November 10th, 2008 at 12:01 pm
An Overview of the Take Stock in Children College Scholarship Program
Take Stock in Children is a statewide scholarship program being implemented by Orlando Schools and the Seminole County Public School system the program targets students with strong financial need as well as strong motivation to succeed in college. Beginning in eighth grade, students are invited to apply for the scholarships. These scholarships take the format of two years at a community college and then two years at a state university or college.
In order to be considered, both the student and the parents must sign a contract promising to follow the guidelines of Orlando Schools and Seminole County Public Schools. In addition, students must participate in a variety of Take Stock in Children activities throughout their high school years. Orlando and Seminole County Public School students must remain committed to graduating with their high school class and maintaining a drug and crime free student record.
The Take Stock in Children Program targets at &ndash risk students in the Orlando and Seminole County Public Schools and helps them learn the skills they need to be successful in college. The motivating factor is that a successful Orlando and Seminole County Public School student becomes a successful adult able to give back to the Orlando and Seminole County Public Schools. The connection between the needs of the community and the needs of the student results in benefits for both.
Scholarships and Support
Since 1996, one hundred and seventeen students have been awarded the Take Stock in Children scholarship in the Orlando and Seminole County Public School area. The program has 69 high school students participating in Orlando and Seminole County Public Schools. 101 students have graduated and received their scholarships. The first student to graduate from college because of the program received a Bachelors of Science from the University of Central Florida.
The scholarship fund has purchased over $300,000 worth of Florida Prepaid College Scholarships for students in the state of Florida. These scholarships are waiting for the students currently participating in the middle and high school levels of the program. Orlando and Seminole County students active in the program have additional opportunities to attend workshops and seminars to help them prepare for college and build their individual skills throughout the school year.
Mentors
Each Orlando and Seminole County Public School student is paired with a community volunteer mentor who helps motivate and guide the student throughout high school. Mentors do not give a lot of time but they do provide a lot of support for students working towards the scholarship. Usually mentors meet with Orlando and Seminole County Public School students for thirty minutes once a week on the student’s high school campus. Mentors also participate in the Take Stock in Children workshops and activities. Mentors come from a range of backgrounds and are united by an interested in helping the youth of Orlando and Seminole County Public Schools achieve their dreams of a college education. In addition to the mentor role, there are often opportunities to sponsor a scholarship for an Orlando and Seminole County Public School student. Every donation is matched by the state of Florida, allowing more and more students to participate in the program.
I was always somebody who felt quite sorry for myself, what I had not got compared to my friends, how much of a struggle my life seemed to be compared to others. I was caught up in a web of negativity and needed someone or something to help me to escape.
During an afternoon at work one day, aged around twenty one, a colleague I was working with started to talk to me. What he said was quite upsetting and disturbing, however would have a profound effect on my future. He said to me:
“Your quite a depressive person, aren’t you?”
“Am I?”
I said in a shocked voice as I believed I was no different to anybody else. He continued:
“Yes you are. You very rarely smile, you are negative about most issues and you always seem to be carrying the world on your shoulders”.
This man was aged around fifty three and continued:
“I used to be like you and then I was given some advice, of which I am now going to relay to you. When you feel down, depressed or sorry for yourself, read the newspapers or watch the news on the television. You may then realise that you are in fact one of the lucky ones.”
I listened and thought about what he had said. I had never been a big reader or watcher of the news, but decided to start. The advice was totally correct, the news from around the world and even my own country was quite shocking. I realised that the worries I had were actually quite trivial and that I needed to cherish everyday and start to look on the bright side of life.
Stephen Hill
Laughing gas, N2O, dinitrogen monoxide or to use its older name, nitrous oxide has a range of uses in our society. Most of these would have to fall into the category of non-essential.
Nitrous oxide is well known as a dental anaesthetic gas. Having gas at the dentist though, is much less common nowadays, because of accidents that have happened. There have been occasions where patients have had the wrong percentage of oxygen mixed with the nitrous oxide they were given. The requirement in some states that a fully qualified anaesthetist is present when nitrous oxide is used. It is not as pleasant to be given nitrous oxide as it sounds, it often causes nausea and dizziness.
Whipped ice-cream uses nitrous oxide as the gas in the tiny bubbles. Nitrous oxide ice-cream chargers have caused death to individuals who have inhaled the gas directly. Nitrous oxide is not poisonous, but inhaled in large amounts, like this and without any added oxygen, it causes the lungs to collapse. Inhaling nitrous oxide in this way is illegal in many jurisdictions. Accidents have also occurred when people have confused nitrous oxide with the highly poisonous nitric oxide gas.
Nitrous oxide is used in rocket fuels and also by custom car enthusiasts to boost the performance of their engines. The nitrous oxide is a more powerful oxidizing agent than the 21% oxygen in the atmosphere. Temperatures in the engines are higher and specially designed valves are necessary to withstand the extra heat.
Nitrous oxide is extremely harmful to the atmosphere. It has 250 times the greenhouse gas effect as carbon dioxide. This means that 1 litre of nitrous oxide has the same climate changing effect as 250 litres of carbon dioxide. The quantities of nitrous oxide released to the atmosphere are small, so it still only contributes a small fraction of the total greenhouse effect.
More than likely, when you learned how to add, you started on the right and moved to the left. If you were adding whole numbers, you added the ones, “carried” if necessary, and repeated for the tens, hundreds and so on. This works well on paper, and it is the most efficient paper and pencil method; however, adding in the other direction has several desirable advantages: the left to right method promotes a better understanding of place value, it can be done mentally with much greater ease, and it does not require that numbers be lined up in a column. Students can learn left to right addition, so they have another method to choose from when presented with addition problems.
Left to right addition involves adding the largest place values first. As you move from left to right, you keep a cumulative total, so it is simply a number of smaller addition problems. To give you an idea of how it works and what it sounds like, consider the example, 677 + 938.
Begin by adding the left most place values. In the example this is 600 plus 900 equals 1500. Add the values in the next place, one at a time, to the previous sum, and keep track of the new sum each time. In the example, 1500 + 70 is 1570, 1570 + 30 is 1600. For students who are more proficient at this algorithm, they don’t necessarily think “plus 70″ or “add 30.” Their thought process, if said out loud might sound like, “600, 1500, 1570, 1600, . . .” Continue adding the values in each subsequent place until finished. The final steps in the example are 1600 + 7 is 1607, 1607 plus 8 is 1615. The sum is 1615.
As you can imagine, students need to be proficient at single digit addition and have an understanding of place value before attempting left to right addition. When they are first learning it, they might try repeating sums as they go along (e.g. 1500, 1570, 1570, 1570, 1600, . . .) to help them retain the newest sums. They might also cross out digits as they are adding. There is no rule about having to add in this way mentally. Students could write down the sums as they proceed.
Left to right addition promotes a better understanding of place value than right to left addition. In right to left addition, single digits are carried or regrouped with little emphasis placed on what the value of those carried digits are. In the example, 1246 + 586, students add 6 + 6 to get 12; they write down the 2 and carry the 1 when they should be carrying the ten. In the next step, they add 8 + 4 + 1 to get 13; they write down the 3 and carry the 1 when they should be adding 80 + 40 + 10, writing the 3 in the tens place (i.e. 30) and carrying the hundred. Essentially, right to left addition excludes vocabulary related to place value. Left to right addition, on the other hand, promotes an understanding of place value as each digit is given its correct value. In the example, the one in the thousands place is one thousand, the two in the hundreds place is two hundred, and so on.
Left to right addition is well-suited to mental addition since the sum is cumulative with no steps in between; in other words, there is nothing for the student to keep in mind except for the cumulative sum. In right to left addition, several numbers must be remembered as the student proceeds. To illustrate this, consider the simple example, 64 + 88. In left to right addition, the sum is simple to find: 60, 140, 144, 152. Only one number had to be remembered at any point. In right to left addition, 4 + 8 is 12, so there are already two numbers to remember: the two in the ones place and the regrouped ten. The next step is to add 60 + 80 + 10 to get 150. At this point, the two must be recalled and added to the 150 to get 152. Although this sounds simple, it becomes more complicated with more digits.
Right to left addition does not require numbers to be lined up in a column, but it is often taught that way because the method tends to ignore place value and relies on a student’s ability to line up the place values to compensate. Many errors that students make in right to left addition occur because they don’t have a strong knowledge of place value, and they forget or don’t realize that like place values need to be lined up. They might, for instance, add a digit in the tens place to a digit in the hundreds place. Another scenario is a sloppy recording of numbers where a digit is mistakenly added to the wrong column. In left to right addition, the emphasis is on finding a certain place value in each number rather than relying on the place values being aligned. Students, of course, need to be able to recognize place value before they can be successful at this method. For instance, they should be able to recognize that the ones in the numbers: 514, 1499, and 321 are in the tens, thousands, and ones places respectively. If they can’t, further teaching on place value is required before addition can be taught effectively.
Although left to right addition has several advantages, it isn’t suggested that you scrap everything else. Learning a wide variety of addition methods allows you latitude in problem solving situations. By teaching students this method, you give them another option when they are tackling addition questions.
For many teenagers these days obtaining their license is the biggest and most exciting step life has offered so far. Many are excited, some a little worried, but all should be prepared for what having a driver license means. This is where driver education courses enter into the picture. Not only do these courses teach teens to drive, but teach them ways in which to do so responsibly as well. The following paragraphs will highlight some topics covered in driver education courses and show why this type of education is extremely important for teens to obtain.
Teaches Vehicle Laws
One portion of most driver education courses centers around a textbook portion. In this area of the driver education course, one topic that is often discussed involves various vehicle laws that exist within that particular state where the teenager is learning to drive. This is a vital portion of the course as many states require that individuals take a written exam prior to obtaining a drivers license. On these particular exams students will be required to correctly answer questions pertaining to current vehicle laws. Having this intensive guided textbook course which focuses on vehicle laws will enable teens to learn the laws perhaps even more quickly than if they were studying the relative laws on their own.
Teaches Drug and Alcohol Awareness
Regardless of the fact that drugs are illegal as a rule and alcohol is illegal for individuals under a certain age, driver education courses still find it in the best interest of the teenager to promote drug and alcohol awareness and how this can affect one’s driving ability. Many teenagers are aware of the fact that drugs and alcohol can have potentially damaging effects; however, by teaching this in a structured course along with a variety of statistics and videos, it really sends the message out to the teenagers the damage that drinking and driving or doing drugs and driving can cause an individual. Therefore, it is vital that driver education courses stick with this type of course topic.
Vehicle Maintenance
Many driver education courses also have a portion of the course where individuals are taught various topics relating to vehicle maintenance. Along with knowing various vehicle laws and having the awareness of the potential dangers of drugs and alcohol with driving, it is also important for teens to know some basic information regarding vehicle maintenance. Prior to learning how to drive the vehicle, one should know how the vehicle works and how it can be maintained.
Driving Course
The second main portion of the course, along with the classroom portion, is the actual driving part. Once teenagers have gained the requisite knowledge regarding laws, awareness factors and maintenance, it is then time to get behind the wheel and teach them driving techniques. This is another benefit to having a structured driver education course. It teaches teens how to drive in the company of a certified driving instructor. Some driver education courses held by a school district, for example, will provide the actual training portion while in other areas teens will need to engage in this portion of driver education course on their own with a driving school. Wherever this portion of the driver education course is learned, it is crucial that teens take part in it.
Where to Take Driver Education Courses
Prior to signing up with a particular driver education course, it is important for teens and their parents to contact their local Department of Motor Vehicles or other governmental entity responsible for licensing drivers. Two questions which should be asked are whether driver education is required by the state and what forms of driver education courses are acceptable to satisfy that requirement. Once these questions are answered, the teen can then choose a driver education course to sign up for.
There are a few different places where the teen can take a driver education course. The first is through their high school. Many school districts offer driver education courses as part of the curriculum and this may be an option for the student. Another place to possibly sign up for a driver education course is with a professional driver education center where both classroom and actual driving courses will be taught. Lastly, there is a new and inventive way of engaging in a driver education course and that is online.
Online driver education courses are ones which have recently been gaining quite a bit of recognition. Not only are they great ways to learn course concepts but they are extremely convenient as well. One will most likely have to use a professional driving school for the road portion of the course, but with regard to classroom courses, the online version is a distinct possibility. It is highly advisable, however, that one check with their state to ensure that this type of course fulfillment is acceptable in order to meet the driver education requirement.
The previously mentioned topics are some of the wonderful benefits for teens who take driver education courses. Not only will the teens learn how to drive but also they will be taught how to do so in a safe and legal way. When looking for the perfect driver education course for teens to get involved in, just make sure that the one which is chosen is accepted by the state and that it features many of the components listed above. If this type of driver education course is selected, it may make the teen that much more ready to get behind the wheel.
Failure to educate our country’s most disadvantaged students is the most glaring and abiding social and moral problem of the United States. For nearly 20 years, our nation has worked to improve our schools and student achievement levels. The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act was to be the answer to this dilemma by holding all schools accountable for student performance using high-stakes testing.
The error in thinking is the belief that the NCLB test ratings are fair and accurate. The system does not factor out the disadvantages and/or advantages of wealth and demographics, creating an inequity in the rating of schools. Low-income schools must provide programs, such as preschool, tutoring, remedial classes, and bilingual services, to their students, as well as the cost of more administration required by the state and federal grants that make up the largest percentage of their budget. Wealthier schools that primarily depend upon local funding (generally from property taxes) for their budget have few government constraints, few low-income students requiring special programs, and flexibility in how their budget is used. This means wealthier schools can provide more educational opportunities and enhancements (i.e. access to technology, fine arts and music, extracurricular activities, teacher professional training and improvements, and teacher administrative support) that impoverished schools cannot afford.
The Dallas Schools have developed their own rating system that factors out these disadvantages/advantages, putting all Dallas schools on an even playing field. Available funding, government requirements, the educational level of students entering kindergarten, and the demographics of the community are all factored out of the Dallas schools test rating metric.
Under NCLB, all schools across the nation must test children in reading and mathematics annually between third and eighth grades. The state, using NCLB mandated measures for school performance, calculates the percentage of various student populations that annually meet or exceed the state’s academic standards. Otherwise, they must measure the progress of student “groups” towards a universal fixed point.
Dallas schools use a “value added” school rating system that provides more accurate information, measuring individual student progress from a relative starting point. They then compare the scores with the same student’s scores from the previous year. Dallas schools score higher if students on average score higher than predicted by the previous year’s test scores and if the schools’ overall performance is better than that of other Dallas schools within the same demographics. If Dallas schools perform lower than predicted, they earn a low rating.
Herbert Marcus Elementary, part of the Dallas schools system, is the ideal candidate for the NCLB program. It is located in the inner city of Dallas, the building and grounds are run down, classes are overcrowded, and it is positioned on the edge of a grimy industrial zone. With 1,140 students, almost all are from low-income families and two-thirds speak English as a second language. Even the parents average a seventh-grade education.
Under Principal Conce Rodriguez, the school has done everything right in recent years &ndash students wear uniforms, teachers submit weekly progress reports on every student in every subject, an expanded preschool program, teacher attendance incentives, and a large tutoring project, just to name a few. A community liaison, hired by Rodriguez, has increased the PTA membership to 700 (the largest in Dallas schools) and typically 50 parent volunteers daily at the school. Student attendance is at 97 percent, one of the highest in the Dallas schools system.
Under the Dallas schools rating system, Marcus placed 19th out of 206 Dallas schools, a significant accomplishment with such difficult demographics. Under the NCLB mandated rating system, Marcus placed 76th as only “acceptable”, one step away from being rated as failing. Needless to say, the Marcus educators, students and parents are none too pleased with the NCLB rating system. Some teachers have left Marcus from sheer frustration with the NCLB system and gone to wealthier Dallas schools, where they believe their accomplishments will meet with some recognition. A terrible loss to Marcus or any impoverished school, where quality teachers are scarce.
Other Dallas schools are being similarly penalized by the NCLB rating system. Dallas schools that ranked 2nd, 5th, 8th and 16th under the Dallas schools rating system were ranked 94th, 77th, 83rd and 107th, respectively, under NCLB. Additionally, the school that placed third under the NCLB rating system in the Dallas schools ranked 25th under the Dallas schools rating system. This shows the inequity of the NCLB rating system.
Since shortly after its passage, the NCLB has been under heavy attack by Congressional democrats, Texas republican legislators, and teacher unions. Though Dallas schools educators and parents support the high-stakes testing, they see the unfairness of the rating system used. They wish to see NCLB take a cue from the playbook of Dallas schools to accurately measure improvement in student achievement and factor out the demographics.
It was mentioned on a biology blog that archaeological engravings from the Tiwanaku civilization in Bolivia are unlikely to be depicting an ancient astronaut for the reason that, even with an aquatic tail, the creature still looks too much like a human. The underlying argument was that the evolution of life forms is so diverse that it is highly unlikely an alien would come out looking even remotely like us. In essence, this is the opposite side of the pendulum to Hollywood’s consistent imaging of aliens as humanoids.
The biologist ignored the decorative and symbolic imagery added by the Tiwanaku artists and did not consider the given premise of an aquatic alien inside helmeted spacesuit. I have to assume, therefore, the biologist noted that the creature had two arms and two eyes, and since humans have two arms and two eyes, the biologist concluded that this cannot be an alien.
What should intelligent aliens look like? Or, to phrase it another way, what should we expect interstellar travelers who come here to look like? This is not a complete unknown. If the aliens are capable of interstellar travel, they obviously achieved higher technology. What is necessary to achieve technology? My opinion on this is that to achieve technology, a life form would need a complex brain and the ability to see and manipulate objects. This implies eyes, fingered appendages, and perhaps a head relatively large compared to overall body size. The Tiwanaku alien has all these features.
The biologist might counter that the issue is not that aliens have eyes, but the number of eyes. Here on Earth, higher animal forms evolved with two eyes. For example, mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, and insects all have two eyes, but on another planet the number of eyes would be different. There, perhaps, the life forms would randomly have one, three, four, or even ten eyes. Is that true? Is the number of eyes a random event in the evolutionary process?
Astronomers searching for extraterrestrial intelligence are looking for planets similar to Earth regarding temperature and chemical composition because they know life evolved here, so it is logical to assume that life might also evolve on other similar planets. Likewise, with similar planetary history, we might expect the evolutionary process on those other planets to progress similarly to how it progressed here.
Question: Was the evolution of animal life with two eyes on Earth a random event, so much so that we should expect extraterrestrial life to have a different number of eyes? I think not. Why? It is called natural selection or survival of the fittest. Two eyes are the minimum required to give depth perception and concentrated focus. Perhaps early on Earth there were animals with five or ten eyes, but with a brain too small to orientate five directions, such species quickly became extinct. Only two eyes survived. Should we expect something radically different on another Earth-like planet? No. It is reasonable to expect intelligent aliens to have two eyes, just like humans.
It is also reasonable to expect alien life forms to be imaginable from the diversity of life forms we see on Earth, past and present. The Tiwanaku alien has features similar to a fish (fish mouth that seems to be breathing inside a water-filled helmet), features similar to a lobster (sea creature with two forward appendages for manipulating objects), and features similar to humans (large head and fingered upper appendages). Only four fingers are depicted in the Tiwanaku drawings, versus our five, but this easily falls within evolutionary feasibility. The alien’s three-pod aquatic tail is also an imaginable evolutionary development.
I think the biologist’s appreciation for the potentially enormous diversity of life forms in the universe is admirable. For those life forms that develop higher technology, however, it is likely, not unlikely, that they will have something in common with humans.
This article referred to Bella Online Biology comments on the Tiwanaku Alien pages of the CrypticThinking.com website.
“Everyone believes the world’s greatest lie…” says the mysterious old man.
“What is the world’s greatest lie?” the little boy asks.
The old man replies, “It’s this: that at a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what’s happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate. That’s the world’s greatest lie.”
(An excerpt from The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. A fable about following your dreams.)
Do you believe you have no control over your life? Are you who you are today, by choice or by fate? Will a change in your actions create a change in your life? Many people have given up on their dreams… they say, “Dreaming is only for the rich. When you have money, you can dream. When you have no money, don’t dream.”
That’s true… not everyone is lucky enough to be born with a silver spoon. If you are lacking in funds, it’s going to be difficult to start living life the way you want to. Money buys you freedom to follow your passions. But you don’t have to give up on your dreams, just because you lack money. Depending on where you are brought up, you will face limitations depending on your family finance, culture, and environment. Some of us are born to have easy lives, while some are born to take a more challenging path. Perhaps the limitations and obstacles you face today are part of your journey — you must overcome them to grow stronger on the path to achieving your goals.
When we are young, we all seem to have clear idea of what we want to be when we grow up. But somewhere along the way, these dreams get buried under the reality of daily living. The focus shifts from ‘living the dream’ to just ‘finding a good job with a stable income’. “Survival first”, as they call it. The sad part is that many people spend much of their lives doing what they don’t like, so they can finally earn enough to start doing what they do like. I say, that’s a great way to bury your happiness and turn into an economic slave. Doing what you dislike, day after day, will numb the sense of joy within you. Soon you will feel that your life has no greater purpose, and there is nothing to look forward to but work, work, work…. You will have forgotten how much fun it is to spend your time doing the things you like to do.
*~The Secret to Living Your Dreams~*
It’s painful if you don’t make enough money to live comfortably. But what’s more painful is if the work you do has no meaning to you. Everyday you can drag yourself to work, perform meaningless actions, and then drag yourself back home. Apart from sleeping, work takes up the majority of our time. So if you’re not enjoying your work, you’re not enjoying your life. And life is so short, isn’t it? We probably have less than a hundred years to make our mark in this world. And you never know… you fail to look while crossing the road and BOOM! You could be gone tomorrow. So why spend your life doing something you don’t like to do? We don’t slog three-quarters of our lives just so we can enjoy one-quarter… we might not live that long. Realize that the essence of your life is happening right now — you are walking a path; making your journey through life. And if the work you do, is not designed to help you fulfill your higher purpose in life, then perhaps you are walking in the wrong direction. No point taking this path… change direction.
For your dream to stay alive, you have to act on it. It’s like a fire that grows brighter and stronger if you fan its flames and keep adding wood. If you leave the fire alone, never doing anything to keep it alive, it will burn itself out. When you fail to act on your dreams, they die.
A little girl called Leanne wants to be a ballerina. But her family is poor and unable to afford the fees of the fine arts dance school. Her father tells her not to dream because dreaming is only for the rich. But her mother says, “Lea, you can be whatever you want to be. As long as you put your heart into it, and never give up. Always hold on to your dreams because when there’s a will, there’s a way.”
Leanne remembered her mother’s words. She paid her way through a college degree in the fine arts, using money she earned from working full-time. She was talent scouted by the Royal Dance and Music Theatre of England, where she began her illustrious career as a ballerina. Earning in British pounds, she made more than enough to support her family and give them a comfortable lifestyle.
Leanne had a choice… to fervently believe in her dreams, and do whatever it takes to achieve it, or believe the World’s Greatest Lie… that at some point in her life, she lost control, and fate took over. She had to have the courage to step up to her dreams, and not give up just because she lacked money. If she listened to her father and put her love aside because dreaming was only for the rich, then she wouldn’t have lived to experience her passion. She would pass on from this world, with the music still left within her… buried under some obscure belief that she could never make money doing what she loved to do.
There is music within you, and you only need to coax it out. The daily grind forces us to forget what we love to do. Imagine you’re retired… You have enough money to live comfortably, but not to splurge. How would you spend your time? What activities would you find purpose in? What would you do to amuse yourself? If you have an idea of what you would love to do but are not doing, then schedule some time everyday to do it. Making time for what you love is just like fanning the flames of your passion — the fire can only grow stronger. It’s what will bring a sense of purpose and meaning into your life; that spark of joy and wonder.
The happiest people are those who enjoy their work. They’ve managed to make money doing what they love to do, just like Leanne. And this can happen for you… if you are willing to reject the World’s Greatest Lie. Realize that you always have control over your actions, and therefore your results. The only time your start to fail in life, is when you stop believing in your ability to make a difference. You don’t need a silver spoon; you don’t need to be a genius. What you need is a sincere belief in yourself and willingness to take action towards your dreams. Believe me, you have what it takes. Just follow what British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill said in World War II: “…never give up, never give up.” And you’ll win the war.
“It is clear that modern medicine has created a serious dilemma … In the past, there were many children who never survived - they succumbed to various diseases … But in a sense modern medicine has put natural selection out of commission. Something that has helped one individual over a serious illness can in the long run contribute to weakening the resistance of the whole human race to certain diseases. If we pay absolutely no attention to what is called hereditary hygiene, we could find ourselves facing a degeneration of the human race. Mankind’s hereditary potential for resisting serious disease will be weakened.”
Jostein Gaarder in “Sophie’s World”, a bestselling philosophy textbook for adolescents published in Oslo, Norway, in 1991 and, afterwards, throughout the world, having been translated to dozens of languages.
The Nazis regarded the murder of the feeble-minded and the mentally insane - intended to purify the race and maintain hereditary hygiene - as a form of euthanasia. German doctors were enthusiastic proponents of an eugenics movements rooted in 19th century social Darwinism. Luke Gormally writes, in his essay “Walton, Davies, and Boyd” (published in “Euthanasia Examined - Ethical, Clinical, and Legal Perspectives”, ed. John Keown, Cambridge University Press, 1995):
“When the jurist Karl Binding and the psychiatrist Alfred Hoche published their tract The Permission to Destroy Life that is Not Worth Living in 1920 … their motive was to rid society of the ‘human ballast and enormous economic burden’ of care for the mentally ill, the handicapped, retarded and deformed children, and the incurably ill. But the reason they invoked to justify the killing of human beings who fell into these categories was that the lives of such human beings were ‘not worth living’, were ‘devoid of value’”
It is this association with the hideous Nazi regime that gave eugenics - a term coined by a relative of Charles Darwin, Sir Francis Galton, in 1883 - its bad name. Richard Lynn, of the University of Ulster of North Ireland, thinks that this recoil resulted in “Dysgenics - the genetic deterioration of modern (human) population”, as the title of his controversial tome puts it.
The crux of the argument for eugenics is that a host of technological, cultural, and social developments conspired to give rise to negative selection of the weakest, least intelligent, sickest, the habitually criminal, the sexually deviant, the mentally-ill, and the least adapted.
Contraception is more widely used by the affluent and the well-educated than by the destitute and dull. Birth control as practiced in places like China distorted both the sex distribution in the cities - and increased the weight of the rural population (rural couples in China are allowed to have two children rather than the urban one).
Modern medicine and the welfare state collaborate in sustaining alive individuals - mainly the mentally retarded, the mentally ill, the sick, and the genetically defective - who would otherwise have been culled by natural selection to the betterment of the entire species.
Eugenics may be based on a literal understanding of Darwin’s metaphor.
The 2002 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica has this to say:
“Darwin’s description of the process of natural selection as the survival of the fittest in the struggle for life is a metaphor. ‘Struggle’ does not necessarily mean contention, strife, or combat; ’survival’ does not mean that ravages of death are needed to make the selection effective; and ‘fittest’ is virtually never a single optimal genotype but rather an array of genotypes that collectively enhance population survival rather than extinction. All these considerations are most apposite to consideration of natural selection in humans. Decreasing infant and childhood mortality rates do not necessarily mean that natural selection in the human species no longer operates. Theoretically, natural selection could be very effective if all the children born reached maturity. Two conditions are needed to make this theoretical possibility realized: first, variation in the number of children per family and, second, variation correlated with the genetic properties of the parents. Neither of these conditions is farfetched.”
The eugenics debate is only the visible extremity of the Man vs. Nature conundrum. Have we truly conquered nature and extracted ourselves from its determinism? Have we graduated from natural to cultural evolution, from natural to artificial selection, and from genes to memes?
Does the evolutionary process culminate in a being that transcends its genetic baggage, that programs and charts its future, and that allows its weakest and sickest to survive? Supplanting the imperative of the survival of the fittest with a culturally-sensitive principle may be the hallmark of a successful evolution, rather than the beginning of an inexorable decline.
The eugenics movement turns this argument on its head. They accept the premise that the contribution of natural selection to the makeup of future human generations is glacial and negligible. But they reject the conclusion that, having ridden ourselves of its tyranny, we can now let the weak and sick among us survive and multiply. Rather, they propose to replace natural selection with eugenics.
But who, by which authority, and according to what guidelines will administer this man-made culling and decide who is to live and who is to die, who is to breed and who may not? Why select by intelligence and not by courtesy or altruism or church-going - or al of them together? It is here that eugenics fails miserably. Should the criterion be physical, like in ancient Sparta? Should it be mental? Should IQ determine one’s fate - or social status or wealth? Different answers yield disparate eugenic programs and target dissimilar groups in the population.
Aren’t eugenic criteria liable to be unduly influenced by fashion and cultural bias? Can we agree on a universal eugenic agenda in a world as ethnically and culturally diverse as ours? If we do get it wrong - and the chances are overwhelming - will we not damage our gene pool irreparably and, with it, the future of our species?
And even if many will avoid a slippery slope leading from eugenics to active extermination of “inferior” groups in the general population - can we guarantee that everyone will? How to prevent eugenics from being appropriated by an intrusive, authoritarian, or even murderous state?
Modern eugenicists distance themselves from the crude methods adopted at the beginning of the last century by 29 countries, including Germany, The United States, Canada, Switzerland, Austria, Venezuela, Estonia, Argentina, Norway, Denmark, Sweden (until 1976), Brazil, Italy, Greece, and Spain.
They talk about free contraceptives for low-IQ women, vasectomies or tubal ligations for criminals, sperm banks with contributions from high achievers, and incentives for college students to procreate. Modern genetic engineering and biotechnology are readily applicable to eugenic projects. Cloning can serve to preserve the genes of the fittest. Embryo selection and prenatal diagnosis of genetically diseased embryos can reduce the number of the unfit.
But even these innocuous variants of eugenics fly in the face of liberalism. Inequality, claim the proponents of hereditary amelioration, is genetic, not environmental. All men are created unequal and as much subject to the natural laws of heredity as are cows and bees. Inferior people give birth to inferior offspring and, thus, propagate their inferiority.
Even if this were true - which is at best debatable - the question is whether the inferior specimen of our species possess the inalienable right to reproduce? If society is to bear the costs of over-population - social welfare, medical care, daycare centers - then society has the right to regulate procreation. But does it have the right to act discriminately in doing so?
Another dilemma is whether we have the moral right - let alone the necessary knowledge - to interfere with natural as well as social and demographic trends. Eugenicists counter that contraception and indiscriminate medicine already do just that. Yet, studies show that the more affluent and educated a population becomes - the less fecund it is. Birth rates throughout the world have dropped dramatically already.
Instead of culling the great unwashed and the unworthy - wouldn’t it be a better idea to educate them (or their off-spring) and provide them with economic opportunities (euthenics rather than eugenics)? Human populations seem to self-regulate. A gentle and persistent nudge in the right direction - of increased affluence and better schooling - might achieve more than a hundred eugenic programs, voluntary or compulsory.
That eugenics presents itself not merely as a biological-social agenda, but as a panacea, ought to arouse suspicion. The typical eugenics text reads more like a catechism than a reasoned argument. Previous all-encompassing and omnicompetent plans tended to end traumatically - especially when they contrasted a human elite with a dispensable underclass of persons.
Above all, eugenics is about human hubris. To presume to know better than the lottery of life is haughty. Modern medicine largely obviates the need for eugenics in that it allows even genetically defective people to lead pretty normal lives. Of course, Man himself - being part of Nature - may be regarded as nothing more than an agent of natural selection. Still, many of the arguments advanced in favor of eugenics can be turned against it with embarrassing ease.
Consider sick children. True, they are a burden to society and a probable menace to the gene pool of the species. But they also inhibit further reproduction in their family by consuming the financial and mental resources of the parents. Their genes - however flawed - contribute to genetic diversity. Even a badly mutated phenotype sometimes yields precious scientific knowledge and an interesting genotype.
The implicit Weltbild of eugenics is static - but the real world is dynamic. There is no such thing as a “correct” genetic makeup towards which we must all strive. A combination of genes may be perfectly adaptable to one environment - but woefully inadequate in another. It is therefore prudent to encourage genetic diversity or polymorphism.
The more rapidly the world changes, the greater the value of mutations of all sorts. One never knows whether today’s maladaptation will not prove to be tomorrow’s winner. Ecosystems are invariably comprised of niches and different genes - even mutated ones - may fit different niches.
In the 18th century most peppered moths in Britain were silvery gray, indistinguishable from lichen-covered trunks of silver birches - their habitat. Darker moths were gobbled up by rapacious birds. Their mutated genes proved to be lethal. As soot from sprouting factories blackened these trunks - the very same genes, hitherto fatal, became an unmitigated blessing. The blacker specimen survived while their hitherto perfectly adapted fairer brethren perished (”industrial melanism”). This mode of natural selection is called directional.
Moreover, “bad” genes are often connected to “desirable genes” (pleitropy). Sickle cell anemia protects certain African tribes against malaria. This is called “diversifying or disruptive natural selection”. Artificial selection can thus fast deteriorate into adverse selection due to ignorance.
Modern eugenics relies on statistics. It is no longer concerned with causes - but with phenomena and the likely effects of intervention. If the adverse traits of off-spring and parents are strongly correlated - then preventing parents with certain undesirable qualities from multiplying will surely reduce the incidence of said dispositions in the general population. Yet, correlation does not necessarily imply causation. The manipulation of one parameter of the correlation does not inevitably alter it - or the incidence of the outcome.
Eugenicists often hark back to wisdom garnered by generations of breeders and farmers. But the unequivocal lesson of thousands of years of artificial selection is that cross-breeding (hybridization) - even of two lines of inferior genetic stock - yields valuable genotypes. Inter-marriage between races, groups in the population, ethnic groups, and clans is thus bound to improve the species’ chances of survival more than any eugenic scheme.
Date: 04-23-06
With the price of gasoline on the upswing(again, April 20, 06), there seems to be little sign that we Americans are at least trying to conserve fuel, though there are pockets of concerned groups that are making their voice heard, mainly against Oil Company price gouging. At the same time the automotive advertising media seems to be pushing the higher gas consumption Suv’s and cars. Granted, along with trucks, etc., these are the prime fossil fuel guzzlers, but they are by no means the only culprit for our increasing fuel dependency, be it fossil or renewable.
With all due respect to mr. Edison, inventor of our non-directly fueled commercial lighting system, which was design for practicality and therefore efficiency at the time had not been entered into the picture. The goal was only to provide a method of supplying the world with inexpensive, widely available commercial lighting. From this gigantic effort, we know, the incandescent light bulb was born. This achievement was, at the time, a monumental gift to the world…, but the future would reveal some flaws.
This virtually unchanged technology is still the top lighting source used today. For decades, the incandescent light bulb had little or no competition. Over this time, It has maintained the lowest cost per light unit of output(brightness) than any other lighting technology. All of this time its shortcummings were not challenged, or at least not so heavily, until a much newer technology, the LED(Light Emitting Diode) made its phenominal technological advances in recent years…by surpassing it in light output for the power consumed. All that remains for the LED is the cost per lumen of light output to drop to a competitive level. Given the present LED disparity with the incandescent, the total advantages of LED technology far outweighs this because of its longevity of operation, which is over 10 years in constant use(under most conditions), it is virtually unbreakable and because LEDs give off so little heat due to their much greater efficiency and thus lower operating cost, it far outweighs its present day greater price structure.
Consumer Demand For The LED Is The Key
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As the demand levels for this new breed of basic “tear drop” solid state light source increases, the price will come down some more and it will eventually reach that price competitive barrier. Of course, production quantities alone will not be the only influence determining the final selling price of the LED lamp to the “home lighting” market, for example, but its total monetary value to this particular market.
We would certainly hope that the LED would eventually replace most our present day lighting
sources, saving the nation…to begin with untold billions of dollars per year, but even
if this were possible today, just a little over 20 % of our energy consumption is used for lighting, so this alone would not solve our total energy problems, but it is certainly a beginning. It will take a national and multi-national effort to even begin to level off
the world energy needs through the use of Renewables. It could certainly and quickly reach
a point that an all out global effort will be needed to ebb the ongoing crisis and if not curbed quickly at that point, I believe it may reach a point of…irreversability.