On China and education

An opinion piece in the Washington Post argues that America, and the West generally I suppose, shouldn't be getting into a panic over a recent claims that Chinese high school education is beating the world:

As pointed out by several experts, such as Rob J. Gruiters, university lecturer at the faculty of education at the University of Cambridge, the China ranking is a sham. The 2018 PISA tests were given to 15-year-olds only in the cities of Beijing and Shanghai and the provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang, four of the most urbanized and affluent areas of the country. All 79 nations and political entities participating in PISA are asked to submit results that accurately represent their schools. China has not done that, but the people running PISA do little about it.

Tom Loveless, a former senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and an expert on international school assessments, summed up the situation after the 2018 PISA results were released:

“There is not one but two Chinas: one urbanized, mainly on the east coast, and rapidly growing in wealth; the other rural, in the interior of China or on the move as migrants, and mired in poverty. As a rough proxy, recent population numbers put the Chinese rural share at 41 percent. PISA assesses achievement of the first China and ignores the second.”

And the education standards in the poorer parts of the country sound pretty low:

Scholars rarely get a chance to look closely at rural Chinese education, but the available information is depressing. Loveless cited studies conducted from 2007 to 2013 showing cumulative dropout rates in rural areas between 17 and 31 percent in junior high schools. Only half of rural Chinese children went to high school and only 37 percent of that age group graduated.  A 2017 study revealed that in 27 provinces the average high school classroom had more than 45 students. In 12 provinces the average was more than 55. Loveless said the government’s official goal is no more than 56 students per classroom.

 

Because it worked so well in Hong Kong, I suppose...

Maybe this proposal has been around before, I'm not sure.  But it's being pushed on CGTN now:

At last: the Left wing academic criticism of Dark Emu

In 2019 I noted that there seemed to be a clear lack of detailed academic commentary on Bruce Pascoe's Dark Emu, with the only criticism coming from Right wing polemicists who obviously have some culture war axes to grind.  Nonetheless, I suspected they were correct - and my theory was that the Lefty world of academia was remaining silent rather than being seen as aligned with the world of Andrew Bolt and Quadrant.

Well, at last, it appears that the world of professional academic anthropology has finally broken their silence.  See this article in Good Weekend today, about a new book by two long established anthropologists. 

Perhaps I was unfair in thinking the academics were being silent because of political correctness - it would seem that they just didn't think a book by an amateur historical revisionist was worth looking into with much urgency - which is unfortunate, give that the cultural fashion world of educationalist academia was rushing to endorse it and see it promoted within classrooms.  Some extracts:

It was not until 2019, when Dark Emu had taken on a celebrated status, that Sutton gave it his full attention. He was deeply unimpressed, as he was when he read Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines, the 1987 bestseller combining fiction and non-fiction which popularised the notion of Aboriginal people singing the stories of the land, without much understanding of Aboriginal culture. Nothing in Sutton’s 50 years of research with senior Aboriginal people suggested to him that Pascoe was right. He was “disturbed” that Pascoe’s descriptions of Aboriginal life were based on – and to his mind, took liberties with – “the journals of blow-through European explorers, men who were ignorant of the languages and cultures of those they met”, rather than Aboriginal people, whose knowledge has been recorded for the past hundred years at least.

He was “disappointed” that in attempting to describe Aboriginal land use, Pascoe ignored the importance of spiritual tradition and ritual. He was “stunned” that the book was “riddled with errors of fact, selective quotations, selective use of evidence, and exaggeration of weak evidence”, including the suggestion Aboriginal people have occupied Australia for 120,000 years. And he was “outraged” that school curricula were being changed to conform with the Dark Emu narrative, embracing Pascoe’s descriptions of an early agricultural society.

And clearly, this criticism is from a Left perspective - that Pascoe, by trying to re-classify aboriginal society as an agricultural one, was actually buying into conservative views: 

More than anything, he felt that Pascoe had done the Old People – as Sutton refers to them – a monumental disservice, resurrecting long-discredited ideas of social evolutionism that placed hunter-gatherers lower on the evolutionary scale than farmers. To Sutton, it was a rebirthing of the colonial philosophy used to justify Aboriginal dispossession in the first place: that people who lived lightly on the land had no claim to it, that farmers were more deserving of dignity and respect than hunter-gatherers.

More important to me is the specific criticisms of misleading dishonestly in the book, many of which had been raised by those Right wing polemicists, and are confirmed as correct.  (I always suspected they would be, because no one was coming out and showing the factual errors in the Right wing attacks.)

Pascoe records Mitchell’s astonishment on coming upon a large, deserted village during his Australia Felix expedition, which he estimated housed “over 1000” people. This, says Sutton, is “pure fiction”. “All Mitchell says is that his party ‘noticed some of their huts’; there is no mention of anyone counting anything.” Pascoe then quotes a member of Mitchell’s party, Granville Stapylton, as saying that the buildings “were of very large dimensions, one capable of containing at least 40 persons and of very superior construction”. But he omits Stapylton’s speculation that this was “the work of a white man”, probably the runaway convict William Buckley, who lived with the Wathaurong people for three decades.

Elsewhere, Pascoe cites Charles Sturt’s discovery of a large well and village somewhere north of Lake Torrens in South Australia, but neglects to say that Sturt saw no signs of recent occupation. When Sturt finds grass set out to dry and ripen, Pascoe guesses this was because of surplus grain, which suggested “sedentary agriculture”. Sutton ridicules the idea. “The suggestion, if that is what Pascoe intends, that anyone could practise ‘sedentary agriculture’ in that blasted desert environment is simply ill-informed,” he writes.....

Over 300 pages, Sutton and Walshe pick apart Dark Emu. Where Pascoe writes that permanent housing was “a feature of the pre-contact Aboriginal economy and marked the movement towards agricultural reliance”, Sutton dismisses this absolutely. “The recurring pattern, all over Australia, was one of seasonal and other variation in lengths of stays in one place,” Sutton writes. “No group is ever described, at the moment of colonisation, as living year in, year out, in one single place.” Where Dark Emu featured the use of stone for housing, Sutton answers that it was “the rarest in the Aboriginal record”, a “last resort” in the stoniest of environments.

And so on.

I expect that there are a dozen or so broadcasters from the ABC who will need the smelling salts after reading about this this book - Patricia Karvelas and Jonathan Green especially. They have shown a complete lack of interest in checking whether any form of criticism of Pascoe and his books had some truth or validity.

The Labor Party needs to be particularly careful about this.   I reckon there is a political price to be paid for showing too much credulity to pro-indigenous claims and politics.  The lesson of the Hindmarsh Island scandal seems to have faded too quickly from their consciousness.  

Update:  The Conversation features as positive review of the new book.

Add him to the list of "people unexpectedly still alive"

Michael Parkinson  makes an appearance in The Guardian.  No doubt due to already crinkled face appearance as a younger man in his television heyday, my mind assumed he must be about 125 years old by now.   In fact, he is (checks Wikipedia) 86 - which is still getting up there, really.

I wonder what my CGTN app will have to say about this

The BBC:

China has created a dystopian hellscape in Xinjiang, Amnesty report says

Seems a bit...harsh.   Xinjiang looks all fine to me on any CGTN report I see.  

And I did put the CGTN app on  my Vivo phone recently.   It works pretty well, although doesn't seem to have a search function beyond being to "Ask Panda" for some news from certain categories.  The live feed of the TV network is fine, though.  So anytime I need to watch a panel show about how great things are going in China, and how the West is not coping with its own problems, I can do so on my phone.  (I was somewhat amused to find the app asked for permission to access my media files when I installed it.  I declined that kind invitation, but it still works.  Now it just keeps asking to access cache, or something.  I'm still declining.)

I told my son that I downloaded the app so that in 10 years time, when we are stopped on the street by our  new Han overlords, I will be able to flash my phone and show then I have been following CGTN for years, so obviously I am trustworthy and should be allowed on my way.   As my son is taken to a re-education camp, I will say "told you so". 

[Sounds like I'm making light of a serious situation re Xinjiang.   I actually have been thinking for a long time, though, that the true situation is likely somewhere between the extremes of the reporting on this problem.]   

Lost saint

An odd story at a Catholic news site:

ROME — The remains of St. Peter may have been and possibly still could be buried in catacombs under the Mausoleum of St. Helena after being moved from the Vatican hillside during anti-Christian persecutions in the third century, according to a paper published recently by three Italian researchers.

Labeling their conclusions as “conjecture,” the researchers suggested archaeologists could “validate” their findings with “excavation campaigns”; however, a leading expert in Christian archaeology and a member of the Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archaeology told Vatican News that the researchers’ hypothesis was “unacceptable.”

Emperor Constantine would never have gone through so much logistical trouble building St. Peter’s Basilica in the early fourth century “if it had not been contingent upon the presence of the venerated remains” below, where the saint’s tomb had been venerated since early Christian times, Vincenzo Fiocchi Nicolai told Vatican News May 30.

“It is clear,” he said, “that Peter’s remains were found in the place of the original burial site on the Vatican hill when the formidable Constantinian basilica was built, the biggest basilica ever established in the city,” he said, adding that if later the remains had been moved “ad catacumbasto,” then that refers to a cemetery on the Appian Way, later called, the catacombs of St. Sebastian.

A previous Pope thought the saint's bones had already been discovered, but the means of identification sounds dubious:

While scholars are certain St. Peter’s ancient tomb was located on the Vatican hill where he had died a martyr and where Constantine ordered a basilica be built, his remains have been a source of much controversy and mystery.

St. Paul VI announced in 1968 that the “relics” of St. Peter had been “identified in a way which we can hold to be convincing,” after bones were discovered following excavations of the necropolis under St. Peter’s Basilica, which began in the 1940s near a monument erected in the fourth century to honor St. Peter.

The pope had cases of the relics placed beneath the basilica’s main altar and in his private chapel in the Apostolic Palace. Scientists have confirmed the remains are those of a 60- to 70-year-old robust male, according to Vatican News.

 

The giggling cure

I am surprised to read this:

A new study at the University of Chicago Medicine and Washington University found that a single inhalation session with 25% nitrous oxide gas was nearly as effective as 50% nitrous oxide at rapidly relieving symptoms of treatment-resistant depression, with fewer adverse side effects. The study, published June 9 in Science Translational Medicine, also found that the effects lasted much longer than previously suspected, with some participants experiencing improvements for upwards of two weeks.  ...

Often called "laughing gas," nitrous oxide is frequently used as an anesthetic that provides short-term pain relief in dentistry and surgery.

In a prior study, the investigators tested the effects of a one-hour inhalation session with 50% nitrous oxide gas in 20 patients, finding that it led to rapid improvements in patient's depressive symptoms that lasted for at least 24 hours when compared to placebo. However, several patients experienced negative side effects, including nausea, vomiting and headaches....

In the new study, the investigators repeated a similar protocol with 20 patients, this time adding an additional inhalation session with 25% nitrous oxide. They found that even with only half the concentration of nitrous oxide, the treatment was nearly as effective as 50% nitrous oxide, but this time with just one quarter of the negative side effects.

Furthermore, the investigators looked at patients' clinical depression scores after treatment over a longer time course; while the last study only evaluated depression symptoms up to 24 hours after treatment, this new study conducted additional evaluations over two weeks. To their surprise, after just a single administration, some patients' improvements in their depression symptoms lasted for the entire evaluation period. 

Many years ago, a friendly dentist offered to give me nitrous oxide when I didn't really need it, just to see what it was like.   I did, indeed, giggle a lot at anything said.

Foucault the neo-liberal

I don't know that it's worth dwelling as much on Foucault as some academics like to do, but I was nonetheless interested to learn that there is a stream of criticism that he was too much of a neo-liberal.  That's news to me:

More recently, leftist thinkers have cast Foucault as a neoliberal, arguing that the kind of politics incipient in his thought paved the way to the hollowing out of the welfare state that took place under the signs of Reaganomics and Third Way liberalism. This counterintuitive assertion is the principal argument of The Last Man Takes LSD: Foucault and the End of Revolution. The collaborative work of Mitchell Dean, a scholar at Copenhagen Business School, and Daniel Zamora, a sociologist at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, a version of the book was first published in French in 2019 before being adapted into English this year.

Appearing with the radical publisher Verso, it offers a generous consideration of Foucault’s dalliance with neoliberal thought, coming to the conclusion that the French philosopher used the work of the so-called “New Philosophers” and American neoliberal thinkers in order to question what he perceived as the sclerotic totems of the welfare state. In so doing, they bring together a growing scholarship on the topic, including Foucault and Neoliberalism, a 2016 volume coedited by Zamora to which Dean contributed. Ultimately, though, The Last Man Takes LSD questions the lingering significance of Foucault’s work today, highlighting a greater gap in Foucauldian thought: the absence of a well-developed theory of the state.

Stupid, stupid blowhard watch

 He's such a lightweight, wingnut troll now...

Feeling vindicated

David Roberts notes:

 Here's a link to the study, and here is the abstract:

The idea that U.S. conservatives are uniquely likely to hold misperceptions is widespread but has not been systematically assessed. Research has focused on beliefs about narrow sets of claims never intended to capture the richness of the political information environment. Furthermore, factors contributing to this performance gap remain unclear. We generated an unique longitudinal dataset combining social media engagement data and a 12-wave panel study of Americans’ political knowledge about high-profile news over 6 months. Results confirm that conservatives have lower sensitivity than liberals, performing worse at distinguishing truths and falsehoods. This is partially explained by the fact that the most widely shared falsehoods tend to promote conservative positions, while corresponding truths typically favor liberals. The problem is exacerbated by liberals’ tendency to experience bigger improvements in sensitivity than conservatives as the proportion of partisan news increases. These results underscore the importance of reducing the supply of right-leaning misinformation.

Psychiatric reversals noted

In a journal article about transgenderism* which I don't particularly recommend, I was nonetheless surprised to find this account of how the psychiatric establishment, over the course of a mere 30 years, swung from one extreme to another in its classifications regarding homosexuality:

The story of how disorders are first classified and reclassified within, and then eventually expunged from, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is telling. Homosexuality, for example, was included in the first edition of the DSM, published in 1952, as a sexual deviation classified under the rubric “Sociopathic Personality Disturbance.”2 In the second edition (DSM-II) published in 1968 it became a sexual deviation classified as a nonpsychotic mental disorder along with pedophilia and exhibitionism.3 It was then declassified as a disorder altogether when DSM-II was revised in 1973. The DSM-III, published in 1980, was such a strong reversal of position from its predecessor that it actually classified any homosexual who wanted to be heterosexual as having a psychosexual disorder called “ego-dystonic homosexuality.”4 This was then dropped when the DSM-III was revised in 1987 (DSM-III-R).5

Why was I reading about transgenderism?  Because of this tweet yesterday, which told (to my mind) an improbable story:

Jessica's twitter feed is full of photos of herself, many with the needy "don't you agree I'm looking hot" kind of vibe that young transgender male to female folk seem to often yearn for.  It's not enough that they change their bodies to suit their own mental state - they insist that others join in giving positive comments on their new looks.   Which can be a rather, um, reality challenging call and a significant part of why transgenderism can be such a socially awkward thing for the rest of us.  

As one person on Twitter said:

 
 

*   Here it is.

Against the lab leak theory

There's quite a strong push back against the "the liberal media got the lab leak theory all wrong" in a column in the LA Times, which I got to via Twitter (and not paywalled.)   Some parts:

What’s missing from all this reexamination and soul-searching is a fundamental fact: There is no evidence — not a smidgen — for the claim that COVID-19 originated in a laboratory in China or anywhere else, or that the China lab ever had the virus in its inventory. There’s even less for the wildest version of the claim, which is that the virus was deliberately engineered. There never has been, and there isn’t now.  ...

No one disputes that a lab leak is possible. Viruses have escaped from laboratories in the past, on occasion leading to human infection. But “zoonotic” transfers — that is, from animals to humans — are a much more common and well-documented pathway.

That’s why the virological community believes that it’s vastly more likely that COVID-19 spilled over from an animal host to humans.

That was the conclusion reached in a seminal paper on COVID-19’s origins published in Nature in February 2020 by American, British and Australian virologists. “We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible,” they wrote.

“We cannot prove that SARS-CoV-2 [the COVID-19 virus] has a natural origin and we cannot prove that its emergence was not the result of a lab leak,” the lead author of the Nature paper, Kristian Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, told me by email. 

“However, while both scenarios are possible, they are not equally likely,” Andersen said. “Precedence, data, and other evidence strongly favor natural emergence as a highly likely scientific theory for the emergence of SARS-CoV-2, while the lab leak remains a speculative incomplete hypothesis with no credible evidence.”

Coauthor Robert F. Garry of Tulane Medical School told several colleagues during a recent webcast: “Our conclusion that it didn’t leak from the lab is even stronger today than it was when we wrote the paper.”

As the veteran pseudoscience debunker David Gorski sums up the contest between the lab-leak and zoonotic theories, “the likelihood of the two hypotheses is nowhere near close to equal.”

What remains of the lab-leak theory is half-truths, misrepresentations, and tendentious conjecture. ...

 

Let’s take a look at the science underlying the search for COVID’s origins. One important fact is that we may never get a definitive answer. The animal source of the Ebola virus, which was first identified 45 years ago, is still unknown, Maxmen reported in Nature.

Maxmen noted that it took researchers 14 years to trace the 2002-2004 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, to a virus that leapt from bats to humans. ...

 

The lab-leak theory gains from a superficial plausibility — especially to laypersons. The Wuhan lab had a collection of bat viruses, including some that appear to be similar to the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.

But some virologists say they’re not similar enough to mutate into SARS-CoV-2, even through deliberate manipulation, Garry says. “That’s a point that’s not going to resonate very strongly with people who haven’t studied viruses for a long, long time.”

 

 

 

 

More Right wing nonsense watch

 

Another quick movie review no one was waiting for

I saw the 2015 Jonny Depp film Black Mass last week, on Netflix, and was surprised how good it was.

I see that it was better rated on Rotten Tomatoes than I thought (73%), but it didn't make much money at the box office.  (Just under a $100 million world wide).  

It's true:  it is very much Martin Scorsese territory, and I think some people may have thought it was too much a repeat of Goodfellas and the rest of his oeuvre.  But I thought of it more as Scorsese material but done with a better and more satisfying story arc.   It is nicely directed, and Depp and all of the actors are very good.

The other film it's unavoidably close to is Scorsese's The Departed, which I thought was really awful and couldn't stick with, and even my son didn't seem to care for it.   It is a much, much better movie than that.    

Right wing hero watch

First, Milo:

 Second, Naomi Wolfe: 

Adam Creighton has been busy being upset about her banning:

 

Each of these characters have been mentioned favourably recently at Catallaxy. 

Update:  speaking of Catallaxy, I see that Steve Kates is now sharing Gateway Pundit fantasies of Fauci (and others) being on trial for...well, you can see.

Man with no problem with women blames them for...everything

It's one of the great mysteries of life that Sinclair Davidson seems to think he's performing a service to the world by keeping a forum running where his mates regularly show themselves off as, well, ridiculous idiots.  His former RMIT buddy Steve Kates is currently endorsing COVID as being a vast conspiracy to bring down Trump and hence Western civilisation.   But we've seen that before.  

 Today's entry,  rather, for going "straight to the pool room" comes from Man Who Loves Women (Just as Long as They are Exactly Like my Catholic Mum circa 1955), with this:

Seriously...

What the West needs

It's better than having a trade or other war.   The West needs to infiltrate Chinese social media and continue spreading this idea: 

Young people in China exhausted by a culture of hard work with seemingly little reward are highlighting the need for a lifestyle change by "lying flat".

The new trend, known as "tang ping", is described as an antidote to society's pressures to find jobs and perform well while working long shifts.

China has a shrinking labour market and young people often work more hours.

The term "tang ping" is believed to have originated in a post on a popular Chinese social media site.

"Lying flat is my wise movement," a user wrote in a since-deleted post on the discussion forum Tieba, adding: "Only by lying down can humans become the measure of all things."

The comments were later discussed on Sina Weibo, another popular Chinese microblogging site, and the term soon became a buzzword.

The idea behind "tang ping" - not overworking, being content with more attainable achievements and allowing time to unwind - has been praised by many and inspired numerous memes. It has been described as a spiritual movement.

 

Theories

Orwell was wrong...

...in that the future was not the cynical Two Minute Hate, forced on a populace by authoritarian government, but a whole 180 Minute Hate every evening brought by an ageing billionaire for profit and influence:  

 

I mean, the Right in America (and any Australian sympathisers to it) have become just too stupid to engage with, and their obsession with attacking individual public figures like Fauci is just absurd.   

As with climate change, they think they can pluck any statement made by a perceived enemy out of context and think that it proves their point.   They think they're the smart ones, when they are just nasty and dumb and tribal to the point of preferring self harm to listening to expertise.   

 

Quantum computing on Youtube

I recently watched two videos of interest regarding quantum computing.

As you might expect, Google is going into it in a big way, and while the comedy in this does not really work, it's still interesting:

And Bee Hossenfelder had an informative video on the various approaches to creating quantum computing. I didn't realise there were so many: 

Update:   I have been meaning to say, since I first posted a photo of these early quantum computer set ups, that I like the lacy, intricate design of the Google quantum computer, which is all about the need for extreme cooling. Which has made me wonder - how do you cool something down to below the temperature of space? This article gives some indication, although I still don't understand exactly how it works: 

 “Quantum chips have to operate at very low temperatures in order to maintain the quantum information,” Clarke said. To do this, Intel uses cryogen-free dilution refrigerator systems from specialist Blufors.

The refrigerator features several stages, getting colder as you go down - all the way "down to temperatures just a fraction of a degree above absolute zero - that is really cold. In fact, it's 250 times colder than deep space,” Clarke said. “We use a mixture of helium isotopes as our refrigerant to get down to these very cold temperatures, in the tens of millikelvin.”

While the refrigeration system can bring temperatures down to extremes, it can't remove heat very quickly - so if you have a chip in there that's creating a lot of heat, you're going to have a problem.

"You're probably familiar with the power dissipation of an FPGA," Clarke said. "This would overwhelm the refrigeration cooling capacity. At the lowest level of a fridge, you typically have about a milliwatt of cooling power. At the four Kelvin stage [higher up in the fridge], you have a few watts."

Future fridge designs are expected to improve things, but it's unlikely to massively increase the temperature envelope. "That imposes limitations on the power dissipation of your control chips."