There’s currently a debate about whether mediocre nerds should be imported into the U.S. via H-1B or only supernerds, perhaps via the O-1 visa (both of these are “nonimmigrant” visas and yet everyone who gets one seems to end up as a permanent immigrant to the United States). The main argument supporting a massive annual influx of nerds is that Americans cannot and will not do nerd work, just as Americans cannot and will not do any hard work, which is why we need a border open to low-skill undocumented migrants.
Could the U.S. grow its own nerd supply based on native-born Americans? As it turns out, I have some experience in this area! About 25 years ago, I started “ArsDigita University”, a post-baccalaureate program in which people who had non-nerd degrees could take all of the core undergrad computer science classes in a TA-supervised cooperative open office-style environment. People just had to show up for 9-5 every day for a year and they’d come out knowing pretty much everything that a standard CS bachelor’s degree holder would know. Not a “coding camp”, in other words, but traditional CS knowledge. The big differences compared to a traditional university were (1) take one course at a time, and (2) do all of the work together in one room so that it would be easy to get help from another student or a TA.
Did it work? We ran it for just one year, but as far as I know everyone who completed the program got the kind of job that someone graduating with a CS bachelor’s would get.
As loyal readers may be aware, I’ve long been a critic of the traditional four-year college/university. Simply getting rid of summer and winter breaks would reduce the time required to get a degree and begin a career to 2.5 years. 18-20-year-olds are blessed with tremendous health and energy and shouldn’t need to take nearly half the year off. Here are some examples of my previous criticisms:
“Teaching Software Engineering” (2001), on the magic of project-based learning when the goal is to teach people how to handle engineering projects
If we’re going to cut back on H-1Bs, though, we might need to get a little more radical. Following the lead of the Germans/Swiss, we should try to set things up so that a high-school graduate is ready to begin work in the tech mines as an apprentice nerdlet. We can have some demanding career-oriented classes for smart kids where the goal is not to get into college, but instead to get a job at age 18 and continue to develop skills that are obtained via certificate programs with independently administered exams. These would be like the current Microsoft and Cisco certification programs, but with a much broader array of options, e.g., for having learned physics, math, data science, machine learning, etc. to various levels (Coursera maybe already does this). These certifications could also help older workers who’ve maintained their skills. Instead of showing an employer a 35-year-old transcript as evidence that physics and engineering classes were taken, an applicant could show the employer 6-month-old certifications that physics and engineering are currently understood.
I’m not sure what the argument, from an employer’s point of view, for the traditional 4-year-old college experience is. For the lucky kids who get to attend a top-100 school, it’s obviously great fun to hang out with friends, attend football games, have sex with a lot of different partners, and occasionally study. But how do these experiences make a person a more effective worker? I think the answer is “generally, they don’t”. One of my former neighbors in Maskachusetts spent about $1 million on private school and college for a child who is now working as a receptionist for an HVAC company in a city that is notable for its rich concentration of marijuana and meth stores. Plainly this is something that the girl could have done just as easily on graduation from high school, consistent with the book Academically Adrift:
At the heart of the book is an analysis of data from the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA), which requires students to synthesize data from various sources and write up a report with a recommendation. It turns out that attending college is a very inefficient way to improve one’s performance at this kind of task. After three semesters, the average college student’s score improved by 0.18 standard deviation or seven percentile points (e.g., the sophomore if sent back into the freshman pool would have risen from the 50th to the 57th percentile). After four years, the seniors had a 0.5 standard deviation improvement over the freshman, compared to 1 standard deviation in the 1980s.
Readers: Do you think employers could be talked down from H-1B and convinced to hire American 18-year-olds as apprentices who’d spend their evenings taking in-person or online classes in advanced nerdism?
Separately, I’d love to know how COBOL-coding nerds and beautiful fashion models got lumped together:
“The H-1B program applies to employers seeking to hire nonimmigrant aliens as workers in specialty occupations or as fashion models of distinguished merit and ability“
The Yale Alumni Magazine arrived in our mailbox with a cover reminding the Righteous that Yale students were on the Right Side of History (TM) against the “other apartheid regime” (i.e., not Israel) back in the 1980s:
The article, titled “The shanties on the plaza”, never explicitly mentions the noble Palestinians nor the modern apartheid state of Israel, but the parallels are pretty obvious and I think we can all agree on who was in the right back then.
What about the Extremely Unrighteous? From December 2:
The incoming dictator threatened the entirely peaceful hostage-holding Gazans with “Those responsible will be hit harder than anybody has been hit in the long and storied History of the United States of America.” Considering what we did to Tokyo (100,000 civilians killed in one night), Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I’m not sure how this promise could be fulfilled.
Related:
“Nelson Mandela’s support for Palestinians endures with South Africa’s genocide case against Israel” (state-sponsored PBS): “We have stood with the Palestinians and we will continue to stand with our Palestinian brothers and sisters,” Mandela’s grandson, Mandla Mandela, said at a pro-Palestinian rally in Cape Town in October, days after the Hamas attack in southern Israel spurred the war on Gaza. Mandla Mandela, an ANC lawmaker, wore a black and white Palestinian keffiyeh around his neck as he spoke to a large crowd.
Ron DeSantis has set up all of the core functions of government so well here in Florida that it is unclear what he would need to do for the next two years (the hated Yale/Harvard graduate will be forced by term limits to leave office in January 2027). Here’s an idea for a Big Project worthy of a politician with Big Skills: develop a new campus for University of Florida that will enable the school to break out of its #30-ish rut among national universities (tied with University of Texas-Austin; #7 among state-run universities).
Why would this make sense? Florida’s population is growing and younger people have been moving into Florida, partially due to the state’s #1 ranking for education in U.S. News but mostly due to the efforts of lockdown governors in the Northeast, Illinois, and California. Florida has about half as many children as California, but only two world-class universities. The first is University of Florida in Gainesville. The second is Florida State University in Tallahassee (FSU is ranked #54 among national universities by U.S. News). California, on the other hand, has Stanford, CalTech, UC-Berkeley, UC-LA, UC-San Diego, UC-Davis, UC-Irvine, and UC-Santa Barbara (8 total ranked #54 and above). There would definitely be demand for another excellent school and Florida has the tax base to make it happen.
Why not expand and improve the schools in Gainesville and Tallahassee? They’re already huge, for one thing (60,000 and 45,000 students). More importantly, if the goal is to build a university that can rank within the top 10, they’re not in the right places. The typical elite academic doesn’t want to live in a small Southern city. Gainesville is unsuccessful at getting UF graduates to stick around and start companies (see Relocation to Florida for a family with school-age children); how is Gainesville going to woo a top researcher away from a school in New York City, Boston, or Chicago?
What are some criteria for where to locate a new university?
Politics. Academics can’t tolerate anyone questioning their beliefs, so they need to live in a city that is dominated by Democrats and where they’re unlikely to ever have a conversation with a Republican. This rules out Miami now that the Latinx have defected to Trump.
Hurricane Risk. Being an elite academic goes hand-in-hand with being a Climate Doomer. This rules out Tampa, whose luck eventually must run out (the city hasn’t been hit by a hurricane since 1926)
Airline Connections. Although elite academics are Climate Doomers, each one has the carbon footprint of a 4 million ton/year cement plant. They need to be able to jump on a flight every few weeks to a conference on the other side of the country or the ocean. You might think that this would bring Miami back into the ring, but nonstops from MIA mostly go to Latin America. Following the lead of Barbra Streisand, the escape route for an American who claims to love Brown people is always to Canada and never Mexico or, God forbid, farther south. Orlando, on the other hand, enjoys nonstop connections to cities around North America and Europe. Everyone eventually needs to come to Walt Disney World and Universal.
High-speed Rail. Intercity rail is catnip for elite progressives. This favors cities spread out along Brightline, which means Orlando, West Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale, and Miami.
Reviewing the above criteria, Orlando is the obvious choice. It’s one of the few parts of Florida that voted correctly during the Election Nakba of 2024. It’s far enough inland that hurricanes generally lose their strength by the time they arrive over Space Mountain. Orlando is 100′ above sea level, which will reassure even the most ardent Climate Doomer that a vengeful Mother Earth won’t soon reclaim the city as part of the ocean floor. Orlando has great airline connections that will only get better as the theme parks expand. Orlando is going to be ever more connected via high-speed rail as Brightline expands (Tampa is the next big goal).
For recruiting faculty, the state could do a bulk purchase of annual passes (weekday only should be fine since academics don’t need to work M-F 9-5) to Disney, Universal, and Sea World. Everyone who works at UF-Orlando gets passes to all three major parks.
Is this doable? In 2016, the USTA announced the near-completion of a campus with 100 tennis courts on 63 acres next to the big Orlando airport (the plan was conceived in 2014). Celebration, built in the 1990s, is about 5,000 acres and cost about $2.5 billion in pre-Biden dollars to create (home to about 11,000 people, which means enough square footage for a sizable university). The Harvard main campus, which includes a lot of athletic fields, is only about 200 acres. Current Florida state budget surpluses are about $2 billion/year (Ron DeSantis has been using these to pay off debt, but nobody remembers a politician for fiscal prudence; it is acts of fiscal extravagance for which politicians are remembered and celebrated).
One knock against Orlando is that the summer weather is pretty miserable, with an average high of 91-92 in June, July, and August (not hot enough to keep the crowds away from the theme parks!). But that’s actually cooler than Tallahassee and no different than Gainesville and, of course, the academic elite doesn’t have to be on campus during the summer.
Here’s a map showing the new USTA campus in relation to MCO, Walt Disney World (lower left), and Celebration (lower left):
“Palm Beach unanimously approves land deal for Vanderbilt’s new business and tech campus” (vanderbilt.edu, October 28, 2024): In a unanimous vote on Oct. 22, the Palm Beach County Commission approved a deal to provide five acres of county-owned land to Vanderbilt for the development of a new campus in West Palm Beach. For several months, Vanderbilt has been in discussions with city and county officials and community and business leaders about establishing a presence in West Palm Beach to complement the region’s booming financial and tech sectors. The affirmative vote by the county, along with two acres already pledged by the City of West Palm Beach, paves the way for the university to establish a new campus in South Florida focused on graduate programs in business, computing and engineering, bringing high-impact graduate education to what has become known as “Wall Street South.” … Once operational, the West Palm Beach campus will welcome nearly 1,000 students in various business programs … Since 2020, more than $1 trillion in assets under management has relocated to Florida
University of Central Florida, a stepsister to FSU, has 70,000 students in and around Orlando and a dismal #121 ranking from U.S. News
Joel Fajans was the first friend that I made on arrival at MIT (1979) and, sadly, he died last month. He was a gentle soul who never got annoyed by the comparative stupidity of people who didn’t understand physics as well as he did. Although he was generally busy supervising graduate students at UC Berkeley and running experiments at CERN (see “Nothing’s the Matter With Antimatter, New Experiment Confirms” (NYT 2023)) he always had time to answer my questions. I will miss him. If he were alive today I would be asking him “How many rockets can Elon Musk send to Mars before the Earth’s orbit is changed?” Here’s an excerpt from his research page at Berkeley:
And here’s Joel at the intersection of Hollywood and physics:
One of my favorite memories of Joel is when a group of us went on a bike ride from his house in an upscale neighborhood of Berkeley (he saved some money as a young single academic and then married into a bit of inherited wealth). Accustomed to being able to bike in any direction over any terrain on a mountain bike, I managed to ride the borrowed hybrid over of those one-way parking lot tire destroyers and punctured both inner tubes. Joel had a spare tube for one and patched the other and we resumed the group cycle. Joel never complained about or harped on my incompetence.
About half of my class at Comair failed a stage check and received additional sim training, but I got only the bare minimum. My checkride was not too stressful either. The oral exam, which can last 2-3 hours and can include any item of minute knowledge involving regulations, the aircraft’s systems, or almost anything else aviation-related, must by regulation precede the actual flying and it tends to set the tone. The examiner to whom I was assigned was accustomed to humiliating applicants with an opening oral question that none had ever been able to answer satisfactorily. After they realized how ignorant and worthless they were he beat them down for an additional three hours before getting into the sim with the demoralized young pilot.
What was the question? “Why does the Canadair Regional Jet have both an alternating current (AC) electrical system and a direct current (DC) system as well?” As it happened, I had wondered the same thing myself just a couple of weeks earlier. I’d carefully studied the electrical diagrams for the airplane and had a one-hour phone discussion with a friend who is a physics professor at UC Berkeley. Without giving the guy any hint as to my non-aviation background or the fact that I’d discussed this with a physicist, I went up to the whiteboard and gave a 5-minute talk about how Maxwell’s equations explained that a time-varying magnetic field, like you would get from using engine power to rotate permanent magnets, generates a time-varying electric field, i.e., alternating voltage potential. This AC power is ideal for driving the heaviest load on the airplane, the hydraulic pumps for the flight controls (a spinning motor having more or less the same structure as a generator). Having AC power at a high voltage also makes it easy to have lighter wires to move the power around the airplane and then transform down to lower voltage for radios, etc. A transformer will pass AC voltage but not DC.
He said “Your oral is complete. We’re getting into the sim now.”
Searching through my Gmail, I found a good 2007 answer to one of my helicopter student’s questions:
(Student) from Principles of Helicopter Flight, p. 4: “Equilibrium means a state of zero-acceleration. When an object travels in a straight line at a constant speed, its velocity is constant (since there is no change in either speed or direction). It can then be said that the object is in equilibrium. If an object travels at a steady 50 mph on a curve, however, it must be accelerating because its direction is constantly changing and it can then not be in equilibrium.
(Joel) The solar system is in a pretty good equilibrium. (Alright, you can prove that it isn’t but its lasted a long time. A system consisting of just the sun and the earth would be in equilibrium.) The earth is traveling in a circle. So the quote from “Principles…” is incorrect.
A centrifugal force is a fictitious force, but as any fighter pilot would tell you, it feels pretty real.
You are correct that some force must be applied to force a plane into a circle.
However, if you want to pretend that the reference frame rotating with the plane is “normal”, than, in that frame, the forces are balanced…the centrifugal force is balanced by a force from the wings pointing towards the center of rotation.
The question is not profound…just semantics.
Modern thinking on how to teach physics (teaching that I don’t subscribe to) bans mentioning fictitious forces. The claim is that it just confuses the students.
A 2008 discussion about “why treadmill incline makes walking harder”, in which I quote Joel:
I asked Joel Fajans, physics nerd, and he said “consider what happens if you stop walking; you go backwards but also down”. Joel says that if you want to get fancy, you can go for a special relativity-style argument about frames of reference.
Anyway, the incline does in fact make you work harder than simply lifting your legs from a lower position to a higher one. The fact that your body isn’t going up doesn’t mean you aren’t working because the treadmill is creating a new reference frame.
In response to a 2008 question about why airplane generators are rated in KVA (kilo-volt-amperes) rather than in watts:
watts are true power, while kVA are apparent power. The difference has to do with the phase relationship between the voltage and current. With a resistive loads (light bulbs) the voltage and current are in perfectly in phase. Then kVA=kW. But with a pure inductive load (or pure capacitive load) the voltage and current are 90deg out of phase. Inductors (capacitors) do not dissipate average power; there maybe substantial voltages across them and currents, but there is no net power. So the load in watts is zero. The kVA load is not zero…it is the product of the RMS voltage times the RMS current. So what is this extra “load”? It is power sloshing back and forth between the load and the generator…first the generator stores energy in the load, and then the load puts the energy back into the generator.
Loads in the real world tend to be somewhere between perfectly resistive and perfectly inductive, with phase angles in the range of 10-30%.
The amount of coal you have to burn is proportional to the watts, not the KVA (assuming perfect conductors carrying the power to the load.) But in practice, a generator may fry even with a perfect inductor because the instantaneous demanded currents can be quite high. SO on an airplane you would protect for kVA, not kW.
A 2008 exchange:
(me) Can you make [a jet-powered airplane] generator of equivalent power with fewer windings and lighter weight at 400 Hz. compared to 60 Hz? If you want to run the whole airplane on AC power, forgetting about any rectification to DC, does it make sense to use 400 Hz? I figured the 60 Hz. or 400 Hz. would relate more to the speed with which the rotor was spinning and not the number of windings. In that case there is a gearing issue where it would be a lot cheaper to gear the 30,000 rpm power turbine down to 400 Hz. instead of 60 Hz.
(Joel) Running at higher frequencies makes transformers much smaller. For example, I have a 200A power, 10kW power supply that runs at 60Hz and weighs about 300lbs. I have another power supply, which runs at about 30kHz, which supplies 1000A at 6kW which weighs only about 30lbs.
Most power supplies these days are “switchers”. Rather than working at 60Hz to convert AC to high quality DC, they first convert that AC to very low quality DC (glitchy, not well regulated) and convert the low quality DC to 20-60kHz. Then they take the 20-60kHz and convert it back into high quality DC. This takes a lot of extra circuitry, but is definitely worth in terms of weight and cost. All computer power supplies are switchers, for instance. The only down side is that they tend to have noise at the fundamental and harmonics of the switching frequency, which can be problematic, particularly in the sorts of physics stuff I do. (We are fighting such noise at the moment.)
Anyway, the only thing I’d quarrel with is the claim on the web site that there are extra losses at 400Hz. This isn’t quite as simple as described on the web site. Inductive “losses” aren’t really losses…to first order no power is dissipated, so no extra fuel has to be consumed. It simply means that there are voltage drops on the lines. And I can’t believe that its very large.
One issue not mentioned on the web site, which represents a real power loss, is skin depth. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_depth It turns out that AC current only flows on the outer “skin” of a wire. The skin depth is the thickness of the layer in which current flows. At 60Hz in copper, this depth is about 1cm, but at 400Hz it decreases by the square root of the frequency to about 0.4cm. But this effect doesn’t matter unless the cables are of thickness comparable to the skin depth. I can’t imagine that there are any cables of radius ~0.4cm on an airplane (maybe on an AWACS plane). It is a real problem, however, on long distance transmission power lines.
Joel held strictly orthodox progressive Democrat Cambridge-/Berkeley-style political beliefs. He attributed America’s woes to the existence of stupid/uneducated people in the South, none of whom he had ever met in person. He recognized that California failed to deliver what local and state Democrats promised and assigned 100 percent of the blame for this failure to Republicans because of their role in promoting Proposition 13 and its limits on property tax. (Joel himself was a huge beneficiary of Prop 13 because he and his wife purchased a house in 1999 and, therefore, paid tax on a slightly adjusted original purchase price.) I would point out (a) that California collected a relative high percentage of residents’ income (Tax Foundation) and, (b) California Democrats were in 100% control of the state and could revoke Prop 13, impose a wealth tax, raise income and sales tax rates, charge a congestion fee for use of the roads, etc. This wouldn’t convince him to hate Republicans less. One of Joel’s core yearnings was for higher tax rates and I couldn’t persuade him that the government’s greed was infinite and that, therefore, tax rates were likely already set at a revenue-maximizing level (i.e., to get more tax revenue, the government would have to introduce new taxes, such as value-added tax, not tweak rates; see these charts of revenue vs. rates). Our final political conversation was in March 2024 and regarded the battles in Gaza (I was with him last month, but he was too weak to talk). Joel, an American secular Jew, said “a pox on both their houses”, agreeing with another Jewish Berkeley resident that Hamas and Israel were equally bad. (While this sounds like a nuanced and balanced position, it is highly favorable to the Palestinians. The same people who say that Hamas and Israel are comparable also deny that Hamas was elected to power by Palestinians. Hamas either seized power or is somehow accidentally in charge of Gaza. Once Hamas is gone, Palestinians will revert to
College application season is upon us. A tip from a brilliant young litigator with whom I recently worked (as a software expert witness, not in the law mines themselves!)… “Rankings of law schools look at undergraduate GPA and median LSAT score and, therefore, law school admissions look at the applicant’s GPA and LSAT score.” What’s his practical advice? “They don’t adjust the GPA for how rigorous your undergrad school was. You’re better off going to community college or majoring in ‘studies’ at Harvard than going through an undergrad program where you’d have some chance of getting a B.”
If the undergrad program is so undemanding that straight As are guaranteed, how should the prospective lawyer spend his/her/zir/their time? Cramming for the LSATs! Imagine working with those prep books and prep classes starting the summer before freshman year of undergraduate!
Despite the young lawyer’s mention of Harvard, it turns out to be only America’s #3 college for grade inflation. The school with the highest average GPA is Brown. (source) Of course, for either school the 18-year-old should be sure to pack a keffiyeh and Queers for Palestine banner (also useful once the scholar arrives at the elite law school; see the recent Instagram post by Berkeley Law students regarding the “Palestinian Genocide” (exacerbated by one of the world’s highest rates of population growth)).
We’ve got a mole inside Brown this year. Here’s “Clouseau’s” report on how freshman year started… (not in quote style for readability):
Before classes began, all students were required to read an 86 page report on Brown’s relationship with slavery (TLDR: Slavery was bad and institutions founded 100+ years before the Civil War have connections to it) and attend a seminar discussing it. We have a responsibility to “center discussions of identity” in all disciplines.
During the seminar, the facilitator (a humanities professor) and my fellow students spent 80 minutes hammering Brown and the Antebellum North for their profiteering relationship with slavery, and the group was adamant that they would not have similarly stood by had they been on campus in 1850. The group concluded that the Complicit North eventually fighting a war to end slavery was “largely performative” with respect to combatting the practice.
One place the group did passionately feel Brown was repeating its past mistakes was by refusing to divest from Israel despite the “genocide” (facilitator’s phrasing) in Gaza. Everyone agreed that we had to “free Palestine” — and hundreds of students waved Palestinian flags at the opening convocation this afternoon to emphasize the point. Ironically, 40% of Brown students say they are [2SLGBTQQIA+; our mole hatefully neglected some of these letters]; I guess what happens to members of that community under Hamas does not qualify as genocide.
Anyway, classes start tomorrow. My [STEM class with more than 100 students] has already mandated we use “they/them” pronouns for all students.
[Aerial photo by Tony Cammarata. June 2020 from a Robinson R44 helicopter. Campus shut down for coronapanic.]
4:02 PM Convocation begins
4:03 PM National Anthem
4:04 PM Acknowledgment that we are on stolen Narragansett land
Questions that were not answered:
Why are we singing the anthem of a country that is a product of theft?
Who had the land before the Narragansett? Was it light, heaven and earth, animals, and then thousands of years of Narragansett rule before the settler-colonialist Rhode Islanders came along?
What is being done to return the stolen land? Why is the school actively buying up more instead of giving it back?
If the majority of students identify as progressive, why were they chatting through the land acknowledgement, to the point that it was difficult to hear the speaker?
Separately, a friend’s daughter has been keeping up with friends from high school. Her friend who recently matriculated at Northeastern University’s London campus (5 percent acceptance rate) has been going to clubs… every night. Since there are no neutrally administered tests with unbiased grading (i.e., the professors grade their own students), there is no need to study. Her friend who has been at Fordham for three weeks has already had sex with three different men, which reminds me of a conversation I had with an MIT undergraduette circa 1990. She mentioned that her freshman year roommate had sex with 25 different men. I pointed out that “MIT is in session for only 26 weeks per year.” She responded, “She had a cold one week.”
One common demand from the encamped righteous has been that colleges bring in more students from “Palestine” (example in Oregon; state-sponsored NPR gives us an example from New Jersey). If we look at photos from Gaza, however, we don’t see people who dress and act like American college students. Nobody is drinking alcohol. Nobody has a pet dog (“Islam forbids Muslims to keep dogs,”). Females don’t go out without being well covered in hijab and long dress (to do otherwise would be to dress like a prostitute (BBC)). Here’s an example from UNRWA (they provided 3 million medical consultations to 2.3 million Gazans during 6 months of war, which means that it is easier to get in to see a doctor in Gaza during wartime than in the U.S. during peacetime):
Lets have a look at the encampments. Here’s one at the University of Coimbra, founded in 1290:
There were about 10 protesters (out of 25,000 students total at Portugal’s oldest university) and at least two of them had pet dogs. In the photo above, a dog is not only kept as a pet, contrary to Islam, but is allowed to walk on the sacred Palestinian flag.
Here’s the encampment at Brown:
Instead of hijabs, students who appear to identify as “female” are wearing halter tops, showing cleavage, etc.
How are students from Gaza supposed to feel welcome in this debauched environment? Shouldn’t the pro-Hamas college students demand that administrations ban alcohol (including for those over 21, e.g., at faculty and alumni events), ban immodest dress, and ban dogs from their campuses?
Which young Americans care enough about their fellow humans (or at least those oppressed by Jews) to camp out in support of Hamas? The rich. From “Are Gaza Protests Happening Mostly at Elite Colleges?” (Washington Monthly):
Using data from Harvard’s Crowd Counting Consortium and news reports of encampments, we matched information on every institution of higher education that has had pro-Palestinian protest activity (starting when the war broke out in October until early May) to the colleges in our 2023 college rankings. Of the 1,421 public and private nonprofit colleges that we ranked, 318 have had protests and 123 have had encampments.
By matching that data to percentages of students at each campus who receive Pell Grants (which are awarded to students from moderate- and low-income families), we came to an unsurprising conclusion: Pro-Palestinian protests have been rare at colleges with high percentages of Pell students. Encampments at such colleges have been rarer still. A few outliers exist, such as Cal State Los Angeles, the City College of New York, and Rutgers University–Newark. But in the vast majority of cases, campuses that educate students mostly from working-class backgrounds have not had any protest activity. For example, at the 78 historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) on the Monthly’s list, 64 percent of the students, on average, receive Pell Grants. Yet according to our data, none of those institutions have had encampments and only nine have had protests, a significantly lower rate than non-HBCU schools.
Whatever the cause, the pattern is clear: Pro-Palestinian protests are overwhelmingly an elite college phenomenon.
A couple of charts from the article:
(Why would it be accurate to characterize these as “pro-Hamas” protests? See Talking with a pro-Hamas college student for how the expectation among the protesters is that their success will enable Hamas to rule Gaza for the foreseeable future.)
I listened to a COVID-safe Zoom talk from an MIT math professor. He talked primarily about a geometric optimization problem. My question:
Maybe this will be covered during the talk, but being an engineer I would like to hear what the practical applications could be if Larry solves all of the problems that he’s talked about and/or others that he’s working on. Would ChatGPT get smarter? Would Elon Musk get to Mars sooner? Would renewable energy become cheaper?
He responded that he’d never worked on any problem that he thought had a practical application, but that maybe tools developed to solve a seemingly pointless optimization problem might end up being used to solve a practical problem. He added the question was “Above [his] pay grade.”
What about the graduates? “Half of my Ph.D. students go into academia and the other half go into finance,” responded the professor. “I think it might be because the finance industry has a well-developed path for bringing in people with quantitative skills and no other knowledge.” (i.e., half the students decided that numbers were more interesting if prefixed by a dollar sign)
There are supposedly about 35,000 math professors nationwide. Maybe 10,000 are paid primarily to do research? Taxpayer-investors will need to have nerves of steel to keep paying these folks! (Figure about $350,000
I wonder if we can date the last innovation from the math researchers that is used in ChatGPT. The guys who are credited with developing “deep learning” don’t have math Ph.Ds. (Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio, and Geoffrey Hinton) The speaker on Zoom event said that, as far as he knew, all of the math being used in LLMs was “old”.
Separately, the Boston Globe reports that there is a narrow majority of haters within the MIT faculty:
At MIT, about 20 students, according to student organizers and professors, have been placed on interim suspension, which means they can no longer access campus buildings, participate in graduation, receive wages for student jobs, or finish their final exams and projects. Most have also been told they need to vacate their university housing. MIT declined to confirm the number of students suspended.
A handful of the suspended students were expecting to graduate this semester, and now their diplomas, post-graduation jobs, research projects, and internships hang in limbo, according to interviews with more than half a dozen students and MIT professors. The MIT encampment ended on May 10 when police cleared out the demonstration in the early-morning hours; 10 students were arrested.
Hannah Didehbani, a senior at MIT studying physics who was suspended, said she does not know when she will receive her degree, and that the university has provided little detail about how she should proceed.
“MIT is only taking these unjust, repressive actions such as suspending us, arresting us, evicting us because they are afraid of the power we have,” Didehbani said.
A majority of the MIT faculty appear to be in favor of disciplining the student protesters, however. At a faculty meeting Friday, a motion to remove punitive actions from the suspensions lost, said philosophy professor Sally Haslanger. About 190 faculty opposed removing disciplinary actions, while roughly 150 favored the idea.
Related:
official Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion web site for the MIT math department: Members of our community come from a variety of racial, ethnic, indigenous, religious, and socioeconomic backgrounds. We are LGBTQIA+. We are women and men and non-binary. We have families and pets. We are veterans. We are immigrants. We possess a range of physical abilities. We are first-generation students. We are young and we are experienced. We are MIT Math. [Mindy the Crippler makes our household diverse, according to the geniuses at MIT, due to her Canine-American and Scottish-American background (golden retrievers hail from Scotland).]
A college degree is purportedly important preparation for multiple aspects of life. Universities, therefore, require students to take classes that are far beyond their major. Extracurricular activities are encouraged, such as sports, pro-Hamas demonstrations, drinking alcohol (how is that supposed to make immigrants from Gaza feel welcome?), casual sex, theater, etc. Students are forced to take about half the year off because the faculty and staff don’t want to work summers (defined as May through early September), January, or anywhere near various holidays. There is no urgency to earning a degree so why not stretch it out for four years?
What if there were urgency to getting into the workforce? Here’s the company that sold shovels to the crypto miners and now sells shovels to the AI miners (May 23):
It was a lot better to start work at NVIDA in June 2022 than in June 2024. Consider a Stanford graduate who could have finished in 2022, but instead didn’t finish until 2024. He/she/ze/they took Gender and Gender Inequality, Intersectionality: Theory, Methods & Research, and Race and Ethnicity Around the World from Professor Saperstein to round out his/her/zir/their engineering education. Was that worth the $5 million that would have been earned by starting work at NVIDIA in 2022 rather than in 2024 (two years of salary, stock options at $175 instead of at $1000, etc.)?
How about a “Bachelor’s in AI Gold Rush” degree program that would prepare students to build and use LLMs? It would be a 2-year program with no breaks so that people could graduate and start their jobs at OpenAI. There would be no requirement to take comparative victimhood classes (i.e., humanities). There would be no foundational math or science unless directly related to LLM construction (a lot of linear algebra?). There would be no pretense of preparing students for anything other than working at OpenAI or a similar enterprise.
Students will graduate at age 20. What if the AI gold rush is over when they turn 28? (Maybe not because AI turns out to be useless or even over-hyped, but only because the industry matures or the LLMs start building new LLMs all by themselves.) They can go back to college and take all of that “might be useful” foundational stuff that they missed, e.g., back to Harvard to study Queering the South:
(A friend’s daughter actually took the above class; she was most recently living in Harvard’s pro-Hamas encampment.) As a follow-on:
If the 28-year-old made so much money in the AI gold rush that he/she/ze/they wants to “give back” by becoming a school teacher, he/she/ze/they can get a Master’s in Education at Harvard and take “Queering Education”:
By the end of the module, students should be able to: (1) Talk comfortably about queer theory and how it can inform our understanding of schools and schooling; (2) identify specific strategies that educators at various levels might use to support students in negotiating gender and sexuality norms; (3) identify tools that schools can use to build positive, nurturing environments, which open up possibilities for complex gender and sexual identity development; and (4) analyze and evaluate a variety of school practices, curricula, programs, and policies that seek to support healthy gender and sexual identity development for U.S. children and adolescents.
Related:
“Value of Nvidia jumps by as much as Britain’s most valuable company” (Telegraph via Yahoo): “The US microchip giant Nvidia has gained the entire value of Britain’s biggest listed company in a single day as the artificial intelligence (AI) boom sent shares to a fresh record high. … The one-day gain is more than the entire market value of AstraZeneca, the FTSE 100’s most valuable constituent, which is worth around £192bn. … Its market value of $2.58 trillion now puts it within touching distance of the size of the entire FTSE 100, which is around $2.77 trillion.” (at least the UK is rich in low-skill immigrants and pro-Hamas demonstrations)
