Analog Science Fiction and Fact - 2014-01

by Penny Publications

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  NOTHING TO FEAR

  240 words

  An arithmetic teacher yesterday was arrested.

  He was writing Arabic digits on the board:

  Introducing, so the faculty has attested,

  A foreign practice, Eastern and abhorred.

  He'd infiltrated a weapon of math instruction

  Into each trusting student's tender brain,

  Dooming their innocent psyches to destruction:

  A greater cultural threat than Quiche Lorraine.

  Give thanks for the day our leaders outlawed zero—

  If they hadn't, just imagine where we'd be:

  (We might even have some kind of decimal money)

  So join us in keeping America zero-free.

  That Islamic numeral system gives us fidgets—

  But its origin is more alien still, you'll find:

  For the Hindus taught the Muslims all their digits,

  And the Hindus have a heathen turn of mind.

  The Hindu theologians all are smitten

  With endless empty circles and the void:

  So if you've the intelligence of a kitten,

  You see why zero's got to be destroyed.

  Give thanks for the day our leaders outlawed zero—

  If they hadn't, just imagine where we'd be:

  (We might even be bottling our cola drinks in metric)

  So join us in keeping America zero-free.

  The unpatriotic zeroist insurrection

  Has a vast, pervasive, secret underground

  That quite fortunately isn't beyond detection:

  There's a sign by which the enemy can be found. Can your neighbor total up his grocery prices

  A little faster than you feel he should?

  Then your neighbor is a cause of the present crisis:

  Denounce him, and you'll do the nation good!

  Give thanks for the day our leaders outlawed zero—

  If they hadn't, just imagine where we'd be:

  (Arithmetic might not be a college major)

  So join us in keeping America zero-free.

  —Kate Gladstone

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  Product Recalls

  384 words

  Food Products:

  Stepmother Brand Apples: Red portion of apple contains narcotic agent. What to do: Green portion of apple can be safely consumed, but we recommend returning entire apple to grocer for refund. Narcotic effect can be alleviated by removing apple fragment from victim's mouth, or in some cases by mouth-tomouth resuscitation, but only by persons of opposite sex and royal birth.

  Paradise Brand Apples: Consumption of any portion of apple can result in overwhelming psychological feelings of guilt,resulting in at least one consumer abandoning home and charging spouse with causing global crime wave. What to do: Avoid consumption of any apple served by snakes. If you have yielded to temptation to consume apple, immersion in water by licensed practitioner is said to alleviate guilt pangs.

  Clothing and Cosmetics:

  Athene & Associates, Gorgon Wig: Manufacturer allegedly economized by using reptilian materials in place of synthetic or natural human hair. Product may cause paralysis. Hazard occurs only to associates, and does not affect wearer. What to do: Avoid mirrors. Place product in special wallet (provided at request by manufacturer) and bury it.

  Nessus Brand Men's Shirt: Product has been contaminated with olive oil spiked with semen and blood, DNA analysis of which suggests crossbreeding of human and horse. Though advertised as"the gift that will keep your man faithful," if exposed to heat or light the shirt can prove highly flammable. What to do: Do not try shirt on. Return product to manufacturer. The conflagration,once started, is impossible to extinguish.

  Neverstop Brand Ballet Slippers: Product can be identified by unusual red color. Defect still under investigation by Commerce Department; it may result from Mexican jumping beans incorporated in the soles of the shoes, or from super-resilient experimental plastic. Consumer may be unable to stop performing; shoes are impossible to doff. What to do: anesthetic darts may be used to tranquilize victim; surgical procedure necessary to remove slippers.

  Toys:

  W. Tell Archery Set: Instructions challenge child to test skill by piercing apple (not included) placed on playmate's head. Playmate could lose eye in accident. What to do: Contact manufacturer for blowup doll to substitute for playmate. Discard original instructions.

  Vehicles:

  Wonderful One-Horse Shay: Product can suddenly break apart without warning. What to do: Manufacturer has gone out of business. Suggested action is to replace all mechanical parts after 89 years.

  Daedalus Brand Ultra-Light Aircraft: Product can melt if flown too high. What to do: return product to Daedalus factory, Crete division. Low flight should be safe, but avoid direct sunlight.

  — Mary A.Turzillo

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  CHECKLISTS

  EDITORIAL Trevor Quachri | 1264 words

  From time to time, a letter or reader comment will strike me as perhaps revealing more about the reader themselves than the story or issue they're commenting on.

  Case in point: not so long ago, a reader wrote in, wondering if an author had used a checklist to determine the backgrounds of the characters in one of his stories: one was African-American, one Asian-American, and so on, until the "major" groups were represented, he felt.

  I understand the reader wasn't literally wondering about a checklist; he was criticizing what he saw as obtrusive diversity. I've never been one to look down my nose at sarcasm, certainly, but the characters were predominantly scientists, and the reader's view that they would be a homogenous group struck me as unrealistic at least, and more than a little short sighted.

  So is diversity among scientists actually that unusual? To be fair, the reader wasn't wrong, at least based on the statistics as they currently stand. The National Science Foundation issues a formal report every two years, entitled "Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering." It tracks and examines the statistics on precisely what its name suggests. 1

  According to the report, white men currently make up 51% of working U.S. scientists and engineers; white women 18%, Asian men 13%, Asian women 5%, and Hispanics and Blacks 6% and 5% respectively, across both genders.

  Blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans are considered "URM" in this context—under-represented minorities, where "under-represented" is defined in relation to their percentage of the overall population. If women, for example, make up 51% of the general populace, but only represent 18% of scientists and engineers, that's a sign that something probably isn't quite working the way it should, societally. Pulling oneself up by one's bootstraps is a virtue, sure, but—to mangle the metaphor—numbers like that can be illustrative of a failure to make sure everyone at least has a reasonable length of bootstrap with which to attempt to do so.

  So even if, in this instance, we consider diversity value-neutral—neither a good nor an ill in and of itself—the skewed numbers can still be seen as something of a canary in a coal mine for a larger issue: science education in the United States.

  That the U.S. has had challenges with STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) education for some time is not news.

  In 2009, The Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development released the results of their triennial Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2 ("The U.S. government considers the test one of the most comprehensive measures of international achievement." 3 ), and the results were worrisome: the U.S. ranked 25 th out of 34 countries in math, and 17 th out of same in both reading and science. (The most recent assessment was in 2012, but its results have not been released as of this issue's press date.)

  Although the OECD began administering its test in 2000, our national STEM education was languishing even prior to that. The earlier Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 4 , administered by the International Association for the E
valuation of Educational Achievement, saw similar results in the mid-1990s. (TIMSS is ongoing; the next data collection will be in 2015.) Professor William Schmidt (co-director of the Education Policy Center at Michigan State University's College of Education—no relation to our distinguished Editor Emeritus) and his fellow researchers released the third TIMSS in 1996, which was, at the time, "the most extensive and far reaching cross-national comparative study of mathematics and science education ever attempted." 5 In it, Schmidt ascribes our struggles in STEM education to three elements in particular. Along with decentralized educational policy decision-making and a delayed shift to formal math and scientific disciplines in middle school, the third major element is unequal educational opportunity: "Differences among students will always exist, but Schmidt and his colleagues provide TIMSS data that show that in most countries more than 90% of the variation among students is the product of individual differences. In the United States, more than half of the variation is the result of differences created by differentiated opportunities." 6

  Again: more than half of the variation in scientific achievement of students in the U.S. can be ascribed not an individual student's aptitude, but to unequal opportunities: fewer teachers, with less training (and pay); older, out of date textbooks; inadequate supplies; and the like. Shorter bootstraps, if you will.

  The PISA results seem to corroborate that. Although China as a whole did not top the list in 2009, China's Shanghai region (when taken by itself) was found to have outperformed every other country in every academic category. The differentiating factor seems to be that there, the Chinese government moved away from their long-used "key school" system (which is still in place in many other parts of the country, and why Shanghai's performance is not representative of China overall) for a system of more equitable access. (In "key schools," the most funds—and therefore the best teachers, supplies, books, and material—went to the schools that had the highest-scoring students... who were in turn already more likely to come from affluent backgrounds, and who would get the least "bang for the buck" from the additional funds.)

  Not dissimilarly, in the U.S. it's common knowledge that the best schools are usually in more affluent areas. Specifically, as Andreas Schleicher (who oversees the PISA tests for the OECD) put it: "The [U.S.] fails to put the most-talented teachers in the most-challenging classrooms." 7 (It's interesting that although education is often considered the great equalizer the world over, in this case at least, both Communism and Capitalism are systematically prone to reward the already-aff luent.)

  It's true that in many cases, it takes greater effort and resources to provide for a diverse population than it does for a more uniform one—varied groups of people don't often benefit from a "one size fits all" approach— and this is where equality of educational opportunity connects to one of the other primary factors Schmidt discusses: the state of "decentralized educational policy decision making." To do that topic justice would take more space than I have here, but simply put, while a country as large as the U.S. needs flexibility in how subjects are taught at a local level, we need strict standards on what is taught at that level. That some small but vocal population of the U.S. seeks to legislate the inclusion of unfalsifiable theories in science classes attests not just to the dismal state of scientific literacy, even among adults, but to the idea that left too wholly to decentralized authorities, the quality of scientific education is only going to get worse, not better.

  Ultimately, the chain of correlation, I propose, is quite simple: if you're reading this magazine, you care about science; if you care about science, you care about science education; if you care about science education, then you must care about ensuring all children receive every opportunity we can give them, regardless of background or socio-economic factors. Simply doing the institutional equivalent of passively leaving a science textbook lying around on a coffee table isn't enough; the stakes are too high.

  As we move forward, projects of the scope we like to speculate about in science fiction—space exploration, asteroid mining, wide-scale genetic engineering—are increasingly likely to require global funding, experts, or both, whether because of co-operation among governments or the size of multi-national corporations. Either way, if a purely American team or crew isn't diverse enough to reflect that we're utilizing the full strength of our citizens, it's all the more likely that we'll be part of an American/Chinese/Russian/Indian/Finnish joint undertaking, having found ourselves outpaced by other countries whose science education hasn't been hamstrung by stark economic disparity and anti-science school boards.

  It's only a matter of time until we need to update those checklists, one way or another.

  Footnotes:

  1 http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/wmpd/2013/

  2 http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/

  3 http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-07/teens-in-u-s-rank-25th-on-math-test-trail-inscience-reading.html

  4 http://nces.ed.gov/timss

  5 http://www.educ.msu.edu/neweducator/fall00/Timss.htm

  6 ibid

  7 http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-07/teens-in-u-s-rank-25th-on-math-test-trail-inscience-reading.html

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  IN TIMES TO COME

  150 words

  First off, we have "Life Flight" by Brad R. Torgersen. Generation ships will be incredibly involved undertakings, but it's inevitable that some things will go wrong, and when they do, much will hinge on how well we adapt to the situation.

  Then our fact article takes on an idea we've seen explored in fiction like Edward M. Lerner's InterstellarNet series, but rarely outside of it: "The Probability and Nature of an Interstellar Information-Trading Community" by Mark H. Shellans.

  We also have the third installment of Karl Schroeder's Lockstep, as well as stories like Maggie Clark's look at how the media might portray setbacks in space exploration, "We Who Are About to Watch You Die Salute You," and Jerry Oltion's tale of ways out not taken, "Not for Sissies," plus fiction from David Brin, Stephen L. Burns, and Megan Chaudhuri, as well as all the columns you count on. See you next issue!

  All contents subject to change

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  ON INVESTIGATING HERETICAL GIZMOS

  THE ALTERNATE VIEW Jeffery D. Kooistra | 1831 words

  Anyone who uses Facebook or other social media sites knows that scams abound online. For an older guy like me it usually starts with a friend request from a "girl" with an attractive profile pic. Not knowing what all my readers look like, to say nothing of female writers interested in networking, I accept these requests. Then I wait. Invariably, if an excessively friendly message from my new contact hits my inbox within minutes of accepting the request, it means a scam is in the offing.

  Fortunately, it doesn't take long to learn the typical scam-signature and avoid them. It just requires a bit of experience with social media and genuine people.

  Though money fleecing and sex scams are mundane, those promising access to secrets and "hidden" or prohibited knowledge have a strong appeal to SF-types. Our thirst for knowledge is akin to a sex drive—but unlike sex, a full-blown knowledge orgasm isn't all that easy to come by. Claims of revolutionary space drives, free-energy devices, miracle medicines, and the like all serve as mental foreplay. Tiny dribbles of whispered information can make one a fool as surely as small expressions of affection from a lover just leading you on. Having recently read most everything by H. P. Lovecraft, I've noted that many of his tales contain a protagonist driven by an insatiable desire for hidden dark knowledge. Who among us hasn't wanted to peruse the volumes locked away in the forbidden section of the Hogwarts library? The desire to pierce the curtain and see what lies beyond is nothing less than lust to us, and the more forbidden it is, the kinkier it seems.

  With this lust for scientific kink running strong in me, it was impossible to resist the opportunity to get paid to examine forbidden, heretical claims, and so I went to work for Infinite Energy Magazine. I've told tales before from my time there, most rec
ently in my November 2011 column, "Intellectual Proxies." Therein I discussed how two well-educated men used each other to convince themselves that there really was gold at the end of a particular weird-science rainbow. This time I want to talk about strange science scammers and scientific simpletons, their heretical wares, and how to filter them out from the (very) few heretics who are neither.

  I said "filter," because at Infinite Energy we wanted to hear from people with heretical ideas and devices that challenged accepted scientific and engineering wisdom. But our slush pile had far fewer gems in it than Analog's. At a normal science magazine, violating known science is a criterion for rejection, but I couldn't use that one. Because we wanted to find and test machines that flipped-off known science (on our dime), we were as appealing to phonies as a newly divorced, middle-aged millionaire is to a gold digger.

  Over time, I came up with three broad principles for filtering out the foolish and the phony purveyors. I wish I'd had these in hand before starting at Infinite Energy, but my experience there was one of the few ways I could have discovered them.

  1.) Your task is not to prove the heretic guilty, but to learn if he merits the benefit of the doubt.

  I wasn't there to expose scammers (though it did happen) or to tutor the honestly ignorant in the rudiments of physics and engineering. I just had to convince myself that they weren't guilty of trying to fool us or guilty of fooling themselves. That's usually easy to do if you've got a solid background in physics or engineering, because the typical frauds and fools do not. For instance, either sort might tell you that their measurements prove their generator puts out more energy than it takes in, but some close questioning reveals that they have no idea how to make those measurements.