Archive for 2023

October 4, 2023

WOEING: Once seen as the future, Boeing struggles to make a case for Starliner: The capsule has yet to carry a human to space amid questions about what its future really will be.

Boeing had big plans for its new space capsule, even before it won a $4.2 billion contract in 2014 to develop a spacecraft for NASA to fly astronauts to the International Space Station. If space were indeed going to open to the masses, as many at the time were predicting, Boeing wanted to position itself as the premier spacecraft provider, the way it had with commercial airliners.

Nearly a decade later, those dreams have crumbled. Not a single person has flown Boeing’s spacecraft to space. No one has booked a private flight. The company has had to absorb about $1.4 billion in cost overruns, and NASA’s safety advisers have called for an independent review of the program. Meanwhile, SpaceX, which received a contract at the same time Boeing did, but for nearly 40 percent less money, has flown eight missions to the ISS for NASA, as well as additional private astronaut crews.

What went wrong? How could one of the world’s most legendary aerospace companies fail so miserably in its race with Elon Musk’s SpaceX and still be on the ground when its competitor has been launching astronauts to the space station since 2020? One top NASA official called Boeing’s inability to get its CST-100 Starliner capsule into regular use an “existential” challenge.

Bad management. There’s a lot of talk about the economics, and the difficulty of shifting from a cost-plus environment, but the bottom line is, they built a lousy spacecraft.

Plus, give NASA a little credit here: “NASA purposefully awarded two contracts in case one provider faltered, and the value of that strategy is now evident. If SpaceX had not been successful, NASA would still be relying on Russia to get its astronauts to the space station, as it did during the years after the space shuttle was retired and SpaceX started flying.”

Posted at 8:23 am by Glenn Reynolds on Oct 4th, 2023

A VERY PUBLIC EDUCATION: California’s Math Misadventure Is About to Go National.

When I decided to read every word of California’s 1,000-page proposal to transform math education in public schools, I learned that even speculative and unproved ideas can end up as official instructional policy. In 2021, the state released a draft of the California Mathematics Framework, whose authors were promising to open up new pathways into science and tech careers for students who might otherwise be left behind. At the time, news reports highlighted features of the CMF that struck me as dubious. That draft explicitly promoted the San Francisco Unified School District’s policy of banishing Algebra I from middle school—a policy grounded in the belief that teaching the subject only in high school would give all students the same opportunities for future success. The document also made a broad presumption that tweaking the content and timing of the math curriculum, rather than more effective teaching of the existing one, was the best way to fix achievement gaps among demographic groups. Unfortunately, the sheer size of the sprawling document discouraged serious public scrutiny.

I am a professional mathematician, a graduate of the public schools of a middle-class community in New York, and the son of a high-school math teacher. I have been the director of undergraduate studies in math at Stanford University for a decade. When California released a revised draft of the math framework last year, I decided someone should read the whole thing, so I dove in. Sometimes, as I pored over the CMF, I could scarcely believe what I was reading. The document cited research that hadn’t been peer-reviewed; justified sweeping generalizations by referencing small, tightly focused studies or even unrelated research; and described some papers as reaching nearly the opposite conclusions from what they actually say.

The document tried hard to convince readers that it was based on a serious reading of neuroscience research. The first chapter, for example, cited two articles to claim that “the highest achieving people have more interconnected brains,” implying that this has something to do with learning math. But neither paper says anything about math education.

The CMF is meant only to guide local districts, but in practice it influences the choices they make about what and how to teach. Even so, the version ultimately adopted by the State Board of Education is likely to distort math instruction for years to come. Armed with trendy buzzwords and false promises of greater equity, California is promoting an approach to math instruction that’s likely to reduce opportunities for disadvantaged students—in the state and wherever else educators follow the state’s lead.

If there’s a better argument in favor of local control of education — or homeschooling — I’ve never heard it.

Posted at 7:34 am by Stephen Green on Oct 4th, 2023

THEY DON’T COVER DEMOCRATS, THEY COVER FOR DEMOCRATS: Here’s Why The Media’s Lies About Rep. Jamaal Bowman Should Concern You.

A milder but nevertheless disturbing version of the “vanishing commissar” played out over Sunday and Monday in Washington, D.C. Here’s what happened. During a series of contentious spending votes on Saturday ahead of a looming government shutdown, while House Democrats were trying to slow-walk a vote, Democrat Rep. Jamaal Bowman pulled a fire alarm in a House office building on Capitol Hill, forcing an evacuation.

Bowman’s stunt, which is under investigation by Capitol Police, was caught on a security camera. It’s clear he pulled the fire alarm as a delaying tactic, precisely to force the evacuation of the building and disrupt official congressional business (the kind of thing the media would call an “insurrection” if a Republican had done it.) Indeed, there’s no other reasonable way to interpret his actions. Everyone who has ever attended school knows what a fire alarm is and what happens when you pull it — including Bowman, a former school principal.

Here’s where things get a little Soviet. In the aftermath of the evacuation, Bowman insisted it was an accident — not that he pulled the alarm by accident, since the video footage clearly shows him doing so intentionally, but that he didn’t know what would happen when he pulled it. . . .

But here’s the important thing: Bowman’s claim is that he thought pulling the fire alarm would open the door. That sounds like an outlandish lie, doesn’t it? The sort of patently false thing no one in his right mind would ever believe or even try to explain. Just a bone-crushingly idiotic fiction that requires us to believe Bowman is mentally ill or psychotic. Every single person in Washington knows it’s not true.

And yet, every single Democrat and the entire corporate news media immediately responded as if it were a reasonable and acceptable explanation for Bowman’s actions.

A former school principal who doesn’t know how a fire alarm works? Puhleez.

Posted at 7:30 am by Glenn Reynolds on Oct 4th, 2023

October 3, 2023

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