simple concept (i.e. dissolving CO2 in water makes carbonic acid) and applying it to the very large and very complex chemical system that is the ocean.  It has been shown that increasing acid species (like CO2) in the ocean cannot drive the pH very far because the CO2 in the water will react with minerals in the sea floor, forming salts – in fact, on page 17 of the same issue of Scientific American is a short article on storing CO2 by reacting it with the basalt underlying the ocean…   Ian Plimer has explained the ocean chemistry issue very clearly previously, showing the Dr. Krauss is misleading the public in his column.  Further, recent studies have shown that increasing CO2 in the oceans actually increases shell development in some species…  A good question for Dr. Krauss would be “How did the oceans stay alkaline during the Jurassic-Cretaceous period when atmospheric CO2 levels were 5 times the current value?”

In Discover, they have interviews with Judith Curry and Michael Mann about the impact and importance of ClimateGate.  Judith Curry makes a very eye-opening statement to a question:

Q. Are you saying that the scientific community, through the IPCC, is asking the world to restructure its entire mode of producing and consuming energy and yet hasn’t done a scientific uncertainty analysis?

A. Yes.

Egads – why the hell should we act if we don’t know whether the uncertainty overwhelms the supposed effect?

Michael Mann tells us:

We’ve reached a point now … where we’ve got climate scientists, who understand the physics of climate and how that translates to uncertainties, working hand in hand with economists who will run the projected impacts through a cost-benefit analysis.  The way it plays out is that the small probability of extremely bad things happening incurs huge potential costs, and you want to hedge against those potential catastrophic costs.  So when you taken uncertainty into account, it actually leads to the decision that we should taken action more quickly.

Of course, Dr. Mann makes us rely on faith that (1) climate scientists really do understand the climate, and (2) that economists are hard scientists who can accurately predict the future.  Considering how well economists and their ilk did over the past 5 years, I would have to question that one…

And I won’t waste my time with Jeffrey Sachs monologue, which sounds like a desperate plea to act while at the same time avoiding any comment on the fact that the science is clearly unsettled.

The federal Finance Minister, Jim Flaherty, today released revised rules for mortgages to try to avert a housing bubble.  His mechanism is to make it more difficult for people to buy houses without taking more equity and to make it so that borrowers need to meet a higher bar of being able to pay back the house (5 year fixed rate vs. a shorter term or variable rate).

Here is the problem – this is a band-aid solution to the housing problem that doesn’t address the fundamental problems:

• We have too much debt
• Debt is too easy to acquire
• Interest rates are too low, making debt appear less risky (it is only truly less risky if it is very short-term debt)

A simpler solution is for the Bank of Canada, and central banks everywhere, to consider changing the measures that are used to guide the setting of interest rates.  Today, there are three criteria that the BoC is using to set interest rates:

1. Inflation (CPI)
2. Economic Growth
3. The value of the Loonie

The problem with these is that the Inflation rate has been compromised by politics.  They removed “volatile” prices like food and energy, which means that the remaining prices are more greatly affected by things that are deflationary, such as electronics.   Economic growth is likewise a dangerous measure, especially if that growth is being built with a large current account deficit or increase in debt levels.  And the third is simple ridiculous.  Maintaining a low Canadian dollar protected Canadian business from having to spend money on improving efficiency and productivity – but we should have known we could not rely on that forever.  Also, the value of currencies is likely to shift significantly over the next few years as Europe, Japan and America deal with their giant fiscal problems and China grows into the largest economy on Earth.

A better method for setting interest rates would be for the central banks to use the same kinds of measures that the free market would (i.e. if we didn’t have central banks) – RISK.  If there is a rising level of debt, there is a rising level of default risk.  Lenders (i.e. bondholders) would demand a higher interest rate to counter the risk profile.  Central banks should do the same.  If the level of private and public debt is rising to quickly, interest rates should be increased to slow or cease said growth.  The painful part may be that we are so far gone that economic contraction may be necessary to unwind the debt.  Imagine for a moment that we didn’t have CMHC (or Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac in the US) insurance for mortgages – would banks be rushing to offer mortgages with zero down and low interest rates?  I don’t think so.  The risk profile for banks would be very different and the housing market would likewise be very different.

Therefore, the Bank of Canada and the Minister of Finance should sit down and decide what a reasonable debt level is for Canada – preferably by asking the banks what they would be comfortable with if they had to lend with no insurance policies from government.   Then raise interest rates until debt levels fall.

I am fascinated by this news story from Toronto.

A group representing dozens of lawn care companies trying to bring charges against Ontario’s environment minister and senior bureaucrats over the province’s controversial pesticide ban is now calling for charges against 23 activists.

Group spokesman Jeffrey Lowes of MREP Communications said Wednesday that information has been laid for criminal charges against 23 individuals….

…The activists worked with the Ontario government to ban pesticides using alleged false and misleading information to undermine the industry, Lowes said.

The documents filed on Tuesday allege the activists knowingly presented false and misleading information about the health and environmental risks associated with pesticide products, knowingly misled the public, lawn care industry and government officials, and impeded access to Health Canada approved pesticide products through fraudulent means.

Hmmm.  I wonder if this has been happening in Calgary too?  I’ve written on this subject previously (here and here) – and while Calgary’s city council avoided such a ban (here), there are still forces at work trying to change that.

In today’s National Post, there is an article about the elimination of a report card in Elementary schools in Ontario, replacing it with a “kinder, gentler progress assessment”.

This is a stupid idea.  You cannot fix what you don’t measure.  And fluffy, feel-good assessments don’t measure.

Mary-Lou Donnelly of the Canadian Teachers’ Federation is quoted as saying:

Assessment is very complex, it’s not just a right or a wrong and a test mark. It is an accumulation of how the student is doing in many, many different areas,

Except that measuring whether a student is absorbing and understanding the material is just a right or wrong question.  It can, and must, be measured by a test score.  Yes, there are other things that teachers should be communicating to parents about their child’s behaviour, attitude, etc – but the test score should be the opening part of the discussion.  If this kid is failing to learn the material – then let’s talk about why.   But without grade letters or percentages or some hard measurement, we can’t tell if the child is succeeding or not.

It also does a disservice to the child as they grow up.  How many businesses and career paths don’t involve hard measurement of performance?  In my field, measuring performance is critical to our success.  We measure the productivity of employees and groups of workers so we can realistically predict outcomes.  This is how the real world works – if you can’t measure it, you can’t figure out where the problem.  The movement in business over the last 20 years has been to quantify performance.  And our education system is moving as fast as it can AWAY from this model.

The big question is why?  That is simple – the teachers’ unions don’t want to be measured.  They want to get paid to do their job regardless of whether they are doing it well or not.  Measurement of performance is bad for unions because it might show that not all their members are equally good at what they do.  And poor performance is tough to use as leverage when asking for more money…