Further afield

Review - Institute of Public Affairs, Sep 2000

Summaries and excerpts from interesting reports

MONEY DOESN'T ENSURE GOOD EDUCATION

A Cato Policy Analysis on Kansas City's efforts shows that there is a lot more to providing a good education than expenditure levels:

For decades critics of the public schools have been saying, `You can't solve educational problems by throwing money at them'. The education establishment and its supporters have replied, `No-one's ever tried.' In Kansas City they did try. To improve the education of black students and encourage desegregation, a federal judge invited the Kansas City, Missouri, School District to come up with a cost-is-no-object educational plan and ordered local and State taxpayers to find the money to pay for it. Kansas City spent as much as $11,700 per pupilmore money per pupil, on a cost-of living-adjusted basis, than any other of the 280 largest districts in the country. The money bought higher teachers' salaries, 15 new schools, and such amenities as an Olympicsized swimming pool with an underwater viewing room, television and animation studios, a robotics lab, a 25-acre wildlife sanctuary, a zoo, a model United Nations with simultaneous translation capability, and field trips to Mexico and Senegal. The student-teacher ratio was 12 or 13 to 1, the lowest of any major school district in the country. The results were dismal. Test scores did not rise; the black-white gap did not diminish; and there was less, not greater, integration. The Kansas City experiment suggests that, indeed, educational problems can't be solved by throwing money at them, that the structural problems of [public] educational systems are far more important than a lack of material resources, and that the focus on desegregation diverted attention from the real problem: low achievement.

Source: (http://www.cato.org/pubs/ pas/pa-298.html)

DAMN THOSE KANGAROOS!

The reuse of some object-oriented computer code has caused tactical headaches for Australia's armed forces. As virtual reality simulators assume larger roles in helicopter combat training, programmers have gone to great lengths to increase the realism of their scenarios, including detailed landscapes and, in the case of the Northern Territory's Operation Phoenix, herds of kangaroos (since disturbed animals might well give away a helicopter's position).

The head of the Defence Science and Technology Organization's Land Operations/Simulation division reportedly instructed developers to model the local marsupials' movements and reactions to helicopters.

Being efficient programmers, they just re-appropriated some code originally used to model infantry detachment reactions under the same stimuli, changed the mapped icon from a soldier to a kangaroo, and increased the figures' speed of movement.

Eager to demonstrate their flying skills for some visiting American pilots, the hotshot Aussies `buzzed' the virtual kangaroos in low flight during a simulation. The kangaroos scattered, as predicted, and the visiting Americans nodded appreciatively ... then did a double-take as the kangaroos reappeared from behind a hill and launched a barrage of Stinger missiles at the hapless helicopter. (Apparently the programmers had forgotten to remove that part of the infantry coding. )

The lesson? Objects are defined with certain attributes, and any new object defined in terms of an old one inherits all the attributes. The embarrassed programmers had learned to be careful when reusing object-oriented code, and the Yanks left with a newfound respect for Australian wildlife.

Simulator supervisors report that pilots from that point onward have strictly avoided kangaroos, just as they were meant to.

Source: From 15 June 1999 Defence Science and Technology Organization Lecture Series, Melbourne, Australia, and staff reports

THE HUMAN COST OF GREEN IMPERIALISM

The US State Department, the World Bank and other aid organizations have often made aid to developing countries contingent on the creation of national parks. These efforts to protect wild lands have come at considerable human cost, say anthropologists.

Environmentalists have succeeded in protecting an area altogether the size of China, the United States and Canada.

Approximately 70 per cent of the protected areas are inhabited by Homo sapiens as well as other species.

Between 1986 and 1996, about three million people were forced to move as a result of development and conservation projects, according to World Bank statistics.

Many of these were extremely poor indigenous people.

The world's first national park, Yellowstone, specifically excluded people from living there-and after the creation of the park in 1871, some 300 Shoshone residents were killed in conflicts with the Army.

In Africa, the establishment of big game parks in Kenya and Tanzania involved mass expulsion of the Masai people.

In Madagascar, rain forest villagers were forced to leave nature preserves in the 1940s-and 20,000 were killed in conflicts with colonial authorities.

Expulsions have continued at big parks in Kenya, Botswana, Indonesia and Sri Lanka, says Marcus Colchester of the Rain Forest People's Program, and in enlarging Kaietur National Park, Guyana recently extinguished the rights of local residents.