Sunday, April 25, 2004

EPA wins an important battle Surely the first worry that comes to mind regarding ICBMs is how much their rocket fuel may pollute the atmosphere. Fortunately, the EPA is looking after our interests in this matter. In order to comply with EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) regulations, and at a cost of about $5.2 million per ICBM, the rocket motors on 500 Minuteman III missiles will be replaced with new ones. These rockets will emit less toxic chemicals when used. But the new, environmentally correct rockets will be heavier than the old ones, and will thus  have a shorter range than the original motors. The actual range of the  Minuteman III  has been classified, but is thought to be nearly 10,000 kilometers, based on where the missiles are stationed and where the original Russian targets were.  Thus, if the Minuteman III ICBMs have to be used in some future nuclear war, their rocket motors will not pollute the atmosphere. EPA regulations do not apply in foreign countries, so no changes are being made to reduce the harmful environmental effects of the nuclear warheads. [Link via Tom Tomorrow.] Postscript: Have you read this book yet? 10:50:17 PM    comment [] Historical Ignorance We have all heard the claim that test scores show today's teens are becoming increasingly ignorant of history. Stanford Professor of Education Sam Wineburg has recently deconstructed this enduring myth. As it turns out, American students have always performed poorly on tests intended to measure factual knowledge of history. Back in 1917, 1,500 Texas teens sitting for the first large-scale test fared just as poorly, while tests in 1943, 1976, 1987 and 1994 produced similar results. "A sober look at a century of history testing provides no evidence for the 'gradual disintegration of cultural memory' or a 'growing historical ignorance,'" Wineburg writes in the article titled "Crazy for History." "The only thing growing seems to be our amnesia of past ignorance." What is the cause of this enduring problem in test scores? According to Wineburg, the test itself is rigged for students to fail: Since the 1930s, Wineburg explains, assessors have relied on the multiple-choice test to rank students according to a symmetrical bell curve, rather than examining them to determine whether they have gained a particular level of knowledge. The best way to ensure that most students land on the bell's curve is to include a few questions that only the best students get right, a few questions that most get right, and a majority of questions that between 40 to 60 percent get right. "Items that deviate from this profile are dropped," Wineburg writes. "In other words, only the questions that array students in a neatly shaped bell curve make it to the final version of the test," whether or not they teach anything meaningful. By the way, guess who also has problems with factual knowledge of history ... In a footnote, Wineburg notes that even professional historians do poorly outside their research specialization. In a 1991 study, Wineburg found that when historians trained at Stanford, Berkeley and Harvard answered questions from a leading high school textbook, they scored a mere 35 percent ú in some cases lower than a comparison group of high school students taking Advanced Placement U.S. History. "Technology may have changed since 1917, but the capacity of the human mind to retain information has not," he writes. 9:57:04 PM    comment []

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